J.D.’s Columns

Calendars without Underpants       Happy New Year to all Y’all. My interest in calendars began as an early teen in Deadwood, South Dakota, when my Dad brought home a huge boxful of old calendars given to him by an itinerant calendar salesman. In those days, pictures on calendars were about the only visual art hanging in working class homes. Most folks’ houses sported a knickknack shelf containing a salt and pepper shaker collection, or twenty ceramic hunting dogs, or what remained of the Ironstone china after the grandfolks bounced it across the prairies, but very few contained framed artwork. The images on calendars were all we knew of the Old Masters.    I lugged the box upstairs to my bedroom and began my arts education session. About fifteen deep, below the Golden Retriever puppies and Autumn in New England and Poppies in Flanders Fields and Two Cowpokes Leaning on the Fence Rail and Scenic Lake Louise and The Resurrection and Van Gogh’s Sunfl...

    The Ice Cream Addict        Depending on whose set of statistics one adopts, there are currently between 500,000 and a million Americans who are homeless.  Not counted are our neighbors who are jobless, vagrant, beggarly, destitute, down-and-out, impecunious, impoverished, necessitous, needy, penniless, penurious, poor, or poverty-stricken.       And that does not count prisoners.  According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics,  two and a half million  adults are incarcerated in US federal and state prisons and county jail, about  1 in 110   adults . They are not homeless, because, according to the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987, “People in jail are not homeless.”      I’ve teetered over the chasm of many of the above categories, having wintered in a tipi in the slop of a feedlot , nested in one-room tree house, lived 32 miles off ...

Shimming with the Ching      (My truck popped a u-joint climbing out of the Missouri breaks southeast of Havre, Montana. I was laying on a flattened banana box in the middle of nowhere when a skinny guy appeared from somewhere. He was wrapped in an army blanket poncho and drank from a neatly creased brown paper bag. He plopped down on the shady side of the truck, looked at my repair job and started talking…...)      “About ten years back, I woke up one morning in the back of my van underneath that railroad overpass just east of Cut Bank. You watch the weather on TV? Cut Bank is the coldest spot in the lower forty-eight most every day. You leave a six pack outside on the Fourth of July, it could freeze overnight.          I was a mess, running low on fun tickets and too grubby to get a job. Red dog wine was blurring my vision. So I pulled out the three bronze Chinese tokens that I got in Nam an...

Dewie’s Gone      On the morning of December 13, 2005, Charles Durward Lovelace took that long last hard ride out of this life and into whatever awaits him across the Great Divide. He left behind a wife, Carolyn, a few grown kids, nineteen horses (down from thirty-three only weeks before) and a collection of stories that will be told across many a campfire to come. I never knew his birth name until he was dead. To me he had always just been Dewie Lovelace, my close friend for 33 years.      We met in the summer of 1972 in Burgdorf, Idaho. Five of us mountain hippies had burned an hour attempting to move a large log outhouse fifty feet to a fresh hole using only man strength and awfulness. Dewie showed up in a second-hand green Forest Service pickup, reached in the back and carried three log chains over to us, smiling all the way. At that point, when Dewie was in his early 40’s, he had already shod a few too many horses and, even when not...

  Skunked      My kid and I lived in a homebuilt house above the Gold Fork of the Payette River in central Idaho. It was seven miles to a gas station, sixteen to where she was a senior in high school, and one hundred to the nearest stop light.       The cabin had an attached room about eight feet wide and fifteen long, the mud porch. with an outside door that led to an inside door. The outside door opened inward so six feet of January snow wouldn’t trap us inside. In the summer we left that door open and kept a sack of dry dog food slit-open on the mud porch floor so that our cow dogs could retrieve their own kibble.       She slept upstairs. I had a bed under the stairs on the bottom floor. The footprint of the place was about that of a two-car garage with big bay windows where I would sit in a rocker at midnight and wait for her Firebird’s headlights to come across the valley and up the county ro...

Sturgis Twenty Years Ago         I did Sturgis again this year, but it wasn’t under the best of circumstances.  My folks live in Sturgis and my Dad was sick.        In modern parlance, what one means when they say they “did” Sturgis is that they attended the Black Hills Motorcycle Rally. Normally Sturgis is done on a motorcycle. As memories of my daughter’s desire to become a tattoo artist and in my role as her human scratch pad, the underside of my right arm, from elbow to wrist, is inked with the years that I “did” Sturgis on a Harley.         Sturgis, South Dakota is situated on the northern edge of the Black Hills at the foot of Bear Butte, a two-thousand foot rocky cone that is way sacred to Lakota folks and contains a secret cave high on the western slope that is, some say, the home of Crazy Horse’s bones.  It is a pretty little town, with a creek ...

