The art of invisibilty

I live at the base of a prairie covered mountain called Mount Jumbo. Have you ever seen the prairie? The range? Oh you Easterners don't know what you're missing! The colors are what get me. Throw green out the window. Ash gray of sage, dark red of dried forbs, shocking yellow of dry grass, blue shadows on the white snow and ice, and all the lichens on the rocks. And of course the blue sky. How complicated the sky is! And I'll need a picture.

I took my dog, Lyra up the mountain today in the cold. There is a large letter "L" on the side of mount Jumbo which stands for Loyolla high school. It is a common thing out here to put big letters on hills. When I saw They Might Be Giants play at UM they commented that in Missoula we have an "L" right next to an "M" and wondered if we just went ahead and alphebatized all the mountains in the area.

Well mount jumbo is an open prairie, but its more complicated than that. There are huge blocky, argillite boulders jutting out of the soil. Wetter spots that caused by topography of the mountain result in trees and shrubs that need more water than the drought adapted grass that covers the exposed, dry areas. There are also long draws, like creases in the very rock, extending from the bottom to the top of the mountain. These may be categorized as 'effervescent streams' by a hydrologists survey, but they haven't had an actual streamflow in a very very long time. Though water doesn't flow through these channels, trees seem to. The discharge of any stream is a combination of sediment and water (and fish), but these streams' discharges are dry, spidery trees floating atop the bedload of dark soil. These tree streams in the range also convey something miraculously against the force of gravity. Trackers.

I wanted to make it up to the L completely unseen. I am in fact the subject of the above photo. You wouldn't know it though because I was practicing the art of invisibility at the time. Just kidding, I don't know WHO took that. How long can I keep pirating photos for my blog before the MAN gets me?

Anyway my point is that the art of invisibility is a combination of other arts.

AWARENESS: This is paramount. you can't hide from everything at once, so you need to choose when to hide and when to move, especially in the prairie. Most of the time when I mess up and become visible, it is when someone I didn't notice walks up behind me. Thats why John Young promotes the Leopard method. Walking smoothly and using lots of peripheral vision. Stopping to look in all directions while sniffing and listening at all times. It engages a lot of your brain at once. People with Attention deficit disorder are supposedly uncanny at this skill.

MAKE BELIEVE: pretend to be a mouse when hiding in the grass. think mousy thoughts not thoughts of weird tracker things and hiding practice. Think about how tasty the grass looks. Eat some.

PATIENCE: don't try to sneak by people all the time, just wait till they aren't looking! This can take a while. Oh well. My pants froze solid while practicing the art of patience today.

I made it to the L. Joggers are really easy to avoid. They stare at their feet on the uneven ground. People on first dates are harder to avoid. They look around awkwardly. I want to put on funny makeup and hide all over the place.