Escape

 

With everything in so much turmoil these days and nothing we below can do anything about, I think it best to just focus on our own lives and those we live with, love and need.  

It does seem true that we are living at the end of a civilizational era, on the brink of catastrophic war followed by an interregnum that could last for centuries before another civilization arises, if one does.  It's odd to me that most people don't see this. They focus on trivial, ephemeral political issues -- hostility to a personality or political perspective.  They are as if the crew of the Lusitania were brawling in the wheelhouse, oblivious to the periscope of the U-20 foaming a path through the sea to starboard.  

Maybe their behavior is natural and to be expected; after all, does not the water still flow from the tap, is not the refrigerator crowded with food from every part of the world, do not the lights come on at night?  All is as it was and ever shall be.  Why would it change?

 So if the coffee in your cup inexplicably trembles ever so slightly  as it sits on the side table while you scroll your tablet, it cannot mean that a Tyrannosaur has smelled you out and is coming. Ridiculous.  And that low rumbling you hear is merely distant thunder, not the sound of a rolling artillery barrage headed your way.  How could it be otherwise? 

I'm with you.  I don't want to know.  All these grim conversations I've had lately with those in the know, men who see clearly how things are, have spotted the avalanche roaring down the mountain toward us, the tsunami rising out of the sea and racing toward our shore -- what can I do about it?  My own politics comprise the single sentence: Can't we all just get along? That gets a horse laugh from all sides -- the joy of life comes from smiting your enemies, and if you don't have any, you make them.  Fight with a neighbor, fight with a nation, whatever and whoever.  Just fight.

Well, I don't want to fight.  Go away, all of you. Leave me alone, can't you? Let me dream of a long ago summer of love that was once real and will surely come again.  

It was real.  Wasn't it?

 

Yippy ki yay

 We had an onslaught of coyotes harassing one of our herds and we didn't have enough hands to deal with the situation so I volunteered to night herd and then flank ride when we decided to move the cattle to a different range. I rode a gouch-eared mare they told me had good cow sense although she didn't look like much.

Since my main task was to keep the coyotes away from the calves I was armed with a saddle rifle, my old short-barreled Winchester .30-30.  When I was night herding I heard a lot of coyotes yipping and yowling  but only saw coyotes twice. Once I spotted one loping towards the herd and I reined in, drew the Winchester from its scabbard and carefully led the beast.  I could see it clearly in the strong moonlight.  I fired and missed but I must have got close because without slowing down he veered away from the herd, zig-zagging as he ran.  He must have been shot at before.  I counted him as a "mission kill."

The other one I saw was very close in to the herd, crouching getting ready to spring.  I was afraid to shoot at him because he was between me and the cattle and I sure didn't want to go down as having shot a cow if I missed him.  So I charged him. I thought about yelling and whooping but I didn't want to startle the cattle.  When he spotted me coming he took off.  Once I was between him and the herd I chanced a shot at him. He was pretty far away by then, but I reined in my horse, took careful aim, gently squeezed the trigger while holding my breath and ... missed him clean. I swear he turned his head to look at me, though.  I imagined him saying, "Nya, nya, ya missed me!"

I levered another round into the chamber and lined up on him again, but didn't fire.  If I didn't hit him the first time I sure wasn't going to now that he was farther away and getting hard to make out. 

Once in a while, I heard a shot fired by one of the cowpokes and wondered it they had any better luck than me.

Other than those two incidents nothing happened other than I got really cold. The sky was mostly clear so the temperature plunged down into the single digits. Before the moon rose the night sky was stunning.  So many stars. The Milky Way a wonder of creation. To fight the cold, sometimes I leaned forward on my mount, hugging her neck to absorb some of her warmth.  Several times I dismounted to swing my arms and stamp my feet to get the circulation going.  I walked some, too, did jumping jacks and squats and so forth, then remounted.  I had to keep up with the herd and keep an eye out for those darn coyotes. I remembered the words a worn out old man had once spoken to me, that the best job was one with no heavy lifting, indoors in winter and all the water you could drink.  I thought it was a joke then, but now I understood.

 After sunrise we brought dogs out, mostly border collies but also a couple of blue heelers, a type of dog I don't like but they were very good at encouraging the stragglers to keep up.  We didn't have dogs out at night because they might have been mistaken for coyotes and shot, but during the day they were very aggressive toward any coyote that showed up. I saw one border collie actually overtake a running coyote and bite one of his rear legs, causing him to tumble. He got up and lunged at the border collie.  The collie didn't engage but darted away.  I took the opportunity to risk a shot at the coyote. Missed again, but I saw dirt and snow scatter just behind him.  I should have led him a little more and maybe aimed a bit higher but he took off like a scalded cat so I counted it another mission kill.  At the shot, the collie, who was charging in again on the coyote, veered off and ran back to the herd.

