General: November 2007 Archives

"If you value your freedom thank a vet." I don't know who said that or when I first heard it. I grew up with it. This pairing of violence with liberty and freedom. It is in the hymns I sang as a child in school and church, back when those lines were still blurred in Mormon Utah. I grew up on stories of revolution by force starting at Lexington and Concord. Liberating strife.........
Here in the mountains of Zion my ancestors fought with the "remmenant of Jacob" to protect their homes and farms from cattle thieving Utes. My great grand father was honored as a veteran of that strife. The treaty that ended the Black Hawk War is still reenacted sometimes around here. There is a statue in the town of Manti just west of the LDS temple there depicting the Ute chief Walkara beside a pioneer man and woman gesturing toward the temple. It tells the stoy of Walker, as he became known, inviting the Mormons to come and share the area with his people. He had no concept of fences and Euro-American settlement. Very quickly he could see that the influx of wagons full of farmers was going to obliterate his people's way of life. As the game began to dissapear the Utes began to eat Mormon beef and that is where this liberating strife began. It ended when the Utes were relocated to a reservation in eastern Utah.
So I called my friend Jim who served in Viet Nam in the Marine Corps and thanked him and to wish him a happy Veteran's Day. I missed out on the war. I was in Canada responding to a call from my church to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ to First Nation people there on Iriquois and Ojibaway reserves.
Now I spend my Fridays volunteering at the local state prison helping descendants of the Utes my ancestor fought pray and sing to their god in the traditional Ute way. Life is often circular like that.






I also thought about  the death of Alyssa Peterson, a non commissioned officer in Iraq who killed herself after being  ordered to torture detainees. Her case received a lot of attention a year or so ago. I wrote a blog about it then but it was eaten by cyber-gremlins.
The news reported that one in four vets are homeless today. In Utah on any given day there are 530 veterans living on the street.  If you value your freedom, thank one of them.

Years ago when we were all younger I bought an old (1953) GMC flat bet with my friend Bruce Burnham. The truck was used to haul firewood, coal, lodgepole pine, firebrick and whatever else needed to be moved. The old boy did some serious duty in his time. The Roid (short for Hemroid) was the baddest ride in Sanpete County all through the eighties and early nineties. On a trip from Salt Lake hauling fire brick for my wood kiln in ht early nineties he lost a wheel and the program ground to a halt. The rear dual wheel went one way and I and the Roid went on down the road flattening one side of the brake drum. I towed the Roid home and it has been parked here ever since. A few years ago, after considerable searching at junk yards, I got a new brake drum to replace the one messed up in the fire brick incident so I could move the truck into my lot to keep the city from citing me for having it parked in their right of way.

                                                                                                                                                                     
Saturday morning I drained the old gas out of it, put new fuel in the tank and dropped a new 6 volt battery in the truck. The old Roid fired right up and purred like a cat. I was delighted and relieved as I had arranged for Zina to bring a crew of her college buddies down to help us move the logs for our future home to our new lot. We purchased the logs (a disassembled 1880's house ) from Scott Anderson and Kent Perkins. Kent dropped by to see how the project was going. I think the He and Scott are glad that we will be re-habing the old house and living in it.









Zina and her crew of six spent Friday night in Spring City and after eating breakfast with us and got right into moving the logs. The longest of the logs were 34 feet and weighed a lot. I was very glad for a bunch of young healthy folks to help out.








W.C. Fields said that youth is wasted on the young. I am just glad there is such a thing as young people inj the world.










Up at the new lot we stacked the logs on blocks in preparation for wrapping them with water proof material for the winter. Building can't start any sooner than Spring and may be much later depending on financing and the sale of our current home.








We made four or five trips to get all of the logs moved. The lot where the logs have been stored has just been sold to our friends Russ and Sharon Evans. They will  be building a commercial building on the site. It is a sweet location, right across from the LDS Meeting House. I think they plan to open an antique shop of some sort. It will be a great improvement to Spring City's Main Street.






Caleb and Zuna horseing around.











Joe the Potter takes one for the team. That really hurt!





















Linsey Pack and Zina showing the boys just how it is done. Girls can do!










Now that is one fine piece of machinery. Moving the Bennion's log house adds to a long list of mythic tasks this old six banger has accomplished.









The log pile was finished none to soon. Pictured here are (L to R) Chris Nielsen, Kendall Wilcox, Davey Ornegri, Lindsey Pack, Adam Barlow, JTP, and Zina. Missing from the photo are Ash Sanders, Jason Brown and Caleb Proulx. They went home early and others showed up late. It was a great day with great kids. At lunch we fed them on a new recipe of mine I call "Four Square Medicine Chilli. It features Venison, beans, squash and corn. They must have liked it....... no leftovers.

 "To be born in Wales, not with a silver spoon in your mouth, but, with music in your blood and with poetry in your soul, is a privilege indeed." Brian Harris
This pretty amazing. My only question is why do they follow Paul's performance with Steven Tyler?