Tag Archives: Howard Mesa

The Roads of Howard Mesa

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Yet another expensive auto repair.

Our place at Howard Mesa Ranch is on top of the mesa, five miles from pavement.

When we bought our place from the original sales organization, the roads, although unpaved, were in pristine condition. I never saw a grader at work there, but the roads were always smooth and wide. Our sales guy, Larry, took us around in his old Buick sedan. That was six years ago.

Although Mike and I never expected the roads to be kept in that same great condition, we expected them to be kept in passable condition. Certainly by a Jeep or 4WD pickup truck — even while towing horses or a camping trailer. Hopefully by a sedan if driven carefully in dry conditions.

Flash forward several years. Road maintenance dollars, divvied out by the Property Owners’ Association, goes to the people who complain the most — who also happen to be the people who live closest to pavement. One of them whines that his road needs to be maintained so construction vehicles can reach his lot. One of those vehicles gets stuck and the POA pays to have it towed out. Dollars that should be spread around evenly on the roads that service all owners are laid on thick on the south end near Highway 64.

July 2004. I was living in a trailer on our Howard Mesa lot, working at Papillon at the Grand Canyon. I drove my Jeep down from the top of the mesa early in the morning to get to work by 7 AM. I hit a pothole in the road hard and instantly hear the sound of air hissing from the tire. I was still two miles from pavement and managed to get a mile closer before the tire was completely flat. Another property owner helped change the tire. The damaged tire could not be repaired. Replacement cost: $152.

August 2004. I’d flown to work that day in my old R22 helicopter, but storms in the area convinced me to leave the helicopter at the airport and drive home. My 1987 Toyota MR-2 was at the airport. I’d driven it on many occasions to and from our lot. But that day would be different. On that day, I’d get stuck in the mud two miles from my gate. I walked to my trailer in the drizzling rain, still in my uniform, as the sky darkened around me. A shortcut through a field got scary when I heard coyotes howling nearby and realized that I had nothing to protect myself from them. No damage to the car; just inconvenience. I came back two days later when the ground was dry and managed to make it the rest of the way to my lot.

October 2004. I take my Toyota to get an oil change. The quick lube place refuses to do the job. The oil pan is smashed in and they’re afraid they won’t get the plug back in after they remove it. The oil pan, which was obviously damaged while driving at Howard Mesa, has to be replaced — I don’t take the car off pavement anywhere else. Total cost $312.

May 2005. Mike and I bring our horse trailer with living quarters back up to our lot for the summer season. Erosion has narrowed the road in places. The 35-foot long trailer slips into a ditch on the driver’s side, smashing the valve for the black water holding tank. We get it back on the road. It then slips into a ditch on the passenger side, smashing the step to the trailer door. Total cost: $268.

May 2005. The next day. Mike and I take his truck on the other road that climbs up to our side of the mesa to see if it’s any better. It isn’t. It’s worse. The 4WD truck slides into a deep, mud-filled ditch. Another property owner tries to pull us out with his Jeep when our truck’s 4WD low setting doesn’t do the trick. The truck is stuck fast in the muck. AAA refuses to send someone to tow us out. We pay a local tow company to do the job. Total cost $250.

We make a lot of noise at the POA annual meeting. It wakes up the POA decision makers. They finally start spending some money on road maintenance on our part of the “ranch.” They grade the state road and spread cinders in the most slippery spots. They put in culverts. But the money runs out before the job can be finished. The road is much better, but has a few very tough spots to negotiate, spots where tire placement can mean the difference between clearing the ground and bottoming out. Yet last week the cinder truck spread cinders on a perfectly smooth road that is never even used. Could it be because there are two lots are for sale on it and the owners wanted the road to look “maintained”? That road is only about a mile from pavement.

July 2006. Today. MIke has driven up for the weekend in his Honda Accord. He’s driven very slowly, very carefully. But he still bottoms out once on his way down this morning. The oil trail starts about a mile short of pavement. His car’s oil light went on three miles south of the Howard Mesa turnoff on Route 64. The oil pan is so torn up that Mike can stick his finger in it. Total cost: unknown so far. But the tow to Williams was $89, the rental trailer to bring the car from Williams to a Honda dealer in Flagstaff was $64, the rental car so he could get to work tomorrow was $86. He missed work today. The cost of the oil pan and replacement labor will probably exceed $300.