 Once the herd was at the new pasture the coyotes became less of a problem.  Maybe they stuck to their home range. I don't know.  We did lose a few calves despite all our efforts so maybe they had eaten their fill and didn't feel the need to risk getting shot.

The sun was warm and the days were quite pleasant.  We all took turns sleeping in the camper mounted in the bed of a 4x4 pickup and chowing down at another that had been converted to a modern-day chuckwagon. Some boys drove up with hay bales that we broke open and scattered over the snow for the cattle to feed on.

After a few days of this, a relief crew took over. I was glad to head out, bone weary and sore. We rode our horses to the old bunkhouse and stable where the hands were staying and after taking care of our mounts and having a supper of pinto beans cooked with dried chili peppers,  fried eggs, ham, bacon and fresh-baked corn bread sopped in bacon grease, a salad of tomatoes, lettuce, onions, carrots, green peppers and black olives with a dressing made of vinegar, olive oil and lemon juice, and a desert of bread pudding with raisins, washed down with percolator coffee, all rustled up by yours truly, the guys washed up and crawled into their bunks. I cleaned the dishes, noting there were no left overs, not even one piece of corn bread. One of the guys got out of his rack and dried and put away the dishes for me. Afterwards, I sat down in a chair by the old coal-burning pot-bellied stove. Oh, it was so toasty warm there. I closed my eyes and fell asleep. When I woke up about 45 minutes later everybody was sleeping. I packed up my gear, left a note saying good-bye and God bless and went home. 

The cowpokes weren't so lucky. They are still out there, earning their pay.  

Later, I thought about the conversation I had with the 'poke who dried the dishes for me.  I mentioned my chagrin at firing at and missing three coyotes and he said, "You didn't really want to kill those coyotes, did you?"  As soon as he said that, I realized it was true, although it had never entered my conscious mind before. I stopped washing, pot in hand, as I thought about that.  He looked at me, understanding.  Then he said, "You know we lost calves to coyotes.  Maybe to those you didn't shoot.  Think about the horror of those calves being attacked and ripped apart by the 'yotes, their moms trying to fend them off and failing, how they feel because you felt sympathy for their killers.  Something always has to die, Wanda.  Something always does.  Us or them."

 

Winter contentment

 

It's funny, but I'm regretting the passing of winter. For me, it's become a very comfortable season.  It compels confinement. In the past, that would have been frustrating for me, I'd want to be up and doing, out and about.  But recently I relish the relief of having an excuse to not do anything.  Oh, there are chores and things that have to be done around the house and with family, but they are things I enjoy doing or at least don't mind, and just about everything can be put off if the weather is inclement.

So life slows down and the long evenings of welcome quiet are something I look forward to. After the little that needs to be done is done, I sit in my favorite chair in front of the fireplace and read or knit -- my Lord, yes, I've taken up knitting and crocheting; I never would have imagined! 

This is a family that reads.  I've seen to that, or, rather, my parents did, making reading part of us kids' daily life, as their parents did for them, and as I now do for my children.  El jefe also came from a family of readers, so we dovetail in that as in so many other things. El jefe also enjoys reading aloud so he's the designated bedtime story reader. 

He's like my dad that way, but unlike the popster, who would read us books and short stories he always intended to read but somehow never got around to -- Moby Dick, Arundel, Northwest Passage, The Sea Wolf (I had nightmares about that one), Blue Hotel, The Lottery, The Tell-Tale Heart, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge....sweet dreams and nighty-night, kids; actually, my brothers loved the scary stuff, me not so much, 'though I did like Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales -- 

Anyway, el jefe reads them children's stories: Thumbelena and other stories by Hans Christian Andersen and Hansel and Gretel and the Brothers Grimm tales and also more grown-up tales such as Jack London's The Hobo and the Fairy, Kate Douglas Wiggin's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh, Stephen Vincent Benét's The Devil and Daniel Webster, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, Frances Hodgkin Burnett's The Secret Garden, Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, Jerome K. Jerome's The Passing of Third Floor Back, Ring Lardner's Alibi Ike, Booth Tarkington's The Terrible Shyness of Orvie Stone, Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat. Also such novels as Peter Pan, The Virginian, Swiss Family Robinson, Heidi, Treasure Island, Riders of the Purple Sage, Alice in Wonderland, Charlotte's Web, Childhood's End, The Light in the Forest, The Hundred Dresses, Idylls of the King (okay that's poetry), Under Two Flags, The Maltese Falcon, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Four Feathers, Tom Sawyer, The Light That Failed, Wild Animals I Have Known (semi-factual), The Lonesome Gods, Huckleberry Finn, Pasó Por Aquí, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Screwtape Letters, The Hobbit.... They never know what he will read them on any given night.  His practice is to read them a poem before beginning his book reading, usually a classic from the 19th century -- The boy stood on the burning deck, Whence all but he had fled; The flame that lit the battle's wreck, Shone round him o'er the dead.....  Oh, dear.

