Bunkhouse Chronicle

I’m not a builder. I have no professional training of any kind, though as a kid I helped my step-dad built a gigantic barn. I was mostly useful as an extra hand to drive nails, fetch this tool or that, or to hold the end of a tape-measure. As I got older my pursuits went ...

Much of last week was dedicated to moving manure. I should be more precise: it was dedicated to breaking up fields of ice-manure, 8 or 10 inches deep, by hand, with a pick, then coming along behind with the tractor to pick up the delightful mess and move it away from the barn. It was ...

This year I intend to garden—or farm, as I prefer to think of it—as if our lives depend on it. I’ve set a high bar for this summer’s haul: 500 lbs. I want to harvest 500 lbs of vegetables, eat them, preserve them, and give some of those pounds of food away to kith and ...

Last summer, while lounging around the Munich Airport waiting for a flight to Reykjavik, I bought a book: “The Silk Roads, A New History of the World”, by Peter Frankopan. Frankopan is a senior fellow at Oxford University, and has written a convincing reassessment of world history. It is also a poignant, and incredibly well-considered ...

this post originally appeared in The Nugget News, February 28, 2017 Multiple news outlets have reported that President Donald Trump does not read books. If these reports can be believed, which is a large-style “if” these days, His Excellency eschews the written word altogether, preferring, one supposes, the background noise of flattering network coverage and ...

this post originally appeared in The Nugget News, February 21, 2017 This morning I woke up at 4 am. This is earlier than usual but I was prompted by the insistent wet-nose poking of our oldest dog, Buddy, who is nearly blind, mostly deaf, and recovering from a nearly fatal injury to his elbow that ...

…this post originally appeared in The Nugget News, February 14, 2017 Yesterday, encouraged by the bluest skies, I bravely opened the door to our shop. Our shop, where I like to futz and putter and try to make things, or fix things, or think about things, had become a desultory crypt of neglect. That’s my ...

It’s never like old times, of course.  We get older, the world keeps spinning, things fall apart, and tucking in behind a crew-served gun, although something like riding a bicycle, feels a little different on this end of the years.  It’s slower maybe, the rust of time and a lot of miles revealed in stiffer ...

Brass and links piled up beneath the M2.  Big Sandy, Arizona I have just returned from a weeklong gig covering the Bushmaster Users Conference for a magazine.  I was invited down to this eye-popping event by my former platoon sergeant from the US Marine Corps, Eric Rogers, who went on to become a warrant officer ...

Many of us watched with interest the recent, and remarkably anti-climactic, extradition of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman to face drug trafficking charges in the United States. He has, naturally, pleaded not guilty. As this news broke, I received no fewer than a dozen messages and emails from my former partners in narcotics enforcement celebrating, to ...