Shoveling Water

Essay

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 over sixty miles per hour and snowdrifts can swallow you whole. Welcome to the …

Jeremiad

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!

By Clayton Fox

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 is, Neil Young has always spoken to me more than Bob Dylan, I’m really not sure why. …

Shoveling Water

Oh, Canada. Oh, Crap.

Six Gallons of Molasses