He doesn't just read, he acts out the characters, giving them different voices, from squeaky to gruff, depending.  He rushes excitedly through the sentences or pauses dramatically, as the story unfolds, sometimes looking up from the page and turning his gaze from one child to the other and they look back with awe, expectancy or impatience -- yes, well, what happens? -- as the story line dictates. Sometimes his readings are so good and the novel so engaging that as I happen to pass by I stop to listen, too, slipping quietly into the room so as not to disturb. Sometimes my mother slips in to listen, as well.

What's that? TV? Cell phones? The internet?  None of that in my house! (Except internet for school work and other research under supervision.)

Otherwise, while el jefe is terrifying  entertaining the children, I sit watching the fire in the fireplace, thinking nothing much at all.  Sometimes I go over to a window and stand looking out at the winter landscape, watch the early sunset, see a late crow fly across the western glow, or maybe an early owl. One by one, the stars and planets appear and a chill draft curls up around the window, making me shiver, so I retreat to the fireplace and stand in front of it warming up, then make a cup of tea, settle into my chair, pick up my knitting and begin clacking the needles or go back to my book and open it to where I left off, the cat climbs into my lap, the fire hisses, and all's right with the world.

 

 

 

 

Atomic bombs now and then

Original art from the story.

If you wanted to change the horrible present and were somehow transported back 30 years into the past into your own childhood with full knowledge of all that had happened in the intervening years, what would you do? How would you convince your parents that you had returned from your adult future to you own childhood?  If you did convince them, what would they do?

 Time and Again, based on a story by H. Beam Piper, first broadcast over NBC radio as an episode in the series Dimension X on July 12, 1951. The story originally appeared in the April, 1947, issue of Astounding Science Fiction.  This was Piper's first published story.

This story interests me not just for its thought experiment aspect but because it evokes the last days of the Pacific War as it was for people at home in the states, how they thought about the war, and in particular what it was like the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, and more broadly how the future was expected to play out in another generation -- not well. Not well at all.

 

 

 

 

 

The Men That Don't Fit In

 

 I was thinking about poetry and wondering why it's basically vanished from the world.  Nobody writes it, nobody reads it, nobody cares about it.  Oh, sure, stuff called poetry is still published and maybe the poet's family says they read it and it was just swell, but the truth is there is no audience for poetry anymore.  And even someone like me who actually does read poetry reads essentially nothing published after 1960.

I think one reason why poetry is dead -- and there are many reasons -- is that there is no longer poetry addressed to the reality of life, distilled observation and common sense. Certainly there is no robust, masculine poetry anymore -- the kind that speaks directly to you without literary allusions, metaphors, obscure references, the kind of poetry you  have to take a class to understand. There used to be lots of that sort published in mass-circulation magazines, then collected in books that became popular best sellers.  There was also a lot of humorous poetry, poetry for children, religious poetry.  All gone now.  

It seems to me there is a demand still for such poetry but in its absence people quote, recite, song lyrics.  That's the closest thing there is to popular poetry anymore, and sometimes the lyrics are pretty good.  But too often they are painfully poorly written, the writer unskilled with the written word, unable to express well what he wants to say.  Not all, of course.  Some song lyrics are very good and stay with you, creating images in your mind that linger.

Anyway, here's a poem that I think illustrates what I'm talking about.  A plain poem telling us something about the world and a type of person in it that we can recognize. Maybe it's us and a warning.  It has a certain masculine flavor to it that seems gone from the world.  It was written by Robert W. Service in 1911.

There's a race of men that don't fit in,

    A race that can't stay still;

So they break the hearts of kith and kin,

    And they roam the world at will.

They range the field and they rove the flood,

    And they climb the mountain's crest;

Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,

    And they don't know how to rest.

If they just went straight they might go far;

    They are strong and brave and true;

But they're always tired of the things that are,

    And they want the strange and new.

They say: "Could I find my proper groove,

    What a deep mark I would make!"

So they chop and change, and each fresh move

    Is only a fresh mistake.

And each forgets, as he strips and runs

    With a brilliant, fitful pace,

It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones

    Who win in the lifelong race.

And each forgets that his youth has fled,

    Forgets that his prime is past,

Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead,

    In the glare of the truth at last.

He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;

    He has just done things by half.

Life's been a jolly good joke on him,

    And now is the time to laugh.

Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;

    He was never meant to win;

He's a rolling stone, and it's bred in the bone;

    He's a man who won't fit in.

And here's a song, Gentle on My Mind, that I think has lyrics to rival the old verses of the popular poets of days gone by.  It was written by the great John Hartford in 1968 and is here sung by Glen Cambell.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whoof!

 

Stay away from politics. 

If you get involved with it, the world looks terrible and it's clear that we're all doomed if something isn't done right now to stop the evil other side and their wicked ways.  

