J.D.’s Columns

  Wyatt and Sylvia   Toole County, Montana       In the last year before consolidation, before the farm kids were pulled from the soil and sent to city packing sheds, my partner and I taught first through eighth grades in a two-room school on the hard red winter wheatfields of northern Montana.       In August we received a list of unfilled positions and applied by letter from California to School District 19, Toole County. “It’s a dead-end deal,” said Sam Black, the chairman of the school board, when we shook hands on the phone. “One year, then we fold the school and you are dismissed. I won’t lie to you. You are the only one who has called about this. We’ll take the chance if you will. Five thousand dollars and a place to stay for the school year. Plenty of opportunity for weekend work if you can handle equipment.”       There was no school bus. The kids were delivered to the white fram...

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 over a 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 road. ...

A Halloween story, 2023 This is a bit longer than average, but it took awhile to tell the tale. The Year of the Whore San Francisco       It was late October when Pennywhistle Rudy and I busked tourists on Fisherman’s Wharf. I had sweated that summer away rolling logs to the carriage of a sawmill in the Salmon River Mountains then drove combine in the oat and barley harvest east of Donnelly, Idaho. When the warning snows came at Equinox, I headed toward the ocean. Rudy rode shotgun, figuring he had at least another month before his ski-guide gig began in the Wasatch Mountains.       He was a tootler of Irish and Mormon tunes and I wore a brown western hat so we were a natural for the streets. He’d lean back against a building, playing jigs and reels with a coffee can full of tin whistles and a sign reading “Penny Whistles. Three bucks.” My hat was at his feet. I sat in the shade, provided security, and studied human behavior. H...

I am posting this because it is one of my favorite memories. Kate Wolf was a fine person and a fine singer, and she sorta changed my life by sending me back to Idaho. 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 minu...

Boggy (I heard this tale from Traci Jo the Barmaid, who was kicking my butt for two bucks a game at nine ball in a big city alt-country bar off Castro Street, San Francisco. To keep her from wiping out my meager supply of fun tickets, I suggested that we dance.)      “No way. I have had enough of men. They have too much skin in all the wrong places. I know, I was married to two of them. The first was a Momma’s boy, never could make a decision, wanted the crusts cut off his toast. I ditched him when I found a big pair of lace panties in the laundry that didn’t belong to me. I hid them in a plate of spaghetti that I served to him that night. When he forked them out of the noodles he went to hemming and hawing and turned red as the pasta sauce. Then he dug out his wallet and showed me a picture of his entire bowling team decked out in women’s clothes and confessed that the panties belonged to him. For some reason that was enough for me to walk out of the house and ...

November 2023     To Buy or Not to Buy         Not too long ago, we and dog loaded into a Subaru with a hillock of sleeping bags, pads, books, salami, kibble, and a change of clothing each. In the wayback were a Dremel tool with a chewcanful of router bits and a belt sander.  We were headed to Boise to attend the Annual Powertool Pumpkin Carving Gala and Belt Sander Drag Races.       America had more in store for us than making merry. When we were a coffee addict’s full bladder away from home, in this case Baker City, we pulled off I-84 into a clean petroleum and junkfood emporium where I was blown away to discover, piled at the entrance, a half-cord of punky lodgepole firewood, shrink-wrapped in armload quantities, five bucks each, and clearly labeled “Made in Canada.” I nearly choked on my corndog.      The local firewood gypsies, those independents who herd rattletrap pickups...

 Since the East Oregonian will not pay me for including my columns in two additional newspapers, I have quit them and will post my work here for those folks who follow my word pizzas.  I am sorry that there will be no print edition. The times they are a' changing'.