Murphy & the Bear

The Navajo have a name for wintertime when they perform their ceremonials: “The Season When the Thunder Sleeps.”

With that in mind, I’ve decided to name summertime “The Season When Tom and Julie Don’t Sleep.”

For the past few weeks, we have been plagued by a bear trying to get into our dumpster in the middle of the night. Ever vigilant, Murphy the Lodgedog nightly has been pitching six fits at about three in the morning when the critter starts to rattle the dumpster. 

This is a smaller and younger bear than the one the size of an Escalade that got into our neighboring lodge a couple of summers ago, broke into their walk-in freezer, and ate all their ice cream.

But though young, he’s already gotten in trouble before. About a week ago, Murphy started barking, roused us out of sleep, and I shambled down to the storeroom to turn on the outside light to see what the matter was. Julie shouted down from the balcony, “Tom! Don’t open the door! There’s a bear out there!” So naturally, I opened to door, and sure enough there was a bear on the other side of the road from the dumpster. He boasted a white ear-tag: a sure sign that the Division of Wildlife had already had at least one run-in with him.

I was so mad at being awakened in the middle of the night that I stood there in bare feet and boxer shorts, waved my arms and shouted, “Get outta here! Go on! Git!”

The bear looked surprised, said, “Whoaaa?” and ran up the mountain.

Murphy was beside herself. She literally could not stop barking, and for the rest of the night, the slightest noise would set her off. 

It has been like that every night since. We haven’t been this sleep-deprived since our son was a collicky infant and I briefly considered drowning him in the bathtub.

Just last night, Murphy went off again. We didn’t see the bear this time, and I briefly wondered if it might be our neighborhood evil raccoon, but this morning the dumpster had been moved, so it was clear that the bear had been back. 

Since we seem unable to convince Murphy to be a less-ambitious watchdog, it’s time to start filling balloons with a dilute ammonia solution and putting them on the lid of the dumpster. Bears, whose sense of smell is tremendous--even better than that of dogs--do not like the smell of ammonia, so perhaps if our bear gets a whiff of the stuff, he’ll leave us alone.

If not, just about the time it becomes The Season When the Thunder Sleeps and the bear goes into hibernation, it will also be The Season When Tom and Julie Sleep, as well.

Rain

Some of my earliest childhood memories are of smelling the moisture in the air after a rainstorm.

I grew up in the Oklahoma panhandle, where rainstorms were few and far between. However, most years around about the 4th of July, we would be treated to spectacular downpours, the product of cumulus clouds that would build and roil and form and churn about in the air above the high plains, then release torrents of water from the bottom of anvil-shaped monster-clouds, as well as not a little bit of hail, and occasionally a tornado or two.

But I always welcomed the rain--since I didn't have to worry about the hail denting the car or the tornado sucking the house away to Oz and perhaps, if you were lucky, dropping it on a politician: that's why God made fathers: to work to earn money to pay for the insurance.

The July storms were usually the first rain we'd had since spring, when after a dry winter we'd have maybe a week or two of gentle rains, and everybody would hurry out to Elmhurst Cemetery to harvest the asparagus that was frantically erupting from around every tombstone. My wife has similar stories of harvesting spring asparagus from the irrigation ditches on the farm in Boulder County, Colorado, where she kept her horse. Town boy that I was, I had no clue that you could find asparagus growing on the sides of irrigation ditches, but I learned early on that you could always find a healthy crop of it at the Beasley mausoleum after the first rain.

A few times, I was lucky enough to be on the edge of town after a rainstorm and find myself buffeted by the wind blowing the moist pollen from the fields of wheat that stretched away to the horizon. I'd go home later and find myself covered with the stuff; my t-shirt would never be the same again. But while standing at the edge of the dampened fields, I only cared for the smell of the wheat, driven by the still-moist breeze.

The smell of wet wheat is almost indescribable. For a boy growing up in the proverbial center of the Dust Bowl, I can only say that it smelled like "life."

Of course, I was born long after the Dust Bowl, but I remember my mother cursing and crying when the wind blew, telling the stories of her mother making her and her sisters lie on a bed with a wet sheet over them so they wouldn't breathe in the powder-fine dust and develop pneumonia from it.

Some of her anxiety undoubtedly rubbed off on me, but even in the early 60s when I was a child, it didn't take much for me to develop an appreciation for the blessings of rain.

