“There’s a snake in my boot”

Hooray! It’s high summer. Time for festivals, snow cones, ice cream, baseball games the Fourth of July, parades and all of those wonderful activities that call to mind the summers of your childhood. No, I didn’t forget fireworks. I just saved the best for last.

Those small-town summer festivals are terrific. We went to the Pork Rind Heritage Festival in Harrod, Ohio, a couple of weeks ago. It was great! We bought three large bags of fried-on-the-spot pork rinds in three different flavors—crispy, regular and barbecue—for six dollars. They didn’t have fireworks that I know of, but they shot off the Civil War canon every fifteen minutes.

A few years ago, we watched the City of Louisville’s fireworks display from the banks of the Ohio River. They discharge twenty minutes worth of non-stop fireworks from barges in the middle of the river. It was great!

Last Saturday night we caught the fireworks while passing through Myton, Utah, from the car. They were set off on the sidewalk in front of the rest rooms at the city park. We know that only because Mr. B. was looking for the rest rooms, and during the extended lull before the finale we got a little closer to the fireworks than we realized. It was great!

We got in on some pretty good fireworks in Logan, Utah, a few years ago. They are fired from the middle of Aggie Stadium, but we watched them from the cemetery. Before that, though, we had a few fireworks of our own. Figuratively and literally.

Everyone knows that fireworks are dangerous. They must have some redeeming value, however, because even in Logan (the safest city in the United States) you can still buy ten-second Roman candles, snakes, poppers, and of course, sparklers—all without finishing Hazmat training or getting a hot work permit.

One grandson was taking no chances though. He suited up for Butterbean family fireworks by putting on his boots. They looked just like the !4” Ranger Extreme Rubber Firefighting boots except they were smaller and had frog eyes on top. Never mind that he was wearing his shorts instead of Nomex Assault Gear Turnout pants. All the other kids were foolishly wearing flip-flops with their shorts for which indiscretion they were duly warned.

The dads assembled their candles, lighters, and punks, while the moms placed their chairs well away from ground zero which kept relocating and so did the chairs. The kids surged backward as the parents yelled “stand back” and forward as the dads held each piece to the igniter.

In an order that resembled mayhem, each “firework” was finally lit, exploded, and enjoyed with obligatory “oohs and ahs.” The kid in the boots was joining in the festivities with the rest, except that he couldn’t jump up and down so easily. So far, so good.

In any quality pyrotechnic show, the sparklers are saved for last. That is because the dads are more interested in big firepower than in little sparks. The kids love the sparklers because they finally get to do something besides watch.

So the sparklers were passed out like dealing cards and a few of them were finally lit. The kids with their lit sparklers were darting around like overexcited fireflies. The sparks were bouncing off their bare feet and legs, and they didn’t mind the little prickles much.

All was well until the Future Chief of the Fire Department dropped a piece of hot wire from his defective sparkler into his boot where it didn’t bounce unless he did. By the time someone figured out that his yelling was for some reason other than hyperactivity, he had a pretty good burn. Something to forever remember The Fourth and fireworks by. A memory he is sure to cherish.

And when he does fireworks with his kids, he will be able to show them the scar on his foot, next to the strap on his flip-flop, and scare the heck out of them. And if he ever lets them light sparklers, he can say, “My grandma and I think that sparklers belong in the same category as Red Ryder BB Guns.”

Really business as usual

So you think you know what the world’s oldest profession is? Well, I am here to challenge that myth. I believe that the oldest and longest-running profession is selling lemonade. I am not talking about soda fountains or juice bars with 60 kinds of fruit drinks, or even general stores that sell everything.

I am talking about the traditional (understatement) lemonade stand, the one where the entrepreneurs are all under the age of eight, and the establishment consists of a fruit box or a chair with a pitcher of lemonade, some cups piled upside down on the “counter” and the poster with scrawled crayon letters that roughly read “lemonade 25 cents,” or denari, or euros, or round stones, or whatever is appropriate.

I expect that lemonade stands have been around at least as long as there have been lemons. And considering that probably no one has ever made any money selling lemonade, that is a long time.

How do kids manage to get the resources and the permission from their parents to set up shop? If the parents aren’t actually complicit, they must at least have noticed when their kids started pillaging the family stores for cups and Kool-aid or started moving the furniture outside.