But if you avoid that toxic cesspool, you notice the sun is shining in a bright blue sky decorated with drifting fair weather clouds that cast dappled shadows, a gentle breeze from the south is rustling the leaves of the trees, flowers are blooming, the birds are singing, the cattle are lowing and the kids and the dog want to hike down to the pond and have a picnic. 

Let's go!

And hubby says, "Hey! Wait for me!"

 

Why?

**

"Anything you want to do, you can do… anything… and believe it. You can do it. Don’t let people tell you you can’t. Don’t let people tell you you aren’t good enough.
Be good enough."
Gayle Snell, WASP
 

With the two recent air crashes in the news involving female pilots that have generated vast hostility to female pilots, not only by men, but women, too, including one prominent female columnist who referred to the Delta Airlines pilot as "baby cakes," I've wondered why such hatred? 
If the two pilots were men, in particular white men, there would have been no such reaction, just as when not long ago a New Zealand Navy  ship captained by a female ran aground there was an eruption of misogyny but when a US Navy aircraft carrier captained by a man collided with a merchant ship and the captain was relieved of command, there was no reaction, as there was not when a male captain got his ship sideways in the Suez Canal and blocked it or another male captain rammed his ship into a bridge in Baltimore.  Nor was there when a Bering Air Cessna crashed killing all aboard or when a Jet Rescue Learjet crashed, also killing all aboard. The pilots were male.

Retiring Rear Adm. Wendi Carpenter,Commander,
Navy Warfare Development Command,
surrounded by female Naval aviators & air crewman in 2011.
Carpenter was designated a Naval Aviator in
1979, graduating at the top of her class.

 About the same time as the Delta crash, when a general aviation pilot -- a male -- cut in front of another plane in the landing pattern, causing a mid-air collision, and the male pilot crashed, killing himself and his passenger while the female pilot in the other plane landed her damaged aircraft safely, there was no outrage about incompetent male pilots -- nor praise for the female pilot. But had the situation been reversed there would still be furious ranting about incapable female pilots.

Carpenter was assigned
to the Second Fleet
as an expert in air
warfare command
and control.

I don't understand why this is happening now.  Female pilots are old news.  Notice in the photo to the upper left that Rear Admiral Wendi Carpenter is retiring after a full career as a naval aviator -- in 2011! Fourteen years ago. Fourteen! She began her aviation career almost half a century ago! Notice, if you will, that she is surrounded by female aviators in a photo taken years ago. And back during World War II women were flying those old death trap planes designed and flown before there were even V numbers -- planes with nicknames like one a day in Tampa Bay and the widow maker.  I've written a little bit about this in Girl Fliers.  So what's the big deal in 2025 about women flying airplanes?  

Incidentally, V numbers were developed by Hazel Hasleden around 1950.  The "V" stands for "vitesse," meaning "speed" in French. They were introduced after an October 26, 1952 deHavilland Comet crash in  Rome that involved what today we would say was Vmu (Slowest speed at which an aircraft can become airborne) / Vr (rotation speed), pitch control, power and the difference between being stall-limited and geometry-limited on takeoff. The official conclusion of the British Bureau of Aircraft Accidents for the crash was that "The accident was due to an error of judgment by the Captain [a man!] in not appreciating the excessive nose-up attitude of the aircraft during the take-off." 

If you want to know more about Vmu, read this: MINIMUM UNSTICK SPEED CALCULATION FOR HIGH-SPEED JET TRANSPORT AIRCRAFT . How's your math by the way?  You'll need it. If you can understand this monograph, tell me does anything in it relate to the  Delta CRJ accident? If so, what and how?  If you have no idea, stand down.

A dozen years ago a thorough study of female Army aviation pilots was made, WOMEN IN COMBAT ARMS: A STUDY OF THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR, that stated, "there is a population of female soldiers that have contributed as front line 'trigger pullers' throughout the course of the past 12 years of war in both Iraq and Afghanistan. These women are Army aviators who have served in attack aviation roles, without restriction, since the beginning of major combat operations in the Global War on Terror. This research shows that over a decade of females serving on the front lines alongside their male counterparts, there is no significant stigma or other prohibitive factors that would degrade the effectiveness or lethality of combat arms units in war.

"Performance in combat is the central issue that must guide the debate of women in combat arms. However, as the research indicates, the performance of women in combat is not a problem. Both historically and more recently during the war on terror, anecdotal and statistical input conclude that women can and will continue to perform admirably in combat across a wide variety of jobs.
"A look at the data on aircraft accidents is useful to make an assessment of performance of female pilots. As the data highlights, women are involved in fewer aircraft accidents than all-male crews -- comprising only 3% of incidents. As women comprise roughly 10% of all aviators, the evidence suggests that women may operate aircraft more safely than men. As it pertains to just AH-64 aircraft, 100% of all accidents, both in garrison and in theater, involve all-male crews, at least suggesting that female attack pilots may be even more safe in the performance of flight duties." 

