Pit Stop

      “Drug Check Point in 5 Miles”, the mobile sign flashed at me.

      Sometime in the past seven or eight years, “they” closed the Bennet rest stop.  As far as I know, there is no rest stop between Vail pass and Arriba, now.

      I exit I-70 before Arriba.  Once in a while, I need to make a stop while eastbound, especially if I have business to conduct in Limon.  Cedar Point beckons.  Cedar Point sits on a high point between the rest of Eastern Colorado and the Front Range.  I think it is the highest point on the railroad between Genoa and Denver.

       Cedar Point is about as close to the middle of nowhere as you can get on I-70.  It provides a rest stop with a view.  Going south (I think, might be west) from the I-70 exit, you climb up a hill via a gravel road.  From the hilltop, you can see for miles and miles in nearly every direction.

      Standing there, you are not invisible to I-70 traffic, but it would take an eagle eye for anyone travelling the interstate to notice that you are relieving yourself in the wide-open spaces while enjoying the view.  Lumps of weathered Kleenex caught in the ditch weeds suggest that squatters also have used this place for a rest stop.

     Situated on top of the hill, you can see if anyone should approach via the county road from either direction.  It doesn’t exactly replace the Bennet rest stop, no tourist brochures or hazardous road or weather conditions, but it works.  It is a marvelous view, too.

      “Drug checkpoint in 5 miles?”  Less than that to Cedar Point exit.  They will probably be watching that exit.  Anyone carrying drugs will want to exit before the five miles.

     I really didn’t think about that very long, and in a couple of miles, I nearly forgot about it.  I exited at Cedar Point.  Nobody.  Nothing.  I hesitated at the stop sign and turned right up the gravel road.  An abandoned Suburban sat by the side of the road.  I slowed, looked, nobody in it, so on I went.  A few yards brought me to the apex. 

     I pulled over, stopped, and unfastened my seatbelt.  Before I could open my door, a white SUV with blue/red (I think) lights flashing screeched to a stop ten yards behind me.  I exited and met the sheriff’s deputy about half way between our vehicles.

      “We are checking on you,” he announced.

      “I figured that,” I replied.

     “You live around here?”  I told him about the farm and its location, indicated my license plate.  I figured they would check that out, as well as my driver’s license.

      “Why are you stopping here?” he asked.

      “I’m headed for Limon, to the barbershop.  I really need to take a leak.”  While we were having this exchange, a second white vehicle with lights flashing pulled up behind the first sheriff’s vehicle and another deputy jumped out and approached.

      “He needs to use the bathroom,” the first deputy yelled back to the approaching second deputy.  They both laughed.

       “Well, don’t blow away,” the second deputy said.

      “I’ll stand over here,” I said, indicating the leeward side of my pickup.

      “Well, have a good day,” the first deputy said, extending his hand for me to shake.  I was a little surprised, but I shook his hand.  He returned to his vehicle and headed farther down the road.  The second deputy burned a U-turn and headed back the way he came, but he stopped a few yards down the road.

      So I stepped beside the pickup and did my business.  I tried to marvel at the view, but other thoughts crowded into my head.  What was I thinking?  I should have known I would attract attention by exiting here. 

     They didn’t even ask to see my driver’s license.  I think I must look guilty, based on the frequency of my undergoing extra scrutiny in airports by TSA.  The brevity of my interview and the trust the deputies placed in me didn’t add up to other experiences I have had with law enforcement personnel.   

      I restored my personal garments, rounded the pickup, and prepared to hit the road again.  The second deputy was still sitting a few yards away, the first deputy had turned around and was headed my way again.  I assumed he preferred to follow me, so I pulled out ahead of him and headed back towards the interstate.

      I had an escort in front and behind me.  As we neared the interstate, I saw at least three more lawmen at work.  Two were investigating a van they had stopped going up the entrance ramp to eastbound I-70.  The third was approaching an eighteen-wheeler that was slowing to a stop at the stop sign on the exit.