Well, actually it’s easy for kids to get adults on board with this project. Parents concoct an idea of their own—they will use this opportunity to teach their little budding capitalists about business practices—assets, profit margins, production, etc.

By the time they find out that the kids don’t want to build a business model, it’s too late. Kids are only interested in gross income. They don’t want to learn about production costs or profit margins. So the parents shrug and settle. Maybe by default the kids will learn something about supply and demand.

So like smart little entrepreneurs, they get their production materials donated. Mom would rather raid the cupboards than go to the store with a bunch of overexcited kids who have no investment capital anyway.

With all aspects of the business model except a passion to be lemonade tycoons abandoned, they plunge ahead. They stir up lemonade under conditions for which the health department was invented, and they carry it outside. Here are some business ventures that I remember:

One day this last March, while driving through my daughter’s neighborhood, I was shivering and complaining about the falling snow while wishing that I had a nice drink of hot chocolate to warm me up. We noticed some activity ahead on the sidewalk that did not look like children making snowmen. You guessed it—the children had set up shop. They were probably able to offer lemonade without ice that day, thus cutting overhead costs considerably.

My grandson’s business model calls for running world’s biggest and best lemonade stand. He has gathered the production resources for a high-end stand where he will sell Brazilian Lemonade. He even understands that he needs a hot day on which to sell it. He is still waiting for a hot day though.

My nieces had a good idea for overcoming the problem of selling on a high-speed street. (They employed some sophisticated advertising techniques whether they realized it or not.) In order to get potential buyers to notice their stand and not drive on by before they knew what they were missing, they positioned one little salesperson 50 yards ahead of the stand. Her job was to jump up and down and in exaggerated forms of American Sign Language convey the message “lemonade stand up ahead on the right,” thus giving passersby time to slow down and pull over. I’m a little challenged with ASL myself, but maybe someone got the message. Their idea must at least partially comply with non-discrimination guidelines though.

I remember trying to sell lemonade once when I was a kid. We lived in Dry Fork, or the hinterlands as it was known then. My mom tried to teach me about “location, location, location,” but I must have thought that if I built it, they would come. I had a little table and a chair and I sat on my chair all afternoon. About three cars passed by and none stopped. I had to bring my lemonade back inside and serve it for supper. No one paid me for it either, which may have been a violation of child labor laws.

Actually, I would be very surprised if there aren’t applicable regulations governing the sale of lemonade from roadside stands. Probably kids should just give their lemonade away as they have always done. Otherwise they may find out that the business-model part would be the least of their headaches when operating in today’s business environment.

Stop for the bend in the road?

All of you who deign to read the Butterbean rantings know by now that I am not necessarily the most logical tool in the shed. (See what I mean?) I have to ask dumb questions all the time. And I get humiliated by the answers all the time.

Just because I don’t understand something doesn’t mean that everyone else doesn’t. For instance, there are probably people who understand why boys wear their pants so low that they have to hold them up with one hand. I hope they aren’t talking on their cell phones while they are carrying their lunch trays.

So in view of that, (not the pants) can anyone explain to me why there is a stop sign at the corner of 500 South and 3500 West? There needs to be a good reason.

Excuse me, there is not one stop sign, but two of them. One so you will stop before you turn onto 500 South and one to halt you before you turn onto 3500 West.

Did you notice that I said “corner,” not “intersection”? This corner is essentially a bend in the road. There is only one way to proceed and that is around the corner unless you want to get out of your car and walk on the cow trail that continues straight ahead on what would be 500 South if indeed 500 South did continue past 3500 West.

Just in case you are getting a little dizzy, or you are like me, not too facile with your cardinal directions, I have produced in stunning detail, a map of the corner in question:

(Graphic here)




I heard there was a flourishing rabbit den straight ahead, past 3500 West on 500 South, up the hill and around the thistle patch, but I don’t know for sure. Beyond that there may be an anthill and many ant paths, but I don’t think there is an actual road. Some may disagree with me, but I am here to say that 500 South ends at 3500 West and vice versa.

So this is how it goes when I am on my way to Wal-Mart: I am driving south on 3500 West, and I dutifully stop at the stop sign and look both ways. I will be sure to avoid a collision if there is a rabbit careening down the trail from the west. I feel pretty sheepish though, looking off into the sagebrush in search of, I don’t know, a school bus?

