Field notes from the Figure 8 Ranch
I’m writing this on Sunday morning, during the first real snowstorm we’ve enjoyed this year — though I almost didn’t believe it was going to happen. I stopped believing the weather woman about 2 months ago. This was a deliberate ...
Last week provided a sobering look in the American mirror. Much of that ugly reflection was concentrated in the State of Virginia, where governor Ralph Northam first admitted, then denied, that he was one of the two utter dimwits who ...
There is a concept in the art world known as Negative Space. The basic idea is that instead of trying to draw the branches in a tree, one draws the space between the branches, and therefore, ultimately, the whole tree ...
The field of candidates for the 2020 Presidential Challenge Blowout is taking shape just in time for pitchers and catchers — they report for spring training in early February – and what makes this timing so marvelous, so utterly serendipitous, ...
The real crux of the word-ban issue at CDC isn’t that the words are “banned.” They aren’t, not really, and as of this morning there are no credible reports of bonfires on Capitol Hill fueled by the ritual tomecide of policy manuals. Officially, the words are merely “discouraged.” What’s most troubling is the rationale put ...
Few topics in wildlife conservation are as fundamentally polarizing and explosive as the topic of wolves. And like most subjects in our “Breaking News” zeitgeist, the hyperbole shills on all sides of the wolf issue seem to work in feverish piques, pandering to our baser emotional responses, and often ignoring outright any evidence contrary to ...
If there was ever a time to examine the wisdom and efficacy of attempting to govern 320 million people as a single entity, maybe now is it. The GOP’s tax bill came in at 479 pages. It’s a safe bet that not one single professional representative—on either side of the aisle–has read the bill in ...
I am sentimental about sawmills. That’s especially true around Christmas because the Sierra Pacific sawmill, at one time the second largest of its kind in the United States, was also the principal private employer where I was raised–in the sparsely populated northeastern corner of California. My stepfather worked at Sierra Pacific for over twenty years, ...
One frustrating aspect of living in an outdoor paradise is the perpetually nagging notion that—no matter how much you do—you are missing out on something. That’s nowhere more true than in central Oregon, which is known worldwide as a playground for outdoor adventure: from skiing to mountain biking, from climbing to bird watching. And, of ...
I’ve seen this man before. He’s Mexican, late middle-aged, soft spoken, and there is a shielded focus in his eyes that betrays the uncertainty of a life spent mostly standing over a trap door. His name is Armando. A couple of years ago, while sitting upstairs in my office working, I saw him ride down the ...
Friends and Readers: For nearly a year Jim Cornelius and I have been writing, researching, reading, and working feverishly on a new literary project to identify, diagnose, and ultimately combat the ironies, mind-numbing complexities, and feverish groping that often define our modern American life. We are pleased that those efforts are now nearing fruition, and ...
I do realize, of course, and sincerely appreciate, the profundity of our great national obsession with Russians, Hollywood perverts, Donna Brazille’s new book, bump stocks, the NFL kneeling/not-kneeling shenanigans, and even Trump’s midnight bully-tweets aimed at a fat Korean dictator. But, and here is an admission, I personally lost faith in travelling carnivals somewhere around ...
It’s time to come clean. Way back in March, or April, or maybe it was May, I wrote in these pages predicting—it was really more of a populist pandering, almost a campaign promise—that we would grow 500 lbs. of vegetables. That was worth a giggle then, and somewhere inside I knew it was a bold ...
The first True Bill in the big collusion extravaganza has finally been handed down. Early Monday morning, in a showbiz fail, Paul Manafort, former chairman of Trump’s presidential campaign, made a strangely unattended perp-walk with his lawyer into the FBI’s Washington D.C. field office. Manafort, who was clearly the first chair in a sloppy money-laundering ...
Bunkhouse Chronicle 