      Where had they come from?  I didn’t see a thing when I exited, no vehicles, nothing.  They must have been hiding on the north side of the interstate where eastbound traffic could not see them.  There were at least four official vehicles including my two escorts.

      I turned up the entrance ramp, past the stopped van, and on my way to a haircut.  I got to the Highway 86 exit before it dawned on me I had gone more than five miles since that flashing sign.  There was no drug checkpoint.  I might not even have noticed that if there hadn’t been a conglomeration of police vehicles on the overpass for Highway 86. 

      Aha!  The druggies would take the first exit they see after the flashing mobile sign warning of a drug checkpoint.  Self-incrimination.  Westbound druggies would take the Highway 86 exit.

      All in all, it was an interesting and educational morning.  It may turn out to be behavior altering as well.    

      In future, I may just call on the Flying J folks.  They have two restrooms for customers of the fuel stop, the convenience store and the I-Hop.  The restaurant people will think I am a customer of the convenience store while the convenience store folks will think I’m going to the restaurant.  No need to tell them that I am just going.

       I’ll miss the marvelous view.

Fire!

     “Fire fighters work to control a grassfire that gave Atwood a smoke-scented Sunday afternoon Oct. 5, [2003].” 

     So reads the item from “Looking Back 15 years ago” in the local paper.  I remember it as if it were yesterday. 

      The house was permanently under construction in those days.  There were quite a few small scraps of wood, especially OSB board.  Some of the bigger pieces I had used to pave the way to the trash-burning barrel and the compost pile.  (We had no garbage disposal and sometimes it could be muddy getting to compost pile or trash cans .)

    So I spent a couple of hours Sunday morning burning trash.  The wind was just a breeze out of the southwest, a pretty good day for burning. 

     I had elected to do that rather than trek down to the neighbor’s pasture to cut a load of firewood in the Dodge pickup.  There was lots of good firewood down in the bottoms, but some rather rough ground to get there.  It had been a dry Fall.  I feared I might set the pasture on fire with the pickup’s exhaust system.

      So I burned trash instead.  I had exercised due diligence, covering the burn barrel with a screen to supress the flying sparks.  All went well and the big flames were done, only the coals to simmer and go out.  Or at least so I thought.

      I took a bike ride down the county road, it was such a beautiful day.  When I came back, I rode past the burn barrel.  It was still smoldering and smoking, but nothing unusual.

     I went inside to fix a lunch and maybe catch part of the football game.  Sometime later, not more than 20 or 30 minutes later, I looked out the east windows to see flames encroaching on my woodpile some 30 or 40 feet east of the trash burner.

      My woodpile going up in flames?  That pile represented a lot of work.  I grabbed the fire extinguisher and rushed outside to save the woodpile.  Then I saw the real disaster.  The smoke and flames were headed northeast over a sizable area.

     I yelled at the Goodwife to call the fire department.  The fire had already burned through the north yard where I had several ponderosa pines.  They all were singed.  Two would die and have to be replaced.

      Worse yet, the fire was into the cedars north of the house that provided wind and snow protection during the winters.  It was burning into the neighbor’s pasture, the very pasture I was afraid I would set on fire by venturing into it with my pickup truck.

       There wasn’t much time to think.  My neighbor across the draw, some two miles as the crow flies, but five or six miles by road, was already pulling into the yard.  He saw the smoke and flames long before I did.  What to do? 

      I don’t know.  Get the gates open so the fire trucks can get in.  The two of us were no match for the task at hand.

      The fire extinguisher quickly ran out of water and I had not succeeded in getting the woodpile extinguished.  I abandoned both, extinguisher and woodpile.  I was reduced to the garden sprayer, all three gallons of its capacity.  The fire extinguisher required an air compressor, which I did not have.

