Leaky Buckets

  The tiny house and main house near completion         This is the written version of the story I revisit every time I am struggling with doubt and self worth. When I am lost in a spiral, I know that this is the true story of my successes and even when I am unmoored, it still manages to bring me back to shore. As I write this, I am not boasting. This is just an abridged tale of the last five years of my life and it is still the longest post by far. I’ll begin with the slogan written on the wall of our house that says “you will overestimate what you can do in one year and underestimate what you can achieve in five years.” Five years ago yesterday was my first night spent here in the town of Philipsburg, Montana, in a tiny camper parked on a neighbor’s empty lot with no electricity or heat; just my sleeping bag, head lamp and my dream of building my own house. Now I am sitting at the kitchen table in a completed house that I built with my own two hands and...

  Somewhere near Banff, Alberta We were somewhere outside of Lethbridge, Alberta in a Ford Econoline van. There were eight of us, all grad students in architecture school on our way back from a fascinating conference on the future of computer-aided design at some fancy conference center in Banff. Someone got a text message that a student from one of the earlier years of school had committed suicide the previous night. I had been his Graphics teacher. The mood turned somber pretty quickly in the van.  You put eight graduate students in a van for long enough, conversations will emerge. And pretty soon, we were neck deep in an intense discussion of mental health. Some of my classmates bared their struggles with mental health and depression. I remember vividly because at the time I was twenty two and invincible. I had never experienced depression or self doubt. I had succeeded at everything that I tried and was overcome with wonder at the possibility of the world. I recall trying ...

            Playing the Martin in East Helena... at the last show we saw the cowboy           I was halfway through the first chorus of Tennessee Whiskey when the old cowboy set down his beer mug and asked his lady to dance. A few ladies at the back table whooped at the dancers getting up. A few couples from the side tables got up and joined the cowboy and his lady. The linoleum floor was scuffed with mud from all the muck boots that had traipsed across it for the past couple hours on their path from the door to the counter.  Ruby Valley Brew was a little shotgun bar with a few tables up front, board and batten interior walls, a rough hewn bar guarded by a sturdy looking barmaid and a few small beer producing vats peeking out from behind the hand scrawled menu. The band crowded into the corner by the door on a floor that was sloping enough to make you put a foot backwards for balance. The drummer was close enough to...

  Otto Lake at midnight              I know that sometimes years of distance tend to make memories more nostalgic than they were in the moment. My memories of summers in Alaska were like that. The sense of endlessness to the landscape, knowing that if you started walking west, you could walk for the rest of your life without encountering anybody. The midnight sun shining on the dock as we gathered as wild and weird friends to play music or kickball and laugh uproariously into the wee hours, then wake up at 5 am and go white water rafting all day. The novelty of meeting a moose or a bear almost daily in the campground we all shared on the shores of Otto Lake.  These memories make it easy to brush over the hellacious mosquitoes in the summer of 2013, the simmering resentment at the uncontrolled tourism growth that supplied our weekly paychecks, the general crankiness that filtered through the entire company from a few burnt out employees w...

  Sunrise over the Grand Canyon 1.1.19 I awoke in the dark. My phone read 5am. I could feel Sam stirring beside me. Deke, curled into a ball between us, was determined to sleep as long as possible. I slowly unzipped the side of the tent and peeked out at a winter wonderland. Stars twinkled through the pine trees. The storm had passed leaving eighteen inches of fresh snow. I realized that it was January 1st and suddenly an idea popped into my head. I turned to Sam and said, “want to see the new year’s sunrise over the Grand Canyon?” We scrambled into gear, excavating ourselves from the blanket palace that our tent had become. We had arrived two days prior, driving in the open gates of Grand Canyon National Park in the fog. The federal government was shut down. No one was manning the entry stations at any of the national parks. No one was plowing the roads or cleaning the bathrooms. The private hotel was bustling, but otherwise, only a few bundled up strangers braved the weather and ...

  Margaritaville Encore 12/29/22           We are standing in the “green room” of the Great Northern Bar in Whitefish, Montana. Through the wall, the house music is thumping like a heartbeat and you can hear the crowd getting louder and louder as people funnel into the old ski bum bar. They aren’t here to see us play, they are here to see our friends, the headliners play after us. But that doesn’t change what we are about to do. We are about to put on the best hour-long show of our lives. This is the biggest stage we have ever stood on as a young band. Whether the stages get bigger or smaller from now on is meaningless. For tonight, we have decided to make this our best show ever, for our family and friends who drove five hours to see us play, for the couple hundred paying strangers who are here to dance and drink, for our own love of music that we put so much time and effort into, for the fact that there is a stage with our name on it for the next hou...

  The outlook is gray for Pinochle today I sit across the table from my future father-in-law attempting to read his mind. He squints back at me, trying to ascertain my intentions. To my left, my fiance squares off with her mother on my right. A couple people clear their throats, hem and haw, look around the table and back at their hands. It is the moment of truth; I raise my hands and make a bet. Audible sighs from around the table, some of agreement, others of dismay. The pinochle table cements the newbie’s place in the family.  It is Black Friday, we are gathered at the kitchen table as the Red Lodge sun squeaks between the curtains, cutting a sharp line across the playing surface. The FIFA World Cup squawks from the television in the next room. I have positioned myself so that I cannot see the TV because I have to focus. This is a family tradition and I feel pressure to acquit myself well.  The stories fly back and forth across the room from various family members as T...