And if there is a car approaching the corner on 500 South from the east, the other direction, it will be stopping for I-still-don’t-know-what since any rabbits should be in the other lane and not pose a threat. That other lane is wide enough for a bunny after all. It certainly doesn’t need to stop for me since I am already stopped and busily looking both ways. I probably create more hazards parking there wondering what I am waiting for than if I just made the turn, merged in behind the rabbits and continued on my way.

Well, I still keep thinking someone knows something that I don’t. Maybe this is the intersection from Jumanji, which might be the name of that movie about mad elephants running loose.

Our one-dogpower machine

I fondly remember the days when we didn’t have a pet. I used to be one of those people who disdained “pet talk;” in fact I thought I would never begin a conversation with a sentence like this: “Guess what our dog did today?” Well, I also remember doing just that. It was back in the days when our first dog was a pup.

The sad part of it is that I didn’t have anything to brag about. Our dog, Steve, had not done one cute thing in his life. He was too big and awkward to be adorable. He was too stubborn to get smart. He was too uninhibited to be dignified. He had no sense and he couldn’t see past the end of his nose, which, I admit, was quite far.

So when I stooped to “pet talking,” you can be sure that I was complaining.

First of all, this dog dug holes. He made craters in Father’s lawn; he dug under the neighbor’s fence to let their dogs out to play, and once he got a friend to play with he was prone to run off with him. (Once we found him a few blocks away from home, and he had to ride home in the truck with Mr. B. after an earnest lecture that ended with, “…and your friend can walk home.”)

And he dug up the flowers in the garden. Now if I could have taught him to dig weeds, I could run bragging to my “smart-pet” friends, but he only dug up valuable things. He didn’t even dig to bury things like nice normal dogs do. Why, my nephew’s dog once buried a whole loaf of bread, wrapper and all. Now that’s remarkable. Something to tell others about.

Secondly, he chewed. He chewed the neighbor’s sprinkler heads to bits. He chewed up baseballs, shoes, socks and big sticks. He could turn an aluminum can into crinkled confetti which he used for scattering around during dog conventions.

He ate those big rawhide bones for dinner—just chewed them up and swallowed them. (Expensive meal.) He methodically removed and chewed up the shingles from the roof of his own dog house. He also chewed up his own doggie rug leaving himself nothing to lie on but cold concrete. That’s what I mean when I said he couldn’t see beyond the end of his nose.

You would think that he would have known that he might want that bedding later, like the next time he needed to rest from his labors. Instead he was diligently working on pushing the limits of a dog’s endurance to new heights—like never resting.

What a waste of horsepower—or dogpower. I used to try to think of ways to harness all of that energy and find something useful that he could do.

I couldn’t send him to take out the garbage. That would have been like leaving the cat to tend the canary. I couldn’t trust him to guard the house. He stole more things than any thief would.

He was big enough to pull a plow, but I didn’t need any more plowing done. He had already turned up most of the back yard.

I wondered if he could push the lawn mower if I got it started, but he was afraid of vacuum cleaners, and they aren’t nearly as vicious as lawn mowers. Let me see…

It just seemed like we ought to have gotten something besides confetti in return for our investments of food, sprinkler heads, shoes, new lawn, shingles, etc.

Well, we were seriously working on getting him to dig in a designated spot. If he got that figured out, he was going to be digging post holes for his own fence. That I could tell the neighbors about.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Steve’s behavior was directly related to his age. Like everyone else he finally grew up and became a nice normal dog with a few behaviors worth mentioning in conversation—he could fetch and hunt birds.

How to stay awake without really trying

Boy, am I ever prepared to write this article. I have just spent the worst night of my life.

How Third World peoples ever sleep on floors or woven mats I will never understand, because I can’t sleep in a real bed with a pillow-top mattress, box springs, sheets, down comforters, and pillows.

Excluding a water bed, in one of which I nearly froze to death, I have every kind of sleeping gear that modern industry can produce. But can I sleep? No!

This is how it went last night: I get into bed gingerly so as not to get my heart rate up or mess up the sheets. I fluff up the pillow gently, and I ease into “position number one.” That’s on my side. Two minutes later and my arm is asleep.

