We Don't Need No Water

This has been a week of heat. Thursday night the mesa caught on fire. Tim had never seen a forest fire before (oh, you city folk)... and so, along with the rest of the sleepy hamlet known as Crawford, we went down to the lake to see whose house was burning down. Fortunately, no one's house was burning down (despite rumors) but Jed was still out there "whacking" the fire with a shovel until well after nightfall. Crawford isn't large enough to have a proper fire station so they depend on Volunteer Firefighters to put out the fires in the Valley. Everything from field-burns gone awry, kids starting fires out of boredom, lightening strikes, concentrated heat from the sun on broken glass/in car mirrors, to exploding meth-labs (or meth-lab cover-ups). Not that Jed is even a volunteer firefighter; like a number of people, he wasn't there in a fancy helmet-- just average people in shorts and sandals, trying to fight the fire and not get arrested by the cops for doing so.

All of this explains Crawford pretty well. Talk about an interesting mixture of regular ranchers, a youth population challenged only by the sheer lack of anything to do, and a serious case of nature having its own way with a place.
The best reason to live in a small town (besides the sudden appearance of a couple thousand more visible stars) is that everyone makes there own rules, firefighting protocol be-damned.

Saturday was our annual Crawdad party (yes, Louisianians, crawdads. Deal with it). Every year we go to the lake and sit under the full moon, with a string in the muddy water, like idiots, just to catch a cooler full of Crawdads. They're disgusting, they make wierd noises, and do this thing we call "the moon dance:" coming almost to the edge of the water and waving their claws in the air... Still, every year we catch them at the dam and the next day we party. This year was not only our first year in a new house, but Tim's first year of the explain-your-life-plans ritual while the little kids "organized" (read: destroyed) a bunch of stuff in the barn. I made my margaritas, which everyone underestimated (as usual) and my Grandpa told me that all I need to know in life is this:

The world will end when the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

I'm not sure who said it first, but I can tell you who said it last.

My senior year of highschool we raised funds all year for our senior trip and then spent the last month of school convincing people it wouldn't be that cool. Our logic was that if fewer people came, the people who did go would have more money to spend per person. I'm convinced we could have wittled the list down to myself and my two best friends and gone to Vegas, but we were too young to get into the casinos at the time anyway. Instead we went to Arches National Park outside of Moab, Utah, where I fell in love with the Mormon State. I haven't been back since then, until yesterday.
The park is full of places with names like "the Devil's Garden" and "the Fiery Furnace" because, in all honesty, if it wasn't so strangely beautiful, you could imagine that this is what the nicer parts of hell might look like. Even though Edward Abbey might roll in his grave every time someone opts for the "scenic drive," the park is still marvelously lax on safety measures (one trail goes along a six-foot wide rock fin with a thirty-foot drop on one side), and that should make a mountainier proud.

The rock formations are absolutely beyond words (unless you've ever seen that episode of Star Trek where Captain Kirk gets stranded on a desert planet).

That brings us to today, wherein I sat around and did nothing. If anyone can tell me where Trina is, I'd be much obliged. I hear tell she gets married in two weeks and I haven't seen hide nor hair of her yet. Maybe that has something to do with the whole "making of one's own rules" thing.