J.D.’s Columns

Wid Bisterfeldt Libby, Montana (Her gray ponytail hung halfway down her jeans jacket. Her boots  were black and square-toed. She pointed a ringless left hand off toward the stumpy hillsides where the Army Corps was clearcutting the slopes in preparation for the filling of Libby Dam.)      Wid Bisterfeldt grew up there, way up yonder, just south of  the Canada border, up in the Yaak River country. His daddy was raised up there, and his granddaddy too, far as I know. They were Bohunks, stuck to the old country ways of bringing in brides for the boys from Bavaria, growing cabbage and turnips, speaking German around the supper table. The Bisterfeldt boys were big blond fellows, with big hands, born to log. That is what Wid was doing when World War Two broke out.      You hear plenty about how the Japanese were all herded together into camps down on the Snake River in Oregon where they are still fa...

Lady and the Tramps Ontario, Oregon (The one-eyed horseshoer and I were leaning into the campfire about midnight after three days of drinking beer and swapping lies. I don't remember the subject of conversation, but this is one of Dewie's tales,)      I've been riding, breeding, feeding, doctoring, buying, selling and trading horses for forty years, and I've done pretty good by it. At least I've always had a few more horses than I could afford. Worst I ever got took in a deal, though, was when I got to messing around with improving the bloodlines of a dog.      My wife brought home a little cocker pup looking like it came straight from Disney, all flop-eared and misty-eyed, so she called her Lady. When Lady wasn't more than about six months old, she came into heat. I just couldn't see putting a dog that young into motherhood, so we made a bed for her in our six-horse trailer and fed her in there. Every cowdog in the county fought for the...

Louis LaForce Alberta, Canada       I was headed to Alaska when the LaForce brothers hired me out of the Slave Lake Saloon. They were cutting pulpwood in a swamp along 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 LaForce boys were pulpwood professionals, three generations who had worked together so long 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 son, who didn't like Americans of any shape.     In 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.      On the first Saturday night of my employ, I...

The Movie Business After a summer of laying in the grass beside good trout streams, the fun tickets ran dry in Browning, Montana. I still had connections in the film world from being a sound guy on the east coast, made a few phone calls, and came up with a job as a location scout for a group who wanted to shoot yet another mountain man movie. Two hundred and fifty bucks a week, plus expenses. Big money in those days. I had no idea what a location scout does, but I did know the mountains where the film was to be shot. At the appointed time of the first meeting with my new employer, a black Lincoln town car pulled up in front the Timber! Cafe, in Augusta. Out of the driver's side climbed a pudgy white male human clad in beaded elk fringe leggings over Gucci shoes. Around his neck was sixteen troy ounces of chain with a golden goat dick dangling from it. I should've run out the back door of the Timber!. Instead, I hurried onto the sidewalk to prevent this Californian from being ea...

Cro-Magnon Coffee      I had a Cro-Magnon experience in my kitchen today. It was mid-afternoon when I hit the coffee wall, that place when the morning's coffee erodes from the nerve endings and the remaining brain cells are swamped by secretions from the glands of laziness.       "Go ahead, flop on the couch and sleep," whispered the imp of the perverse, but there were novels to write and dishes to do and peach cobbler to cobble. So, in the spirit of modern problem solving, I elected to consume more drugs, poured the slush from four abandoned mugs into a  yellow ducky cup, popped the concoction into the microwave, selected a minute's worth of radiation, and opened a women's clothing catalog.      When the time's-up bell dinged, I retrieved my afternoon fix from the bowels of the machine and tested its temperature with my right index finger. It was very hot. While standing there with my finger in my...

Harry Bridges the Cowdog. San Francisco       In several late Octobers, when the critters were loaded on cattle trucks, I wandered from the Rockies to California and looked for most any kind of job. During the winter of 79, it was feeding long-coupled gray jumping horses and shoveling their manure for a woman who owned a ranch an hour north of San Francisco, out by Point Reyes.        Bob was a union longshoreman who always wanted to be a cowboy. I had an addiction to double shots of Jim Beam and barmaids’ smiles.  Bob had a good union job.  I couldn’t avoid living from payday to payday.  He floated into the ranch with his sister on the raft of artists who showed up every weekend. She was a painter who had accepted the patronage and marriage proposal of a Lebanese man in exchange for time to paint. She found little inspiration when locked in a whitewashed compound in downtown Beirut, so she fled fo...

