Category: The Grab Bag

Four Bears, Mato-Tope′, is known to history as one of the most respected chiefs of the later Mandan Nation.  Perhaps, by the time white contact with the Mandan-Hidatsa was essentially routine, even the most respected.  I’ve written about him here before, and have just finished a fine book “Encounters at the Heart of the World,” by ...

*This column originally appeared in The Nugget News, 20 April, 2016 Two weeks ago my mother called and dropped a bomb on our house. She asked if I was sitting down. I wasn’t, but I did, quickly, because that’s what sons do when their mothers start a conversation that way. And if you are a ...

Last night, apparently, the town council in our fair burg passed a “resolution recognizing the 9 rules of civility.”  This was evidently the result of a “toxic environment for discourse,” which is one of the more interesting and simultaneously sickening memes I keep hearing repeated about the state of debate and disagreement in America.  Now ...

***Just received this tremendous dispatch from the hard frontier.  It is reprinted with permission from the author, a warfighter who must remain anonymous for OpSec, as must the precise location.  Enjoy, it isn’t often we get real time information from the world’s nasty places.  This post includes a video of the sinking of the USS ...

I’m still working off a theme of Kingsnorth, and language, and storytelling.  I might be compensating for our loss of Jim Harrison, which was a hammer blow for those of us who have devoured his work, much in the way he devoured life. So.  Kingsnorth.  The Wake is a rare book in that its originality–not ...

    *this piece originally appeared in “The Nugget News”, March 22, 2016 The idea that we can hold two disparate ideas in our heads at the same time, and agree with them both, the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance, has rarely been so starkly illustrated for me as it was after a week on our ...

  *this article originally appeared in The Nugget News, March 22, 2016 Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, established in 1937, is composed of 517 square miles of majestic Sonoran desert, bordered to the south by Mexico, to the east by the massive Tohono O’Odham Reservation, and to the west by the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife ...

Brett Miller, of Sisters, Oregon, founder of the highly successful non–profit, Warfighter Outfitters, recently led a group of wounded veterans on a four day Engagement Mission to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. The veterans, who assembled in Ajo, Arizona, from Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Oregon, and California, were partnered with agents from the US Border Patrol, ...

I meant to be back here earlier, truly, but I’ve been fighting some kind of nefarious sinus infection, and yesterday was pretty much a loss.  My breathing is not the best, and I stumble around the house sounding like an air-wrench at a tire shop, just trying to pull O2 through my nose.  So there ...