You would think, given my childhood, that I would have fled to a humid climate and never looked back. In college in a damp climate, however, I discovered some of the unsavory things that moisture can do to skin, so it didn't take much to convince me that rain, like so many other blessings, is best enjoyed in moderation.

My godmother, a panhandle girl, followed her husband to a job outside of Charleston, South Carolina. True to her upbringing, she made him string a clothesline between a gum tree and a live oak growing in their back yard, then proceeded to set up housekeeping, hanging the sheets out to dry. Well, they didn't dry; instead, they developed grayish-green stains that spread exactly like mold on a petri dish.

So she made her husband go into Sears and buy her a dryer. Years later when she told me that story, I  could tell that she was ashamed of the fact that she couldn't dry her laundry outside. She never made her peace with the South. It irked her that the alternative to drying her towels in a machine was having mold turn them into gelatinous goo and that, if you were going to dry your sheets outside, you had to put so much Clorox in the water to kill the mold that if you perspired on the sheets during the night, you would wake up in the morning with little white bleached lines on your skin corresponding to the wrinkles in the cloth.

But I digress.

This post is really about the smell of nature after rain. Up here at the High Mountain Lodge, we don't have wheat, but we have acres and acres of pine trees. After a few clear days, the sun has toasted the pine pollen so that, when it rains, the air smells like tincture of Colorado. Of course, the rain will also precipitate the pine pollen out of the air and make yellow streaks all over your car.

You should feel privileged. For a few days, at least, your car will look like a local's.

Come visit us soon, and smell the air.

Curse you, Marie Callender!

Yesterday in the late afternoon when I was relaxing from doing one of the innumerable chores around the Lodge, I took a break to watch Stupid TV. I don't know what channel it was or what the program was about: it was TV, and hence, stupid.

But I do remember that between episodes, most of the commercials were about food. There was the inevitable ad about that KFC sandwich that doesn't have bread (NB: I actually broke down in shame and ordered and ate one of them. Neither the flavor nor the grease justify the guilt factor. Skip this one.) Then the ads segued to pizza. But I met my waterloo when the ads for Marie Callender's chicken pot pies came on the TV.

"Curse you, Marie Callender!" I shrieked at the top of my lungs (though the imperative verb I used wasn't "curse"). I was so hungry and those pies looked so good. But instead of driving to the Safeway and buying one of her damned Chicken Pot Pies, I decided to make my own.

Here's my recipe:

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F

Crust:

You will need a deep-dish pie plate. If you don't have one, get one. Glass is good.

Put 2 cups flour and a teaspoon of salt in a food processor equipped with the pastry blade; Turn it on.

Gradually add 2 sticks (1/2 lb) butter, cut into manageable pats--about 1-2 tbsp each, and dropped individually through the feeding tube of the processor.

After you've added all the butter, process until the mixture is thoroughly incorporated. It will look like corn meal. If you're not from the south and have never seen cornmeal, think a crumbly mixture of flour and butter.

Gradually add about 1/4 cup of very cold water. Process on pulse. The water should encourage the flour/butter mixture to form a ball.

Stop processing and, after removing the pastry blade from the machine, scoop the dough out onto plastic wrap. Chill in the fridge for at least one hour before rolling out.

Sauce

Microwave or otherwise heat to scalding 2-3 cups of milk. Hold at temperature.

Melt in a medium saucepan 1/4 lb (1 stick) of butter.

When the butter is bubbling, gradually stir in enough flour to form a bubbly paste in the bottom of the pan. It will take 1/4 and 1/2 cup of flour. You basically want a mixture that holds together on the bottom of the saucepan and makes you wonder if you added too much flour. Let the mixture cook for at least a minute or so (this is so the flour will cook and the sauce won't taste like that nasty milk gravy you had at your aunt's house last Thanksgiving). Then sloooowly add the hot milk, whisking it into the butter/flour (snooty cooks call it a "roux") mixture.

The sauce will dramatically thicken almost immediately. Add a very finely diced medium onion, or 2 tablespoons of dried onion to the sauce. Grate half a clove of nutmeg into the sauce. Correct the seasoning for salt--it will probably take at least a teaspoon.

Throw in 1 bay leaf and stir into the sauce. Let the sauce rest. Don't forget to fish the bayleaf out before you proceed with the recipe, or one of your guests will have a nasty surprise.

Final Prep


Sauté 3 chicken thighs or 2 chicken breasts in a butter/olive oil mixture. When done through but not dry, cut into small cubes. Add to sauce.

