Fire, Black Mares, The Mysterious Life of Plants, NaMoPaiMo, and Aerial Technicians

​January 15, 2024
"We should move just a little closer" Skye said. "We really can't see much from here."

They waited, and waited...and then all at once it began. The branches had been limbed from the downed trees and put into piles, and troughs dug around the piles. Hose line ran throughout the area. The ground around the piles had been moistened. There was surprisingly little sound.

After a few minutes, the flames licked skyward, heat signature bending light.

And then, in not so long, the visually impressive part was pretty much over. The tree limbs they'd gazed upon daily were converted energetically into ash that would fertilize the soil.

January 20
"So why are we heading to the arena?" Skye questioned.
"Take a guess."
"New horses."
"Good guess."

There was just one new horse. She was pretty.

"Ohh...what's her name?" Skye asked the boss.
"I don't know. She might need a new name. But she's not a rescue."
Skye laughed. "What's her story?"
"If I have it right, she was a halter horse in her youth, and she's done some performance, but in the past couple years her owners really haven't done much of anything with her. I guess you could say we rescued her from boredom."

There was a long silence. Skye seemed content to watch the mare move about. Finally the boss spoke up. 
"You can ride her if you want Skye."
"Do you think I can ride her in a bosal?"
"I'm guessing you can. And if not you'll know pretty quick."
Skye was off to find a suitable headstall. The boss turned to Grace.

"I think I told you I was looking at some horses for Skye."
"Yes" Grace responded.
"This is one of them. Actually, this is the only one. Twitch sold, and there's another mare that sort of reminds me of her but I'm just not in love with her, and then there was a mustang. But the mustang...she wasn't interested in engaging. You could just feel it. Or maybe we just didn't bond. I don't know. I hope Skye likes this mare."
"She's got a kind eye and a beautiful head" Grace said. "Let's give them some time to get to know each other."

Skye returned with a bosal. The mare was calm and responsive. She was smooth, and easy to sit.

"I'll be back down in a little bit" the boss said. Grace nodded, absorbed in watching Skye and the black mare. They looked very relaxed together.

Time would tell.

​January 24
Grace and Skye hadn't really given NaMoPaiMo a lot of thought this year. Until now.

"Okay," Skye said, "I think we're setting ourselves up for possible failure here. It's not just that your drafter is completely unprepped or anything, it also needs a mane and a tail. Have you ever prepped a 3D printed resin before?"

"No" Grace admitted. "And the printing process does have a unique texture. But it's a really smooth print, and it's a solid print, so, hopefully it's durable."

"Mine...if NaMo is returning to its original format, mine don't count anyway. The Saddlebred isn't a three dimensional horse and finishing your NaMo horse from last year doesn't count. We're not going to get a bunch of likes this year. You might, but I won't."

"Funny you should say that" Grace said. "About the likes. I watched a program last night on the creation of Facebook's like button and how it literally changed the world."

Skye was silent. Grace continued.

"At first it was an amazing and wonderful communication tool. It allowed people to show support for each other. It increased communication and interaction acrooss the Facebook community. But it also quickly became a marketing tool. A way to focus news and target products at you. A way to use what you liked to dictate what you experienced. But then worse...it also became a self worth epidemic. People go out of their way to create content to get likes, to validate themselves. And it's addictive. At first five likes is very gratifying. But then you want one hundred likes. You develop this insatiable appetite for recognition and if you don't get it, you suffer because you are a failure. Unpopular. Not as good as everyone else. For young people, it's devastating. It's dangerous. Between that and bullying, kids have committed suicide."

Skye was still silent.

"We all want the likes. We all want to be influencers. That's natural. But when we start linking our self worth to the fickle whims of the browsing public and the bored pandas, that's dangerous. Do you want to find a different NaMoPaiMo project?"

There was another quiet pause.

"No. I want to finish these. The Saddlebred was gorgeous, remember? Just...not primed right. This time I won't try going dark to light. I'll just do it...normal."

"What about the big guy? He's really nice Skye. I think you can do it. I think you can finish him.""

"I'll try."

"Good enough."

