Travel is uncomfortable. Why do we subject ourselves to it? We get restless sitting at home. We want to see distant relatives. Our people will listen to us and we'll listen to them and together we'll make medicine. We took four days driving to Mesa, Arizona from home on a combination of interstate and two lane secondary roads. The interstate is helpful to shrink the distance but they're monotonous. On the back roads you view the countryside and the towns up close. You see humans and their effects. Sometimes you meet one. We spent three days with Uncle Vern (age 101) and Cousin Kelly (youthful), the fourth of his five daughters who helps him stay in his condo duplex on the east side of Mesa. Mesa is flat with lots of tall palm trees and all kinds of cactus. I especially like the giant saguaro, standing with their arms up like a desert yeti. We were in Mesa during the solar eclipse. I had ignored the hubbub because we were too far west to see the show. On the day of
" I am of the mind that concerning our 160-acre situation it is better to do something than do nothing to prevent, or at the very least stall, a wildfire on our tree farm ..." All too reliably, forecast rain systems had avoided drought-stricken Palmville Township in 2023, and just taunted our crops. I had little reason to think these scattered showers that day would act any different. Disking my over-grown firebreaks on Thursday, April 11th, to help prevent the spectre of wildfire did the same thing as washing a car did long ago, for toward evening it progressively rained, sleeted, and hailed on me a quarter mile from home forcing me to take shelter in a dense windbreak of white spruce trees north of the one-room Palmville schoolhouse; I loved the irony of it: disking against the threat of wildfire and 'producing' rain. It was a partly cloudy evening. I was disking a 16-foot wide north/south firebreak between the county road ditch and a 4-row win