                     The Value of Literature Riggins, Idaho      During a late-Summer thunderstorm, I herded a Dodge Powerwagon along the Salmon River road upriver from Riggins, Idaho, crept up ten miles of switchbacks, lunched at a spot that once was a freight transfer station, eased along Toller Ditch, floated down the Lake Creek drainage, and arrived in Burgdorf, Idaho. I stayed there for a few years in the high country, thirty miles off the road, with my wallet in the cupboard and chickadees landing on the brim of my hat. A wad of my memories soak in those hot springs.     It was before the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness was established, before the Forest Service burned several “unpermitted” cabins that existed on both shores of the Salmon River. Interesting folks lived in those cabins, folks like Sir Rollie Hammel who logged the river for driftwood with a chunk of rope du...

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...

Cow Palace       A few miles south of downtown San Francisco, within easy howitzer range of the Transamerica Pyramid, sits a monument to free-span roof systems called the Cow Palace, a rectilinear barn, built before the rediscovery of the dome, with a main floor plenty big enough for a rodeo, circus, or monster truck crushorama. There is off-floor seating for, say, eight thousand folks. During one winter in California, I was inside the Cow Palace three times.      The Grand National Horse Show and Livestock Exposition is held yearly there. A few memories linger from my attendance of this event..........The Sons of the Pioneers, looking more like the Grandpas of the Pioneers, lowered from the catwalks on a swaying stage, singing "Cool, Clear, Water" while twenty roving carneys, with ice chests and suspenders, worked the crowd yelling "Beer, Cold Beer."........Monty Montana, straddling a bored paint gelding, twirling two ropes at once...

Of Hearts      Valentine’s Day is right around the corner. Hop aboard the time scooter and we will putt back along the goat trails of life. We are second graders, sitting at our desks with a folded half sheet of red construction paper and a pair of blunt-nosed scissors. Valentine’s Day is a week away. We’ve been tasked with cutting heart shapes that will be attached by white edible paste to folded paper and then addressed to that special someone with the scribbled request that they “Be Mine Valentine.” Note that the teacher is using sharp pointed scissors to cut hers      Now let’s move a few years toward the future as we are being introduced to the anatomy of the human body using a roll-down chart. We snicker appropriately at drawings of butt cheeks and genitalia. Then the charts go under the skin to the nerves, the muscles, and the innards. There is a big picture of the human heart and we almost gag. That thing, with all its tubes and lobes...

Ketchup for Breakfast            At an Idaho conference a few years back, a woman asked me who had most influenced my writing. I had no idea, but I said it was probably Edgar Rice Burroughs, inventor of Tarzan, because he could make a reader believe that a child could be raised by apes and never grow a beard as an adult. Since then, I have given some thought to her question and realized that Joe the Birdman Gould influenced my way of life if not my writing.       Joe Gould was born in Norwood, Massachusetts in 1890 and graduated from Harvard with the Class of 1911.  Of his college experience Joe said, "I did not want to go. It had been my plan to stay home and sit in a rocking chair and brood. I was an undistinguished student."  Upon receiving his bachelor's degree, when asked by his mother what were his intentions, Joe replied, "I intend to stroll and ponder."     ...

  The Reintroduction of Kate Wolf Marin County, California       Five years before Kate Wolf died of leukemia, I was forty years old, living in a hired man's shack with an open fifth of Jim Beam and a Martin guitar that I could not play. Across the hills of Marin County, big productive Holstein cows were being branded on their faces and sold for slaughter because the USDA had determined that there was a surplus of milk on this planet. I was wearing out my boots walking around pool tables. I believed that old drunks spoke the truth.      One Sunday morning came down awfully hard. I awoke with a flash of energy as the last of the double shots and slow dances with a woman who had a Jackson Pollack painting tattooed on her left breast blew through my nerve endings. Five minutes later, the goddess of excess smote me behind the right ear and I crawled back into the bunkhouse flannel with the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle.  ...