      I tried to control the southwest edge of the flames to keep them from getting around to the southwest where the housed would be endangered.  The Goodwife took the garden hose to the woodpile and succeeded in getting it extinguished.  I helped her string the hose out toward the windbreak, but we lacked quite a few feet of reaching it. 

      More neighbors arrived.  One lady came from church.  She was in black skirt, hose, and black dress shoes.  The skirt may have survived the afternoon, but the shoes didn’t.  She and the Goodwife spent the afternoon in the cedars keeping the blaze from destroying the trees.

      Another neighbor saw the lack of garden hose.  I told her to go buy hose, but no stores were open Sunday afternoon, so she recruited a few hundred feet from her neighbors in town.  Even with water, it took the ladies all afternoon to control the smoldering flames that worked under the compilation of dead grass and needles that covered the ground beneath the cedars.

     The fire fighters and several volunteers, including local Future Farmers of America boys who showed up, fought the grass fire in the pasture.  The battle was complicate by rough terrain unsuitable for motorized vehicles.  The boys relied on shovels to stop the flames advance.

     I was still worried about the south edge of the fire front.  I left the girls in the tree row and headed out into the pasture with my weed sprayer.  I managed to extinguish everything up to the highway running north into Atwood.  The flames on the south had to back up into the wind, so they were much more docile than the flames consuming fuel to the north.

       My three gallons were just about gone as I approached the highway.  A man in a pickup driving down the highway saw me, stopped, and hauled two jugs of water over the fence and helped me replenish my sprayer.

      The south edge safely suppressed, I started north.  The fire departments had stopped that and were working on the north and east edges.  I made my way back to the house where the girls were winning the battle in the cedars, finally.  I started checking hot spots that were smoking.  I feared it might reignite, but there was nothing left to burn, really.

       The hot spots were cow droppings.  I remember Dad talking about picking up cow chips for cooking fuel when he was a kid growing up on the prairie.  I now had a good idea of just how good a fuel cow chips are:  they burned hot, and they burned for a long time.

       There wasn’t much left for me to do.  Begin surveying the damage:  the worst was the trees we lost.  There is now a permanent hole in the northwest corner of the yard where the cedars died from the fire.  I tried for as long as we lived there to get other trees to fill in, but I was not very successful.  The roots from the neighboring survivors spread over to the blank space where I was trying to get new saplings to grow.  The bigger trees hog all the water and nutrients, leaving the little fellers to languish and eventually die.

     There were some fence posts that had burned.  Two or three power poles had to be replaced.  I thought I would get a bill for that, but I never did, perhaps because other fires in that pasture were started by electric lines arcing.  (There is a substation in the pasture, too.)

     The immediate job was to thank the many who helped fight the fire.  How do you do that?  Then there was all the garden hose to return.  I don’t remember exactly how that was done, but some folks didn’t get the right hose back.  I offered to buy new for them, but they all declined.

      How had the fire started?  Obviously, it was the trash-burning barrel.  The charred area looked like an old-fashioned megaphone like the one the cheerleaders used in days of yore.  The mouthpiece was the trash barrel, the huge bell spread out in a V-shape to the northeast, the direction of the breeze.

      How did the fire get out of the barrel?  It didn’t come over the top.  The particleboard walk I had constructed to get to the compost pile in muddy weather was to blame.  The fire worked its way out underneath the barrel, igniting the OSB stuff.

      Complicating the matter was the compost pile.  I had tried to use hog wire to keep the animals out of the compost.  I thought I was dealing with coons or other vermin, until one morning I found the dog’s collar stuck in a hole in the hog wire.  Iko was the vermin.

     I had wood pallets lying around doing nothing, so I constructed a fence out of four of them, using screws and some 1 X 2’s to connect the pallets and hold them together in place so the dog couldn’t get to the scraps.

      The fire worked its way via the “boardwalk” to the pallets.  When one of the 1 x 2’s burned in two, one of the flaming pallets flopped over into the dry grass, and away it went.

