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...

The Movie Business Northwestern Montana After a summer of laying in the grass beside good trout streams, the fun tickets ran dry in Browning, Montana. I had connections in California, 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 did, 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 eaten by log truck drivers. My t...

Ponderings           At the age of 84, I am certifiably old in the game of life,   but not quite ready to cash in my chips. It has been an interesting process. When I was 21, I was certain that I would have a handle on the changes by the time I was thirty. What I didn’t know was that the changes come faster than one can accommodate or adjust to them. Thus, as an old fart, I have lingering questions.      For instance, who or what am I to believe now that lying has been institutionalized by the government at all levels? Will Artificial Intelligence, which mines cyberworld for its information, eventually learn to lie to us? “Gee. AI, how is the security of our power grid?” “Oh, just wonderful, JD.  It is the most secure power system ever developed by humans.”      So, I have sluiced my memory box to reclaim chunks of knowledge that were given to me over the years by folks who had no reason or inclina...

Being Rich       I grew up in a union household where being rich smelled of worker exploitation.  I am old now and my thousand bucks a month Social Security check ensures that I will never be accused of ill-gotten rewards. My daughter and I were recently discussing how diddled we, as members of the working class, were becoming because our leaders are greedy people when she reminded me of how we once felt rich, during the Wendy’s era.       We were living between Petaluma and Point Reyes, northern California, while I took care of an assortment of horses, cattle, sheep, hogs, dogs, and poultry, including peacocks, on a couple hundred acres of prime Marin County pasture.       The property was bordered on the north by Red Hill Road that began in Petaluma then snaked up and down through San Francisco’s milk supply and ended up twenty miles west at Point Reyes National Seashore and the big blu...

                              The Executioner’s Fork         Five of us roomed in three bedrooms, a kitchen and one bathroom of a stout white house near Harvard Square. Charles, the producer of the unfinished film that gnawed at our waking lives shared a room with Beryl, who ate only with chopsticks and spent her days with runes and Tarot cards.      I'd quit a tree-trimmer’s job in California, enrolled in graduate school in Cambridge, then dropped out and returned to California for six months to help Charles as he ran his lens across the new consciousness born in the Haight-Ashbury. In Cambridge my friends from college were dealing Mexican weed and windowpane acid. My room was a leaded-glass turret with a radiator that sounded like it puked hailstones. There were brown roses on the wallpaper.  By pressing my thumbs on my eyes, just so, the ro...

  Catching Dewie’s Mare        I was a tad grouchy that October morning, forty-some years ago, when my old stock truck rolled along the Snake River and onto the flatlands where Dewie and Carolyn lived in a barn above their fluctuating herd of horses. Dewie was a horse trader, Carolyn a horse tamer and carpenter. Dewie said he always had more horses than he could afford, and Carolyn claimed they had three doors in the barn house that went nowhere.      Dewie stood with a rope halter outside a pole corral with half a dozen horses all snuffy, tails in the air, stirring up dust. When he saw me, he turned and hooked a boot heel in the corral fence and stuck out a paw. We shook hands and he asked what I was doing.       I allowed that I was headed to find winter work in California, that I had quit my ranch job in the high country yesterday when I discovered all my missing work gloves under the seat of th...

The Kitchen Radio      On the prairies of western Nebraska, a plastic AM radio tuned to KCOW was a standard  kitchen appliance. It provided gossipy news, country music, Kiddie Carnival, and tornado warnings, sunrise until dark. That is where I learned the words and tune to Teddy Bears’ Picnic.       After sunset, the outside world flooded the kitchen. AM frequencies from thousands of miles away skipped into the Sandhills. One of the strongest signals was from XELO, Juarez, broadcasting from just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, out of reach of US regulators.       That was where I first heard Heartbreak Hotel, Love Me Tender, Bebopaloola, Waiting for a Train. The frequencies were taken over late at night by what we called Holy Rollers. The piece that follows is an example of their programming. I once had a recording of this broadcast so I could demonstrate to my effete FM-listening east coa...

Random Thoughts        The morning of the 14 th  of June, 2024, began normally enough. Tink, my lap guard dog, watered a postage stamp of the backyard lawn while I pried the lid off a big can of Prince Albert and filled my pipe for the first dose of a fresh day. Everything was going great.      Then the bluebirds of happenstance swept in from the unknown. On our way back into the house I became dizzy, whirly. light headed. When I reached the top porch step, I fell backward, down to the lower level and broke my neck in five places.       One hundred days later, in late September, I made it back home, after a life flight to Spokane, a session with a neurosurgeon who patched vertebrae with what in Xrays look to be parts from a metal gate, a fitting for a neck brace, a week in the hospital, a month in a Spokane rehab joint in which I contracted Covid and had my wallet stolen, then two months in a facil...

           Deadwood on Five Dollars a Minute (This was written thirty-some years ago and first published by my pal Babs, in her BORDERLINE magazine.)                I live on a windy knoll  in the Salmon River mountains, seven miles up a gravel road from Donnelly, Idaho,      “The City of Helping Hands,”  population 247, but I grew up in Deadwood, South Dakota, and my folks still live there, in the Black Hills. On October 1, 1989, casino gambling, with certain limitations, became legal in Deadwood. What follows is my set of notes from a weekend trip to Deadwood in March 1991. Day One At five in the morning I kiss Caty and Baby-in-Belly, (working title: Little Luna) scrape windshield ice from Bic, the disposable Chrysler station wagon, then shimmy down Highway 55 in the Payette River canyon toward the nearest stoplight, 93 miles south, in B...