One Nation, Under God
One Nation, Under God
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I usually grow a big garden -- corn, potatoes, peas, beans, squash, and the like. This year I didn’t. So little rain fell in April and May that it seemed a good idea to skip gardening, and concentrate on fishing instead. I did plant a row of tomatoes and peppers, and I’m growing some pole beans, but that’s it. I just didn’t want to fight the drought. Instead I gave in. My yard dried out and yellowed a month ago. There’s no grass to mow, but I still knock down the weeds every couple of weeks. Wh...
Years ago, while living in Bozeman, I suggested that people who didn’t farm or ranch should live in town. I even recommended folks looking to move to Montana check out existing housing in the small towns scattered across the state where infrastructure is already in place. This was years before the onslaught of home fixer-upper shows on HGTV, and decades before anyone ever thought about working remotely. Still, it seemed a good way to slow down sprawl, protect agricultural land, and revitalize r...
It was 50 years ago this month that I first fished the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. I was working for an outfitter in Cooke City and had been asked to accompany an elderly couple into the canyon and tend the horses. I don’t remember how the fishing was but I suspect it was good, good enough that I soon began making the trip on my own on foot. In the ensuing half century I rarely went a summer without at least one trip into the canyon. The cutthroat were plentiful and 40-fish days were common...
I wonder what’s next? First it was disease, then drought. Now we’re dealing with wildfires and an infestation of grasshoppers. Winter can’t arrive too soon. Or can it? It snowed Sept. 9, 1970 in the Beartooth Mountains. Early snow isn’t unusual there, but this was a dump, more than a foot of wet, heavy snow. We were in the process of setting up a hunting camp at Granite Lake and the string of horses we’d left there in a pole corral escaped and disappeared during the blizzard. The wrangler...
In 1985 I left a lucrative career in the construction industry for a newspaper job. It wasn’t for the money. In fact it was more than 10 years before I again began making the hourly construction wages I had given up. But I found the work interesting enough to make a career out of it, and there were the perks, free coffee among them. I also had the great pleasure to work with a number of talented photographers along the way. And while I never made enough money in the newspaper business to a...
Since hot weather is apparently here to stay, I’ve decided to embrace it. I have little choice. There’s no escape. While I can hide inside, the relief is only temporary, and if I move any farther north, I’ll have to learn to speak Canadian. Dressing -- or more accurately undressing – for the heat is of upmost importance. I haven’t worn long pants in weeks, and socks are even too much most days. It seems only a short time ago that I was dressing for winter, pulling on long underwear as soon as I...
Years ago I came west to escape the heat. Either that or I was headin’ down the highway lookin’ for adventure. Whatever the reason, I found both cooler weather and excitement in Montana. I got a job in Cooke City working for an outfitter. Riding and packing horses in the Beartooth Mountains provided plenty of adventure, and the high–elevation climate of Cooke was a delight. It seldom topped 80 degrees. I’d grown up in southern Indiana where the summer nights were sweltering, and we didn’t have a...
You know it’s summer in Yellowstone Park when the bison start goring the visitors. A 30-year-old woman suffered what the park is calling “significant” injuries recently following an “encounter” with a bison on a hiking trail near Yellowstone Lake. It’s a relatively common occurrence. Last summer in separate encounters with bison in the park a 72-year-old woman was gored, another woman was knocked to the ground, and a nine-year-old girl was tossed in the air. All were injured but survived. F...
I like to fish. A lot. But even though fishing is best this time of year, I can’t help but think it’s only a little more than two months until hunting season begins. And I really like to hunt. It seems only a short time ago that hunting season ended and seven months of waiting began. But the older I get the faster time flies. The once-interminable wait between seasons now hardly offers even enough time to dry my boots before I’m off again. I’m not alone in this. I have friends who are also co...
My father’s been gone for 15 years, and while I can’t say I think about him every day, he’s never far from my thoughts. Among the many things he taught me was how to hunt and fish, two pastimes that consume me for much of the year. He’d be fine with that, but he’d also remind me to call my sister, and go to church. My earliest memories afield go back to a squirrel hunting trip with him when I was still too young to carry a gun. He’d gotten permission to hunt a stand of hardwoods that border...
I don’t know why I’m so enamored with snakes, but they’ve had a hold on me since I was a kid. They still do. Last week at the cabin I saw our 10-month-old springer Dot cautiously approach something in the yard. About the time I thought “snake,” it struck at her, missing by a foot, but putting her in retreat. It was a big, beautiful bull snake, vividly marked in gold and black and green. I was thrilled to have such a magnificent creature in my yard. Growing up, the only snakes in my yard were...
I recently read another article concerning the influx of new residents to Montana and what they should know in order to fit in out here. It’s a tired, overworked story. The reality of the situation is quite different. We have to adjust to them, not the other way around. While long-time Montana residents bemoan the flood of out-of-staters fleeing the places where they were born and spent their careers, those are the same folks we most often choose to lead us. Our governor is from New Jersey. O...
It was 86 degrees when we got to the lake. I hoped to fish the next day, but the wind rose at dusk and howled all night. At first light it was spitting rain, and after wrapping up some work on the cabin we decided to head home. While we were loading the truck Barb said she smelled smoke, and within a few minutes the landscape had disappeared under a blanket of haze. We hung around for a while hoping the source of the smoke wasn’t nearby. If a fire was close it would be here soon riding the roari...
