One Nation, Under God
One Nation, Under God
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During a trip to Cooke City last week I was asked about my license plate. “Where’s 11?” the woman who brought my barbecue sandwich wanted to know. “Phillips County,” I replied. She said nothing, just gave me look. I didn’t think anything of it until I got home and told my friend Dave. “She probably thought you were diseased,” he said. Phillips County, which had skated through the pandemic unscathed, with zero cases of covid until it blew up a couple of weeks ago, now tallies 90 some odd cases....
When I was young and full of myself there were a number of things I did that I swore I’d never quit. They were too cool, too unique, too fun. I couldn’t imagine a spring without horn hunting or a fall without chasing elk. I promised myself I’d drive over the Beartooth Pass every summer, and I’d never miss the Mothers’ Day caddis hatch on the Yellowstone River. Time has a way of breaking promises, however, and that list of things I’d never quit has dwindled to a scant few. One of them is com...
I was talking to my good friend Edub last week about folks we used to work with at the Bozeman Chronicle who had gone on to work for larger newspapers. We laughed about a rookie reporter at the paper who had struggled with the writing, couldn’t meet deadlines, and left after less than a year. Edub said he thought the guy was still working for the Boston Globe. Then he looked at me with a grin on his face and said: “And you’re working for the Phillips County News.” It’s true. My journalism career...
I don’t know if it’s the months of social distancing or simply old age, but I’m barely presentable in public these days. My wife keeps telling me to zip up my pants. Not that I’m embarrassed to be unzipped in front of her, however, I doubt she’s the only to have noticed. I fear I’ll soon be known as that old dude who doesn’t zip up his pants. At least I’ve been keeping to myself. For many years I covered prep and college basketball for the Livingston Enterprise, the Bozeman Chronicle, and the Ph...
I grow attached to my boats. I still have the Grumman canoe I bought with paper route money when I was 14, but many others have come and gone. The pretty wooden drift boat in which I learned to row is but a memory now. I cashed in a retirement plan to buy that boat and never regretted the decision. The aluminum Smokercraft that Barb and I bought when we first got together is also gone. It took us to dozens of lakes and rivers across Montana. We’ll probably never catch as many fish out of a...
I’ve spent the past few months as I usually do – fishing and gardening and mowing grass. The tomatoes are coming on, as is the corn. The fish have been biting, and twice I’ve impaled myself with treble hooks. It’s almost life as normal. Almost. My son-in-law Elder is in quarantine after a co-worker at the restaurant in Livingston where he tends bar tested positive for covid. Now he’s out of work, both at the restaurant where he worked part time and at the warehouse where he worked fulltime...
I’m concerned. The weather forecast is calling for strong storms this afternoon. Lately, even the slightest chance of inclement weather has produced some scary meteorological events. I used to eagerly anticipate such natural phenomenom, but more often than not the weather that arrived was not nearly as exciting as what was advertised. I’ve never lived anywhere that the sky looks more threatening than it frequently does here in Malta only to just miss us to the south or the north. "Wow, that loo...
A lot of folks up here in north-central Montana seem to think we live on an island, that the threat posed by the pandemic doesn’t concern us. Although I don’t share those thoughts, my wife and I have been living on an island of our own making. Since the middle of March we’ve been staying home, social distancing, avoiding crowds. It’s been harder on Barb than on me. I’m pretty much a hermit anyway, but she sorely misses lunches with her friends, bingo, and author conferences. We’re fortunate t...
I’m not a very fashionable guy. Since leaving the newspaper in Bozeman 14 years ago I’ve pretty much worn the same clothes every day. In particular, the same pants. A good friend who used to work in Yellowstone Park wasn’t allowed to use his national park clothing allowance on the boots he wanted so he’d order extra pants instead and give them to me. He retired a few years ago and now I’m down to my last pair. My wife hates them. She thought the pair I’m wearing now were my last, and was qui...
It’s not just on Father’s Day that I think of Dad. Quite often lately I think I see him before realizing it’s just the reflection of me in a mirror. I hope the stories I tell my daughters don’t have the same effect on them my father’s stories had on me. Dad told great stories. Some – involving women and alcohol -- I seldom repeat, but have never forgotten. Others I tried to top. I blame him for the time I spent behind bars in Eureka. Dad often talked about hitchhiking around the country bef...
It’s finally Ace’s turn. At this time last year I still had four dogs. Two were old and retired from the hunt. One was a young up-and-comer, and then there was Ace, like Dwight Schrute, always a padawan never a Jedi. Ace hunted behind both Spot and Jem until they got old, but didn’t inherit the mantle of top dog when they quit. By then we had Baby Ruth and she quickly rose to the top of the heap. Ace didn’t seem to mind. Like all of us, he too, loved Baby Ruth. But she died last winter of canc...
I don’t like to see my boats upside down in the water. It’s distressing. When I was a kid, however, my friends and I would almost always flip my canoe. Like us, in our youth, it was unsinkable, so it didn’t really matter. I’m still here. So is the canoe. But as I grew older, unplanned dunkings lost their allure. If I want to get wet I go swimming. I’ve owned a number of boats over the years, and with the exception of the canoe, none of them have ever flipped. Until recently. My friend E-dub and...
