Today in 1943, “pay-as-you-go” income-tax withholding began. (Oh thank you, Milton Friedman.)

Today in 2004, Marlon Brando died, age 80.

There was probably no connection between the two, but I have friends who could spin conspiracies proving me wrong. Today is also the day the Battle of Gettysburg began (1863). I had a Confederate cavalry re-enactor friend who, with his comrades, almost won that battle once. It was very embarrassing for the event organizers. Not to mention the Union troops.

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The wind has been howling more than usual lately. Making me crazy. Makes me dream of northwest forests. But some evenings it goes still and then it’s pleasure to pull up a chair on the hillside and sit gazing over a sun-setting vista. Watching thunderstorms off in the distance that somehow never seem to come here. In the high desert you learn a use for that otherwise obscure word, “virga,” meaning rain that starts to fall but never reaches ground. Curtains of it everywhere.

This time of year it’s cloudy and the storms seem to be all around us, in a circle. They’re dry and dangerous with lightning strikes. Then when the rains come, they come in wash-filling torrents that even the dogs are smart enough to avoid.

And the junipers. Suddenly they’re all in berries without having given a sign of blossom. I can see the little purple buds when I look close. But only real close. I wonder how many juniper berries it would take to flavor homemade gin? Hm. Not enough of a drinker ever to try that experiment.

And yesterday afternoon I had a chat with some horses. A family on the road in has three, including a gorgeous palomino Morgan mare — the very horse I’d love to have (although geldings seem to be a little more sensible — if the word “sensible” can ever be applied to a horse). For the first time ever they were moderately close to the road as I drove by. And surprisingly, when I slowed down, all three strolled over to the fence. I stopped, got out, and said hello and scritched them all behind the ears and on the forehead. If they were disappointed that I didn’t bring food, they were too polite to say. If I stay in this place I’m going to have a Morgan horse one of these days. A dun or a palomino, maybe even that very horse I scritched today. Don’t care whether it’s a mare or a gelding. But I want sensible. That’s why I want a Morgan.

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Monsanto lost a Supreme Court case yesterday on GMO faux food. Or animal feed grains, in this case. I don’t quite know what I think about genetically modified foods. On one hand, I can see the possibility of there being excellent plants, modified for drought resistance or higher nutrient content. But any company that produces a product called “Roundup Ready Alfalfa,” specially designed to do well with Monsanto-produced poisons, and goes around threatening hapless farmers who have Monsanto seeds blow into and take root in their own fields … I like to see them lose, just on principle.

Besides, they’re too tight with the fedgov. They’ve given me the creeps ever since I learned that the gov owns part of the patent on Monsanto “Terminator” seeds. Ugh.

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This is an interesting NYT op-ed on Alcoholics Anonymous that — surprisingly — has something to say about limited government and personal freedom. When you have some time, be sure to follow the link to the Wired article that got David Brooks to musing. I haven’t finished it yet myself but it takes a pretty interesting tack.

I don’t quite know what I think about AA, either. Although I believe the “surrendering to a higher power” bit is just a mind game, I know it works for some when nothing else has. But the whole model of permanent addiction seems so toxic. I know there are permanent addicts, for sure. I’ve known many of them. Unfortunately one of the most “hooked” people I ever knew was hooked on AA. She’d had a five-year career of drinking. But she’d been in AA for 12 years and if she couldn’t go several times a week, she felt as if her world would collapse. Sad woman. Tons and tons of promise. Everybody liked her upon first meeting her. She seemed interesting and unique. But nobody ever wanted to be around her very long because every dinner party, every trip to the beach, every card game would eventually turn into “The Tragic Tale of Francine,” as she halted all the fun and told the same, endlessly repetitive story of her woes. All attempts by friends to show her another side of life failed; she was so addicted to her addictions, including sorrow and AA.

I think it makes more sense to see addiction as a complex phenomenon that starts and ends with personal choice. I think at least it helps to give an individual addict more eye-opening choices.

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Tumbleweed Tiny Houses is giving away free plans for one of their simplest little wheeled abodes. You just have to buy a copy of The Small House Book. (NFI, BTW.)

This particular house, the Popomo, is a super-modern cube. I like that, but I know it’s not for everybody. They estimate materials costs at $20,000. I’m betting any 10 BHM readers could build it for under $5,000. Maybe way under, with some good scrounging.

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… and some more miscellany.

The confession

The astute among you who’ve followed my links to Joel Simon’s blog, The Ultimate Answer to Kings, have noticed, shall we say, a few similarities between Joel’s life and mine.

I think it’s time to reveal the secret.

No, I am not Joel Simon. I have more hair and I’d look just awful in that beard, not to mention that Jayne Cobb cunning hat.

