(IT) COULD HAVE BEEN THE BAT PHONE

Betty and I more-or-less collapsed into the hot tub a coupla/3 daze ago.  The Day After It Snowed.  We had partaken of what a long-lost friend labeled as the essential elements of the hour of the essence of euphoria.  I’ll always remember that, e’en tho’ the me(s)mory of the long-lost friend vague-i-fies with each bend down the current of the passage of the temporal aspect.  No, I’m not affected by the essential elements rite now.

Hot-tub jets bubbling, steam all around, we chatted about thissenthat.  And, I mentioned that while reading the local paper’s Daily Police and Crime report there was a recent entry from our neighborhood.  Police responded to a resident in the 100 block of Sunset Hills having been the victim of fraud.  Fraud – sounds like “flawed”, doesn’t it?  Anyhow, I/we didn’t know exactly WHOM was allegedly de-frauded nor exactly WHAT constituted this grievious slap in the face of collective humanity, but there are only a few residences with addresses in that particular block of that street.  THAT’s our street! But we reside in the 200 block, again with as few as 5 specific addresses.

I reflected on my habit over the years of perusing the newspaper’s crime report.  The (daily) Blotter. This section is usually much more interesting than most of the rest of the paper – in fact the paper could have a daily headline:  Not Much Going On In Grand Junction (related stories throughout).  I look for names I recognize, is there a high percentage of presumed illegal personages arrested, what neighborhoods are mentioned frequently – with an undercurrent of relief that we live relatively unscathed and distant from that day’s nefarious goings-on.  And then, I remembered…

There had been another crime-report entry occurring in my neighborhood in the local media many years ago.  I was driving to work or on an errand and perhaps a couple-hundred yards from the house saw a phone in the middle of the road.  It was much larger than present-day cell-phones, so it could have possibly been a satellite phone, or maybe some kind of walkie-talkie-type radio phone, I don’t know.  I picked it up – it appeared to be undamaged and I presumed it had fallen off of a utility/workman’s truck just a few minutes prior.

I debated.  I should submit a “FOUND item” for the newspaper’s lost-&-found section.  I suppose laziness won out, as I didn’t want to go through the trouble of sending in a “FOUND item, call and identify” article.  Maybe instead of laziness, ‘convenience’ came to the fore as I had an idea which was a more-immediate solution.  Presuming that whoever lost it might be driving (and searching) down this road again very soon, and seeing as how I had a roll of duct tape, I taped the thing prominently 7 or so feet off the ground up a tree.  Who could miss that?

Again, anyone driving by paying even a modicum of attention would see that.  The phone, one band of duct tape around it, a bit above eye level right at the edge of the road.  I drove on.

A couple days later I was reading the daily paper and scanned through “The Blotter.”  At that time we had two newspapers in town, and the one which is now out of business was a lot more imaginative than the other paper.  I noticed an article entitled COULD HAVE BEEN THE BAT-PHONE and read further.  A resident in the 100 block of my/our street called law-enforcement personnel to report a phone taped to a tree in her yard.  It was surmised that perhaps itinerant drug dealers checked in at that location, or some other suspicious and definitely illegal business utilized that spot as a meeting point.  But, to their credit, whoever summarized ‘The Blotter’ entries was thinking out-sighed the box.  You can’t rule out the bat-phone …

Betty got a photo of an occasional visitor to our yard recently (snowed the next day).

Sunset …

Sunrise …

Annie (a.k.a. “Killer” or “the Princess” or “Adventure Kitty”) built a cat-fort.

Below, Jake, a good reason to build a fort to try to escape from ~

Kevin makes it slightly difficult to get to the hot tub from the downstairs door …

Triangle Mesa, overlooking the Gunnison River, in the Dominguez Wilderness Area.  I had ridden my bike up from below to this overlook.