A Tunneling We Shall Go, A Tunneling I Say!

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Location Taken: Wind River Canyon, Wyoming
Time Taken: November 2012

Sometimes there’s a need for something,like a train line running through a certain canyon, blocked by the most simple of things, like a giant rock in the way. Just a simple issue, but oh so difficult to deal with.

That is the time to pull out the explosives, of course.

Works every time.

Well, at least if the job is in fact “remove that there rock”. Sometimes it’s a bit more challenging, like “remove some of that there rock”, or “remove just a little of that there rock”. Then you need special explosives.

Maybe even smaller explosives, if that’s not too blasphemous a thought.

Tunnel carving these days comes in two flavors: bore or boom. Either use a giant cutting machine that eats its way through the rock or just convert the rock into lots of little pieces to haul away.

Older tunnels, though, took a different path. For a long time, it was painstakingly chipping away the rock with a pickaxe and hoping it didn’t fall down on your head. Eventually controllable explosives became available, but even then, they weren’t THAT controlled, and might still drop the ceiling on your head.

This particular train tunnel is an older one, but I’m not sure how old. It’s the wrong shape and age for a bored tunnel (those are round, and usually have to be much longer in order for bringing in the machine to be cheaper than blasting an opening). It’s more of the age of explosives, but it is a rather short tunnel through an outcropping, and they may have decided not to risk the rock face falling and blocking the river. And this is in central Wyoming, which is very lightly populated even today, so explosives might have been difficult to get as well. So it’s entirely possible that this was chipped into the rock with simple tools.

They certainly weren’t too sure about the rock staying put. That’s why the elaborate wooden entrance. And if you look carefully at the rock above the entrance, you’ll notice it has a different texture. That’s plaster, carefully colored to match the surrounding rock. It’s there to make sure that section doesn’t fall unexpectedly. They’ll still have to check it regularly for cracks that indicate things are shifting, but it’s better than just having a rock randomly fall on a train.

Mind you, that’s rock as in ten-ton boulder, not rock as in pebble. So it’s a decent precaution to take, I’d say.

  

Ever wonder what Yellowstone looks like on Halloween?

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Location Taken: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
Time Taken: October 2012

There’s a lot of merit to going to Yellowstone at the end of the season.

Yellowstone has long been on the “nifty things we should see” list for my Mom and me. But for most of the year, the park is far far far too crowded for us. It is the best known national park in the country, after all, and a lot of people come to see this lovely place every year, especially during the summer.

Which, alas, means long lines of traffic and crowded viewing areas for most of the year.

So, when Mom and I started planning a cross-country camping trip from Seattle to Washington at the end of October, we decided to see if Yellowstone would still be open.

And it was! Barely.

The park closes for the year on November 5th. We were there on the 30th and 31st of October. They already had a few road closures for snow by that point, though the weather warmed up the days we visited enough to start melting the snow.

And the park was, while not empty, the next best thing. There were a few people at every place we stopped, but only a few. The largest crowd was at Old Faithful, about forty or fifty people watching the geyser go off. The seating area could have held hundreds, and does for most of the year.

I had absolutely no problem getting the best view for my photos, and we could spend some time looking at whatever caught out curiosity. Plus we could pull off on the side of the road whenever we wanted, to look at interesting scenery or wildlife.

The campground was even pretty busy, especially compared to the other places we camped that trip. And while the temperature did drop below freezing, that was one of the days where I didn’t end up with frost on the tent!

And the light October snow and the fall coloration leads to some not-so-standard photos of the park, like this one of the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River. The ice is just starting to build up around the bottom of the falls, and a lot of the ponds were starting to ice over, but the rivers were still flowing strong and mighty.

  

Big Sky and Big Land

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Location Taken: Western Montana
Time Taken: October 2012

I’ve long heard of Montana being called “Big Sky Country”. I mean, it’s in all their tourism campaigns. Still, I’d always assumed that referred only to the non-mountainous eastern section, which do make up the majority of the state.

This was largely based on my previous encounters with mountains. I mean, you go through the Rockies in Canada or Colorado, and as soon as you enter them, the sky shrinks. By which I mean the clouds get less impressive, and the landscape more impressive, so you pay much less attention to the sky than you do in the flat plains.

This is not the case in Montana.

Even surrounded by magnificent mountains, the sky loomed large overhead. Together, they made the scenery feel impressively large, as neither element diminished the immensity of the other.

So if you ever want to see a Big Sky, go to Montana. Any part will do just fine.

  

Pick Me! Pick Meeee! Yay!!!

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Location Taken: Arcadia, Michigan
Time Taken: May 2008

Have you ever heard of morel mushrooms?

They’re the wrinkly mushrooms that cost ten dollars or so for a small package of dried ones. It’s very rare to find them fresh, and they’re much more expensive that way.

Well, unless you happen to live in a part of the world where they grow. Then all you have to do is go out and pick them yourself.

Be careful you’re getting the real thing, though. There’s a few species of False Morel that look somewhat similar and grow in the same areas that the true morels do, and they’re somewhat poisonous. So, like all mushroom hunting, you really do need to know what you’re picking. Especially in North America, where a lot of the poisonous mushrooms look rather similar to the ones that are the tastiest.

