You can normally fly about three hours on the fuel carried by the helicopters we use for our deer surveys. One of the greatest headaches of the whole project is figuring out where those three hours will take you so you can have the fuel truck waiting.

Besides guessing where the crew is going to find a lot of deer and go slowly, and where there will be few and they'll cover a lot of ground, you also have to figure out if the fuel truck can get there (not a sure thing in the winter). And if there's a flat, open space large enough for a landing site.

Not to mention you don't want to drive the truck too far, because you're paying it by the mile, and it ain't cheap.

But you want it as close as necessary, because you're paying the helicopter by the minute, and it costs a whole lot more.

The way we did our flying yesterday, the fuel truck went thirty miles northeast for the first refueling, then back to town and 35 miles northwest for the second.

I maybe could have done that better. May try something different next year.

Since I was essentially on standby in case the warden doing the counting wanted a break, I also drove thirty miles northeast, then back to town and 35 miles northwest.

While passing through town, I stopped to see wife and eldest son at this seasonal event.

Met the local newspaper publisher at the door. Him catching notice of my camera slung under my shoulder.

Yeah, taking a couple thousand pictures just to get three or four worth looking at.

"You'd make a good reporter," he answers. Not just being kind.

The bad news is, wife informs me he is leaving our little community, for a bigger, warmer climate. Apparently he and his girlfriend have decided to get serious and try living together, rather than commuting across states to visit.

Damn.

The crowd seemed a little bigger than last year's, which is good.

Our local poet was in his usual spot under the stairs, again handing out free samples.

But I still had to marvel at the incongruity of the event and the locale.

Families happily, noisily hustling through the shower room to get from the south side of the cell block to the north. Right past the stairway door where a guard was murdered.

And the tree in the corner..

Not five meters from where a new inmate was lynched.

By his fellow inmates, mind you. Who staged a riot and takeover of the whole cell block for the sole purpose of killing him.

His crime?

Murdering the grandmother of another inmate. A woman who lived across the street from the prison. Inmates on the second and third tiers of the south side could look out the windows and see her house. And they all shared in the homemade cookies and treats that she brought over on a regular basis.

The de facto grandmother for over a hundred hardened criminals.

Not the person you want to victimize.

This was a hard, dangerous, primitive place. Can you imagine their incredulity if you had told any of those men, inmates or guards, that there would someday be a Christmas tree standing here?

That little children would happily trot down these lanes as if they were in a mall?

Yes, there is a new, hard prison on the other side of town. With even more inmates. Such men are still in their own world, with its own rules. And there are still men and women who guard them, and try to go back to a normal life after their eight hours are up.

But being here, walking this lane knowing some of its past, and seeing what has taken its place, well,

You can't help but be uplifted.

The best picture from my half-hour visit, though, I did not see. Or take.

The wife did. Borrowing the camera to lean back from her tables to snap a shot of...

A pointy-eared elf. Standing a little wistfully on the second tier.

Staring out those same windows to the south.