Microwave 2 cups of mixed frozen vegetables. Add them to the sauce. Don't worry about excess moisture.

Get the dough out of the fridge. Divide into two parts.

Roll out the 1st piece of dough to about 1/8 inch in thickness and line the bottom of the baking dish. Ignore the overhanging dough for now. (For an extra-crispy bottom crust, paint the bottom of the pie pan with melted butter before lining it with the crust.)

HINT: The easiest way to roll out pie crust is on a pastry cloth (think a linen or cotton dish towel that's been rubbed well with flour). After rolling the dough out to the proper thickness, position your rolling pin at the edge of the dough, then using the pastry cloth, drape the dough over the rolling pin. Then roll the dough (minus the pastry cloth) onto the pin. You can then unroll the dough into the pie pan with a minimal amount of grief.

Pour the sauce/chicken/veggie mixture into the dish.

Roll out and cover the pie with the top crust.

Trim and make look pretty. Pierce the top crust to allow steam to escape.

Cooking

Place the pie in the preheated 425-degree oven on a baking sheet for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, decrease oven temperature to 325-degrees and bake for 50 minutes.

Let the pie rest for a few minutes before serving, but don't forget to salute Marie Callendar when you cut into it.

Commentary

The pie crust is really the secret here, and food processors are the secret weapon. If you don't have one, you can use the old "cut the butter into the flour using two knives in a scissor motion," or you can use a pastry masher. My mother used the latter, and you could have taken her pie dough out of the bowl, rolled it out, then sewn the pieces up into shoes that would hold together better than leather.  For all I know, that's what they did during the Depression to keep children shod. But the food processor keeps the butter/flour mixture filled with air, so that when the butter melts into the flour during cooking, the result is thin flakes of tender crusty goodness.

The sauce is a classic béchamel--basically gravy with an attitude.

Instead of frozen mixed veggies, you can add just about any fresh veggies you want: broccoli or broccolini both work well. If you use fresh vegetables, nuke 'em until they are are tender and then dice them coarsely before adding them to the sauce. If you don't have a microwave, then steam the veggies. Whatever you do, DO NOT BOIL THEM. That's just wrong, and it sucks all the goodness out of the veggies.

Enjoy!

Attack of the Killer Ceiling Fans

The High Mountain Lodge does not have air-conditioning. At 8,700 feet in elevation, even at the height of summer, it is not unusual for the temperatures to drop into the 40s at night, and by August, we are warning guests at the Lodge to watch their step in the morning going across the multi-tiered deck to the dining lodge so they won't slip on the frost coating the boards.

It's a different world up here--even from Denver. When the city is baking in 90+ or triple digit temperatures, we consider it a heat wave if the mercury hits 80. And on the two days this summer it hit 90 on our thermometer in July (courtesy of reflected heat from the deck; the air wasn't nearly that warm), we were willing to believe that there was something to global warming after all.

Instead of air conditioning the High Mountain Lodge has ceiling fans in every room. On warm summer nights, guests can open their windows and doors, and the fans will circulate the air and mix it with the outside breezes. Lodge guests, particularly those from lower elevations and hot climes, tend to underestimate the chill in the air. 

(Someone remind me to blog about the frigid June wedding Julie and I attended on the shores of the (frozen) lake just below the summit of Mt. Evans when it was 98 in Denver. We weren't married then, but our memory of the misery we went through sort of put the kabosh on any fantasy about getting married outside in a Colorado mountain meadow.) 

No matter how many times we point out the extra blanket in every room (and show guests how to turn up the heat in their room), invariably, they will show up for breakfast (in shorts and t-shirts with blue lips) to comment on how COLD it is. 

So when we get the occasional phone inquiry from people in Houston asking if we have air conditioning, because they won't book with us if we don't have air conditioning, we refer them to a couple who are our competitors (who are also our friends) who have put in refrigerated air conditioning in their inn just to assuage the heat-fears of people from Houston.

"How's that working for you?" I ask.

"They complained about how cold it was. I got up after midnight and gave them two extra blankets and suggested they turn off the air conditioning and open the french doors onto their patio. But they were afraid of bugs."

"You didn't tell them that there are no bugs in Grand County?"

"They're from Houston. They figure you're lying to them."

But all of this is a prelude to telling you the story of how we (actually I) suffer from our ceiling fans.

Ceiling fans have metal chains hanging down from them: one to turn on the light, and one to adjust the speed of the rotation of the fan.

