I’m going to make this quick and perfectly clear — if you find it your calling to come on this site and begin policing it for language you find insensitive, or callous, and feel even further compelled by some messaging of the cosmos to highlight how you “feel” about the use of language here — then you have stumbled on the wrong fire.

The seasons have finally turned here in the Cascades, which mostly means a ton of work.  Spring in the mountains is a cranky bitch, like the old flatbed Studebaker I drove when chasing cows on the Fish Creek Ranch out of Eureka, Nevada.  It took a full can of starting fluid every morning to get that motor to run but she would eventually cough and snort and whine and then finally crank in a cloud of black and blue smoke.

Not so long ago I bottomed out.  It was a hard stoppage. If you’ve ever been out on the desert, driving too fast on nominal roads, and suddenly high-centered your rig in the rocks, you’ll have some idea what this felt like.  There were some nasty scraping sounds as my skid plate dragged over the rocks, followed by a solid “kathunk” and a jaw-jamming loss of forward movement.  Things on the backseat ended up on the dashboard.  My seatbelt locked up like a parachute harness and there might have been some whiplash.  It was all quite unexpected because I was actually at a dinner party.