But I am the neighbor Joel refers to as W. or Uncle W. — and I suspect his attempt to turn me into a person of the male persuasion for literary purposes has fooled very few readers.

So there you have it. Yes, Joel is the hermit neighbor who lives in the next trailer down the ridge. It’s nice having a crotchety old one-legged hermit for a neighbor. They leave you alone, which is good. Except when you don’t want to be left alone. Which is also good.

Joel is very much like his fictional character Shadow, from stories like this one. And he and Shadow are both more suited to being desert rats than I.

So that’s that. Joel, you can now quit your unconvincing attempts to hide my identity.

… and the miscellany for today

• Awwwwww. This is so sweeeeeeeet.
• On the other hand, this isn’t sweet at all. It’s crude. In the oily sense. Yet it’s strange how something so terrible can look beautiful when captured at the right moment, in the right light.
• And if you’re interested in a good site for following oil spill news — with speculation, but speculation by very knowledgeable people — The Oil Drum is a good place to start. The link goes to a current article that supports the viewpoint (that we’ve been hearing increasingly) that the well structure itself is compromised and the leak will keep getting worse. But no Alex Jonesy stuff this time.
• Oh, just what we need! “A Fannie and Freddie for Food.” Government-grocery store partnerships, all across this great land! That’ll ensure that we all have full bellies and healthy nutrition, won’t it? Ya sure, you betcha. (And really, while I knew I lived in an actual desert, I had no idea that living 10+ miles from the nearest grocery store put me in a “food desert.” Geez, should I just curl up and die, or what? You poor folks who live above the arctic circle somewhere or in rural Wyoming just ought to shoot yourselves before you starve to death, I guess.)

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Got this note last night from my beloved former veterinarian up in the Pacific Northwest:

I thought this may make you smile. I had a visit … from an outlaw last night. Someone left a note attached to a $100.00 bill shoved in the front door of the clinic. The note said, “I had some extra cash while passing through, please use it to care for an animal in need.” It was signed “Colton Harris-Moore AKA the barefoot bandit.” [My receptionist] found it and was busy trying to figure out which client left it when I came in. After reading the note, I knew who it was right away — although I wasn’t sure the gift was really from him.

The sheriff didn’t immediately recall the name Harris-Moore, either, when my vet phoned. But he quickly got it and referred the incident to (believe it or not, there really is such a thing) the Island County Fugitive Apprehension Specialist, in the area where “Colt’s” career began.

The specialist assured her the note and gift were most likely from the real barefoot bandit — who has always shown sympathy for abused animals and who is famous for surviving and hiding out in wooded areas (and she’s in as wooded an area as you’ll find anywhere).

She was both charmed by the gift and a little creeped out knowing that a notorious loose-cannon fugitive had been at her clinic and home when she was there alone. I’m also making a guess that Colt might have been in the area for some time. Perhaps he just chose a vet’s office at random, but it seems quite a coincidence that he would select the one vet in the area who is most associated with animal rescue and the wellfare of unwanted dogs and cats if he hadn’t been around long enough to know that.

If the name Colton Harris-Moore doesn’t ring a bell with you, you’re probably not from the Pacific Northwest.

Here’s a London Times story on him

And a Time magazine article.

And his Wikipedia entry.

And his fan club.

And his NON-fan club.

Colton Harris-Moore may not be a true Freedom Outlaw. He may not even be a particularly good guy. But you gotta admit, the boy does what he does with panache.

And in this day of omni-surveillance, it’s encouraging to know that some untrained kid can spend years outfoxing “authoritah” and surviving in the cold northwestern forests.

Maybe he’s “not Robin Hood,” as somebody says in one of those articles. But Colton Harris-Moore, if you should ever happen to read this, you can know that your $100 gift (since the sheriff couldn’t track the bill to any particular robbery) is going straight into an emergency medical fund dedicated to treating lost, stray, and unwanted animals.

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This is my first full spring in the desert and I’m not loving it. I knew, from word and brief visits, that it could be windy here in springtime. “Heck, it’s windy anywhere that time of year,” I thought. But wind here is something cosmic — even worse at times than the howling gales that are part of Wyoming’s very identity.

We’re under high-wind warnings two to three days a week right now. And that’s not to say that the other days are calm. Merely that they’re windy enough to be annoying and to make havoc of both your housecleaning and your hair, but not likely to blow large objects or columns of stinging, blinding sand at you.

There was a time when winds like these would have driven me to screaming-mee-meeism. A few days of this and I’d weep and wail and have fits of melodramatics I never knew the adult me was capable of. Now I merely hate them with every fiber of my being and long for brighter latitudes every moment of every endlessly windy day.

