Leaky Buckets

The winter that never ends... I guess that's okay It is the winter that never ends. At least it feels that way. Anecdotal evidence from my 14th Montana winter says this one was the longest and coldest of them all. But every winter feels long and cold; this one is just the most recent. Then again, it is April 5th and it is puking snow for the seventh day in a row. It started snowing on Halloween and I have not seen the grass in my yard since then.  Snow in April is not at all unusual. Heck, we have had snow in June four of the last five years. What makes this winter feel longer is that we never had our usual January thaw. The pattern is usually a bitter cold snap in the middle of December followed by a week of sun and forty degrees in mid January, which melts off most of the early season snow. Then, February rolls around and the precipitation starts. At least, in my memory.  The last couple nights, all the local contractors have been gathered at the White Front for their daily ...

  Surfing at sunrise The instructions to the secret beach were simple. Too simple, considering the beach was three thousand miles away in another country. Four brief scribbles with some approximate distances attached. The worrying part was a tiny building and the instructions to ask Raul, the supposed resident of said shack, where to find El Pingüino. These were not exactly details that our parents wanted to hear when they were told that we were going surfing in Baja for a month, so we conveniently didn’t tell them. Anyway, we trusted our surf guru, so with a napkin scribble, we set off from Montana on New Years Day, Baja bound.  Four days and one international border after leaving home, we were hurtling down Baja’s Highway 1. The lanes were awkwardly narrow and full of truck-eating potholes. The shoulder of the road consisted of about three inches of crumbling asphalt and a steep ditch filled with blooming cacti. Semi trucks rigged up like Mad Max were racing northwards aroun...

  Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Gran Canaria at sunset This hike wasn’t a jaunt, or a stroll or an amble. It was more like a trudge. Silly us, thinking that a thirty mile hike across an ancient volcano was going to be a nice mosey, a pleasant journey across Gran Canaria over three days. We should have known that we were hiking a traditional pilgrimage and pilgrims never had it easy.  It was early November, but in the Canary Islands, off the coast of Africa, it is almost always summer. I found a mini pilgrimage across the largest of the Canary Islands, from the north side of the island to the south. It was a miniature version of the famous Camino De Santiago in mainland Spain, between the two churches of St James. It was also supposed to be a gorgeous hike. But as we trudged up the mountain, all we could see was pea soup mist. When we left the spectacular sea port of Agaete that morning on the bus, the Atlantic Ocean shone like a gemstone and the white washed stucco glittered in the humid a...

  Wearing my earthquake clothes in Newfoundland The earth shook as I stood in front of the mirror in the changing room at the Red Cross thrift store in Christchurch, New Zealand. I had just discovered the joy of merino wool for the first time, in the form of a blue long-sleeve shirt that said Elusiv in faint gray letters across the front. And at that exact moment, there had been a small earthquake. I stepped out of the changing room and all the clothes racks were swaying slightly, coat hangers tinkling as they gently drifted back to stationary positions.  It was my first earthquake, and it was very minor, but my fellow shoppers had more experience than they wanted with earthquakes. Many of them were standing in doorways with their hands braced against the frames, preparing for the worst. We were only four years removed from the massive 2011 Christchurch earthquake that had toppled numerous buildings and killed 185 people. Rubble was still strewn around the city and many of the...

  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 ...

  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...

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 to...