In the Navy, where women have been aviators since 1974, 12 percent of pilots are women and they have a comparable safety record to Army female pilots.

Harriet Quimby in her plane.

 I truly do not get this hostility to women pilots.  All this vicious hysteria, this intense hatred of female pilots makes no sense to me.  I could maybe understand it back a hundred years ago when Amelia Earhart set a world altitude record less than a decade after a female duo riding motorcycles from New York to Los Angeles were arrested for wearing pants -- I kid you not.  But times have changed.  Or I thought they had.  For heaven's sake, the second person to fly across the English channel was a woman, Harriet Quimby, back in 1912. She was celebrated as a heroine, men wrote songs about her and women rushed to dress the same way she did when she flew the channel. So what's the big deal now, 113 years later?

When I read some opinion columnist, who knows nothing about the subject, asserting that women are pushed into aviation as DEI hires, that women are incapable of flying airplanes, and gets spittle-spraying fanboys shouting their agreement, I wonder what the motive is.  What is the objective these people hope to achieve? What is their end goal?  Do they want women banned from aviation? Why?  How is the world made better if this is achieved?

Another thing I wonder is why are these neurotic creeps spazzing out like this when they have to know that women are not going to be banned from piloting airplanes, civilian or military. Nothing will result from their hysteria. The accidents will be properly investigated by knowledgeable, responsible people, causes discovered, and actions taken to prevent such causes in the future.  Okay, one thing will be achieved by their antics: they will drive a lot of women away from conservatism who were sympathetic to it.  Maybe that's the goal, why all this is happening.  That this will cause the right to lose elections doesn't matter to them.  All that matters is that they drive away women.
(By the way, I mentioned that 12 percent of naval aviators are female.  Guess how many naval aviators are black -- 0.013 percent. Look at that group photo above of female aviators.  Almost entirely white women. So shouldn't  right-wing white men be cheering for them?  Yay! Mighty whitey rules the skies!  Fat chance.  Rightest white men hate white women.  Elliot Rodgers is their hero.  I don't know where they think white men come from. Maybe they buy into the leftist assertion that men can become pregnant, too. Spare me the details.)

 I was taught to fly by men -- my father and grandfather among them -- who certainly did not think women should not be pilots. To me it was not a big deal.  It was just part of growing up.  They taught me how to ride a bicycle, a horse, a motorbike, how to drive a car, how to fly an airplane. It was all part of a continuum.  Among these, why would only flying an airplane be considered something a female could not do? Every male instructor I ever had only wanted to make me the best pilot I could be and never expressed any doubt that I could fly as well as anyone, and gender had nothing to do with it. And, believe you me, none were afraid to kick my ass till I was.  And when I finally was, it was a high five and now go fly!

****** 

Female WASP pilots were safer pilots than men. ATC (ACT is a typo) is
Air Transport Command. WAFS is Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron.

 Thousands of pilot trainees were killed learning to fly during World War II.  WASP pilot trainees died, too.

 

 ************

 

 

 

 

This guy didn't have any problem with women pilots in 1944, so why now in 2025?

Odean "Deanie" Parish, engineering test pilot, and her P-47.
She passed away in 2022, one day shy of her 100th birthday.

Jackie Cochran, winner of  five Harmon Trophies.

Female air traffic controller, Floyd Bennett Field, 1943.

 

A male pilot remembering and thanking a female pilot for helping him overcome his fear.

 

********

 

*******

 **WASP: Women's Airforce Service Pilot

      

An emergency very well handled -- by a girl!

Écoute-moi

 

 Écoute-moi s'il te plaît j'ai besoin de parler

accorde-moi seulement quelques instants

ne me bombarde pas de conseils et d'idées

ne te crois pas obligé de régler mes difficultés.



Écoute-moi s'il te plaît j'ai besoin de parler

n'essaie pas de me distraire ou de m'amuser

je croirais que tu ne comprends pas

l'importance de ce qui vis en moi

surtout, ne me juge pas, ne me blâme pas

ne te crois pas non plus obligé d'approuver

si j'ai besoin de me raconter

c'est simplement pour être libéré.



Écoute-moi s'il te plaît j'ai besoin de parler

n'interprète pas et n'essaie pas d'analyser

respecte les silences qui me font cheminer

c'est par eux bien souvent que je suis éclairé.


Et quand tu m'auras bien écouté
À ton tour, tu pourras parler

Et à mon tour, je t'écouterai.

~ Jacques Salomé

Talk, talk, talk

Well, an episode, shall we call it, occurred that won me a small victory.  I have been beating the drum for us to acquire a King Air for some time, and now the opposition has surrendered and we are going to get one.  Huzzah!  Besides my desire to get away from recips and into turbines, we just need a bigger airplane.  Oh, I love flying the Baron, really do, but it just doesn't have enough payload for some of the things we need done.  It's great for running around doing most of our transportation needs, but sometimes you just need more.  The BE-18 could fill that spot, but it is really just too old, especially now that Duane, our local FBO, has finally decided to retire and shut down his airport, meaning we will lose Randy, our A&P guy who knows our plane inside and out and is an expert in its round engines, so we really need to look at parking it. Or at least not depending on it.  

