Leaky Buckets

There is nothing worse than a spider with superpowers. It started out as just a normal spider, or so I thought. I was lying in my tent, deep inside my sleeping bag, head propped up on a pile of extra clothes that I had shaped into a pillow. My headlamp dangled from the ceiling, casting angular shadows into the corners where my worldly possessions were stacked around me like a fortress. I was halfway through Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for the third time, plodding through the part where he is in Bozeman visiting friends. I was trying to suss out landmarks from my college days, but it was slightly too vague. My shoulder was aching from an hour of leaning awkwardly over, so I flopped down onto my back, and looked up at the ceiling. And that is when I saw the spider, descended about halfway down from the ceiling towards me and my book on a string of web line, a la Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible.  The best reaction would have been to do nothing, because being afraid of a sil

  Zippy and Sam on a High Line adventure, August 2021 One of my favorite photos was taken on the edge of the Missouri Breaks. It is a gloomy August day in 2020 and Sam is standing on the rim with the dogs, looking stoically out at the lazy river below. On one side of the picture is a lonely ranch, perched dramatically above the badlands. On the other is an unobtrusive purple car, rakishly parked on the side of the gravel, windows down, Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark playing on the radio.  I flash to numerous other moments, as Sam and I exit the Hell Creek Bar, or the Helmville Rodeo, or the Jackson Hot Springs and walk through the parking lot. We walk past a line of shiny Silverados and brooding Rams, lifted Jeeps and knobby-tired Tundras with all the necessary accessories for surviving the zombie apocalypse and finally come to our little 2008 Honda Fit. I take so much pride in driving such an insignificant little car in a country where people are judged by what they drive.  I lov

  US Bank Stadium, Home of the Vikings I root for two football teams; the Minnesota Vikings and whoever is playing the Green Bay Packers. Last night as I watched with delight as the cheeseheads got bowled over for the seventh time this season, I started pondering the allegiances to various teams. The invisible borders that determine who to root for, who to root against, and how those decisions are made by happenstance but are then set in stone for a lifetime.  My dad grew up in Minnesota and as far as I can tell, that is why I became a Vikings fan. Logically, it didn’t make sense to root for a team halfway across the country that hasn’t been to a Super Bowl since 1979 and always finds a way to choke away some of the greatest chances in football history. But since the age of seven, my earliest memory of listening to the Vikings beat the Cowboys on the AM radio, I have been a die hard supporter. As a grown man, I have cried three times directly due to Vikings games… twice in anger, once

  Jamming for the first time after the injury A few years ago, while fleeing the grind and driving over Homestake Pass, on my way to visit some weirdo friends near Wise River, I had an idea for a song. A song about living unconventionally, because you only get one life and you shouldn’t spend the whole thing working just to accumulate money. Typical themes for a mid-twenties kid living out of the back of his Tacoma. I called the song Going, Going, Gone . I promptly forgot about the song for a few years. As one does, I soon found some stability. I would not ever call my life conventional, but there were hints of the normality that a younger me had planned to run away from. I found myself in a stable relationship and we made a smart financial plan to rid ourselves of the debt that sinks so many American ships. I started a construction company and worked six days a week, dragging myself out of the debt that I accrued for a college degree that I hardly use.  I love building things, whether

  Beside my house sits a small cabin. It is ten feet wide and twelve feet long with a small wood stove in the corner and a giant window facing south at Broadway. The foothills of the Pintlers are hidden by the far ridge, but the mountain peaks shine in the morning sun. Before I built our house, this dry cabin was my home for nearly three years.  A twin bed, a coat rack, a small table and countertop with a mini fridge and electric kettle. Christmas lights twinkle permanently from the storage loft. Over stuffed bookshelves teeter precariously over the final few square feet of floor space. A vacuum cleaner props beside my dad’s shotgun and the Makita tool bag behind the door. In winter, the floor is impossible to keep clean between firewood dust, muddy dog paws and slush from my boots, so I keep a pair of indoor slippers for inside time. I sit with my feet kicked up on the end of the bed. The dog has claimed the pillow end of the bed as his. I am reading the north wall and revisiting ol

I am sitting by a warm wood stove in the cold months of the year. Life doesn’t get much better than this. I have turned the living room chair so that my feet dangle eight inches from the cast iron. There is about a fifteen degree temperature difference from my toes to my ears. I lean over to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf along the wall and without moving any part of my body besides my arm and eyes, I grab Regarding Willingness by Tom Harpole. Lest anyone think I am a book snob who reads philosophy books in the pre-dawn lamp light, I must clarify that this is a local author. One hundred pages from a guy who lives 50 miles from my front door, telling tales of horse logging, chainsaw incidents, rescuing people who have fallen into the dumpsters at the Powell County transfer station. And a story about skydiving with Russian cosmonauts, but hey, there are some local folks around here who have led unbelievably interesting lives that you will likely never hear about. And so here I am, with m