At the High Mountain Lodge, some of the fixtures can be controlled from a switch on the wall, and some from the pull chains from the fixtures.

But they all have chains depending from them.

And, God help me, they all attack me.

If the High Mountain Lodge has cooler temperatures, it also has lower humidity and vicious static electricity. When I was a little boy growing up in Oklahoma, it was fun in the wintertime to play the game of "static electricity." You'd shuffle your feet across the wool carpet and sneak up on your mom or dad (usually your mom, because she wasn't as liable to smack you when you touched the metal frame of her glasses and sent huge amounts of volts of electricty coursing through her body). She'd just scream.

But the High Mountain Lodge has low humidity and high static electricity all year long. So maybe the fact that Julie and I own an Inn is a way for me to work off the karmic burden of torturing my parents with static electricity in my childhood.

You see, there are several rooms in the lodge where the chains from the ceiling fans hang down low enough to attack me when I'm making a bed.

You would think that I would have enough sense to avoid them when cleaning a room or making a bed, but I tend to get focused on projects, even if it is only making a bed. 

For the past year, I have had the misfortune to be making a bed and in the course of doing so, back up into the pull-chains from the fixture and experience a "static-electric discharge."

We have one room in particular (it's one of our most popular rooms), where the pull-chains for the lamp/fan fixture hand down just about at a perfect distance to attack me when I'm making the bed. And, I swear, every time I make the bed in that room, the damn fan attacks me. 

Here's the scenario: I get the bottom sheet tight, then I balance the top sheet on the bed so that it's hanging equidistant from the floor on either side of the mattress.

Then I shake out the blanket (which crackles from static electricity) and back up to make sure that it's symmetrical to the bed, and get close enough to the ceiling fixture that the static electricity causes the metal chain to wrap itself around my face and discharge on my cheek just below my eye. 

Then I scream and begin to curse and roar and stagger about like Boris Karloff imitating Frankenstein's monster in the movies and fall over one of the chairs in front of the fireplace. 

Nobody told me that innkeeping involved doing battle with static electricity. 

I wonder if there would be anyway we could get our electrical co-op to suck up the excess static electricity I generate when making beds?

Prolly not. Julie doesn't believe I work all that hard; an electrical utility would demand more evidence than an electrical discharge scar across my face.

Fitted Sheets

When I went off to college many many years ago, my first roommate was a guy whose dad owned a dry cleaning plant and laundry somewhere in the wilds of Kansas.

Bill came to school armed with flat sheets for his bed--but no fitted bottom sheets. Instead, he was expected to wrap his mattress in one of the flat sheets. It seems that his father was consumed with hate-filled rage whenever he encountered a fitted bottom sheet, courtesy of the folding machines at his laundry being unable to do anything but tie the cloth in knots. Bill told me that he'd seen his dad purple with rage trying to unwind a fitted bottom sheet from one of the laundry's state-of-the-art sheet folders.

At the time, it seemed a rather excessive reaction to the convenience of a fitted bottom sheet, especially since Bill's dad, despite his rage, hadn't bothered to teach his son how to make a bed using a flat sheet for a bottom sheet.

After a few days of waking up when Bill fell on the floor when his alarm went off wrapped up in his sheets like an Egyptian corpse somebody had done a bad job of embalming, I finally took pity on him and showed him how to do military corners that you could bounce a dime off of after sleeping on the sheet all night long.

I wasn't a particularly militaristic person, and this was during the Vietnam War, when every eighteen-year-old male was trying to find some ethical reason to avoid the draft. I didn't learn my bed-making skills from the military or militaristic parents, but from a terrifying nurse in an osteopathic hospital who could make the most arrogant doctor tremble and sweat--and sometimes weep. My first high-school job was as a hospital orderly, and this nurse taught me how to unfold a sheet, put it on the bed, pull the fabric so tight you could have sent semaphore messages by tapping on it, then tuck the corners in so tightly that nothing could have escaped that mattress. She actually taught me how to tuck a sheet in so tight that an alcoholic suffering from delirium tremens couldn't escape. "It's kinder than puttenem in a straightjacket," she told me.

"Yes, ma'am," I replied.

That nurse taught me how to make a bed so tight it would make a marine drill sergeant weep, it was that beautiful. I could make a bed with a person still in it with the sheets so perfect that it wouldn't be wrinkled the next day. When it came to bed-making, I was a god.