What was the episode?  Oh, I was flying back in the Twin Beech from picking up some heavy cargo, flying at close to maximum gross weight, climbing to avoid some weather and the old bird groaned up to 12,000 feet at max continuous climb rpm and manifold pressure and wouldn't go any higher.  I pushed the manifold pressure up to 36.5 inches and rpm to 2300 to keep on climbing and fragged a jug.  Ka-Blam! Oh, that was fun.  You wanna descend down through a building winter storm filled with icing layers, sleet, blustering snow and lots -- lots! -- of turbulence on one stupid engine?  Include me out on that. I finally got the plane stabilized at something below 2,000 feet in rising terrain and limped home -- the landing into a quartering crosswind with erratic gusts, blowing snow was...interesting.  I swore never (expletive deleted) again.  You buy me a King Air or fly the (triple compound-adjective expletive deleted) thing yourself! 

What caused my engine to "frag a jug"? It seems the cylinder base studs failed, causing the cylinder to separate from the crankcase. I was keeping an eye on the cylinder-head temperatures and they were below 260 degrees C. throughout the climb -- overheating can damage the studs. I've wondered if the episode of detonation I experienced a while back due to a damaged spark plug insulator might have caused cracks in the cylinder base studs or flange because it was the same cylinder that let go. Randy swore he has always followed AD 56-06-02 and P&W SB 1000 as well as AD 78-08-07 and never detected any cracks or other anomalies. He wondered if I always "heat stretched" the cylinders with a proper warm-up, which I assured him in a somewhat heated exchange, if I may use that expression, that I always do.  He was directing blame away from himself and I was thinking darkly of "pencil repairs." I expect he could sense that. I always monitor the oil and head temperatures closely, carefully warm up and cool down the engines and fly within parameters. Maybe the damage evidenced itself after his work and neither of us was at fault. I suppose the cylinder would have let go at some point and it was just my bad luck that it happened as I was trying to climb out of an icing layer in a fully loaded airplane.  But better then than on take-off.

Reflecting on my actions, aside from not leaving the ground in the first place and waiting the storm out, or turning around once I saw what conditions were, I think that when the plane didn't want to climb anymore at 33 inches and 2200 rpm, I should have descended until I reached an ice-free altitude. It was an error of judgement on my part to decide to try to keep climbing caused by my knowledge of how close the cloud tops were (14,000 feet; I was almost at 13,000 feet when the cylinder separated), what altitude I had reached with a similarly heavy payload in the past without any problem and my desire to get into clear air.  I can almost hear my dad saying, "Here's your sign."

Ranch airstrip hanger being built c.1946.

 ******

We're going to upgrade our ranch landing strip. A lot has already been done but we'll be doing a few more things, including making it friendly to ag pilots.  We need those guys. We'll be buying some of the equipment Duane has and get the required permits or whatever we need to have our own refueling facilities.  But it will remain a private airfield.  Duane was hoping that we would buy his airport but we'd have to hire someone to run it, and since, financially, already it is a dead loss, we couldn't do that.  No buyers at all appeared and when he notified those renting hanger or tie-down space that the airfield was closing a lot of them didn't even respond. Some hadn't paid their bills in more than a year, but Duane carried them anyway.  I guess, with the airport abandoned, their planes will just rot. I know there is a Stinson, Navion and round-engined Cessna there.  I guess there they will stay.

