J.D.’s Columns

Packrat                                                                                                           (There was one street in North Fork, Idaho, one saloon. A hardrock miner named Rollie wove this tale between double shots of Jim Beam. His daughter drank with us. She said her mother made Rollie remove the hardhat once a week, so she could wash it when it started leaving stains on the pillows.)      "I once was the smartest fellow...

 I used to write a cowboy poem each Christmas for my pal Lyle. Lotta folks in this little town are stringing lights around their porches, so I figure this is legal.....     The Buckaroo Fez  The weather had changed on the high desert range. And the coyotes were yodeling tunes In a symphony hall of black canyon walls Lit by a sliver of moon.  Inside a line shack sat Shorty and Jack, Rocking in fireside chairs. Two buckaroos for the Diamond Bar Two, Bearded and grizzled as bears.    Shorty McGhee turns to Jack and says he, "Pard, this book has my lariat twisted. It’s a history of hats and everything that Fits on the noggin’s been listed. There's snap-brim fedoras, and stovepipes more o' Those things worn by big city shiners, And bonnets and skullcaps and things with ear flaps That shade the cowpokes in China,   You got teenagers’ beanies, crowns made for queenies And helmets pounded from tin, Caps made of beads and swampy old reeds And some tha...

On Cranberry Sauce      Chances are pretty good that, in the next week or so, readers will find themselves seated at holiday tables and confronted with gloppy, ridged, cylinders of a lovely, red, tart substance. I speak of the traditional (at least among us trailer trash) butter dish full of canned cranberry sauce that somehow is able to escape from its container intact, year after year. So, in honor of the season, let us study Cranberries Without Underpants.       There are two basic types of cranberry on this planet.  The smaller cranberry, originating and still cultivated in Europe, grows on a bush, has a single seed and has been given the botanical moniker, Vaccinium oxycoccos, which comes from the Latin “vacca”, meaning cow because, apparently, cows like to eat them. Oxycoccos refers to the sharp leaves of the plant.        Our North American table variety is Vaccinium macrocarpon, from “...

                                                      The Turkey Totem        American history has not been kind to the hippies, the megamedia having portrayed them as druggies, welfare abusers, anarchists and freeloaders. Oh, sure, some folks got a little too far into sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Many of them did turn on, tune in, and drop out, but they were also early proponents of vegetarianism, free medical clinics, food co-ops, organic gardening and, above all, peace. A casual cruise down the aisles of a modern box store with its vegan, non-gmo, ovo-lacto-gluten-free options and racks of tie-dyed tees illustrate the legacy of a group of folks who tried to establish an alternative way of living. I was, and perhaps still am, a part of that movement.        In the late 1960’s, Bill...

                                                                         At the Zoo with a Lama   Honolulu      When my daughter was eight or so years old, we bunked for two weeks on an upper floor of a concrete apartment building not far off the Waikiki strip while her mother investigated a rumor that a tiny bird was gagging into extinction on fumes generated by the exoplanet observatories on the Big Island.      On the second Sunday morning of our stay, Delta suggested that she and I and her pal Max go to the Honolulu zoo. When she phoned to invite Max, his father wished to speak with me. He explained that he had offered his home as a halfway house for Tibetans and asked if a newly arrived ...

The Food Critic       I sometimes harbor a desire to be a food critic. You know, sitting in a restaurant like any other customer while scribbling in a tiny notebook, “The ambiance delightful, the staff friendly, but the escargot regrettably undercooked and the calamari the texture of bicycle innertubes” or “The tofu is the consistency of wintered-over cow patties but not nearly as savory” or “The pizza dough is tough enough that I expect to find a lug nut.”      Several factors have squashed this desire. Having been born and raised as far from an ocean as one can get in North America, I am ill-equipped to comment on a huge category of dining experiences because I have a flatlander’s distrust of saltwater bugs like clams, crabs, oysters, abalone or shrimp. Any impartial assessment of seafood other than halibut or mahi mahi is off the table.      And there is a good chance that my trailer trashy palate is not delic...

The Neighbor’s Dog     (Dewie Lovelace, my cowpoke guru and pal, told this story over the whine of immense pump motors that suck water from the Snake River at the Dead Ox pump station north of  Ontario, Oregon.)      Neighbors. Takes all kinds of folks to be neighbors, and you never really know who is living down the lane. Carolyn and I have moved around some, so we’ve had different types of neighbors. The one that lives down the road from us was about as different as they come.      Let's call him Joe. To get to our place you drive past his place. He moved in there two years ago last April. Lived all alone. Don't know exactly where he came from, but when he showed up he was packing Pennsylvania plates on a Pinto station wagon. He seemed to spend most of the day drinking on his porch.      Two Julys ago, I was coming home from town and spotted Joe on the porch with his little white poodle...