January 29
First light in Chilao. Dawn was anything but silent. Firefighter crews were already at work somewhere in the campground, making ready for the camping season, making ready for the fire season. 

The new black mare seemed engaged and unruffled. 
"What does her face say?" Skye asked.

"She's taking everything in with interest. Like she's reading a great novel but with her whole body. I think she's happy."

The morning was lovely. Warm for January. The predicted winds had gone somewhere else to blow. Birds were stirring. The girls rode on a westerly course, into the rugged terrain where often they found Petrichor, Highlander and the other stallions and their bands. Today there were no wild horses.


They took their first glimpse at the picture rocks without the old coulter pines shadowing them. There was another tree that would soon need felling. There were pockets of tree die-off here and there, despite a very wet year. Beetles caused some of it, but sometimes it was a mystery.

"You know, today we understand that trees and plants are connected to each other below the soil, and share nutrients and information" Skye said. "So maybe this tree was dependent on the other trees and now that they're gone, it can't survive."

"Maybe" Grace said. "But using that same body of research, those trees that were dying would at some point have given their last energy to their surrounding offspring."

The answer wasn't obvious. Sometimes trees died suddenly, and it was hard to understand why.

The girls meandered back toward the ranch. 
"We haven't been on a long ride in a while" Skye said. 
"Let's plan one" Grace replied.

The boss had brought some things to show Skye down to the indoor arena. So the girls brought Skye's herd there to turn them out. 

"I made them" the boss responded. "A long time ago. Nineteen or twenty years ago. I wrote a novel called The Wisdom Walkers. It was about how these two women traveled across the world to meet each other. A long time ago. 74,000 years ago. So to help work out the details of how they would have done that, we did some miniature journeys. Mikki and I."

"Mikki? Our MIkki?"

"Yes. One of the main characters in the book is based on her, really. So we took herds of horses and a pack train through Vasquez rocks. I made these saddles, out of clay, because I didn't know anything about sculpting apoxie and I don't know how to work with wood."

"Me neither!" Skye chimed in. "I tried and...it's hard! I gave up! But wait. If it was 74,000 years ago, why were they riding horses? Horses weren't domesticated yet. Were they even tall enough to ride?"

The boss laughed. "Not really tall enough for Mikki. She's so tall, all legs. But the basis of the story is that we humans were a lot more advanced in some ways than anyone recalls or understands, but the eruption of the Toba volcano wiped out most of us, and our societies. It's thought that after the Toba volcano erupted humans could easily have gone extinct. Our numbers were in the thousands after that. And of course that kind of loss means the loss of knowledge."

"So in the story, Mikki's people were already here in the Americas and had been for who knows how long. Mikki loved that. If I can find the pictures we did...they were done with a film camera, so somewhere I have actual printed pictures...if I can find them I'll show them to you."

Skye examined the interior of one of the saddles. It had cracked and taken the leather with it. The boss went on talking, animated by the memories the saddles brought to her.
"They saddles are heavy and not shaped right. They aren't worth anything, and I'm not going to keep them. If you want the beadwork and feathers off of that saddle, I'll cut them off for you."

Skye looked at Grace. Grace nodded. "Take them."

"Don't worry" the boss continued. "Grace told me how you feel about saddles in general, I'm not trying to pawn these off on you. But you can have the beadwork if you want it. The thought was that 74,000 years ago we might not have had the technology to make seed beads from glass yet, but we could probably have made crow and pony beads."

Outside the forest hummed with human activity. A prescribed burn at the base of the Vetter Fire Lookout was going well, the weather perfect, the wind cooperating.

When Skye looked closely, she could make out firefighters all along the ridge line, monitoring the burn.

And line workers flew through the air, dangling from helicopters.

"Could you do that?" Grace asked Skye. 

"Oh man! That would be totally exciting!" 

"It pays really well too. Edison puts people through line worker's school. They have tuition grants and special programs to train people to do line work. I don't know if 'line work' is the right name for the job..."

"Aerial Technician."

Grace laughed. "Yes. Of course. Aerial technician. What was I thinking."
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