[August 1 Update: The Honda’s engine damage was severe and the engine needed to be replaced. Thank heaven it was covered by insurance. It would have cost thousands of dollars.]

It struck me today that we spend more on repairs to our vehicles due to road conditions than we do on property taxes, POA dues, and even hauled water combined. What’s wrong with this picture?

There are a lot of lots for sale at Howard Mesa Ranch. If you’re thinking of buying one, be sure you talk to the POA about maintenance on the road to your lot first.

Then, if you do buy, go out and get a high clearance 4WD vehicle. You’ll need it.

[composed on top of a mesa in the middle of nowhere with ecto]

Working on a Schedule

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Making a plan and sticking to it.

I just made the 3-hour drive from Wickenburg to Howard Mesa. Once again, I was driving Mike’s big Chevy diesel truck and pulling the horse trailer with both horses inside. Alex the bird was riding up front with me (in his lucite box, of course) and Jack the dog had the whole back seat area to himself, with the seat pushed up out of his way.

My last trip up here was interrupted by some personal business down in the Phoenix area. Mike and I had to load all the critters up and bring them home. There was nothing pressing this past week at the office — I’m between computer books and don’t need to start my next one (a revision of an Excel for Windows book) for about a month. But in all honesty, I dreaded making that long trip again. Finally, today I could put it off no longer. Mike went to work and I loaded everything up again. (And believe me, it isn’t easy hooking up a horse trailer by yourself, with no one to help you get the ball right under the hitch. The trailer weighs about 3500 empty, so nudging it with your foot is not an option.) We left Wickenburg at 7:45 AM.

I made two stops along the way.

The first was at the Cornerstone Bakery in Yarnell. This is a great little family-owned bakery that’s generally open on weekdays until the fresh-baked goodies run out.There’s seating inside and out and it’s a really pleasant place, with good food. Today, I picked up four things: a slice of pumpkin roll to eat in the car, a huge cinnamon bun, an “energy bar,” and a piece of peach bread pudding for dessert tonight.

The second stop was at the Safeway Supermarket gas station in Chino Valley. There I paid only (read that word with sarcasm) $3.01 per gallon for diesel. That’s still at least 8 cents per gallon cheaper than Wickenburg.) The pump shuts off at $75 automatically and that’s a good thing. Next week, if I take the truck into Flagstaff, I’ll fill up at the Maverick station on the west side of town, near Home Depot. Last week I bought diesel there for less than $3.00 per gallon.

On the way, I listened to podcasts. I went through all the NPR Business Story of the Day stories on my iPod — about a week’s worth. One of the stories was about Best Buy, which is trying a new working schedule system. Rather than forcing their office workers to sit at a desk from nine to five every day, they established the amount of work each employee must finish in a week and let their employees work any time they want — even at home.

It’s about time someone figured it out.

I played the corporate game for eight years — first with the New York City Comptroller’s Office Bureau of Financial Audit (5 years) and then with Automatic Data Processing (3 years) as an Auditor and Financial Analyst. People would show up for work on time then sit in their cubes or offices most of the day, with breaks for coffee, lunch, and bull and gossip sessions. It was difficult to get much done if you were a popular person around the office. People would be constantly coming to your door to chat about the weekend or what whosherface in the whatsit department was saying behind her boss’s back or the latest company-wide rumor or “How about those Mets!” Then there were always the people who were at their desks at 5:30 or 6:00 PM so that the boss would see them “working hard” long after “quitting time.” I wasn’t one of those people. I worked 8 to 4 when I worked for the City of New York and when I wasn’t on an audit in the field, I worked 8 to 4 at ADP. The only reason I knew about those people is when I occasionally had to stay late for a meeting. (I had one boss at ADP who liked to call meetings that started at 4:30 PM. Sometimes on Fridays.)

When I left Corporate America for a freelance career, I didn’t have to work on a schedule. I could work whenever I wanted to. The trick, of course, was to get the work done. When you’re a freelancer, if you don’t work, you don’t make money.

I’m fortunate in that I can get most things done very quickly. I routinely start article assignments on the day they’re due and turn them in before 2 PM. If I could write and sell one article a day, I’d make a very nice living — that’s because I’d write a week’s worth in 3 days and spend the other 4 days doing something else.

