More Dogs on Main

I stayed up very late the other night watching the first few of the Chilean miners get safely extracted from the mine. As media frenzies go, this was pretty well handled. The whole event had been carefully staged. After 70 days in the hole, the miners came up with fresh haircuts, clean shaves and clean clothes. I look worse after a Saturday morning session of cleaning the garage than they did after a couple of months stuck in a hole. The number of people at the top of the shaft was limited to a manageable crowd. The big family reunions would occur in the privacy of their own homes.

The first man out gave an emotional hug to his young son that resonated throughout all humanity. Tough as this world can be at times, there are moments that let us know it is all going to be OK, and that was one of them. The cameras were at a pretty discrete distance, so we shared the moment without feeling like we were intruding on something that was so private, but at the same time had drawn the attention of people everywhere. I doubt American television could have covered the event with such respect and dignity. Some reporter would knock down a dozen people to get himself between father and son and ask some stupid question like, “Does it feel good to be out of the mine after 69 days?”

I think my favorite part of it all was the guy who brought a bag of rocks from the mine up with him, and passed out rocks to the rescuers on the surface. Those are about as special as moon rocks. Although I wasn’t about to watch all 36 hours of it, I kept checking back to see how it was going.

So here it is, the middle of October, and we still have nearly summer-like temperatures. Nobody is really complaining about it. It’s pretty good weather for installing new ski lifts, and the folks at the resort formerly known as The Canyons (and now simply “Canyons,” which is maybe even more grammatically awkward) have to be loving it. But it really ought to be nudging toward winter by now. It’s pretty late in the year not to have had snow right at the house.

My nephew from Jackson was in town last weekend, and we got talking about some unusual weather observations. Both of us had noticed that this was a bug-free summer. Normally there are a couple of major hatches along the river that coat my car with squashed bugs. My car will go about 600 miles between fill-ups, and I usually have to debug the windshield a couple of times between trips to the gas station. Some years it’s so bad that I have to clean them off the car radiator. I don’t recall doing the bug scrape even once all summer.

It wasn’t just here. Comparing notes on my drive to Coeur D’Alene and Scott’s drives around Jackson and Yellowstone, for some reason, there just weren’t many bugs splattered on the windshield this summer.

My nephew is a carpenter, and by the early fall, typically he is battling hornets. They are normally buzzing around the eaves of the houses, in the trees, and just generally hanging around in malevolent swarms. I usually run into the same thing here. In fact, when I was painting the barn a couple of weeks ago, I was armed with a can of plutonium-based hornet spray, expecting to run into a couple of football-sized nests. There weren’t any.

An elderly neighbor once told me that the hornets could forecast the winter. If they built their nests low to the ground, it would be a light winter with little snow. If they were at the tops of the trees, there would be a lot of snow. Bigger nests meant colder weather. The primary basis for the credibility of his claim was that he lived to be over 100 and presumably had many years of carefully documented observations to support his conclusion. Or he might just have been a very old farmer.

For what it’s worth, the only hornet nest I’ve been able to see this year is pretty average in size, but way up in the top of the tree. The neighbor is no longer around to ask what the scarcity of hornets might mean. Maybe we’re in for the kind of hard winter that sent them packing off to Arizona.

I don’t know what the lack of bugs means, but this year was definitely very different from most in that department.

Tom Clyde served as Park City attorney in the 1980s and is the author of “More Dogs on Main Street.” He has been a columnist at The Park Record for more than 20 years.