Morning Drill

"Eyes right!"

"Tails left!"

"What are we looking at?"

"No idea".

In the early 1970s our family bought a ranch in Montana and moved there from California which, incidentally, was viewed as a borderline criminal act by native Montanans. Nevertheless, as the years passed we gained a certain amount of acceptance and went about our way making a living working hard trying to blend into the established network of oldtimers.

One of the things we loved the most about those oldtimers was their ability to “read” the signs of many important things like pending disasters, weather, hay quality, crop yields, cattle health, etc. They did this in a variety of ways which the wise newcomer observed and learned from but never attempted.

However, the father in one newly arrived family, apparently eager to speed up the acceptance process, declared one day that he was pretty sure it was going to be an early winter. “How do you know”, we asked. He thought for a moment and then replied, “The birds are all sitting in a straight line”. He nodded his head toward the power poles and walked off happily confident and proud that he'd learned one of the coveted secrets. There was hardly any point in asking him how else birds on telephone wires could sit.