(I used to write articles for Informit when I worked for Papillon at the Grand Canyon. Every day I was a spare pilot, I’d sit in the “training room” with my laptop and knock off a couple of articles between control holds and lunchtime flights. I made more money on the days I was a spare pilot than on the days I actually flew all day. Go figure.)

People who can’t get things done at a reasonable pace or can’t get started because they have some kind of discipline problem should not be freelancers. In fact, they’d starve if they didn’t have a regular job.

Of course a freelance career has other challenges — like getting the work to do. Some people can’t do that either. It’s not always as easy at it might seem to be your own boss.

This Best Buy thing is good — if managers can set reasonable goals and employees can get the work done on time. Imagine the benefit to a single parent with a child in half-day kindergarten. Mom (or Dad) can work her (or his) butt off while the kid’s in school, then spend the rest of the day doing things with the kid. And what about those folks who do their best work late in the day or at night? Or people who live 60 miles from the office (as I did for a short while) and are driving a gas-guzzling SUV? (Don’t look at me; my car got 30 MPG, even back in 1992.)

Imagine the savings to businesses that adopt programs like this. If employees can work at home, they can reduce the amount of office space needed. The cost savings are incredible. Employees would save on commuting costs if they came to the office less often. (My sister spends over $250/month to commute from Hackensack, NJ, to her office on lower Broadway in Manhattan.) They’d also save money by buying less work clothes. Employers could even hire new people at a slightly lower wage because the employee’s cost of living would decrease — and his or her lifestyle would improve.

In the Best Buy piece, the reporter said that people had actually turned down promotions because the new job wasn’t on the new work program. That’s saying something.

It’s a tough pill for some managers to swallow. Managers are accustomed to seeing their employees at work — or at least being in touch with them directly throughout the workday. Some managers assume that employees aren’t capable of getting the job done without being watched over. For some employees, they might be right. Employees who need a babysitter to watch them work at the office shouldn’t be on a program like this. Only good workers who can discipline themselves to work when they have to and get the job done should be rewarded with this ultimate grant of flexibility.

I’m all for flexible work programs and telecommuting. Anything to give families more time together, give people more time for healthful recreational activities, and reduce our use of fossil fuels and highway traffic. (You would not believe how bad traffic in the Phoenix area can get; and I thought New York was bad!)

I hope Best Buy succeeds in their efforts and makes itself a model for other businesses.

In the meantime, the story gave me some food for thought. While it’s true that I don’t have access to the Internet at Howard Mesa, I do have my laptop. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t produce something while I’m up here getting away from the heat. So I set a goal for myself to write a how-to piece or other blog entry for this site at least once a day. And at least two articles for publication per week. When I meet my quota, I can goof off.

I pulled though the gates to my place a little after noon today. I unloaded the horses and let them loose to graze on the 40 acres of high desert grass. I set up the hose to fill their water trough. I unloaded the car, put Alex in his cage, and gave Jack some water. Then I made lunch. As I sit at the table writing this, a thunderstorm is moving in. It’s only 75° outside, I’m the only one around for miles, and I’m at peace with the world.

Tomorrow I’ll get to work.

As for this and other blog entries…don’t’ expect to see them appear on the site the day they’re written. I have a 20-mile drive to the nearest wi-fi hotspot. I’ll come down off the mesa every few days to send in my daily dispatches.

So I guess I’ll be commuting once in a while after all.

[composed at the top of a mesa in the middle of nowhere with ecto]

Zen and the Art of Ikea Furniture Assembly

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I experience a Zen-like calm while assembling Scandinavian-designed shelves and cabinets.

Okay, so I’m exaggerating. But it certainly was pleasant — at least for a while.

Our storage shed at Howard Mesa was in desperate need of some shelves and mouse-proof cabinets.We needed the solution to be cheap.

In a fit of confusion, we’d gone to a Wal-Mart in Prescott and bought some crappy, Chinese-made modular shelves. Of course, we didn’t know they were crappy at the time. Although I hate Wal-Mart and hadn’t stepped foot inside one for more than two years, for some reason we thought we could find what we needed there. After all, Stan raves about the place. Maybe it had changed in two years. It hadn’t. (People say I’m too hard on Wal-Mart but I know I’m not.) And the “furniture” we bought was so poorly made that we brought back all the pieces we hadn’t assembled. We’re still trying to figure out what we’ll do with the three pieces we did put together.

