Leaky Buckets

  Car Barn... 66 GTO and 62 Impala         The clock in the kitchen is making a funny noise. I wrack my brain trying to remember which engine is revving. It must be the 69 Plymouth Roadrunner with the 383 engine in it. There is a throaty choke, and the clock revs aggressively and zooms off into the ten o'clock hour. In an hour, my favorite car, the Pontiac GTO will be revving its engine to tell me the hour is up. Every sixty minutes, a different muscle car will growl to life through a tiny speaker in the heart of the clock, scaring the bejesus out of the house cat and reminding whoever is nearby that time passes us by.  I used to know all the cars on the Muscle Car clock by heart. It is an old analog clock that I got when I was nine or ten years old and obsessed with Camaros and Chevelles. Recently, while searching for some old paperwork in the attic, I spooked like Captain Hook in Peter Pan when I heard a strange ticking sound emanating from a box in the corner. The clock had been

  Heddal Church My brother and I had been walking for hours along a two lane Norwegian highway when the Heddal Stave Church appeared like a mirage in the rain. Rural Norway didn’t have a taxi service. We were both too young to rent a car. We were too shy to ask for help, and we couldn’t read Norwegian road signs. So we were left to walk the five miles from the bus stop to the largest of the 28 remaining Norwegian Stave churches.  Out in the middle of a large field, the majestic wooden church loomed like a mysterious fortress. Built sometime in the 12th Century, Heddal was the largest of historic wooden churches scattered across the fjords and rolling hills of Norway. Our mission was to visit as many churches as we could and learn how these wooden buildings had lasted nearly a millennium in the harsh, wet climate of Norway. The small scholarship from Montana State University barely budgeted for one person, but on a diet of refried beans and crackers, I managed to fit my brother into the

Ahhhhhhh         “The way is shut.” The stuffy lady in a park ranger’s uniform stood in the middle of the road and quoted Gandalf at us. I put the truck in park and got out to reason with her. It was the day after Christmas 2018 and the federal government was shut down. Over a foot of snow had fallen in the last couple hours on the mountains outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico and none of the roads had been plowed. This lady clearly did not want to be outside, but someone had buried their SUV in a snowbank and she had been called out to help clean it up.  This was the only road going where we wanted to go; which was the middle of nowhere. Sam and I had had enough of traffic and people and our wasteful consumerist society and were headed out into the mountains to camp for a couple days. But the Park Ranger was adamant that no one was going any further. She didn’t want to “come clean up our mess,” which she had clearly been doing all day with unprepared tourists. She was worried we would g

Whoa! Creativity!   For four months, from November to March, I woke up every morning and wrote a story. Most of those stories, at least the decent ones, made it onto my blog. I feel silly talking about my blog. Blogging was all the rage a decade ago, in an earlier version of the internet before reels and Tiktoks and Covid and whatnot. Everyone had a blog or a tumblr to share their knowledge and stories. Then social media came along and stole the thunder and the publicity. I am not knocking blogging; they are great ways to share stories or learn information. But they have been replaced in the pop culture sphere and aren’t quite old enough to be classic; kind of like CD’s. Everyone is digging vinyl again, and streaming is the hot new thing, but CD’s are just kicking around in the console of your truck, waiting to be valuable again.  Blogging, at least in my social spheres, went out of style when Instagram and Reddit came into style. So obviously, like the social buttercup I am, I jumped

  The Pancake arch, under construction Architectural History II was not the most fun class of the semester. The professor was 78 years old, taught like the cliche monotone professors of 1980’s teen dramas and dressed in tweed like it was London in 1955. He often acted like a cult leader and his students were the underlings; ignoring us most of the time, yet randomly vicious is his pointed critique of our essays, clothing styles or posture. The class was at 8am in a large, slightly too warm and stuffy lecture hall that was built to cure insomnia. The textbooks were approximately the size of wrecking balls and weighed about the same. I have always been fascinated with history, but listening to an ancient man mumble about Palladio or Renzo Piano at around dawn was not exactly enlightening to me.  As with any college class, there was an inevitable group project, combining three random young adults into a triad of missed deadlines, poor communication and desperate all-nighters just before

  The Town Crew, working hard to supply water to us Last night as I was driving home, a generic country song came on the radio. I spent a lot of time in my vehicle, so many of my thoughts come to me while I am sitting at the wheel. I had forgotten my music device, so I was stuck with the FM dial. On drives east of town, I can listen to 99.5 The Bull; the classic country station out of Helena that hasn’t yet succumbed to the corporate sameness of most radio stations. Alas, west of town, where I found myself last night, I am out of range of the Bull and have only two options out of Missoula, KISS Country and EAGLE country, basically identical nationally syndicated pop radio stations marketing themselves as “country music for the working people of Western Montana” or some other blustery jingoistic nonsense. But bad music is better than no music when there is snow on the road after a long day.  Just like a thousand other songs you can hear on the radio anywhere in the USA, this song mentio

  The Modern West Podcast Somewhere on the great prairies of Wyoming, Montana or South Dakota, I reach for my Spotify phone. The hum of the highway, the whoosh of the constant wind and the crackling of my blown out truck speaker have kept me in a borderline-meditation state for the last three hours of driving, but now I have resurfaced and need entertainment.  I pull off into a truck parking area and rummage in the console for the old Samsung with no calling or texting capability, a cracked screen, dying battery and only two important apps; Spotify and Voice Recorder. The device is slow as molasses and the touch screen is fading, but this little black box holds an entire roadtrip soundtrack. I have my playlists of all genres from Montana songwriters to New Orleans Jazz, all with silly names to help me remember which is which. Motor Breath is the heavy metal playlist for traffic jams and thunderstorms. Hobgoblins is the underground hip hop playlist for late nights. Johnny Bicycles is in

  Insulation, another task in the toolkit, though not terribly enjoyable Every morning after breakfast, I grab my old Randy Moss notepad, open it to a blank page and scribble down a to-do list. Yes, I have an old flexible-binding notepad with my favorite NFL football player of all time on the cover because I will never grow up. Anyway, I write down a to-do list for the day. The other day, I think it was a Wednesday, I had a particularly notable to-do list. It included the following… Meet Kyle at nine to pour 30x30 radiant slab Tear out old windows and install new ones for Emily  Clean woodstove chimney and install new spark arrestor Install and wire a bathroom fan in upstairs bathroom Design a new logo and sticker for my bluegrass band Complete the architectural plans for Craig and Donna Bake a cake for Sam’s surprise birthday In the end, it took me two days to complete this task list, with the help of my buddy, David. But what struck me was the variety of tasks on the list. David and