So it’s roll over and on to the next most “successful” position—my back. But about three and a half minutes later my feet hurt. The covers have bent my toes back, and they never took gymnastics.

Roll over and try something else…maybe…no, my elbow is poking my ribs. That won’t work. Try another ninety degree rotation. I am flat on my stomach now which feels great, except I need a snorkel to breathe.

I only have so many sides to try. Look at me and count—right, left, front and back. Yup, that’s four sides which is not nearly enough. After twelve and a half minutes I have exhausted all of the possibilities and not one of them could produce enough comfort to induce sleep.

I am back to side number one and the pillow feels like a bag of bones, the wrinkles in the sheets make depressions in my hips and they begin to itch, my nightgown didn’t follow along with the last roll over, and somewhere near the middle of the bed there comes a black hole sucking me up, bed clothes and all.

Then my brain switches into sprint speed. I begin to remember everything I ever forgot to do like take out the garbage in June of 2005. And what is the significance of remembering something so insignificant? Am I in the middle stages of Alzheimer’s?

If not that, then for sure a brain tumor. Maybe that’s why my legs are twitching. And isn’t my heart beating too fast? (If it wasn’t before, the specter of a brain tumor is enough to push up the tempo.) Oh, great, I’m going to die of a stroke right here in my bed and no one will ever know. No one.

Now my back and arms begin to ache. They are probably tired from straining to stay out of the black hole. Maybe if I get up and find something to fill it up… (Now even you are considering the probability of a brain tumor, aren’t you?)

While I’m up, I’ll fix the sheets. What is this lump? Maybe it’s a pea. No, it’s a sock.

What am I going to fix for breakfast in the morning? If morning ever gets here. Oh! I forgot I was out of eggs. What am I going to do now? Maybe it’s starvation that will get me.

What’s that noise? Besides snoring, I mean. Did I leave the space heater on? Did I pay the homeowners’ insurance premium last week?

I’m having a hard time finding a way to end this travail. I wish I could say that I finally fell fast asleep and lived happily the rest of the night. But I didn’t. Once I nearly got comfortable, but then my “bigger half” turned over.

High water--an event to celebrate

There’s a certain excitement in the air. It has nothing to do with the next calendared holiday, but it does have everything to do with this time of year and the weather.

To my knowledge, this is one event that, as of yet, has not been commercialized. They don’t sell souvenirs or tee-shirts; but I wasn’t the one to mention it.

I’m thinking of that exciting time when after a few days of warm weather, especially suddenly warm weather, the creeks fill up. These days are marked by the sudden appearance of large amounts of water in the streambeds and constitute a holiday season all of their own—high water.

As you know, the term “arid” is highly applicable to lands of The Basin. So when water in large enough quantities to make a noise runs, it is time to celebrate.

“High water” doesn’t necessarily mean the water flow at it’s greatest level, as the dictionary might lead you to believe. It simply means the arrival of anything more than a trickle—any level higher than the stingy flows of late winter. On the creek out my back door, it means any water at all.

The farmers and gardeners get especially excited about high water. They take Sunday drives every day of the week to go check on the flows. They get out of their pickups and stand on the edge of the creek in the same place every day and cast a beady eye on a certain rock or a tree stump in order to gauge the water level. They then declare ominously, “She’s up again today. If this hot weather holds, she’s going to keep rising. Who knows how much?”

In certain years, high water is a time to remember. When the weather turns hot abruptly, like it did last weekend, high water could more or less arrive in the form of a flash flood. A wall of water carrying soil and debris comes crashing down the creek, it’s lead edge fanning out, and water rolling over itself in a frantic hurry to get to some lower point—or so I’m told. The farmer who is furthest up the creek and observes that phenomenon has something to talk about for the rest of the summer—which is much longer than high water, or low water either, will last.

Farmers in The Basin observe to pray for “moisture” daily. They would pray for moisture after twenty straight days of rain. (I think that happened about once.) They like to see water in the irrigation ditches, of course, but what they surreptitiously want is enough snow in the mountains and a quick hot spring with temperatures high enough to bring down a good share of it all at once. There’s nothing like a good old-fashioned high water celebration, which means take the afternoon off to check it out and talk about it.

