Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Take me to the river
Drop me in the water

We woke up (pleasantly) sore on Sunday from our 4000 feet up & down, six hour hike the previous day.

We had some breakfast, then I headed over to Bells' house for a little "boy's morning."

I brought the guitar, the bass & the amp over, set them up and we made a racket for a while. Unfortunately, the hi-hat on the drum kit is broken and we couldn't fix it.

Later, Bells made me lunch, put Aden down, and we unplugged and went out for a back-porch session.

It's always nice. He and I first started playing together about sixteen years ago, in 1991. Of course, we lived thousands of miles apart for a number of those years, but we kind of learned together. We would get together after an absence, and teach each other what we had learned. Slowly, but surely, we got better and better over the years.

I'm not saying we have any desire to get off the back porch any time soon (and quite frankly, we own the back porch, literally and figuratively), but there is a really nice chemistry there.

It is a great feeling when the "sum" actually adds up to something more than its parts. We know how to lay back and give the other space inside the song, and we don't even really have to look at each other to end a song, or move from a break back into a verse.

Anyway, writing about music is like painting about literature.

After a nice jam, Stanette came out & she and I went to the river.

We dropped a car at the takeout, then drove 5 or 6 miles to the put-in.















There were three of these eagles, buzzing us. They were circling over us, checking us out on and off for about an hour.







Please don't visit Montana. It is ugly and boring and there is nothing to do. It is all cowboys and reservations and animals that can kill you.




There are no jobs and no views and horrendous gridlock from the 902,145 people (ranked an impressive 44th in the nation) packed tightly into a paltry 147,046 square miles (only 4th in the nation).

Blain, was that sufficient?




^^Duder grabbed a fish there. It was cool to see.






Urban blight.



^^The water was up to the top of the bank last year.






I floated right under this guy.



He just checked me out.




Overcrowding. Traffic.





I mean, look at how they are packed in there. They are on top of each other! No privacy.




You can see a few beaks peeking out of the holes.



^There are our three curious friends.



See the eyes?



Sorry so blurry, still trying to figure out my camera.

A couple videos of the eagles, which I thought were osprey because of the mottled color underneath. Osprey get that big around here.



Ain't no mountain high enough

Here are some more pictures from the absolute hoofer of a hike we took on Saturday, up to Pine Creek Lake.






The wildflowers were blooming.



The lake was gorgeous.



We walked over and had lunch on that rock you see on the left-hand side in the picture below.



There were some large fish swimming around in there.

Here is the view back from that rock...