Ow Tanenbaum!

Today we went out for a Christmas Tree. M thought it would be fun to cut our own tree on Bureau of Land Management land. I thought so, too, and we all packed the BLM maps, the cocoa, the video camera, saws, animal crackers, and loppers into the Matrix and headed out.

After driving for about a half hour and then backtracking over a mountain pass, we discovered that access to the first place we saw on the BLM map was denied to us by an out-of-county logging company. It made scintillating video footage. So we drove by a local lake and up another mountain pass and stumbled into another area. By this time, A had fallen asleep. I video taped him snoring.

I think everything was going fine, even after we waved at some skeet shooters blasting bright orange disks in the middle of a mud pit. (I didn't video them on the grounds that it's generally a bad idea to take pictures of people with guns unless you've known them for longer than a half hour.) M found a place to park the car a little farther up the mountain. He got out and I stayed with the snoring infant. It did cross my mind as M's yellow-garbed figure disappeared around a bend in the road that if I was in the car with the doors closed and the windows rolled up I wouldn't be able to hear M calling for help if he needed it.

In my more paranoid moments I wondered if I would be able to use my cell phone to dial 911 and if I'd have to rewind the video to tell them what BLM lot I was on (let's see, it's around here somewhere -- no, I went back too far to Thanksgiving; hold on a moment. Uh, OK, we're at -- oh wait, that was the sign for the road that was closed...).

A woke up at this point and wondered where M was. So I told him he was looking for a tree to cut down.

M came back and suggested a road we could walk that might have a tree for us. So we unpacked and drank some cocoa, broke out the video camera, gave A a shovel, and started walking.

It was about this time that the target practice began. We never actually saw who was shooting as they were over a ridge, but we're pretty sure that they had semi-automatic weapons. And every now and again we'd hear the skeet shooters, too. We had to explain to A that he was hearing weapons like Elmer Fudd's rifle (or Sylvester's gun, he added). During a particularly startling barrage of automatic gunfire, I reflected that at least we probably didn't have to worry about mountain lions.

We walked for a little bit (A is a real trouper and dragged his shovel the entire time).

Then we found a clear-cut.

And it started to rain.

So we walked back to the car for more hot cocoa and animal crackers.

And M wasn't going to give up. By gum, he'd given the BLM $5 to cut a tree, and we were going to do it. We drove back down a little until we found a place to park the car (again). We eventually agreed on a nine foot tree and M helped A to cut it down. It turned out to be very light, and fit on top of the car easily.

On the way back down the mountain we had to stop at the mud pit because the local high school guys had blocked the road with their -- um -- vehicles so they could watch a jacked-up-truck jump mud humps and bits of blasted orange skeet bits. They were cool and unblocked the road when they saw us and we got home with the tree still tied to the car roof.