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 …
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 …
The Sun, The Moon, The Star
The best little Basque restaurant in Elko, Nevada
From bum darts to an annular eclipse, featuring a blazing ring of fire
Large Fodder’s Rule: Get Naked or Get Out
Randy, a husky old crust in a tall hat and a striped, blue western shirt, sits on a stool at The Star Hotel and Bar — since 1910 the social crossroads of downtown Elko, Nevada — drinking a glass of bitter Picon punch, a specialty of this traditional Basque restaurant. It’s three PM on a Friday, the hour of indolence, and he’s telling me bawdy stories from an era which has ended, it seems, most everywhere but here. It’s not the frontier era (corporate gold mines sustain this region now, although there are still teeming sheep herds in the mountains, tended by immigrant shepherds from Peru) though it does have the feel of an older way of being — elemental, earthy, alkaline. It’s a spirit I associate with Elko as I do no other western town, and why I visit every year or two to fill up on lamb or seafood at The Star, gamble in the Stockmen’s Hotel Casino, and fortify my depleted animal spirits.
As three …