Back to square one.

I was going to try Office Max when Mike suggested Ikea. There’s one down in Tempe, near Phoenix. I didn’t think they’d have what we wanted, but got online to check their catalog. That’s when I found the Träby series of cube-like shelves with optional doors and drawers. We went down to Ikea with the truck to see them in person. They were exactly what we were looking for. And — surprise, surprise — all the pieces we needed were in stock. I loaded up the cart, checked out, and loaded up the truck. Yesterday, at Howard Mesa, I began assembly.

If you’ve never assembled Ikea furniture, you really are missing out on an experience.

First, open the box in which the item’s pieces are packed. You’ll find the box completely filled in with furniture pieces, bag-wrapped hardware, and the minimum number of foam inserts. There’s no wasted space in that box. Since Träby had a natural wood finish, each piece was wrapped in clean, blank newsprint paper.

Now unwrap the hardware and sort it out. There will be pieces you’ve never seen before (unless you’ve assembled Ikea furniture in the past). You might want to sort out the furniture pieces, too. Each one will be slightly different and have tons of holes pre-drilled into it.

Open the instruction booklet. The whole thing is pictures. Line drawings of furniture pieces and hardware with arrows and numbers. In fact, it looks a lot like a coloring book before a kid has gotten to it with crayons. My favorite picture is the one of the man with the pointy nose on the phone; they phone wire is connected to the Ikea store. In words: Call us if you need help.

Next, get your tools ready. You’ll need a philips head screwdriver. That’s it. Okay, sometimes you might need a hammer, but if you do, the hammering job is so light that you can use the heel of your shoe or the handle of the screwdriver.

Now sit on the floor with everything around you. And follow the numbered pictures in the instruction booklet. You’ll screw in weird, tall screws that stick up an inch or more, then stand a panel on top of them and use round do-dads to hold it in place. It’ll be rock solid when you turn the round thing, as if there are ten more screws doing the job. Back panels slide into slots and are held in place with other slots.

What’s amazing about the assembly process is that everything is so incredibly well designed that the pieces can only go together one way. When you’re finished assembling a piece, you feel as if you have performed the final function in a long string of tasks that bring that piece of furniture into existence. You feel as if you’re part of the Ikea team. Like there are a bunch of Europeans nodding their approval at you from across the ocean.

I say Europeans because Ikea is a Scandinavian company and the Träby shelves I bought were made in Poland. The workmanship was quite impressive for such inexpensive furniture. And everything is designed right down to the last screw hole.

The cabinet doors went on just as easily. The only hard part was bending my body in such a way to get the screws into the right pre-drilled holes. The hinges had all kinds of adjustment screws, but I found that if I just used the center setting for each screw, the door hung properly — the first time, every time. Sheesh.

Things changed when it came time to do the drawers. I’d bought two sets of them. Each set had a big drawer and a small drawer. When I opened the box, I got a shock: the drawer insides were lavender. You know. The color. Popular around Easter.

I followed the instructions to assemble the drawers and found that the pieces fit together admirably well. But I hit a snag when I screwed the roller tracks into the cubes I’d already assembled. I kept stripping the screw heads before I could get the screw all the way in.

Now this was weird. I’d been screwing things in all afternoon and hadn’t changed my technique. I hadn’t stripped a single screw up until that point. Now I was stripping the heads on every single screw, unable to get them all the way in. What had changed?

I looked at the box the drawers had come in and saw my answer: Made in China. I guess Poland wasn’t cheap enough for the folks at Ikea headquarters. They’d outsourced to China, like everyone else. The Europeans who’d been nodding their approval were now snickering at me.

I got fed up and stopped only halfway finished with the job. I’ll need Mike to get two of the screws out so I can try again with a fresh set. I’ll go to the hardware store today and buy new screws. Hopefully, they won’t be made in China. Or, if they are, they’ll be made with slightly better quality metal.

Lessons to be learned here? Cheap is cheap for a reason. Even Ikea outsources to China. The best-designed furniture can still be rendered useless by poor-quality hardware.