     For the next few days, I had to suffer the good-natured ribbing about being a pyromaniac.  A small price to pay for all the help we got from the community.

      For the next few months, the “burn scar” served as a reminder of the incident.  However, come April and some moisture, the burned area turned a beautiful green.  A few of the yucca plants had perished in the blaze. 

     A local preacher stopped me one day that spring.  “Congratulations,” he said.  “You have the greenest pasture in the country!”  Some small comfort for the trouble I had caused.

     Unfortunately, it wasn’t the last time the trash barrel ignited the neighbor’s pasture.  The next time, it wasn’t my fault.  Honestly!

The Trellis

     Two of them you could never see.  The third one is somewhat visible since I trimmed the juniper on the corner.

      Wagon wheels spruce up our yard.  One stood by the air conditioning unit just outside the front door.  It was nearly invisible, hiding under the spruces that guard the walkway and entrance to our front door.

     The third one sits in seclusion near the southwest corner of the house where the fence separates backyard from front yard.  It truly is hidden by evergreens that line the walk.

     When we first moved in, a little strip of soil bordering the garage wall had some kind of perennial branch that grew nearly to the eaves of the garage roof.  There was never a bloom of any kind. In the backyard, huge roses grew to over six feet high and blossomed profusely.  They wasted their sweetness on the desert air to paraphrase an elegy-writing poet.

      Why shouldn’t those roses be in the front where somebody might see them?  So I dug out the old plants by the garage and transplanted the three biggest rose bushes from the backyard.

      The roses seemed intent on proving the oldest rule in real estate:  location, location, location.  They emulated the former dwellers and grew up to the garage eaves.  They didn’t blossom.  What is in that soil?

     The roses did spill their canes out onto the driveway and the sidewalk, however.  They need a trellis, I thought.  I looked at various and sundry arbors to support plants.  Anything that fit the bill came with a healthy price tag.

       Why not use a wagon wheel?  It seemed a good idea.  I grabbed a shovel and began moving rocks piled around the wheel near the air conditioning unit.  I made an amazing discovery.  The wheel stood so straight and true without ever leaning because, it was embedded, about six inches of it, in concrete.

      One reason not to use a wagon wheel to support the roses, freeing the wheel from its resting place was going to be a challenge.  A shovel and a hammer didn’t cut it.  Neither did a chisel.

      A trip to the farm produced a crow bar.  Now I was well equipped to chunk away at the concrete, doing my best not to injure the wheel.  It still took a bit of work, but the wheel finally rolled out of its castings.

       How to stabilize the wheel in its new location amongst the roses?   Concrete worked before.  I guess it would work again.  I did not like the concrete around the wooden parts of the wheel.  The wood tended to rot. 

     Therefore, I made a small form, mixed up some Quickcrete, poured it into the form and let it set for an hour or two.  Carefully, I rolled the wheel up onto the stiffening mixture.  It made a dandy impression.  I rolled it off and let the concrete set overnight. 

     I should have let it set for two or three nights.  The small pad stood still for the removal of the forms.  But when I rolled the wheel into place in its track, the concrete went to pieces somewhat.   Still, it made a nice perch for the wheel.  But it wasn’t going to stand there by itself, concrete notwithstanding.

      I bought some four-foot sections of rebar and drove them down on either side of the wheel.  Another trip to the farm yielded some old rusty pump rod.  Those I bent into the shape of an arc as best I could.  I drove the ends of the pump rod into the earth and connected them to the wheel with, what else?  Bailing wire.  Duct tape wouldn’t work for this job.

      There was the trellis in all its rustic glory, glory that would soon be hidden by rose bushes, I hoped. 

                                             Rose bushes a-plenty, actual roses rather rare.

      You too, could have a trellis.  All it takes is a spare wagon wheel, a crow bar, some rebar, a hammer, some old rusty pump rod, a sack of premixed concrete, some 2 X 4’s for forms, a screw gun and screws to hold the forms together, a little water for the cement, and you are good to go.