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Tip o' the Day

There've been a few times when a fire became more than a mere pleasant accompaniment to outdoors adventure -- Like the time I was alone, bringing out the last of our hunting camp on the first day of December. The temperature hovered below zero, and two feet of snow lay across the frozen land. And I lost a mitten.

It was while my packstring trundled silently along the trail. I took the mitten off to dig in my saddlebag for a sandwich. After I'd eaten the sandwich, and wished to slide my already freezing fingers into the fur-lined glove, I missed it! My first thought was to stop the packstring and flounder back to look for it. But there were eight laden packhorses back there and I had no idea how long it'd been gone. Besides, it would certainly have been buried in the snow by churning horse hoofs. Later, though, a quickly kindled fire from dead fir limbs broken from trees near the trail saved deadened fingers.

Another time a friend and I returned to road's end after backpacking all day in a drenching rain. We reached a three-sided Forest Service shelter well after dark, scrounged what poor wood we could find with a flashlight, then huddled around a fluttering fire that seemed as if it'd never take off. Then I remembered the battered piece of magnesium wedge (used by tree cutters to tip a tree in a desired direction). An old sawyer had told me they sometimes used battered pieces of old wedges to make warming fires burn hot.

Dumb me! I threw the piece of magnesium (not even as large as a man's billforld) into our fitful fire, then promptly forgot about it while I tried to boil coffee, water for soup, heat campwater for rinsing hands and dishes.

For the uninitiated, magnesium is one of the most difficult metals to weld because its melting temperature and its flashpoint is so close together -- in the neighborhood of 500 degrees. Apparently, some point at the bottom of our little fire, the temperature hovered at 500 degrees.

My friend and I had piled wet wood all around our campfire in hopes it would dry sufficiently to allow us to cook breakfast the following morning. Meanwhile, our coffee water and our soup water and our dishwater barely simmered. Then the magnesium caught!

Instantly the temperature of our fire shot to 2,000 degrees! Flames leaped toward the shelter's shingled roof! Instantly our coffee pot boiled over, the soup pan boiled dry and melted, Luckily I managed to kick the dishpan out into the drumming rain. The wet wood we had scattered around the fire instantly steam-dried, began smoldering, then turned to blaze! My friend and I threw coats over our faces and tried to push the wood out into the rain with long sticks. For a moment we thought we'd lose the building.

Then the magnesium chunk burned out and the flames receded to lick merrily at the charred firewood left in the firepit. Sheepishly we gathered our scattered wood, now all dry, and ricked it along one wall. Then we started cooking all over again.

No, Roland Cheek hasn't been in a gunfight at the O.K. Corral or punched dogies down the streets of Abilene. But he has straddled rawboned ponies over 35 thousand miles of the toughest trails in all the Northern Rockies and spent five decades wandering the wild country throughout the West. Now, after crafting six prior nonfiction books, hundreds of magazine articles, and thousands of newspaper columns and radio scripts about his adventures, the guy has at last turned his talent to Western novels, tales from the heart, dripping with realism, and based in part on a plethora of his own experiences.

COWERING FROM THE MEDICAL PROFESSION

One of my life's greatest disappointments in came with the realization that I'm not indestructible. Until that truth struck, I'd experienced no reason to think ought but that God had perfected the formula for quality creation when sculpting me. All through my formative years: through puberty I had no reason to contemplate my ultimate demise. The teens? Ha! I scoffed at the concept of horizons in my future. From twenty to thirty I may have thought once about fatality when faced with the unfairness of someone my own age being felled by fate. But me? I'm impervious.

Chinks began showing from thirty to forty, but surely they were aberrations. So shin splints from too strenuous jogging? Don't think about it. But when the edifice began crumbling between forty and fifty, and aches and pains multiplied until I--the guy who always eschewed medicinal solutions for medical problems--whimpered and looked the other way when a doctor waved a needle the size of a musketeer's rapier in front of my nose.

But it was between fifty and sixty that I actually embraced the medical profession, asking doctors to place me on their dance card. They did, and now my blood pressure is under control. And if I pop the occasional pain pill, certain throbbing from muscles overtaxed through too many years of liting heavy packs onto tall horses are at least tolerable.

Now I'm into the seventh decade, with no idea what the next ten years will bring, except a certainty there'll be additional change, some of which won't be as good as I'd wish. My own mortality, I now recognize, may not be as dismissable as I once thought. And its parallel spectre of a probable paucity of metaphorical rabbits medical practitioners can pull from pharmaceutical tophats caused me to wonder if I should leave my future entirely in the hands of well-meaning, but dreadfully limited doctors.

Or should I become more proactive about my own health?

Calculated logic won out over easy-out druthers and Jane and I joined an athletic club where we spend several hours twice per week to whip these once-vaunted bodies back in the direction we formerly assumed them to be by birth and heritage and a dream of being God's-favored. We've been at it now for over a year, and we're finding it ain't easy having to pay for lo those many years of buttering the extra biscuit, spearing the second slice of roast, ordering the larger-sized strawberry malted.

Working out for our health has become a way of life, however, one that is missed if we cannot--or do not--work out. Yes, we still can--and do--hike mountain trails, ride an occasional horse, glass for wildlife, float a wild river. But included in that mix is time for more systematic cardio and muscle toning. It's a year-round effort and I credit the program as a major player in my dropping 30 pounds.

Weight training has also permitted me to regain some of the use of rotator cuffs sorely damaged by two decades of packing big loads on tall horses. I'd also like to tell you that a new-born svelte frame is turning the heads of pretty young maidens, but alas, not so. Although one nice-looking lady who took a seat on a parallel machine did smile my way. Turned out she her husband was down from Edmonton to do some shopping.

When I finished my routine and was wiping my machine down, I flippantly said, "I'm terribly sorry to have to tell you this, but ours was just a summer romance."

Her response was quick: "Oh! Well, what are you doing in September?"

I was still chuckling while leading Jane to the lady, so the two could discuss the best Flathead Valley places to shop for furniture.

Another young lady had a flushed face and rivulets of perspiration dripping from her fevered brow, but took a firmer grip on her barbells and flashed an impish grin. "You know," she said, "it's a lot more fun to put on fat than to put on muscle."

Actually, I'm finding a derivative benefit to the athletic club that I never anticipated: the camaraderie with others working out there, too. As sort of an ice breaker to a guy grunting with strain, I might say something like, "You got any idea how devastated we'll be if we do all this and die anyway."

Sometimes the glaze will leave their eyes and you can see them beginning to process what I've just said. Then an ear-splitting grin might spread, and if they're sharp they might say something trite, like: "Ain't gonna happen to me!" One lady blurted, "I just want to look good in my coffin."

Her response sounded fair enough to me until I remembered that it won't work for me. Why? Because I never looked all that great in my cradle!

Roland Cheek wrote a syndicated outdoors column (Wild Trails and Tall Tales) for 21 years. The column was carried in 17 daily and weekly newspapers in two states. In addition, he scripted and broadcast a daily radio show (Trails to Outdoor Adventure) that aired on 75 stations from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean. He's also written upwards of 200 magazine articles and 12 fiction and nonfiction books. For more on Roland, visit:

www.rolandcheek.com

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