Today I’ll put together the last shelf cube. With luck, I’ll get that same feeling I had yesterday at the end of all my successful assemblies. But when I feel those Europeans nodding their approval, I’ll ignore them.

As for the Träby shelves and cabinets — they look great and are rock solid.

[posted with ecto]

Ikea, furniture, Poland, China

At Howard Mesa

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I begin a short stay at our vacation place.

If you’ve been following these blogs at all, you might know that Mike and I bought 40 acres of “ranch land” north of Williams, AZ (south of the Grand Canyon) about six years ago. The “subdivision” — for lack of a better name — is called Howard Mesa Ranch. We’re on the east side of route 64, at the very top of the mesa. Our land is five miles from pavement, up a maze of partially maintained dirt roads, and is “off the grid,” meaning it has no utilities.

The idea, when we bought the place, was to build a small summer home up there, somewhere we could escape the heat of central Arizona, where daytime temperatures typically exceed 110° F in July and August. The reality was that it was extremely difficult — if not downright impossible — to get contractors to do work at our place. Heck, it took over a year for a contractor to put in our septic system. So although we might be able to get a mobile home hauled up to our lot and installed on jacks (like our next door neighbor did), it would be extremely tough to get a real builder to build us the tiny custom home we designed and had drawn up. To make matters worse, Mike’s work kept him tied to the office throughout the summer and we didn’t spend nearly as much time at Howard Mesa as we’d hoped to. So the building plans are on hold, at least for now.

In the meantime, we used the land to “camp” during the summer months. We have a horse trailer with living quarters (which is for sale, if anyone’s interested) and I lived in that two summers ago when I flew for Papillon at the Grand Canyon. Last summer, we brought the trailer back to Howard Mesa and I stayed there with Alex the Bird, Jack the Dog, and our two horses for over a month. We’d had a pre-constructed, portable shed brought up to the property to hold our camping gear so we wouldn’t have to tow a trailer back and forth. I spent the month making that usable, blogging, and getting little else done.

Now I’m back, at least for a few days, using the shed as my base camp.

I drove up yesterday with Alex, Jack, and the horses. It was a long drive made tolerable — if not interesting — by podcasts from NPR and Slate. I accumulate podcasts on my computer at the office and keep my iPod updated with them. Then, when I’m stuck in the car for a long period of time — like for a drive down to Phoenix — or sometimes when I’m flying alone, I listen to them. It’s a great way to catch up on what I’ve been missing and feed my brain.

The horses were happy to get out of the trailer after the 3-hour drive and immediately began grazing — there’s enough grass right now to sustain them. The first thing we did to the land after buying it was to fence it in so the horses could roam around. Oddly enough, although they have 40 acres to roam, they spend 95% of their time within sight of our camp. In fact, one of their favorite poop spots is about 50 feet from the shed. Never thought I’d have to fence them out.

(A little side note here. Our friends Matt and Elizabeth live full-time on the mesa, on the northwest side. The mesa is open range, meaning that cattle can — and apparently do — roam around, grazing. Recently, a herd of cattle invaded Matt and Elizabeth’s property, destroying their garden, drinking all the water out of their fish pond, and breaking their patio blocks. Unfortunately, the law in Arizona says that if you live on open range land and want the cows off your property, you have to fence them out. Last week, Matt and Elizabeth put in a fence to protect their home from the cows. Now I’m thinking about putting in a little fence to protect our camp from our own horses.)

It took me about an hour to settle in. Then I spent much of the day assembling some storage shelves and cabinets I’d brought up in the back of the truck. I had my iPod settled in the i-Fusion speaker do-dad I bought (and wrote about in this blog) a few months ago so I could listen to music while I worked. Outside was cooler than inside by about 10 degrees — not much air circulation in a shed, even if it does have six windows — so I’d step out periodically to feel the breeze.

The weather was constantly changing. Mostly overcast, I could see thunderstorms moving off in the distance.

One of the things I love about our place at Howard Mesa is the views. We’re on top of the mesa and can see the horizon in almost every direction. (From the second floor of the house we designed, we’ll be able to see the horizon in every direction.) It’s monsoon season now in Arizona and isolated thunderstorms roll through every afternoon. From our camp, I can see them moving through, sweeping across the flat, barren desert to the northwest or west or the mountainous terrain to the south and southeast. I can see storms when they approach and prepare for them before the sudden downpour. But sometimes those storms I see coming pass just to the north or south of me with just a drizzle for all my trouble.