Old Fred (I heard this story on a cemetery road near Cove, Oregon.  Just outside the portals to the cemetery, p oking out of the cheatgrass and fescue, was a wreath of plastic petunias, a white cross fashioned from plaster lath, and a small marble headstone that bore the inscription "FRED".  An eighty--year-old cowpoke, Earl, launched the tale.)       Yonder lies old Fred, the best friend this town ever had.  He came to town with a young feller who was working for the Forest Service over in La Grande but was living here, down behind the drive-in, a block off the school. Fred was a big red dog, kinda like a cross between an Irish setter and a long-haired Labrador, with a wad of teddy bear tossed in.     Fred’s owner worked hard and was gone some. Guess a fire fighter’s supposed show up for work even when there's two foot of snow on the Fourth of July.  Anyway, Fred took to wandering and started walking the kids home from sc...

                     Daisy                Central Idaho        On the third of July, Parks and I left our cow camp along the Payette River and drank our way to Elk City, Idaho. A buddy of ours represented the Idaho County Sheriff's Department as the sole deputy in Elk City. We wanted to see how he handled an entire town full of two-fisted sawmill workers on a holiday when it was un-American to be caught without a beer in your hand.      I provided the transportation. My ride at the time was Daisy, a pistachio-green early-sixties Chevrolet Nova. The car had lived too long on logging roads and goat trails.       A sixpack beyond Grangeville, Daisy had an asthma attack and coughed to a stop. I unwired her hood, propped it up with a limb, twisted off her air cleaner, set it on a stump, found a rock, and whack...

The Singing Cowboy   Loveland, Colorado           Uncle Darius was an electrician and horseman who wore 36-inch inseams on his Levis. He was married to my Mom’s little sister, a palm reader, Madame Pauline.        We were watching the Roy Rogers Show on television in my Grandma’s living room, Loveland, Colorado. The crooked banker lost the fistfight with Roy and was in the hoosgow. In the final act, Roy and Dale hooked their bootheels in the corral fence and were joined by several hired men in a rendition of  “Happy Trails to You.”      Darius stood, ambled over to the television, turned it off.  “You know, J.D., I don’t know what I would do if someone came up to me and actually sang, right in my face.”       Spanish Fly Payette Lake, Idaho       I was working with a backhoe operator as the shovel person laying pipeline...

Kneesies   San Francisco       Wino Park was on a corner south of Market, San Francisco. My employer leased the lot and installed a drinking fountain, porta-potty, a couple of concrete benches and a dozen six-foot sections of three-foot steel culverts, so folks who were used to sleeping where they fell might find some shelter from the storm.  I was the janitor.       The job was simple enough. Every Friday I replaced the stolen handle from the drinking fountain and swept up broken green glass. I began the job wearing the same hat and boots worn as a hired man in the Salmon River Mountains but changed to a Giants cap and high-top Kedds after one of the park denizens kept asking me where I left Trigger.      I was a walking cigarette machine. It was much easier to get the work done to buy a pack of Camel stubbies and leave them, slit open, on the table in the middle of the park. No one ever...

The Guitar Lesson Petaluma, California       I worked for a young woman who owned a sizeable chunk of Marin County, tending her herd of Hanoverian jumping horses, thirty shaggy pampered sheep, one too-friendly diary heifer (Marilyn Moo), four free-range hogs, twenty feral chickens, random ducks and three gangly, loud-mouthed peacocks. She paid me a thousand dollars a month, I shared a one-room bunkhouse with a blue-eyed cowdog. The boss and my pre-teen daughter slept in a large brown farmhouse with nine neutered, spayed, and spoiled-rotten house cats.       One morning, shortly after I swatted Myra the feline matron from her rummage through a plate of bacon, the boss announced that she was going to view art in France. She would place a few thousand bucks in my bank account for wages and ranch expenses and she would return in a month or two. The place was mine to run as I saw fit. Delta and I were to help ourselves to the stash ...

Michael the  Basque Petaluma, California        Orville and I were rolling wire off a cliff and into Mazzoni's draw on the morning of the Fourth of July. The other option was to be in the main ranch house helping the boss prepare for the gala party to be thrown that afternoon. Orville was a buckaroo, good with horses, wore his pants tucked into his boots, and 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 was better than listening to three performance artists inventing the ultimate wine cooler.        Orville’s companion was a raven named Bro that he incubated and hatched somewhere in the Musselshell country of central Montana. Bro was full-fledged and could fly but seldom took wing, preferring instead to ride on Orville’s right shoulder, who’s shirt pockets were always full of sunflower seeds and Bro helped himself. They both ...

Emmanuel’s House Eastern Oregon       It was a hot Saturday morning, 80 degrees at seven. I could see the thermometer on the side of my shop from where I stood barefoot on the carpet in front of the air conditioner, talking on the phone to my wife.       She had headed out a half hour before to work on a fire a hundred miles from our snug, cool little home and jerked me out of dreamworld to report spotting a strange sight. Fifteen miles to the south of our house, a man was pushing a shopping cart full of plastic sacks down the edge of the highway, in the middle of nowhere, Wheatsville, USA.  I allowed that, yeah, it was uncommon to see a homeless person ten miles from the closest possible home and went back to bed.      It was just as hot the next morning when she called to say that she had waved at the same guy, pushing the same cart, who was now at milepost 14, 12 miles north of yesterday. W...