Fast forward a couple (ok, three) decades. My wife and I buy a 13-room Bed & Breakfast. We have a lot of sheets to wash. And suddenly, I am transported back to my undergraduate years and my first roommate's stories about his dad's rage against fitted sheets.

I suddenly love this man.

After a year of inn-keeping, I'm finally pretty good at folding a fitted bottom sheet. Sort of. It depends on how exhausted the elastic is. The more un-elastic the elastic is, the nicer the fold is going to be, and the better the sheet will look when it's wrestled onto the bed.

On the other hand, if it's one of our newer sheets with elastic all around, then no matter how carefully it's folded, the wrinkles on the sheet when we get it on the bed are inevitably going to resemble a Dan Brown map on how to find gold in the cave of the Knights Templar.

At the High Mountain Lodge, we iron the top sheets and we iron the pillow cases, but those damn bottom sheets have defeated us. Please don't think the less of us for our failure!

And Bill, God bless your dad. The things you told me about him scared the, uh, they really scared me. I sure hope he was reconciled to the deficiencies of his ironing machines before he retired.

The Summer of the Hummingbird

In keeping with Native American and Asian ways of remembering events, the summer of 2010 at the High Mountain Lodge promises to go down in the Beckwith Family Annals as the Summer of the Hummingbird.

Looking West from the Deck of the High Mountain Lodge

As I write this out on the deck of the High Mountain Lodge, a swarm of 12 to 18 hummingbirds (surely the collective noun for hummingbirds must be a "swarm" and not a "charm" as one website reports) are fighting a pitched battle over the feeder we installed on the balcony outside our bedroom. We have another, similar feeder hanging outside our sitting room balcony, and an even larger one hanging outside the windows of the dining room.

We are filling the feeders at least twice a day. We have almost gone through the 50-pound bag of sugar we bought at Costco in Denver in late spring to feed the two hives of bees we are keeping down in the hayloft of the ruined barn on the property. We've only filled the feeders for the bees twice; the hummers have sucked down all the rest.

It has gotten to the point where, when the feeders are empty, the hummingbirds will fly up in our face as if to remind us to feed them. This afternoon when I filled the big feeder off the dining room, the moment I cranked open the window to get to the feeder, I had three hummers buzzing around impatiently; they turned angry when I took the feeder away, and when I brought it back a full ten minutes later two of them landed on the perches before I even had a chance to hang it on the hook outside the window.

One flew into the office this afternoon when Julie was figuring out the sales taxes, and later I found another one trapped in the dining room trying to get to the feeder outside the window. I had to catch it and gently shoo it out the window. It immediately flew to the feeder, not a bit the worse for wear.

These creatures are fearless and violently territorial. Years ago, Julie and I visited a couple who, in their retirement, had bought an alfalfa farm down by Cortez, Colorado. At the time, we thought they were insane to work that hard in their retirement; that was before we bought the High Mountain Lodge.

Anyway, we were having breakfast one morning, and I commented on how scrappy the birds were (I'd never seen that many in one place before, being an Oklahoma boy). "Yeah," said our friend, "if they were any bigger, we'd have to shoot 'em."

At the time, I thought she was exaggerating, but a few mornings ago, when it had been warm enough overnight to leave the sliding glass door open to our balcony, the hummers started fighting over the feeder at 4:30 a.m. The noise woke both Julie and me up. Perhaps a better collective noun might be "an annoyance of hummingbirds."

We have created a monster--a collective monster. The peace and quiet of the High Mountain Lodge is now punctuated by the various and varied noises hummingbirds make. Earlier today, I was in our sitting room and began to wonder if Denver air traffic control had, for some reason, begun to divert airplanes over Grand County. But no, it was just the hummingbirds at the feeder--two, and sometimes three trying to feed from the same station.

The IRS Is Coming To Get Me

Since the first of the year, many of the 300+ channels of satellite TV that the High Mountain Lodge subscribes to and advertises as a desirable amenity to potential guests have been infested with advertisements for tax preparation programs. Intuit (the makers of TurboTax) and H&R Block have been buying huge blocks of ad time showing happy people answering simple questions on their computer screens then hitting a button, and presto! the gummint sends them a check for two thousand dollars. 

I swear, if either of those companies buys Super Bowl time, I will turn.the.game.off and the Saints can fall into the Gulf of Mexico with the rest of the city.