Yesterday was like that: more action elsewhere and very little rain on our camp. Only one storm was fierce enough for me to close the door and lower the windows on the shed. And even then, it was just for ten or fifteen minutes. When the rain let up, I opened everything back up to let in the cool, moist air, heavy with the smell of the rain.

The other thing I love about our place up here is the solitude. Sure, there’s a house across the road, about 1/4 mile away. But that’s the only one I can see. And there’s hardly ever anyone there. It’s a big event when someone drives by. And the fence and gate — with its No Trespassing sign — keep out the occasional real estate investor who wanders up here, sent by a Realtor too lazy to show him the lot in person.

Sunset was a glorious thing, with the sun peeking out from behind thick clouds on the horizon, illuminating in silhouette the mesa I can see miles and miles away to the northwest. The rain was falling hard there and the sheets of rain glowed orange. To the east, the tops of the thunderheads shined puffy white. Then the sun dipped below the horizon, turning the cloud bottoms to the west gold, salmon, and violet.

I called it quits for the day, made my bed, and took a short shower. Water is precious here. We don’t have a well; hardly anyone does. The water table is far below the surface — much farther than most people can afford to drill. So we have water tanks — two of them — and normally pay someone to fill them up. I figure I have about 700 gallons of the 2,100 gallons total capacity. The horses drink 30-50 gallons (total) a day, depending on how hot it is. So we use water like the precious resource it is. That means a three-part shower — wet down, soap up, rinse off — with the water turned off for the middle part.

I made a cup of coffee and sat outside on the picnic table in my pajamas, watching the light show to the west. To the east, another thunderstorm was on the move, flashing white lightning to announce its arrival. Some coyotes howled. I heard an elk call. The horses were milling around in the corral, nibbling on some alfalfa I’d left out for them. I went in for the night.

Believe it or not, I watched an episode of Monk on my iPod. On a whim, I’d downloaded the two-part series pilot a few weeks ago. I set the iPod in the i-Fusion and settled down to watch it. The iPod’s battery made it through the 47-minute first part. And the tiny screen isn’t so bad when it’s just you watching it and it’s twelve inches from your face.

I slept terribly. Part of it must have been the coffee. I used to drink coffee all the time and it never kept me up. But now I usually have just one cup a day and rarely drink coffee before bed. And I’m getting old. I guess I’m going to have to buy some decaf.

The other part of it was the mice. The shed has a mouse problem. Every time we arrive after being away for a while, there are mouse droppings all over the place — that means I spend the first hour or so of every visit vacuuming and washing everything in sight. At night, when it’s really quiet, we could hear them inside the walls. One morning, one ran right past where we were sleeping. We’ve caught four of them in the past and I regularly leave rat poison around when we leave at the end of a weekend.

Last time we came, Mike brought an inverter and three mouse repellant noise makers. (The shed has a pair of solar panels and can generate DC power.) He set them up right before we left. When I got here yesterday, it was pretty much clean. Those silly things really do work. The one in our garage has kept it mouse-free for over two years. But I can’t stand the sound of them so I can’t keep them turned on when I’m around.

Anyway, I was worried that they were still in the walls and would walk over me while I was sleeping. So that kept me up.

And my neighbor’s light woke me up, too. Imagine a dark, moonless night in the middle of the desert, high on a mesa. The only lights are miles away in the distance. Then, suddenly, a bright light flicks on, piercing the night. It shines right into the window where you’re sleeping, right into your face. Of course you’re going to wake up. Especially if you weren’t fully asleep in the first place. I’m not sure why it went on, but it probably has a motion detector. An elk or coyote must have triggered it. It was on for about three minutes, then went off. The darkness closed in around me again.

I was sleeping quite soundly this morning when a noise outside woke me. I knew what it was without even looking. My horse, Cherokee, was trying to get at the bird food in Alex’s lucite travel box, which I’d left outside. I yelled out, “Cherokee!” and heard him walking away. But the damage was done. I was fully awake.