While pounding through the waves recently on Fort Peck Lake I couldn’t help but recall how many times I’d been here before. Not necessarily on Fort Peck, and certainly not in a boat this big, but for sure in waves large enough to give me pause. Probably the scariest were the trips Barb and I used to take on Yellowstone Lake where if anything happened and we ended up in the frigid water we were toast, or more accurately ice cubes. The wind at that elevation came up quickly and with little war...
I’ve been called a lot of things over the years, but this was a new one. A concerned reader, upset over my opinion in a recent column, referred to me as a self-righteous liberal. I was aghast. Me? Morally superior? I simply point out things I see and state an opinion on them. It’s not always even my opinion. Sometimes I just like to poke the bear. Makes for a better read. I hope my columns on occasion prompt discussion, even if it’s often what a jerk I must be to have written what I did. A colum...
While working in the yard yesterday I noticed a dark cloud approaching from the west. “It’s going to rain,” I thought to myself. The weather app on my phone affirmed my prediction. “Rain starting in six minutes,” it read, “continuing for 40 minutes.” I welcomed the moisture like I always do this time of year. April showers bring May flowers and all that. I should have known better. It hardly even spit, the dark clouds vanishing by the time they reached town. I miss rain. Especially in...
In the 1980s while hunting on the CMR National Wildlife Refuge I drove into Glasgow to pick up a friend who was arriving on Amtrak. On a bulletin board in the train station was a racist cartoon that caught my eye. Having grown up in southern Indiana I’d seen that sort of thing before, but this was particularly vile, especially in a public space. It colored how I’ve viewed Glasgow ever since, but that was more than 30 years ago, and times change, don’t they? Apparently not so much. Passing throu...
I’ve always liked a room with a view, and I’ve had a few. The view out the front window of the apartment Barb and I rented on Willson Avenue in Bozeman always reminded me of a Courier & Ives print, especially in winter. The four-plex we lived in, however, was torn down a few years ago. Apparently, it didn’t fit the aesthetic of the neighborhood. The view out of our front window in Malta is somewhat similar. The prettiest house in town sits across the street surrounded by towering trees. The best...
Raising a young bird dog is always a challenge. Balancing a pup’s enthusiasm with enough discipline to maintain a handle can be difficult, especially when there are too many birds. That’s not typically a problem. But like a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, I found myself peering out the windows at the cabin last week to see if the coast was clear. It wasn’t. There were sharptail grouse feeding under the boat parked outside. There were grouse on the split rail fence across the road. T...
Our new governor seems intent on living out a country song. Hardy’s recent hit “Rednecker” comes to mind whenever Greg Gianforte makes the news. “My town’s smaller than your town/And I got a bigger buck and bass on my wall” A New Jersey transplant, Gianforte long ago gave up the silk shirts and gold chains of the Jersey shore for boots, jeans, and big belt buckles. Some might call him a poser, but the software developer seems to be doing everything he can lately to prove he’s just a regular guy...
At times I wonder what we were thinking. Like when I was getting dressed one day last week and discovered a hole in my sock that wasn’t there when I had taken it off the night before. Or yesterday when I was on my hands and knees in the living room mopping up a coke that had been sent flying after a high-speed collision between a TV tray and a dog bed. Or all the time I’ve spent cleaning up broken branches and tree bark that litter every room as if we’d been running a wood chipper inside the h...
It must be spring. The first grizzly bear of the year has emerged from hibernation in Yellowstone Park. I’m sure I ran into his relatives years ago. Grizzlies, more than any other animal, are a hallmark of wild country to me. I love knowing there’s still a critter out there that just might stalk and eat me. The first grizzly I saw in the park was at a distance. He was ambling through the sagebrush while I watched from the relative safety of a stand of trees a couple of hundred yards away. It was...
I’ve always been an avid reader. As a kid I was a big fan of the Hardy Boys mysteries, reading nearly every book in the series. Frank and Joe solved crimes, rode motorcycles, flew planes, even had their own boat. As I grew into my teens I still read the Hardy Boys, although by then it was more to laugh at the outdated language in the books than it was to lose myself in the predictable plot lines. The brothers and their “chums” frequently tailed “swarthy” characters, who typically glanced a...
It’s been a year this month since the world as we knew it changed. Barb and I were on vacation in San Diego but raced home to Montana when Covid-19 hit the fan. Except for a brief foray into Wyoming last summer I haven’t been out of the state since. My 33-year association with the Bozeman Chronicle ended that month when the paper dropped all of its columnists. My final column in the Chronicle, detailing our trip to California, is still displayed on the paper’s web site. The headline reads “Doin...
February used to be my favorite month. The shortest month of the year, February also signaled the end of winter for me. For years, Barb and I would head for warmer climes at the end of the month. While it might remain cold and snowy in Montana for a while yet, I didn’t care. I wouldn’t be back until spring. Then things changed. Instead of looking forward to dragging a boat clear across the country to Florida, I began to dread the trip. We seemed to always hit a blizzard in the Dakotas. Each yea...
