Independently owned since 1905
Independently owned since 1905
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When I was young, I had a book, I Have Five Pennies, in which a young boy is sent to the store by his mom for groceries. She gives him five pennies for himself, and as he goes, he sings, “I have five pennies to spend on candy; all for myself! Isn’t that dandy?” Along the way, though, he meets five creatures searching for life basics. I can’t remember all of them, but one is a hungry squirrel, and another is a robin searching for nest-building materials. All are in some sort of need. On display at the store is a big, intricately-decorated lollip...
Fall is falling. Sunday morning, it becomes official. I will — hopefully — be in a spot that cares nothing for the arbitrary Gregorian calendar, but is sensitive to the celestial timetable that inspired such things. The first “calendar” was made about 8,000 BCE by the same culture that 9,200 years later invented golf. Ancient Scot hunter-gatherer tribes built an earthen calendar of twelve pits aligned with the southern horizon, which archaeologists believe were used to keep track of moon phases and seasonal changes. Here we are, 10,000 years l...
Digging around in the dictionary recently led to monogenesis, a theory that all living things evolved from a single cell — some combination of proteins and acids and God knows what else that became able to duplicate itself. Maybe this tiny accretion floated in primal seas for eons waiting for the final magic ingredient to adhere to it, maybe it instantly coalesced when a lightning bolt struck; but somehow suddenly there were two of whatever it was. If this wasn’t miracle enough, the other whatever was also able to duplicate itself. So began the...
In the June 27 issue of The Ledger, I confessed to gathering odd words and the names of short-lived famous people from American Heritage Dictionary’s booster seat edition. For two-plus years, I’ve put them in a notebook for further research. I’m not done with the Dictionary (two-thirds of the way through “P” at “pronate”), but research has begun. People of the Month are Southern writer Flannery O’Connor, who died at age 39 of lupus; and Alexander the Great died at age 32 in 323 BCE of nobody is quite sure what. Mystery Word of the Month is: ...
I’ve not been writing a lot of late — mostly, just this column. The best of writing days are dark and wet, when I’m glad to be inside and gladder still to have something to do that I love to do. But now, the long light of the season demands to be used. Lingering day calls, “Don’t just sit there. Do something!” Not that writing is not doing something. It surely is, but a window in my writing room frames a green hodgepodge of trees, a wild bit of lawn that needs taming, wilder roses, blooming dewberry vines, the beginning of a trail to the river...
Bruce Springsteen recorded “57 Channels and Nothin’ On” in 1992. We’ve made incredible — ahem — “progress” since. Thirty-two years later, there are over 100 networks, some of which broadcast on multiple channels; giving us so many choices that even the internet doesn’t know how many we have. In fact, the internet is home to its very own channels. Not all channels come with advertising, but most do. Vehicles that make your neighbors jealous while making you, your kids and your pets ecstatic — and improve your sex life. Drugs for every ailment k...
I once golfed with a pastor who did well until the 13th hole. Then, the wheels came off. On the 16th tee, he put a drive so far out of bounds, he should’ve been called for a foul. He turned and said, “I know what I’m doing wrong. I just can’t stop it!” I asked how many parishioners confessed that very thing to him. He laughed so hard, he got his game back. That’s golf. Winter has (almost) ended, and to keep their minds off politics, skiers have turned to golf. Not all, but a significant percentage of schussers have transitioned to cussers. If...
It seems to be spring. Winter wasn’t so great, as winters go; after too many days of skiing last season, I’ve not had enough this year. But I’m grateful my knees still work after 34 seasons of sliding downhill; not perfectly, but still. Also, I only had to run the snow blower a few times. My doc tells me I’m good for another year. The new roof on my eternal rebuild project doesn’t leak. Plus, I live in the Northern Rockies, not Gaza, Ukraine or New York City. I once thought we lived in the Inland Northwest, but Dick Wentz asserted, “Compton, we...