Only days after the most recent snowfall, it’s finally beginning to feel like summer. But the arrival of warm weather also heralds the return of one of Montana’s more annoying species: loud, outdoor drunks. Apparently some folks just can’t get together in the great out-of-doors without acting up. Something about all that fresh air and open space brings out the worst in too many. We’re forced to tolerate them at campgrounds, boat ramps, and on all the lakes and rivers. They’re hard to miss, alw...
After a lifetime of crying over the ones that got away, I’m finally at peace with all those lost fish. They were simply meant to be. Fishing last week with my friend Mike on the Big Dry Arm of Fort Peck Lake, I hooked something heavy that stayed deep. Within seconds Mike said: “That’s a big ‘eye.” He would know. A Minnesota native, Mike is the best walleye angler I’ve ever shared a boat with. He’s adept at every technique from bottom bouncing to vertical jigging to trolling crank baits. There...
My how time flies. In a couple of weeks, it will be 50 years since I first arrived in Montana. Shortly after high school graduation, I headed west from my home in southern Indiana after deciding to forego college, and instead, get a job on the Alaska pipeline. I didn’t have enough money to get all the way to Alaska and figured I’d find work along the way. Passing through Billings, four days into the trip, I picked up a newspaper and saw an ad for jobs in Yellowstone Park. Heading south from Bil...
There was a time that it wasn’t spring until I spotted my first grizzly bear. While I’ve stumbled upon few grizzlies in the fall, it was April when I expected to see them. They were following the elk herds and so was I, although for different purposes. I’d seen grizzlies at night foraging through the Cooke City dump. We used to take girls there, drink beer and park. Running into bears on foot in the backcountry in the middle of the day, however, was an entirely different experience. I was only...
The more things change, the more they stay the same. I’ve seen countless before and after photos recently of clean skies over cities -- like Los Angeles -- that used to be noted for their smog. Folks have been driving a lot less following more than a month of stay at home orders and the air is undoubtedly cleaner. Unfortunately, that’s not the case with water, specifically the West Gallatin River, into which drain the toilets of Big Sky. The water and sewer district there faces a potential law...
I get by with a little help from my dog. Calling it “help” however, might be a bit of a reach. My wife calls it “controlling.” Jem’s always been an affectionate, loving dog. When our pup Ruth died of cancer last fall, Jem seemed to sense my grief. Or at least that’s what I thought when he insisted on climbing onto my lap at every opportunity. A lapdog since we got him nearly 14 years ago, it’s one of the few things he can still do. He walks with a painful gait, can’t jump into the truck, and...
I thought I’d have little trouble with this new normal. After all, I’ve been social distancing for decades. I don’t like crowds. I quit going to bars years ago. I hate standing in lines. I hunt a lot, but most days it’s just me and the dogs. I’d fish by myself more often too, if only my wife didn’t insist on going along. Lately, however, I find myself getting lonely in my own skin. Fortunately, I’m quarantined with my favorite person, and we both miss the same things: human contact, hand...
I’ve been staying close to the house for a few weeks. Too close. Yesterday I found myself out in the garage casting a crankbait at a five-gallon bucket. I’m ready to go fishing. Friends of mine -- fortunate to live where there’s open water -- have been fishing since this all began. They call me from the lake and the river, send me pictures, tell me where they’re headed next. It’s painful. The last fish I caught was through the ice, which until recently was still there. Now it’s finally gon...
Oh, how the world has changed. Here’s a story that has nothing to do with coronavirus. It was nearly 30 years ago, and I was camped at an old homestead on Frenchman Creek in mid-October. I’d gotten permission from the landowner to hunt, and I had an antelope tag in my pocket. I’d spotted some pronghorn when I arrived the night before and awoke anxious to go after them. But the crowing of rooster pheasants at first light prompted me to pick up the shotgun instead of the .270. New to pheas...
OK Boomer, let’s see what you got. I quit elk hunting some years ago. I haven’t shot a deer or an antelope in a couple of years. That’s all about to change. In this time of quarantine, I’m reevaluating my priorities. The dogs might not like this return to big game hunting, but they’ll get over it. And it’s not like I’m going to quit bird hunting. I’m just going to spend a bit more time hunting critters that fill the freezer. I backed off gardening in recent years, too. It was much more fun to sp...
We left Montana the last day of February driving south in search of sun and surf. We returned two weeks later to a world much different than the one we’d left. I hadn’t seen a palm tree in a couple of years, and had never been to the San Diego Zoo. Barb told me I was due. On the way down we stayed in Las Vegas, at a hotel now closed, walked the strip, and ate at a breakfast buffet. We avoided the crowds at Hoover Dam, however, after a security officer saw our Montana license plates, took one...
Times certainly have changed. More than three dozen bison were killed by hunters recently just outside Yellowstone National Park. And it was no big deal. The national media wasn’t in attendance. Neither were members of the Buffalo Field Campaign. Protestors didn’t poke hunters with ski poles, as they had in the past, nor did they chain themselves to gates in an attempt to disrupt the hunt. There were no arrests. There were no cries of outrage. Maybe it was because the hunters were all Nat...
Times certainly have changed. More than three dozen bison were killed by hunters recently just outside Yellowstone National Park. And it was no big deal. The national media wasn’t in attendance. Neither were members of the Buffalo Field Campaign. Protestors didn’t poke hunters with ski poles, as they had in the past, nor did they chain themselves to gates in an attempt to disrupt the hunt. There were no arrests. There were no cries of outrage. Maybe it was because the hunters were all Nat...
