J.D.’s Columns

  Catching Dewie’s Mare        I was a tad grouchy that October morning, forty-some years ago, when my old stock truck rolled along the Snake River and onto the flatlands where Dewie and Carolyn lived in a barn above their fluctuating herd of horses. Dewie was a horse trader, Carolyn a horse tamer and carpenter. Dewie said he always had more horses than he could afford, and Carolyn claimed they had three doors in the barn house that went nowhere.      Dewie stood with a rope halter outside a pole corral with half a dozen horses all snuffy, tails in the air, stirring up dust. When he saw me, he turned and hooked a boot heel in the corral fence and stuck out a paw. We shook hands and he asked what I was doing.       I allowed that I was headed to find winter work in California, that I had quit my ranch job in the high country yesterday when I discovered all my missing work gloves under the seat of th...

The Kitchen Radio      On the prairies of western Nebraska, a plastic AM radio tuned to KCOW was a standard  kitchen appliance. It provided gossipy news, country music, Kiddie Carnival, and tornado warnings, sunrise until dark. That is where I learned the words and tune to Teddy Bears’ Picnic.       After sunset, the outside world flooded the kitchen. AM frequencies from thousands of miles away skipped into the Sandhills. One of the strongest signals was from XELO, Juarez, broadcasting from just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, out of reach of US regulators.       That was where I first heard Heartbreak Hotel, Love Me Tender, Bebopaloola, Waiting for a Train. The frequencies were taken over late at night by what we called Holy Rollers. The piece that follows is an example of their programming. I once had a recording of this broadcast so I could demonstrate to my effete FM-listening east coa...

Random Thoughts        The morning of the 14 th  of June, 2024, began normally enough. Tink, my lap guard dog, watered a postage stamp of the backyard lawn while I pried the lid off a big can of Prince Albert and filled my pipe for the first dose of a fresh day. Everything was going great.      Then the bluebirds of happenstance swept in from the unknown. On our way back into the house I became dizzy, whirly. light headed. When I reached the top porch step, I fell backward, down to the lower level and broke my neck in five places.       One hundred days later, in late September, I made it back home, after a life flight to Spokane, a session with a neurosurgeon who patched vertebrae with what in Xrays look to be parts from a metal gate, a fitting for a neck brace, a week in the hospital, a month in a Spokane rehab joint in which I contracted Covid and had my wallet stolen, then two months in a facil...

           Deadwood on Five Dollars a Minute (This was written thirty-some years ago and first published by my pal Babs, in her BORDERLINE magazine.)                I live on a windy knoll  in the Salmon River mountains, seven miles up a gravel road from Donnelly, Idaho,      “The City of Helping Hands,”  population 247, but I grew up in Deadwood, South Dakota, and my folks still live there, in the Black Hills. On October 1, 1989, casino gambling, with certain limitations, became legal in Deadwood. What follows is my set of notes from a weekend trip to Deadwood in March 1991. Day One At five in the morning I kiss Caty and Baby-in-Belly, (working title: Little Luna) scrape windshield ice from Bic, the disposable Chrysler station wagon, then shimmy down Highway 55 in the Payette River canyon toward the nearest stoplight, 93 miles south, in B...

                            The Executioner’s Fork  Cambridge, Massachusetts        Five of us lived in three bedrooms, a kitchen and one bathroom of a stout white house near Harvard Square. Charles, the producer of the unfinished film that gnawed at our waking lives shared a room with Beryl, who ate only with chopsticks and spent her days with runes and Tarot cards.      I'd quit a tree-trimmer’s job in California, enrolled in graduate school in Cambridge, then dropped out and returned to California for six months to help Charles as he ran his lens across the new consciousness born in the Haight-Ashbury. In Cambridge my friends from college were dealing Mexican weed and windowpane acid. My room was in a leaded-glass turret with a radiator that sounded like it puked hailstones. There were brown roses on the wallpaper.  By pressing my thumbs on ...

Wyatt and Sylvia   Toole County, Montana      In the last year before school consolidation, before the farm kids were jerked out of the soil and sent to city packing sheds, I taught nine students in one room, way out on the hard red winter wheatfields of northern Montana.       In August I received a list of unfilled positions from Helena and applied by letter from California to School District 19, Toole County. “It’s a dead-end deal,” said Sam Black, the chairman of the school board, when we shook hands on the phone. “One year, then we fold the school and you are dismissed. I won’t lie to you. You are the only one who has called about this. We’ll take the chance if you will. Five thousand dollars and a place to stay for the school year. Plenty of opportunity for weekend work if you can handle equipment.”       There was no school bus. The children were delivered to the white frame building by wind...