In Missoula is a house on North Street referred to by its occupants as the Food Shack. It’s home to college students, recent graduates and miscellaneous other young singles, a successful experiment in rotational communal living that I’m privileged to be part of, even if it’s in a peripheral sort of way. A couch in the living room has often been mine for a night or five, and the sensibilities of my hosts and hostesses are remarkably like my own, given the disparity of our ages. They’re the kids and grandkids I didn’t have, full of fun and joy a...
Questions: Why does halftime at the Super Bowl last 100 years and feature stuff football fans have no interest in? Is it just me, or do others have no idea what or who Usher is? Does the NFL book halftime entertainment to fool people not remotely interested in football into watching. Do these people Tevo halftime and fast forward through the ads? Is halftime a plot by Budweiser to give fans time to run out for more beer? And just who the heck is Taylor Swift? If she’s so damned cool, why isn’t SHE the halftime show? I confess: Until I saw Ms....
It’s time to write something clever about the new year. Or at least something. We get an extra day in 2024, and we get to go through an election season. Oh, boy! Mudslinging, prevaricating, science-denying, character-assassinating, and false-promising will be colossal and maybe the most disgusting ever. I can hardly wait. For that and other reasons, I’m grateful not to have a television. It saves me time being enraged that I can spend on more important things, like trying to get something done on my house without some small disaster. Very rec...
“It’s the most wonderful time of the year,” asserts the song. The reference of lyricists Edward Pola and George Wyle and performer Andy Williams was, of course, to the Christmas holiday. The song was written in 1963 and recorded for the Andy Williams Christmas Album. It has some long legs. It’s still heard in stores as the annual runup to the “the holiday of giving” (and getting) spreads from its Black Friday sendoff. It’s been recorded by Garth Brooks, Harry Connick, Jr., and J.Lo herself. Every time, it’s climbed the charts. Legs. Big legs. T...
We’ve been arguing forever about how we became a species. Some don’t argue, true. They just believe one way or another, or accept that they will never know. These relatively rare subjects are happy to be at peace with the question. Maybe they know that their vision of the Spirit is nobody else’s business. Some Higher Power may be hanging around, but I have no idea what It’s up to, though I often ask It favors. As vague as my vision might be, I’m OK with it. When folks come knocking with their answers, I ask if they’re happy in their faith...
As I grow older, it becomes more difficult to accept the uncaring nature of what seems to be a majority of humans when it comes to other species on the planet. From mosquitoes to redwoods, we seem bent on destroying the other biota on Earth. They get in the way. They block the view. They are more valuable as commodities or oddities or collectors’ items than they are as living things. We buy and sell them. We kill them with impunity, as if we are the only creatures in creation that have the right to be alive. We are wrong. Humans seem to have th...
Life is full right now. Time seems compressed, but on Saturday, I will take a day to travel to the Colville Reservation to visit a dried-up cemetery. I have written about this place and those buried here often, including this piece — slightly modified — for The River Journal, telling of my 40th visit to the grave of Joseph of the Nez Perce. I would apologize for repeating myself, but the message here bears repeating. Nespelem, Washington, October 25, 2014: There are few new buildings in Nespelem. Or newish, at least. Of note within the vil...
Once upon a time, long, long ago — at least a decade, maybe more — I was enlisted by a couple of teachers from a local school to help lead a group of seventh graders into the wilderness. Their idea was to bring them back as well, not just leave them there, tempting as it might be. These were good kids, most on the cusp of puberty, some having passed that tipping point and some still maneuvering toward it. For the most part, they were divided into two basic groups: a giggle of girls and a boggle of boys. These classifications may not be com...
They’re making hay in southwestern Montana, cutting record harvests in the Big Hole, Horse Prairie and the Beaverhead and Madison valleys. These water-rich bottoms are sandwiched between spectacular Montana ranges: the Pioneers, Anaconda-Pintler and Beaverhead, and the Ruby, Gravelly and Madison. These stony sources feed the rivers that coalesce into the Missouri at Three Forks: the Red Rock, Ruby, Wise, Big Hole, Beaverhead, Madison, Jefferson and Gallatin. It is big country, anchored economically to the critters that eat the hay come w...
