J.D.’s Columns

Two Rural Dining Experiences Donnelly, Idaho      When I first wandered into The Club, it was not formally called The Club. That was just the local name for the establishment. The only signage identifying it as a café/bar was a plywood sign on the roof, lighted by incandescent bulbs, that said “EATS.”         It was a hot July afternoon when I walked through the beat-up front door into a white room with four small Formica tables, a dozen straight backed chairs, and six leatherette stools at the counter. The kitchen area was tiny, with a serving window ledge. I could see the top of a gray head belonging to the cook, who also acted as waitress, cashier, and busperson.      I was the only patron. It looked dark and cool back in the back room. An old-school wooden bar hugged one wall. A few round tables skirted a dance floor and jukebox. The bartender wore a ballcap that said “Clyde.” I asked Clyde if ...

Estelle Gary, Indiana       During the last great spasm of the American steel industry, a thousand of us worked under one roof, turning sheet metal into refueling lines for the Strategic Air Command and prototypes for America's infant space program.      Five days a week I fought sunrise traffic from my flat in southside Chicago to the parking lot outside Door South #l6, where I inserted a card in the time clock then faced a mountain of long, thin wall steel tubing. By fitting sizing dies onto twenty-foot hydraulic rams I pulled one tube inside another until the mountain dwindled to four tubes. Those were left for the next day, as a reminder to the time-study finks in neckties that the union was running the job.      Repetitive tasks are a machinist's yoga. While the machinery whirls the mind cruises. Those instances when attention to the job disappeared entirely are chronicled by circular scars on my palms....

When Pigs Swim        In 2006, according to federal data, the state of Iowa contained 55,869.36 square miles, 2,987,345 humans, and 16,900,000 hogs. That works out to 52.4 humans per square mile and 302 hogs per square mile, or roughly six hogs per person. Memorize these numbers.      Now, set the time machine to a few years ago, when several rivers began to flood the three percent of Iowa that lies along riverbanks and below levee height. In the interest of cheap math, let us assume an equal distribution of hogs across Iowa, meaning that about 480,000 hogs were going to get very wet.       Because today’s farmer is wired into various government GPS buoys and flow sensor devices, many hog producers had several days’ warning of what was going to happen and took preventative measures. For the most part, this involved shoring up the levees and trucking hogs to higher ground. Assuming that a hundred hogs fi...

  Getting Goosed        One evening last week, I walked out from our house to get a better view of a moon rising in the smoke and dust over the mountains. Across the face of the moon I saw the season’s first formation of geese. They were flapping along at maybe five hundred feet above the valley floor, honking directions and fast food advice to each other, sounding like an orchestra of bicycle horns.       Forty-some years ago I worked for a fellow named Shelly in Long Valley, Idaho. Shelly was one of the most honest, fair, friendly people  I’ve had the privilege to have as a boss. So friendly, in fact, that we employees had to brace ourselves when he was on the job, to keep from getting knocked off their feet when slapped on the back. His was the only outfit I ever worked for that gave each employee a turkey at both Thanksgiving and at Christmas.       We didn't see much of Shelly in the...

Slug Bug                                                                                                               A couple of years ago I visited with my wife’s Library of Congress librarian sister and discovered the particulars of a very interesting and non-government regulated hitchhiking scheme called “slugging” that currently operates around our nation’s capital.       The system of slugging is quite simple. Back ...

The Gift       The kid was twitchy in a way that was not easy to diagnose. He pushed open the double doors of the Arts Center and stumbled onto the slate floor of the foyer, eyes busy, rocking his weight from one foot to the other, wearing kneeless jeans and a dark brown Big Dog tee-shirt. Nervous. Out of place. A six-pack of Mountain Dew beyond bucket-of-hormones wired. Up to something. Stoned. Tweeked.       “Hi. You got anything for two dollars? See, like I am supposed to meet my brother out front, but he is not here yet and it is cold and I have two dollars and I thought maybe I could pick up something for my Mom who is working at Taco Bell today and we don’t have much of anything anyway and so if there was something that I could get for her it would make her happy and do you have anything for two dollars, maybe in the back room or upstairs or downstairs or something?” His speech was fast but slurry, with just a hint of Elmer Fu...

TICK, TICK, TICK        OK, you just spent the afternoon adding to your guess-what-bird-I-saw-today list by walking a mile though the brush along the river. It was a hot day, so you are changing out of your sweaty duds and admiring your image in a mirror when notice a new mole just below your belly button. You move a little closer to the mirror, stand on your tippytoes, and realize that the mole has a silver-brown sheen and, aw Jeez, legs. The temple of your body has been invaded by a parasite and it is dining on your vital fluids. Tick alert! Quick, get the critter off your skin, but how?       First, a bit of soft science. There are roughly eight hundred types of ticks on this planet. A hundred of these can carry disease to warm-blooded critters, including humans. Not every tick carries a disease. Of the hundred types, five species will be found in the Pacific Northwest. These are the Rocky Mountain Tick, the American Dog Tic...

    Jury Duty        Civic mindedness and sciatica do not co-mingle well. I am rolling down the long dusty trail, 45 miles, toward service to my country as a prospective juror while my right leg feels as though there is a high-voltage buzzer strapped to its instep.  Last night it took five minutes of whiny baby steps to relocate from the television throne to my bed. Luckily the weather sucks today, the roads are matted with frozen fog, and I probably won’t be called upon to step quickly or firmly on the brakes.       I am grouchy and sore. Why me? Why should I waste a day of my life in support of the American judicial system when I rarely vote?  (Until the latter/summons arrived last week I wrongly supposed that being called for jury duty was tied to the voter rolls. Nope, it is driver’s licenses.)  I should’ve opted out. I can barely walk. I hope I don’t collapse in a screaming fit in th...

Organic Ski Adventure      Thirteen of us started the winter in cabins that we’d spent the summer jacking back to level and chinking from the weather we knew would arrive at 7500 feet up in the Salmon River Mountains.      I’d showed up with a mate and a two-year-old daughter in July after spending six months on the road wandering across the West, stopping long enough to work for the gasoline it took to nudge our ex-telephone truck another hundred miles down the highway.       The last job I had held was on the Blackfoot reservation in Montana as a location scout for a bunch of Hollywood buttheads who were trying to cash-in on the mountain-man-meets-noble-savage theme. I quit when one of them got nasty with a waitress in a Browning café as she tried to explain that there was no wine to go with their overkill steaks because it was a dry reservation.       That night we palavered with a couple who sa...

The Sky is Falling        On the evening of Friday, May 16, 1980, I attended a party in the Salmon River Mountains of central Idaho. Why I remember the date so clearly will emerge. Most of the celebrants were younger than I, including Gail, a twenty-something blond woman. She and I were chatting about nothing when she got beer teary, saying that she was supposed to graduate from the University of Idaho, in Moscow, Idaho, on the next night but was afraid to make the 300 mile round trip because she was sure that her Volkswagen bug would break down and strand her in bumfudge nowhere, of which there is an abundance in those hills.     I had been working in Idaho for eight years but had not visited the University. I did know a little something about the operation of a VW, though, so I volunteered to accompany her to Moscow as her driver and mechanic.       On Saturday morning we putted off the mountains down onto...

Moo                                                                                                         I spent a good portion of my working life as a person who tended hamburger on the hoof.  This summer I hope to make the pilgrimage to central Idaho where, forty-some years ago, my daughter and I lived in a teepee with an Airstream cookshack on a spit of land along the shores of Cascade Reservoir in the Salmon River Mountains.       We drank directly f...