I have been using tax software programs for years to do my taxes, pausing periodically to pay a CPA to "check my work" as we used to say in 7th-grade algebra class. The programs have gotten incredibly better since I paid over a hundred dollars for the first iteration of "Mac-in-Tax" back in the 1980s when the Apple Computer Company decided that color computing might be the Wave of the Future.

That first program was a joke. It was basically all the forms where you could fill in amounts, which got added and subtracted automatically so you wouldn't get audited for a math error. If you clicked the "help" button, it took you to the verbatim IRS instructions. I'm pretty sure there is not enough GIN in the world to make me read that verbiage. When you begin reading a sentence, you're pretty sure that it's in English, but by the time you get to the end of it, you're not so sure.

The programs got better over the years, and by the time I got laid off from my job in 2008, I was doing my taxes on my computer with flair and élan. Gone were the days when the computer would ask me, at two in the morning, for documentation for some obscure deduction and I would let out a primal scream and begin digging through the file cabinet for a statement that I was pretty sure we'd burned in the fireplace last October when the weather turned chilly. The scream would make the dog start barking, and that would wake my wife, and she'd come down to see if I was all right, then speculate about how much money we were going to get back on our taxes.

I wonder if law enforcement tracks an uptick in suicides and axe murders in the weeks leading up to April 15?

This year, we're having an accountant do our taxes. With two corporate structures as well as our personal taxes, I can't imagine what disdainful questions Turbo Tax would ask me in the "interview" process.

But getting your taxes done by a person is equally an experience of exquisite misery--similar to those early years of Mac-In-Tax. The accountants ask all the same questions that the programs do, but in a different order. They have their own forms. "So, wait," I ask, "You want us to fill out these forms so that you can put that information in the IRS forms. Why don't you give me the IRS forms?"

You can see where I'm going with this.

"We do this to make it easier for our clients."

Yeah, right, and I got a tan from that Blue Moon last December on New Year's Eve.

As we work to improve the High Mountain Lodge and make it a more welcoming place for guests, we plan to continue to focus on our hospitality, our food, and the comfort of our rooms. We have no intention of burdening our guests with our tax struggles (God knows, they have enough of their own). But if you book with us in the last days of Winter Park's season (they close on April 18), don't be surprised if we feed you champagne, brie, and caviar. There are adversities in life that cannot be avoided, and tax season is one of them. Just getting through it is a monumental feat, and it demands a celebration.

Silence

Something set Murphy the Lodgedog off this evening. I'd been having fun playing variations on hymns on the piano, and at first I figured it was the missed notes she was complaining about.

She spun around a couple of times in the sitting room, barking her head off, so I finally let her out, and followed her, just in case she was going to have a set-to with the neighborhood fox that she couldn't win.

She ran up and down the road barking and carrying on, but it was clear that her heart wasn't really in it. There was nothing there to bark at, and even she realized it, but like a politician, she kept up the sturm und drang for longer than necessary.

When she finally quit barking, I found myself standing on the deck of the lodge in absolute silence. The almost-full moon was shining through high clouds, and a fine ice-mist was in the air. The thermometer showed that it was just below thirty degrees, which in January in the high country is just short of the banana belt.

It was a perfect temperature, and a perfect silence. There really wasn't anything to see. Sheep Mountain to the west was enveloped in mist, though you could see its outline because of the moon glow. There were too many clouds to see stars.

I was shocked by the silence. The silence was the loudest thing in the valley.

The thing about silence is, you can't capture it with a camera and post a video of it on YouTube or a still  picture on your Facebook page. There's no laptop in existence that has a scratch-n-sniff screen to communicate how your other senses become heightened as the silence takes over: You can't describe the smell of the cold air or communicate the feel of the frozen mist falling on your skin or even begin to communicate the scent of silence. There's no way to describe the expansion of your soul as the cold settles in around you and replaces noise with a blanket of ice crystals and muted moonlight and a crisp cold.

Make no mistake, though. The silence of the high country doesn't equate to peace. Stay too long outside, and you become uncomfortably aware that the ice crystals falling on your arms are no longer pleasant; they're just cold. You can only equate silence with peace for a short time before you begin to miss the voices of loved ones and the laughter and the joy of human companionship.

Silence is always a corrective to noise, but it can never replace voices.

Murphy and the Fox

We adopted Murphy when she was a year-and-a-half old. We were her fourth family. She had been bought at pet city as a Christmas present when she was six weeks old and a little ball of fur. The woman sold her when she was two months old to another woman, and that person turned Murphy into Keeshond rescue less than six months later.