I mentioned to Jim, the gypsy duster, while discussing the demise of our beloved local airport, my engine-out adventure and he grabbed me by the shoulders gave me a big smooch before I could react and said, "Damn, woman, why couldn't I have met someone like you to marry?" 
I was so surprised and flustered that I said nothing, just half raised my hands in a "I dunno" gesture.  Jim then said, "You know, Wanda, you're the type of woman men fight over."  I thought that was way over the top and said, "Oh, I am not.  Nobody is. Men don't fight over women anymore. Give me a break.  They just go to Only Fans and blow a load, then get on with their lives." 
Jim looked at me and said, "Wanda, Wanda, Wanda, you don't understand men at all. "'Blowing a load,' as you call it in your delicate, ladylike fashion is just like eating a little vending machine bag of Fritos.  It satisfies a casual urge but doesn't mean anything, and doesn't satisfy any fundamental desire of a man's life. You, and women like you, rare as they are, do." 
I started to speak but Jim cut me off.  "No, no.  I know what you are going to say.  I know you. You will say that you are nothing special, just an ordinary girl.  But you're not.  You are special." 
He stopped speaking and stood looking at me.  I could have said all sorts of things, but idiot me said, "So now you expect me to spread my legs for you?" 
Jim shook his head and gave me such a look.  "Oh, Wanda," was all he said and walked away. And I felt like a total ass, which was what I was. 
But as I watched him walk away, he stopped, turned around and said, "Since you mentioned it, any chance you would?"  I laughed, shaking my head, and he laughed too and all was good between us. 
I related this exchange to el jefe and he asked if Jim meant special as in a "special needs" short bus individual and he agreed in that sense I was, indeed, special. Or, he asked, did Jim mean "special" in the way that a southern woman would say, "Well, aren't you just special."  He said he would agree with that, too.  Then he said that if I did spread my legs for Jim to be sure and record the action so he could send it in to "America's Funniest Home Videos."
I didn't ask him what he thought of my flying on the day in question because I knew what he would say -- "Any fool can fly an airplane when things are going well.  It's when everything goes wrong that you prove you are a pilot and earn your pay. Okay, you're a pilot. I knew that already."  Just like my dad. But, still, he didn't argue about buying a King Air any more, any model I want, any upgrades I want, cost be damned.  So I guess he thinks I'm worth something.

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I happened across a comment to a post about transexuals or something -- I didn't read the post; I don't really care about that crap -- but the commenter, in deriding either the post or transsexuals, asked sarcastically how many women like trucks or tugboats?  Well, most of the time when I drive anywhere I drive a truck or an SUV, usually old, beat-up ones with winches and a dent or two. The trucks usually have a rifle rack with a Savage or Marlin rifle and shotgun and a couple of bales of hay or concrete blocks in the bed for traction. Now, if I lived in the city and had no need to haul anything, I wouldn't.  But I neither like nor dislike trucks any more than I like or dislike lawn mowers.  If you need one, you get one and use it.  I don't see what being male or female has to do with it.  As far as men liking trucks, I dunno.  I asked el jefe and he just shrugged and when I asked him what he liked he said motorcycles.  I like them, too, especially the old British ones.  They have character.

I thought about the tugboat remark a bit. I wouldn't mind owning a tugboat -- in a theoretical sense.  I like boats and ships...Navy, duh.  I really like sailboats, especially older styles like the ones Lyle Hess designed. Some of the happiest times of my life have been spent sailing. One of the things I miss most about living here is the sea, the bounding main, salt spray and sea air....

Well, anyway, thinking about that tugboat comment, I recalled when I was a kid reading a bunch of old "Tugboat Annie" short stories that were originally published in The Saturday Evening Post back in I think the 1920s or early 1930s. They were about a tough old broad who was captain of her own tugboat.  I loved those stories.  Apparently, there was a series of popular movies made based on them, but I've never seen any.  I should.  But, you know, it seems like, in those pre-feminist days women really did male jobs that today's anti-feminists scoff at women doing. I have read about women in the 19th and early 20th centuries (in contemporary literature from those times), who captained whaling ships, drove teams of horses delivering coal, worked on ranches gelding calves and branding cattle, plowing behind a team of horses and other tough, hard jobs. In a lot of cases, they did these jobs as widows, often taking over the profession of their late husbands.  That would be a major difference from a woman today doing those sorts of jobs.  
My cousin enrolled at the Maritime Academy has female classmates who intend careers at sea, one of them his girlfriend (whew! and if you've been following my blog for a while you know why I say that).  He certainly doesn't consider her unfeminine for wanting to be a midshipman on an oiler. I have a feeling that Mr. Shy Guy has cut a wide swath through his female classmates.  Still waters run deep, to coin a phrase.

I think a big reason why a lot of tough jobs are not considered right for women to do today is because for most people, men and women, jobs are physically undemanding, even the so-called blue-collar jobs, which I have heard described these days as gray-collar jobs to distinguish them from the old assembly-line, steel mill, foundry sort of jobs that most people don't do anymore. And the ones they do do are not as physically demanding as in the past. No one hauls in nets full of fish by hand or pounds spikes into railroad ties with a sledgehammer any more. Most people work at white-collar and pink-collar jobs.  I'm not sure what the latter is, though I've heard the term and can kind of, sort of, guess what jobs would be called that.
In the not all that distant past, however, life was hard and jobs were tough. There was no social safety net and if you wanted to eat you had to work at whatever work you could find, even women -- the June Cleaver type of ideal Fifties housewife was just a mid-century interlude. And it didn't touch all that many women. So women worked in cotton mills, fish processing plants and whatever jobs they could get. And even in the purported golden age of the 1950s women worked, not only in assorted office jobs, but on assembly lines.  Of course, all those jobs have long since been off-shored so now foreign women do those jobs.  But it's still women doing them.
And yes, yes, yes, there are some jobs that demand a physical strength women don't have.  Duh.  I live on a ranch.  And yes, yes, yes men and women have different work preferences. Everyone knows that.