The Leather Potato         David and I were sandal makers during the golden age of gladiator movies. While Victor Mature leered at the prelate’s consort in a thousand theaters, I was in a little shop in the carriage house of the Brattle Inn, Harvard Square, hair to my butt, holding a mouthful of clinching nails, building thigh-high Roman footwear for tenured professors to wear beneath their Harris tweed trousers. Business was good.      Business was too good. At twenty-two bucks a pair, custom fit, fourteen days lead time, we sold sixty pairs a week. We were capable of building fifty-five. That left five disappointed foot fetishists per week, five folks to whom I could not explain that Leary and Alpert and Harvard University had paid me to drink dropper-dosed water, that the water allowed me to read the minds of the of all the customers at Mrs. Barley’s Burger Cottage, that the water washed graduate school from my soul and made...

  Fifteen Years Ago…..         Five of us, Caty, Clifford, his friend Emily, Belle the dog and I, are headed down the Columbia River toward Portland in a twenty-three-year-old VW bus. I hear nothing but every little tick and clatter of the engine, waiting for some bearing to seize or rod to knock or injector to puke. It is the same when I ride my motorcycle. There are way too many spinning parts in an internal combustion engine for things not to go south eventually, someway, somehow.         I am the genetic product of a hundred generations of worrywarts. Five thousand years ago, when a research and development team gathered along the Euphrates River to address the need for the invention of a wheel, my ancestor, Itllneverwork Smith, was not invited to participate in the think cave because of his previous opposition to the pointed stick and hot flaming substance as being too complex and potentially dangerous ...

The Christmas Ham        Several decades ago, I lived in a big pink house in the high country of central Idaho and was alone for Christmas. My daughter had flown from Boise to see her mother in Hawaii, and my fellow ranch hands all had family gatherings to organize. My nearest neighbors, Bill and Billie Jean, lived in a doublewide half-mile down a dirt lane. I didn’t know them well. He was a boat mechanic and she the daughter of a large cow-calf operator twenty miles south.       It was Christmas Day and I was in the kitchen fixing a peanut butter and banana breakfast sandwich when my pampered indoor cow dogs fired off, letting me know that someone was at the front door. It was Billie Jean, inviting me to come to their place at three that afternoon for a Christmas meal. It would be only them, their infant daughter, and me. I needn’t bring a thing. I said I would be more than pleased to eat with them and would bring fresh bread,...

    The Apple of the Pine         On the day after Christmas fifty years ago, ten thousand rats and I fled with fur a-flying from our bedrooms in a sugarcane field on Maui because someone had set fire to the other end of the field. The rats probably had a better handle on what was going down. They were in a way hurry to get the puck out, and several of them ran right over my bedroll and woke me enough to recognize the crackling as a big fire noise. When my partner and I had abandoned hitchhiking the night before and spread our blankets in the cane, neither of us realized that the harvesting of sugar involved (at least in those days) torching off the whole works. Cane fields burn very quickly. To this day I cut rodents a little bit of slack even when they crap in the silverware drawer because those rats saved our buns that morning.      Hitching in Hawaii was not easy or fun.  Eighty percent of the traffic th...

             Buster and Isabella   Unity, Oregon      (I heard this story from an old cowpoke in a small café over a breakfast of flapjacks and flank steak.)      "Buster came to see me in Riggins two months after Bobby Jean left him, said he’d found us the perfect cowboy job working down in the John Day country, deep in the Strawberry Mountains. All we had to do was feed and doctor five hundred head of dry cows for the winter and they were going to give us each six hundred dollars cash money per month and two cabins. Six hundred dollars will buy a whole lot of fun.       I figured Buster was halfway drunk since he was usually that way even before Bobby Jean ran off with the Ford salesman, but I liked him and he had never lied to me. He was tough enough to give an enema to a cougar. I threw my bedroll and saddle in the back of his truck and into the...

                                                    Hoopla Hoopla, Kitty Kitty     The boss was in Europe and my daughter and I had the run of the ranch. Everything ran smoothly except something had to be done with the cats. During one attempt to stop smoking I imagined that the cessation of tobacco use increases one’s body odor, until I realized that it actually enhanced my sense of smell. So it is with the keepers of house cats. No quantity of chlorophyll pellets or diligent maintenance is able to mask the fact that indoor cats crap in open-air latrines.  Cat owners’ noses adjust to the environment and they don’t notice the smell.      Imagine the odor of a 100-year-old farmhouse where nine cats have been left to define personal hygiene. We decided to create a cat-free zone in the ranch house, if for no reas...