The rescue folks wondered if she was adoptable. She was, according to their records, "stubborn" and had exhibited a "failure to bond" with her previous families. I have previously written in detail about Murphy (http://tjbeckhouse.wordpress.com/category/animals/), but now that we are up at the High Mountain Lodge, the vermin have gotten larger and smarter.

Keeshonden were originally bred as companion dogs in the European low country. Their alternate name is the "Dutch Barge Dog" because they were ideal dogs for the barges that were the pre-industrial revolution transportation precursors to trains. Murphy certainly is true to her breed. A consumate watch dog, she barks when anybody approaches our "barge"--the High Mountain Lodge--including guests coming over from the guest lodge for breakfast.

But nothing compares to her excitement/rage when she sees our neighborhood fox.

Forget the mice and squirrels that made her crazy at our house in Golden. Now she has bigger fish to fry (so to speak). There is a fox in the area that is absolutely unafraid of people. He's gorgeous, with a red body and a striking, bushy, gray tail.

Murphy has seen and chased him all over the mountain. He's pretty blasé about the whole thing. Evidently, this isn't the first time he's encountered an un-cool, agro dog. Just the other day, I was driving away from the lodge, and the fox was crossing the road ahead of us. I slowed down almost to a stop, mostly to get a better look at the creature.

He was gorgeous. I stopped the car while he was in the middle of the road, about ten feet in front of us. He slowly ambled over to the side of the road, and I began to edge forward. "Murphy!" I whispered. "There's the fox!"

Murphy finally saw him, concussed her head against the window glass, and set up a ruckus. The window on the fox's side of the road was down a few inches, and Murphy stuck her muzzle out and barked and roared and snarled and carried on like one of those monsters in the horror movie, The Day of the Triffids.

As I drove away, the fox began, evilly, to trot alongside the car while Murphy proceeded to lose her mind. There is encrusted dog slobber on the driver's side of our Subaru all the way the the back window that I don't know if Bon Ami and acid will ever get off. Even after we'd pulled away from the fox, Murphy continued to be beside herself. She was actually incapable of stopping barking. I pulled up in front of the Alco Department Store (Fraser, Colorado's, answer to Wall Mart), and she continued to bark at everything that moved in the parking lot.

I went into the store, and when I came out a while later, she had subsided into moans in the back seat. We drove back to the High Mountain Lodge and, as we were turning down the road, I whispered, "Murphy! Be on the lookout! Maybe you'll see the fox again."

Sometimes I surprise myself with my stupidity. That little whisper set Murphy off again. There wasn't a fox in sight, but now we have indelible dog slobber on the passenger-side of the car to balance the previous mucking of the driver's side.

Murphy was a basket case after that. She came into the lodge and fell asleep behind the couch. When our guests came to supper that evening, she pretended they weren't there.

Recycling the Christmas Tree Lights

There is a Bed & Breakfast in the area (one of our competitors) whose owners have lined every architectural feature of their (faux) Victorian place with the most eye-bleeding and mind-numbing colored lighting that you can possibly imagine.

Like the Great Wall of China, we suspect that the result can be seen from space, and if Aliens From Another Planet do exist, they can use the building as a great excuse to take over the world--if only to instruct Earthlings in the tasteful and proper use of electrons before eating out our brains.

That being said, we finally got around to taking down the Christmas trees in the Atrium and in the lounge off the dining lodge this week. And I was left with all these huge long strings of white lights that we had lit the Atrium tree with. "What if," sez I to myself, "I use them to delineate the walkways. I think the place would look nice and welcoming." Which just goes to show that I'm not above channeling my inner hypocrisy if it suits me. My only defense is that the lights aren't colored.

It was either that, or coil the light strings carefully before putting them away. And the only thing I dislike more than decorating for Christmas is taking down the decorations afterward. As we are running a business now, we can't use the excuse that we're going to leave the tree up until Valentine's Day, then hang the (very dead) branches with red hearts. That doesn't fly with guests.

Anyway, so in the next few days, I will be recycling the Christmas tree lights into an "architectural feature" at the High Mountain Lodge. I'll post pictures when we get done.

In the meantime, we have awesome guests at the Lodge this weekend, and it will be a pleasure to feed them tomorrow before they go off to hit the slopes at Winter Park. And when they get back tomorrow afternoon, there will be recycled Christmas tree lights to welcome them back and light their way to the Lodge.