J.D.’s Columns

The World Cup      The LaForce brothers hired me out of a saloon in Slave Lake. They were cutting pulpwood in a swamp alongside the  Athabasca River and looking for help. Five bucks an hour, under the table, screw the work visa, if I could run a chainsaw and pile slash.      The pulp trees were an endless thicket of peckerpoles growing in a  mosquito hatchery and the LaForce boys were pulpwood professionals.  They had worked together so long that they pissed in unison before walking onto the logging unit. They were hunched men, top-heavy from working with their arms and shoulders, simple and honest and friendly, except for Louis, the eldest, who didn't like Americans of any shape.      In the camp at night, they played rummy and talked in French of the politics of Quebec while I lounged in my camper shell, listening to a shortwave radio and applying Calamine lotion.    ...

Misunderstanding             Without much effort on my part, I seem to have become a hard of hearing old man in a wheelchair. The chair is the result of a fall that broke my neck, The hard of hearing is because of advanced age combined with lapses in job-related human maintenance.       In my 20’s, I worked with a tree crew in Palo Alto, California operating a chipper machine that noisily converted tree branches into wood flakes. This was before OSHA and common sense entered the workplace. We wore no hearing protection.      I was in my prime, my early 30’s, when I rolled logs to the headworks of a sawmill that cut three-sided logs for home building. The big circular saw bit into the lodgepole logs just to the left of where I stood with a peavy ready to roll another one off the stack. If I ride shotgun with you driving, chances are I will miss some of what you say.   ...

Neighbors        My friend Dewie Lovelace, master story teller, has been spinning tales around some celestial campfire for a couple of years now, and I miss him terribly. From Dewie I learned that everyone has a story to tell, and that it is our duty as humans to share our experiences with others. Dewie’s stories are mine now.   I first heard this one about a neighbor’s dog from Dewie thirty years ago, as he yelled it over the whine of a group of hundred-fifty horsepower electric motors that drive the pumps that suck water from the Snake River at the Dead Ox pumping station, where Dewie worked when he wasn’t shoeing or feeding or swapping horses.          "Neighbors. Takes all kinds of folks to be neighbors, and you never really know who is living down the lane there. I've moved around some, so I've had different types of people for neighbors, but the one that lives across the fence from my place now was, once up...

Michael the Basque      Cowboy Curt and I were rolling sheep wire off a cliff and into Mazzoni's draw on the morning of the Fourth of July. The other option was to be around the main ranch house helping the boss and her perpetual guests prepare for the gala party that was to be thrown that afternoon. Curt was a buckaroo, good with horses, wore a rag around his throat and his pants tucked into his boots. He didn't take kindly to stirring marinade or folding paper napkins. I'd seen a couple of holidays come and go on the ranch. Risking a hernia bucking sheep wire was better than listening to three performance artists trying to invent the ultimate wine cooler.         Curt’s boon companion was a three-year-old raven named Bro that he'd incubated and hatched somewhere in the Musselshell country of central Montana. Bro was a full-fledged bird and could fly as well as a wild one, but seldom needed to take wing, preferring instea...

Popping Hoppers        Ah, Summer, when we can finally curl up in a lawn chair by the pool with the sun over our shoulder and a towel across our knees. We open that thick mystery we've been saving since Christmas, reach over into the big Tupperware bowl, grab a handful of deep-fried crickets, and settle down for a good long read.      Before the reader begins to look for legs and antennae hanging out of the corners of this column, let me publicly state that I am a good red-meat American burger chomper and that my interest in eating insects is mostly scientific, so far.        That interest began fifty years ago in Burgdorf, Idaho, when I was snowed away from civilization for six months at a time and attempted to read the Bible from front to back. Of particular note was the eleventh chapter of Leviticus, in which the Lord lays out to Moses and Aaron those things which may be eaten and those which ar...

Hail Caesar San Francisco        I worked with Caesar Romero. Not the one who danced with Carmen Miranda and Betty Grable, not the Caesar Romero who acted with Tyrone Power, Burl Ives, Rod Serling, and Freddie Prinz, and not the fellow who played The Joker to Adam West’s Batman on television.       This Ceasar Romero was a janitor, a green card custodian two years out of Nicaragua. We buffed floors, cleaned toilets, fixed faucets, painted, filled water coolers, emptied the trash and washed the windows together in a seven-story building situated in the heart of the Tenderloin, San Francisco.      The Tenderloin is a rasty part of Baghdad by the Bay. At the time we performed our custodial magic, the district was becoming a landing spot for Vietnamese folks, ten city blocks in transition from a haven for street hookers, flop houses, soup kitchens and sex toy shops to a home for Asian versions of the s...