I find baffling the real and very intense hatred of women expressed by many males, especially on the right.  Some of their personality profiles that you can glean from their comment histories at various websites fit that of serial and spree killers of women.  They typically exhibit insecurity and low self-esteem. They clearly feel threatened by a woman's success, especially in areas they consider male pursuits but that they, themselves, are incapable of succeeding at. They feel inadequate, but can't accept their inadequacy as males, as human beings. 
Instead of focusing on their own failings and attempting to correct them or accepting that there are some things they can't do and moving on, focusing on things they can do, they nurture anger and hostility toward women in those jobs.  You could just shrug that off except that some may, indeed, be murderers. 
I know of one case of a frequent commenter to a right-wing publication who displayed a deep hostility to women in his posts and was convicted of murdering one women and suspected of murdering others.  He killed the women he was sentenced for, a fitness instructor, by waylaying her as she closed up her business, overpowering her and using an electric drill to bore a hole through her forehead into her brain.
 A common trigger for a woman murderer is societal conditioning: exposure to misogynistic beliefs and attitudes shapes an emotionally vulnerable man's perception of women. And the right is full of misogyny, expressed even by leading influencers.  Are they accessories before the fact to murder?  How many neurotics have they pushed over the edge by their dismissive attitudes toward women? Is that their goal? To get "uppity" women murdered? Sometimes I wonder.

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We're opening up a new pasture because we lost a BLM lease we've held since, I think, the 1930s.  Something to do with reinterpretation of the Taylor Grazing Act by the (pre-Trump) government. Anyway, this new pasture is on land we acquired during the economic crash after World War I that saw a lot of ranchers go bust.  It's not the greatest land and has lain fallow since the late 1940s.  But now, after having been recuperating for three-quarters of a century it seems like it will support about 1,000 AUM.  AUM stands for Animal Unit Month. It's the amount of forage needed by one animal for one month, or 780 pounds of dry forage for a 1,000-lb beef cow. It's a standard unit used to calculate how many animals can be supported on a given amount of land. A thousand beeves is not nearly what we were grazing on our BLM lease, but it's something.

Anyway, we've been drilling new wells to water the cattle we'll be running since all the old wells have gone dry. I had to fly up a hydrologist and we sat down near the old house that used to be the former owner's home.  I took the Aviat Husky since there was no landing strip, just a bit of flat land that the boys had cleared of brush.  At the house, there were old papers and assorted documents related to original well drilling and water usage.  I noted  that a well drilled by hand in 1898 had struck water at 14 feet and that seemed to be a typical depth for all the wells dug. 
Incidentally, I was shown the tool they used to "dig" a well.  It looked like a giant screw with a T handle.  A starter hole would be dug with a post hole digger -- that's like two narrow shovels at the end of wooden handles hooked together so it's like a giant pair of scissors.  You lift and slam the digger down till you get a good bite of dirt, then pull the handles open so the two shovel ends grab the dirt.  Then you lift the digger up and dump the dirt. Then the screw thing would be fitted into the hole and two men would screw it into the ground by walking around in a circle, one on each side holding the handle. When they got down around three or four feet, the length of the screw part of the tool, they'd haul it out, dump the dirt and fit a terra cotta pipe with a flange on one end, flange side up, down into the hole, screw a length of metal pipe onto the screw tool and put it back in the hole and screw down another three or four feet, fit another section of terra cotta pipe and so on until they struck water.

Well, back in 1898, they only had to go down 14 feet, as I said, before finding water.  They then erected a windmill to power a pump, built a water tank, sort of like an above ground swimming pool, to catch the water, and they were good to go, the cattle having plenty of water.  But all those wells had long since dried up so we had to drill new ones.  You know how deep we had to go to find water? More than 700 feet.  That's how much the aquifer has shrunk in just a century and a quarter -- with no large cities or farming nearby, just cattle ranching. Each well we drilled cost us about $40,000 and some had to be re-drilled because they collapsed.  Then there were the water storage tanks, cattle-watering tanks, solar energy-powered pumps, etc.  It will take years to recover the costs and begin to make a profit.

The depth we had to drill to reach water is scary.  Talk about your global warming, your "climate crisis" all you want and I am not concerned.  A warmer climate means longer growing seasons and lots of other good things. A colder climate means shorter growing seasons, crop failures.  So a warming climate can be good.  Nothing to worry about.  But, but, but but -- if you ain't got no water, hot or cold climate, you are dead.  No crops, no livestock, no food. Famine and thirst.  Game over. All done, bye-bye.  

According to our hydrologist, the aquifers are drying up all over the west and what water remains is increasingly contaminated with arsenic and even uranium not to mention the usual iron and manganese as well as cadmium, chromium, lead and selenium.  He said we were lucky to reach water at a little over 700 feet.  He's seen some have to drill down 2,000 feet to get water and some never find any water at all.