Other People's Stuff

I'm snooping in other people's barns on an early November six-mile run near my home. Around here, very few barns actually house animals any more. Some of them still shelter hay, but most of them are just big airy storage units for stuff that nobody wants any more. 

Which makes them crack for me, who used to haunt flea markets and tag sales back in the days when I still thought I needed stuff. Now, I drive by yard sales with a steely resolve not to be dragged in.

I'm already thinking about how much crap I have, and what I'm going to do with it all when I can't deal with it any more. A person with a lot of interests (art, music, natural history, books, science, horticulture, aquariums, batkeeping, specimen prep to name just a few) accumulates a LOT of crap in half a lifetime.

So I love to look at other people's stuff. Everything in this post is in the near barn with the silver roof, and the half a satellite deesh poking out of the carriage space. See photo above.

 Mmm. Beautiful blue Mason jar, nice limited palette composition.

A box of rags, and a robin's nest that must've fallen from a beam above. 

More jars and some gas pipeline, and some great Wyethian milkhouse light at the end of the corn crib.

A very large hole, with bedding. Could be woodchuck, probably is. But could be the work of a rat, too. Rats live pretty large for their size. 

I couldn't find any telltale hairs.

Mousestuff. Oh, don't worry. I will definitely remove the lids before microwaving.

Mice love jars. So do Carolina wrens! Oh my, what a place for a nest. Couldn't tell if the fledglings made it or not. Carolina wrens are such neat housekeepers there's rarely ever a telltale poop left behind.

This was a cool find: a whole box full of tape dispensers? Huh?

The white-footed mice have been opening hickory nuts here.

 Hickory dickory dock. The mouse ran up the tape dispenser.

The tape theme would continue upstairs. I was drawn by curiosity up the Stairway of Poop.

If you know raccoons, you know they love to poop on things. Preferably stairs, where your foot is about to go.

And at the top of stairs. Eating persimmons, I see. Me, too. Only I remove the seeds at the upper end of my alimentary tract, thank you.

At the top of the stairs, a sort of living room, one Vermeer would have liked to paint, if he liked junky interiors. An elegant wing chair, full of some kind of video games. Shazzam! I'd been hoping they were eight-track tapes. That would have been amusing, to go through the titles. But video games mean nothing to me. It's like looking at runes.

Absolutely love the lighting here. Yum.

Yes, I find these scenes compellingly creepy. Especially when I get the feeling people have been, um, doing stuff up here, amidst the animal droppings.

 A little privacy, please. Why would you need a curtain in the upstairs of a barn...? To try on clothes? Oh, never mind. Ishta. Uffda.

The mind does go places. Sometimes comes a bit unhinged.

The runes never speak.

Outside, the beeches whisper of Lothlorien, of a cleaner, more wholesome place, a place where I belong. And on I trot.

More Adorable Rodents of Montana

Looking at my recent entries, it seems I have developed a preoccupation with rodents. The truth is that I like rodents as well as I like any wildlife. Mostly I just like any wildlife that lets me get real close with my camera.

I'm remembering a Patton Oswalt line. "I like porn. Because I can get porn."

But I do like yellow-bellied marmots, and not just because I can get pictures of them. A marmot is nothing more than a nicely colored woodchuck that lives in a group. And living in groups, yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventris) are a lot more noticeable than our solitary eastern woodchuck (Marmota monax) is. Eastern woodchucks generally reveal themselves only first thing in spring, when they're ratty and moth-eaten and hungrily vacuuming up clover in tiny median strips, or the rest of the year, when we find them taking dirt naps on highway shoulders. Marmots are also bolder, perhaps because having many eyes watching out makes them feel more secure in revealing themselves. Perhaps they aren't as heavily persecuted in the wild West as woodchucks are back East.

My affection for woodchucks is sincere; I have a number of wonderful woodchuck stories. The people who lived on our Ohio farm well before we bought it used to take in injured and orphaned wildlife. I'm thinking it's something in the water. Anyway, they had a pet woodchuck that loved to play. Its favorite game was to be slid on its back across the kitchen floor, caught, and slid right back, like a hockey puck. You have to love a rodent that likes to do that.

On our way to Yellowstoen, we stopped at Pompey's Tower, a state monument to Lewis and Clark along the Missouri River in Montana.

William Clark's signature, on the rock of a stack called Pompey's Tower. It was named for the toddler son of French-Canadian expedition cook Charbonneau and his Native American wife, Sacajawea. Lewis and Clark took a huge shine to the child, who they nicknamed Pompey, and named this promontory after him. He was the expedition mascot. I would think a toddler would be a bit of a liability on the push into the Northwest Territory, but Sacajawea must've stocked up on disposables and Tupperwares full of Cheerios before they took off. By all accounts Pompey was a happy baby, even though he was probably chewing on a bit of dried bison sinew instead of Pepperidge Farm Flavor Blast Pizza Goldfish.

Wild rock pigeons flapped and moaned from their nests along the flank of Pompey's Tower.


At the park below, we ran into a little colony of yellow bellied marmots.

They had burrows at the base of the huge cottonwoods along the river.

They peeked out and then came out, perhaps to see if we had any food to offer. Note the white brow band--distinctive.

Also distinctive is the pot-bellied profile when the animal sits up to take a look around. Awwww!

At this point, I was jonesing bad for a fix o' Chet Baker, having been away from him for a whole week.
So when a marmot spraddled out in what we call the frogleggin' pose, I melted.

They seemed to know I meant them no harm (or know that I thought they were meltingly adorable) and relaxed visibly after a little while.

At last, a little babeh marmot peeked out from his cottonwood fortress. Melting, complete. Just another bit of fauna I would love to have in Ohio. Magpies and marmots.