It’s the summer solstice and I’m walking through my lower briar patch. If you know me, you may know what I mean. If you don’t, you won’t. My stroll is through a place that only about .0000000012% of humans know about, roughly 100 people. I’m one of the few of those few who visit on a regular basis. It’s out of the way, you might say. A good clearance four-wheel-drive is necessary to get to the spot where it becomes necessary to get out and walk. After getting out of said vehicle, a visitor will walk uphill, upstream. And dodge devil’s clu...
Memorial Day weekend has passed. Soggy campers weathered the weather, and cemeteries sprouted flags and flowers in remembrance of loved ones. Twenty-eight years ago last Sunday, I traveled to Nespelem in the sagebrush hills of the Colville Reservation to seek out the grave of one of my heroes: Hinmatoowyalahtqít, Thunder-Rolling-In-The-Mountains, Joseph of the Nez Perce. If you wish to know how Joseph became one of my heroes, the story is outlined in Side Trips From Cowboy, published in 2009. If you wish to know why Joseph is my hero, it’s be...
Just so you know, even if there’s nobody on the ocean to experience the waves, the waves are there. From 30,000 feet, whitecaps are still visible. And there are some big ones. As we make our way at 600 miles per hour toward the Hawaiian archipelago, a freighter appears to starboard, giving a sense of scale to the world below. If it’s headed for Hawaii, we’ll get there long before — days in fact. We live on an amazing world in an amazing time. I can haul myself out of bed in Montaho, land of not-quite-eternal snow and ice, at 2:30 a.m. — all f...
My brothers and I and our significant others once stood in Grandpa Earl’s east field on a summer night, watching sunset fade away. Hanging in the sky ten degrees above the horizon was a brilliant, silver-white dot. My sister-in-law asked, “What’s that star?” I answered “That’s Venus.” I never forgot what she said to that. With a bit of incredulity in her voice, she said, “You mean, just right over there?” That caused me to start looking at the sky differently. Yes. Venus is just right over there; somewhere between 160 million and 26 million mi...
I’ve cleaned this old joke up for “family viewing:” Opinions are like ears. Everyone has a couple. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines opinion as: “a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge.” That is not to say that some opinions aren’t based in fact or knowledge, but that not all opinions are. I was once accused of having opinions, as if it was reprehensible. If that’s how the accuser felt, that’s their opinion, right? To their credit, their opinion was based on fact and knowledge. I do...
Long ago, my girlfriend and her sister took me skiing at Schweitzer Basin. Sort of. They got me into a pair of leather boots that connected — temporarily — to a pair of Head 210s. They took me to the top of the “learning” slope and said, “See ya later. Have fun.” They did see me later. I did not have fun. This is what I learned. Having no clue how to turn, I learned that the fall line is where one falls. Often. After two disastrous trips on the chair, I resorted to the rope tow, and learned that, when you fall, let go of the rope. I did NOT l...
Welcome to 2023. Here in the U.S. of A., it so far looks a lot like 2022. Or 2019, for that matter. We’re still stuck in neutral, suffering a lot of noisy engine revving and exhaust fumes from Congress, and getting absolutely nowhere. We‘re held captive by a minority because the majority doesn’t have the guts to stand up to them. In other places — Ukraine, for instance — the suffering is more real than ours. While we whine about gas prices — mysteriously falling — Ukrainian kindergarten teachers and their boyfriends are toting rifles, tossi...
Several days before Thanksgiving, a collection of tracks appear in my driveway, those of a domestic cat. My neighbors have cats, but they don’t visit. These tracks are everywhere, very visible in the fresh snow. I then realize there are two cats, and I suspect that the border of responsibility had been breached again. I’ve lived near a state border much of my life, during which time people of a certain ilk — one I don’t understand — have dumped unwanted “pets” in our driveway. This decades-long parade of abandoned dogs and cats has been alwa...
