Shoveling Water
Fleeing the faculty room to guide fly-fishing in Montana
Howling wolves, disemboweled sheep
’How could anyone actually live here?’
It is a new day and I’m in the truck headed north. A dusting of snow reveals a fresh pair of moose tracks — a cow and her calf — dotted across the highway’s centerline, disappearing into the borrow pit’s tangle of willows. A roadkill coyote stretches her frozen paws to the sky. My thermos is full of coffee, the heater is cranked, and my shoulders are stiff after the previous day spent rowing, or “shoveling water,” as some colleagues call it — my hands on the oars, pulling them in a constant, rhythmic stroke against the current while the boat drifts its way down the shining conveyor belt of the Missouri River, where I make my living as a full-time fly-fishing guide.
Out my left window, the Rocky Mountain Front rises from the plains into a skyline of jagged sawtooth peaks. I’ll be up there in October, after the fishing season ends, leading clients on horseback hunts in the high country, where the wind gusts …
Oh, Canada. Oh, Crap.
Euthanasia laws, a government that targets normal people’s bank accounts and gives medals to Nazis, have turned our neighbor to the north into a threat to free people everywhere.
Justin Trudeau’s father was a cuckold.
Neil Young, go home!
When I think of Canada, I think of snow, maple syrup, “O Canada,” and ice skating (specifically that of Elvis Stojko). I think of Wayne Gretzky. I think of my parents’ love of Vancouver as “the most beautiful city in the world,” of the supposedly global metropolis that is Toronto, the culinary delights of Montreal, of the vast emptiness of its northern reaches, and sure, of its sort of goofy little brother status vis-à-vis my home nation, the United States of America. And, from that point of view, that of the superior, alpha citizenry, something else I think about, and that really bugs me, is how Canada could have produced three of the greatest musical geniuses and poets in the history of mankind: Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young. They all ended up down here, they don’t live in the Great White North anymore, do they? So, why do I have to acknowledge that it made them?
Blasphemous as it …
Six Gallons of Molasses
Aim for the most juice and the least weight
’Hawney, we’re blood’
We do the best we can with the tools we have.
“Over or under?”
The old timers are taking bets on how much juice there’ll be after we run the Dale variety sorghum, tall and straight and stark naked in the front field, through the hundred-year-old press they’ve rigged to a 1952 Ford 8N tractor.
“He says eighty gallon. I say sixty. Where you at?”
I’m dressed like the others in a pair of second-hand Pointer brand bib overalls, a deep green long-sleeved waffle shirt, and a faded Westwind work jacket I found at a yard sale last winter in Virginia.
“That’s a dangerous game.” I put on rubber-grip work gloves and watch my breath disappear. “I’ll take seventy and split the difference.”
If we get seventy gallons of juice, we can hope for maybe six gallons of sweet, earthy sorghum molasses (it is sorghum, and not molasses which comes from sugar cane, but we call it what we call it and don’t fret over technicalities). I ask God under my …