And morels are certainly tasty. Every spring, my grandparents go on a few small mushroom hunts to get some. It takes some hunting, but they’re apparently easy to spot if you’re experienced. Mom says she can hear their little voices going “pick me, pick meee!” but it’s rare for me to be visiting my grandparents when it’s mushroom season, so I haven’t heard them yet. They certainly like blending in with the leaf litter on the ground, I’ll say that.

We package them up in mesh bags (usually the ones that used to hold the oranges my grandpa likes), and take them home. Then we lightly flour them, fry them up, and enjoy! They’ve got a marvelous taste. I’d say nutty, but so many things are called nutty (and there’s so many types of nuts) that I’m not actually sure what “nutty” tastes like. Still, they are delectable.

I’m not telling you where we find them, mind you. It’s our mushroom patch, and ours alone.

We don’t sell the morels we find (the patch is a bit too small for that), but a lot of people do. In fact, they still haven’t managed to figure out how to cultivate them yet, so the entire morel business is built upon wild mushrooms. Which is, admittedly, why they’re so expensive.

There’s a small town not too far from my grandparents called Mesick, that touts itself as the Mushroom Capital of the United States. There’s pictures of morel mushrooms all over the town, and they hold an annual Mushroom Festival. Every spring, the mushroom hunters descend upon this town, which is surrounded by excellent morel growing spots. The few times I’ve driven through the area at this time of year, there was a flock of RVs scattered around all the turn-offs on the main road, the home bases for people delving into the woods to find morels to sell.

Which is why I’m certainly not going to reveal where we get our mushrooms. It’s one of those Family Secrets things, ya know. It’s just not something you share with your neighbors, much less random strangers on the internet. Go find your own tasty mushrooms!

  

I go to the gym and what do I do? I sew.

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Location Taken: Valparaiso, Indiana
Time Taken: March 2007

Random trivia time!

Did you know I forgot about my first job for YEARS?!

It’s true. I’m not sure how. I mean, wouldn’t you expect such an important step to adult life to stick in your brain? I mean, at the very least, it was the first time I’d gotten a paycheck!

But no, it vanished from my personal recollection of my history for a long time. Heck, it still hasn’t made it onto my resume (largely because by the time I remembered it, it had been long enough ago that it really didn’t matter anymore).

It was an interesting job, too. Well, at least it was right up my alley. I worked for the athletics department’s equipment room at my university as a seamstress. I sat around for hours just sewing with needle and thread, fixing all the little tears in the equipment that happen with use. Just me, a pile of things to be mended, and the Food Network on the TV that both me and my boss could see. Not my choice, but then, not a channel that annoyed me, so I had no objections.

It was only for a few months, just one of those small semester-long student jobs. I couldn’t continue it the next semester due to my class schedule or something. And it was outside my normal patterns of life, so I didn’t really have anything to remind me of it. I mean, the only time I went to the Athletics building in the upcoming years was for one Physical Education class (that was mostly online, which still boggles my brain), and the yearly Relay for Life my service fraternity attended. That’s a picture of the Relay above. It’s one of the few pictures of the building I have. I think where I worked was on the other side of that wall, assuming it’s of the wall I think it is… Hmmm…

Still, between the lack of reminders, the simple passing of time, and a growing nervous breakdown that made all my memories before 2009 kinda shaky, I simply forgot about it. I just assumed the much more memorable Cook’s Helper job I took a few semesters later was my first (I was doing full cooking, but students were never referred to as “Cook”.) And that’s what my resume said in my not-at-all-successful attempts to find work after college. (Pro-tip: damage from a nervous breakdown caused by overloading your social phobia makes it tough to apply to enough entry-level jobs to get one during the height of a recession crash).

As for recalling it, well, about two years ago, as I was healing from the memory-affecting side-effects of my nervous breakdown, I started getting a thought in the back of my head. Just an odd twitch that something wasn’t quite right. And then, while lying down trying to sleep (the best time for remembering things you forgot to do, or did wrong), my thoughts wandered to a pair of fish-shaped pillows my sister and I owned.

Yes, pillows. This is relevant.

Mine was shaped like a rainbow trout, and my sister had one like a catfish. They were about four feet long, and my mom had bought them from who-knows-where when we were in middle school as presents. Really, I preferred the catfish one. It had the fun whiskers, after all. But then, my sister liked it too, and she fights mean, so I let her have it. We don’t have them anymore. They faded out of my life during one of the series of house-cleanings. Still, I always liked that catfish pillow.

And there was an identical catfish pillow hanging on the wall of the equipment room I worked in.

It was part of an extensive collection of weird and humorous things hanging up. I don’t recall the specifics, but it was the type of collection where a four-foot long catfish pillow hanging on the wall didn’t look at all out of place. Still, because it was identical to my sister’s old pillow, I noticed the catfish on the wall and that stuck in my brain a little deeper.

So when my wandering brain started thinking about the catfish pillow, it followed the trail of memories associated with it and all of a sudden, I remembered about my first job. I was suddenly wide awake as the memories poured in. Well, “unlocked” is a bit more appropriate of a term. They were there all along, after all. I just didn’t access them. And it really did feel like throwing open door after cobweb-covered door in the unused part of a mansion to reveal treasure after treasure just sitting out in the open behind them.

I also half-forgot the semester I worked in the costume shop for the Theater department doing similar work. And I don’t recall ever thinking about my first job during that one, either, so I might have actually forgotten about the job really quickly.

Really makes me wonder about just how human memory works…