I made some coffee and came outside. It was still overcast, but obviously raining to the west. The sun was just below the horizon and, for the first time ever, I saw a red rainbow — the whole arc, stretching from northwest to southwest. As I watched, she sun rose and the rest of the colors filled in, crowding the red to the outside where it belonged.

Today I’ll finish my shelf assembly project. Then I’ll drive down to Williams for a visit to Java Cycle (my favorite coffee shop), where I’ll have a green tea smoothie (or whatever they call it), send this blog entry, and check my e-mail. I’ll hit the True Value hardware store and Safeway to pick up a few things on a list I’ve been keeping. Then I’ll drive back up to the mesa and spend the rest of the afternoon relaxing.

Hopefully, it’ll be raining by then and I’ll be able to listen to the sound of the falling rain while I read.

[posted with ecto]

Summer Plans

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Maria Speaks Episode 26: Summer Plans.

A discussion of Howard Mesa and flying for hire, including cherry drying in Washington state.

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Maria Langer. Welcome to Episode 26 of Maria Speaks: Summer Plans.

Summer is here in Wickenburg and thermometer readings prove it. For the past three days, the thermometer on my back patio, which is positioned in the shade, has reached 110 degrees farenheit or more. While the metric equivalent of 42 or so sounds cooler, I don’t think it would feel any cooler. It’s downright hot here.

Wickenburg lies in the northern part of the Sonoran desert. That’s the desert with the big saguaro cacti and other low-water vegetation. We’re at about 2400 feet elevation here, which is at least a thousand feet higher than Phoenix, so we’re cooler than Phoenix. Well, cooler in temperature, anyway. You might be able to imagine how hot Phoenix is. Or you can just check the Weather Channel’s Web site for the shocking details.

For the past two summers, I’ve bailed out of Wickenburg for the summer months. In 2004, I got a job as a pilot at the Grand Canyon, flying helicopter tours on a seven on/seven off schedule. I lived in a trailer at our property on Howard Mesa during my on days. Howard Mesa is a 40-minute drive from Grand Canyon Airport at Tusayan. I was five miles from pavement, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by peace and quiet and not much else. Unfortunately, I had a 13-hour work day, including commuting time. Near the end of the season, in September, I was leaving for work before sunrise and returning after sunset. Didn’t get much of a chance to enjoy the place.

Last year, in 2005, I spent the entire month of July at Howard Mesa with Alex the Bird, Jack the Dog, and our two horses. The property is fenced in, so the horses just wander around. I was living in the trailer again, but working on a project. We’d installed a 12 x 24 foot shed there and needed to get things inside it organized. In the future, we’ll use it to store materials for when we build a house up there. Now, it stores other stuff.

Don’t get the idea that our place at Howard Mesa is some kind of luxury accommodation. It isn’t. It’s off the grid, so we don’t have electricity. The trailer has a solar panel on the roof that tends to keep the battery charged. There’s a thousand-watt generator up there just in case the batteries die down. There’s no television, telephone, microwave, or dishwasher. Water comes from two tanks that hold a total of about 2100 gallons; when water levels get low, we pay someone to fill them back up. We did install a septic system, so there are no worries when it comes to using a toilet. Thank heaven.

The shed now has solar panels and will soon be wired for lighting. There’s a fridge and stove in there and a big propane tank out back that keeps them running. There’s other camping gear there, as well. It’s very basic, covering the bare necessities. That’s fine with me. Sometimes it’s good to get down to basics, just so you realize how luxurious your regular home — no matter how small or sparsely furnished — really is.

This year I was trying to get completely out of Arizona for the summer. I applied for two different jobs in Alaska and was told I could have either one — if I started in April. I couldn’t start that early. I was working on a Visual QuickStart Guide for Peachpit Press and those require that I spend long hours in front of a computer with a big screen, laying out every page of the book manually. Although I originally expected to be finished by early May, some medical problems slowed me down. I’m okay now, but the book is just being finished. It’s early June, so the way I see it, I lost a whole month.

I also got called about a job drying cherry trees in Washington State. I wrote about it in my blog. Here’s how it works. The cherry trees start getting fruit in June. It also rains in June. The raindrops settle on the fruit. If the fruit isn’t dried, it splits. No one wants to buy split cherries, so the farmer loses his crop. Evidently, a number of people sell what they call insurance to the farmers. If the farmers buy in, when it rains, a helicopter magically appears over their fields to dry the cherries. The helicopter does this with downwash from its main rotor blades. It hovers about 4 feet over the tree tops and moves along the rows at about 4 miles an hour. A helicopter like mine can dry 40 acres of cherry trees in an hour.