Their eyes gleam when they talk about the water jumping the creek banks and moving those banks around. And they really get worked up when they point out the extent to which the rocks are rolling in the creek beds. And it is something to hear.

The rock-rolling isn’t going to happen this year. Not enough snow up there. Since there are at least a couple of generations of Basin farmers in my immediate ancestry, I should know. So you can probably do your Sunday driving down in the valley where there’s more room.

By way of contrast, let me tell you about middle Ohio where a son of mine lives. There they practice a form of reverse irrigation. They lay perforated pipe in the fields in “furrows” for the purpose of draining the water away from their crops. If a person wants to construct a fish pond, all he needs is a hole and some fish. However a pond is not nearly the attraction there that it is here. People are quite likely to have them in their basements.

If you mention to a native Ohioan something about water shares or water rights, you get no sign of understanding, only a blank stare; and he will begin to choke if you bring up the practice of praying for rain.

Let's not go fly a kite

Well, I realize that it is the month of May now. March is a couple of months behind us. But we are still enjoying March-like weather. If we were going to be stuck in a perpetual weather pattern, I would never pick March. But even though I can predict the weather, I can’t change it.

You would think that we would be making lemonade when life gives us lemons and be finding a way to capitalize on all of this wind we have been having. Something like wind farms, or natural wind tunnels. Actually, I don’t know why the Uintah Basin isn’t the kite-flying capital of the world. We could be having two-month-long kite festivals. Think of the potential—similar to the Utah ski industry with the best snow in the world. “Uintah Basin—the best wind in the world.”

We could draw people from as far away as China where kite-flying is the national sport. There could be all kinds of kite contests like, you know, most original kite, most colorful kite, etc. And then there could be different competitions like youngest kite flyer, oldest kite flyer (that is where I come in) and last but not least, best kite flyer.

Sign me up; where is my kite?

Oh, but hang on a minute. I am having second thoughts here. I am trying to remember when I myself actually ever flew a kite—you know, actually had it off the ground more than six feet and for more than six seconds. Romantic notions of little boys tugging on kite strings entice me once in a while, but then I recall my own experiences with my little boys and kites.

I don’t think I ever went outside on a breezy day to see even one little boy from my family happily holding onto a kite string while a dutiful kite dips and soars in a sunny sky. Instead, I do remember seeing sights of something like a tangled wreck of sticks, string and plastic flapping itself to death on the ground. And, yes, that is my son, and he’s howling.

Until they are able to manufacture kites out of steel and cable, I am afraid the Butterbeans will never have one last through the first week of kite season. Perhaps the Chinese have been holding out on us. Maybe all of the kites they ship to the US are the self-destruct models, and they keep the real ones for themselves. I don’t know about steel, but I’m pretty sure all of the ones I bought had lead in them.

Benjamin Franklin knew that kites were dangerous. I tend to agree with him. Not only could you get struck by lightening, but running around the vacant lot with your eyes on something above your head, for however short a time, and both hands on your ball of string, can be dangerous. There are things you can trip over like rocks, sticks, weeds, or dogs, with nothing to break your fall but your face.

If you (not me) should be lucky enough to get your kite airborne without breaking a strut or the string or your nose, you’re still in jeopardy.

Kites are liable to be acted upon by forces emanating from things like tall tree branches and telephone lines which both have properties similar to black holes. Once your kite is sucked up by one of those structures, it will remain there for the rest of the year, a constantly fluttering reminder to you and everyone else that you lost the battle for the kite.

What’s that saying, “A fool and his kite are soon parted”? Same thing—unless it was a free kite.

Say you somehow come into possession of an unusually sturdy one, and your kite makes it through kite season intact. Have you ever tried to keep it in the closet, saving it for next year? That is nearly as dangerous as flying one.

If there is a kite in the closet, it will jump out at you when you open the door. It will land on your head or shoulder, and the string will wrap itself around one arm and both legs before it hits the floor and unwinds itself into the next room. You can fold them up or roll them up and put them behind everything else on the shelf and slam the door; but in the darkness, they expand, just like a crinkled grocery bag, and perch on the edge of the shelf waiting to attack the next time the door is opened. I have been kite-assaulted many times.

If ever I tell you to go fly a kite, you will know you have been properly insulted; and if ever we should have a kite festival in the Uintah Basin, remind me to be the one who brings the hot chocolate.