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, ...
We like to eat out. We don’t think of ourselves as, say, Truman Capote and Joanne Carson dining at La Côte Basque, but we do enjoy the occasional easy weekend brunch in town, where we often bump into people we know, and value, and spend a few minutes catching up. And really, that’s all we ...
Before the Milli fire started getting that strange look in it’s eye, filling the sky with smoke and causing the evacuation of Crossroads, my wife and I were pleased to host a couple of through-hikers attempting the Pacific Crest Trail. Because of the fires in Central Oregon, numerous trail closures, and active measures by our ...
Borrowing a page from one of my favorite writers and historians, Victor Davis Hanson, I’ve opted to share this recent angry “letter to the editor” of the newspaper I write for, and my response. The writer of the letter has been triggered by last week’s “Charlottesville” piece. I wouldn’t normally post this sort of thing, ...
This week I had planned to write about our garden. After a few years of heartache and disaster, I wanted to share a tale of success–the 18 lbs of peas we’ve harvested so far, the bucket loads of green beans, the beautiful squash, and the luscious ears of corn that have sweetened up just right ...
I, for one, am going to miss Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci. If you didn’t know, The Mooch was sacked as White House Communications Director after an explosive and “colorful” interview with Ryan Lizza, a writer for The New Yorker. The Mooch, raised on Long Island, was brought to us by Tufts University, Harvard, Goldman Sachs, ...
If you were ever lucky enough to live out on the great sagebrush sea, like I was during a certain vanishing era, you might have enjoyed a slice of old Americana in perhaps the rarest of ways: trailing cattle and working horses. The outback was, in those days–and still is to some degree–a kind of ...
Video that surfaced this week, on BookFace, of Sisters Mayor Chuck Ryan in a rant directed at one of his neighbors was certainly evidence of bad behavior, most likely personally embarrassing, and definitely intriguing, but hardly worthy of a 60 Minutes segment. If you haven’t seen it, I strongly encourage you not to bother. The ...
For sheer overwrought political drama, vigorously milked for every last drop of click-bait and ratings potential, last Tuesday was certainly a hoot. Revelations that Donald Trump Jr. “took a meeting” with the mysterious Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya created the largest case of mass apopolexy in the politico-media machine since the final, uninspiring episode of Seinfeld. ...
Occasionally, in the heat of summer, life will throw us a gift. Such a thing happened to me the other night, as I sat on the back porch in the golden light, watching a squadron of swallows dive-bombing around the barn and reading from Ernie Pyle’s magnificent collection “Brave Men.” Many folks know of Ernie ...
Here on the Figure 8 it is the summer of women. I admit to difficulties in the transition. For lengthy seasons in this life I have operated outside the influence of women altogether, marooned entirely alone on the desert, for instance, or crammed into a warship with a battalion of humorless leathernecks. And if anywhere ...
Bunkhouse Chronicle 