And “better” yet — I’m currently living in a friend’s trailer (sans friend) which rocks back and forth in every tiny zephyr. And is as perforated with air-holes as a trespasser’s fanny after an encounter with bird shot. Heavens, what a saint I am for enduring such trials so patiently!

Uh oh. Was that another attack of melodramatics coming on? (Actually, use of the trailer has been a great bounty; I just like to whine sometimes.)

Funny how movies set in these high-desert places never show the perpetual Chinooks. Oh, they’ll show wind if the plot calls for surviving a sand-storm. But daily life in the movies’ desert west will be conducted in the calm — nary a cowboy hat or golden lock out of place. How do they do that, anyhow? They can’t have filmed “High Noon” or “The Outlaw Josie Wales” on a sound stage.

Here, in reality, the wind blows. And so it goes for weeks and months — ironically those very months that should be the best times of year. Hunching against the unholy blast of the dry blizzard, sand in your hair and grit on your skin (not to mention red dust clogging up the works of every electronic device you own, giving them all an average lifespan of six months), you dread stepping outside — but in a life of living off-grid, you have to because you can’t even take a shower unless you trek to the barn — and when you have to go out, you feel you’re being buffeted by the demons of fate (uh oh, there I go again). (I think that was just a completed sentence, but at the moment I’m not sure, so please pardon me.)

You find yourself almost longing for winter, when days are often as still as a Christmas card. Ten-below? Who cares? When it’s that cold, the wind isn’t blowing. A snowstorm that traps you behind the washes for two days? No big deal. Just let me have some days afterward of calm, still air. That’s how crazy is this place. No sane person would want to be here. It’s miserable when it’s miserable. And it’s even more miserable when it’s supposed to be nice.

And finally — yes, really finally — after all of Deepest Dantean Hell’s unleashed unnatural forces (yeah, there I go again) — the nearest neighbors and we were just having a lunchtime chat yesterday about how many of the rattlesnakes on our respective properties are the dreaded Mojave greens — serpents whose bite would be fatal to any human and to any dog — even if the dog has had a course of rattlesnake immunizations, as my youngest and dearest has. (With my older two, I rely more on their brains to keep them out of the snake’s mouth.)

Nobody was really quite sure about how many of our poisonous snakes are those green killers. But the neighbors do commonly vie with each other for the most dramatic snake-encounter reports, and even your basic garden-variety rattler, of which there seem to be dozens of kinds, will make your life wretched enough. This is a common topic over coffee in these parts.

We’re the Edward Abbey version of garden-club ladies discussing begonia blight. That’s us. Only our blights will kill us.

Yep. Lovely place this is. Drive a body to suicide — or drive a more sensible body OUT. It may eventually beat me. I was not made for this. I was born to green and blue, to water flowing everywhere, all the time. I was born to land where you could come upon a waterfall in any empty acre of the forest — small, humble waterfall, but waterfall nonetheless — and where wild cress grew in stagnant pools and deer peacefully grazed — on actual grass that actually grew without the help of five Mexican gardeners — and I’m not sure whether that was just a full, coherent sentence again, but anyhow, I belong in drippy, wet places where the native joke (every region has one) is that if you stood to long in one place you’d grow moss on your north side. Places where wind, when it rises at all, rises only in conjunction with proper rain or snowstorms, which of course make it a perfectly understandable phenomenon and totally acceptable as a temporary visitor.

And this, do I need to say again, is not my native land?

Yet I may be soon (or not, it’s uncertain) committing to a deeper level of involvement here. It’s not sure yet.

But if I do it will be for one reason: friends. Although I, the hermit, require days of solitude and hours of silence, friends matter more than the double-damned winds.

Well, it’ll be for that one reason and a bit of luck. Also a bit of random choice. Perhaps more on that later.

And beauty. Can’t forget beauty as a motivator. She’s one alluring phantom. And in its grand, dry, sweeping-to-the-horizons way, this place is beautiful.

Oh, and because all that wet only gets warm about 20 days out of the year, the region has the highest suicide rate in the nation due to its perpetual and pervasive gloom, and your entire collection of firearms (already quite feeble) rusts, and there are slugs the size of baby whales slithering all over your lawn. (Salt. It’s both pesticide and extremely morbid entertainment in the Great Northwest.) Not to mention that the first European explorers who sighted the place took one look at its dark, impenetrable forests and declared it “uninhabitable.” I was fond of it. It was my world. And there were (and are) friends there, too.

Yeah, there’s all that.

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Two quick things:

1. In England a broke & jobless writer takes to the trees in an experiment in low-cost, low-impact self sufficiency. Very creative.

2. I think Joel “did” 419 better than I: “It’s Interesting Times Day!”

And a third:

3. Radley Balko also does today proud.

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