The work is dangerous, primarily because of the wires that are all over and around the fields. Every year, a couple of pilots get their tail rotors tangled up in wires and wind up down in the trees, wrapped up in a mangled helicopter. But I’m always willing to try something different. The way I see it, I did okay at the Grand Canyon and I did fine racing with boats at Lake Havasu earlier this year. I’m a careful pilot and should be able to do a decent job in the cherry orchards.

Of course, there are only a certain number of spots open to pilots and aircraft. I had three things going against me: First, I’d never done it before, so I was an unknown. Second, I didn’t have a fuel truck driver to deliver fuel to me out in the fields. (One of the guys offered to let me share his truck, though, so that wasn’t a big hurdle.) Third, I was based in Arizona and would have to make an 8-hour flight to Washington State just to settle into my base there. The folks who do the hiring didn’t want to pay for that 16-hour round trip ferry flight and I couldn’t blame them. But I had to charge a bit more than some of the local pilots to cover my travel costs and the outrageous cost of special insurance I’d have to get just for the job.

So they never said yes. But they never said no. When questioned, they kept saying maybe. Time passed. The season start day approached. I assumed they weren’t interested — they never said yes. One of my contacts — the guy who brought me into the running — got an assignment that started on June 5. That’s yesterday. He put me in touch with someone else. That guy told me I had an 85% chance of getting work if I came up there. I read between the lines. He was suggesting that I fly up there and just settle into a hotel and wait. Without a contract.

Now let me explain how payment for this kind of job works. Pilots get a contract that’s usually for about 30 days. The contract includes a per diem amount for standby time. That amount covers the cost of your hotel room, food, ground transporation, and, in my case, insurance (at a whopping $150 a day). The contract also includes a per hour fee for actual flight time. So the more you fly, the more you make, but if you don’t fly, at least you have your basic costs covered.

This guy was suggesting — without actually suggesting it — that I fly up there and go on standby without per diem compensation. So not only would I have to eat the ferry cost, but I’d have to eat my hotel cost, too. Unless I flew. I was told that I could charge more per hour if I didn’t have a contract, but I’d obviously be the last pilot called if I was also the most expensive.

When I pretended, in our phone conversation, not to pick up on this, he went on to tell me that they might still need me. They’d know for sure by Monday (yesterday) and would call then. They’d need me to be there by the end of the week.

This kind of bugged me. I was finishing up my Visual QuickStart Guide and needed the rest of the week to get it done right. These guys expected me to drop everything, hop in my helicopter, and fly up. When they called. If they called.

Well, I didn’t get a phone call from cherry-land yesterday.

Now I do need to admit that this whole wait-and-see situation was starting to get on my nerves. It was okay back in April when I was first introduced. With enough notice, I could shape my summer around the job. True, I did have a book to work on in June, but I figured that I could work on it in my hotel during my standby time. I’d just have to get a PC laptop — which I was due to buy anyway — and find an Internet connection somewhere. I could figure it out. But as time slipped by and I was still waiting, I started to get antsy. Since I didn’t know if this job would work out, I couldn’t really make any plans for something else. I half-heartedly applied for a job at the Grand Canyon again, but didn’t follow up. I didn’t want to go to the Canyon. I wanted to go to Washington. I wanted to try something new, have more free time, and fly my own helicopter. I wanted to open a new door.

So yesterday, when the phone didn’t ring, I was both disappointed and relieved.

Now I can make a real summer plan. And, at this point, it appears that it will involve Howard Mesa again.

I figured I’d go up there with Alex, Jack, and the horses again. But I’d also get involved with the Town of Williams. I’d get a business license there and join the Chamber of Commerce. Then I’d build a relationship with some of the local businesses and offer day trips by helicopter to Sedona and the Grand Canyon. If I got two or three flights a week, it would keep Zero Mike Lima flying and me out of trouble.

Best of all, it’s cool at Howard Mesa — generally 20 degrees cooler than in Wickenburg.

Which is a good thing, because there’s no air conditioning there, either.