I’m not romantic about coyotes, at least not in the way that absolves them of their predatory nature, and so becomes blind to that nature and ends up doing them a disservice. I see a lot of people do that wolves, and the more they try to sell the warm and fuzzy routine the less credibility they have.
The Baying Of The Hounds
The hounds are baying for blood. Beware. The leashes that hold them back are frayed, and, once loosed they will rend and tear any caught in their path. * The framers of the Constitution were not idealists and utopians; quite the opposite — they were skeptics of the perfectibility of man. Knowing that a lust for domination […]
The Jacobites’ Forlorn Hope
Mark me! Today marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of Charles Edward Stuart. Known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, he kicked off the last Jacobite Rebellion in 1745, in the attempt to see the exiled Stuart Dynasty Restored to the throne of Great Britain. The ’45 ended in disaster for the Scottish Clans that backed his […]
East by South: Down the Chewaucan with 700
Last week, while most of Big America was flailing about in a toxic stew of mind-numbing polemics, Murphy Ranch buckaroo Tyler Mecham was following wolf tracks up Dairy Creek. Tyler is 19 years old, 6’3, with Modoc blood in his veins, and as solid a hand as one might hope to find in this rare hidey-hole of genuine Americana.
A Word to the Reader
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.
Honoring the Fallen, by Dan Zappa
On a beautiful November day John Maloney delivered a sweet, brilliant eulogy for his friend Frenchy, voicing the admiration we all felt. Marines shed uncontrollable tears, duty bound to serve in Iraq and resolved to stay tight and honor this sacrifice. My unit prepared for Iraq and an instructor noted one unit that performed better than mine. It was John’s.
The Len Babb Movie Project
Please consider a contribution. I know money is tight and times are rough all over, but we keep trying to make important work in the meantime. My budget will be short and I will lose money, but I’d like to pay the right people and get this out into the world. Len’s story is worthy and I promise to make one hell of a film. Thanks for thinking on it, anyway.
The Highly Exalted
Remember back in January, before we sent SWAT Teams into restaurants after diners and before we jailed hairdressers or governors outlawed vegetable seeds? If those things don’t disturb every fiber in your body…well, they just should that’s all.
A Lifetime Of Adventure
RIR reader and contributor Rob L. Thornton has a poem published in the current issue of Dark Mountain. A signal accomplishment, and we tip our hat(s) to him. I stumbled across the Dark Mountain Project in February of 2016. I know the date because I wrote a piece about it titled Chasing Buffalo Down A Dark Mountain on Frontier Partisans. I was intrigued […]
A Strange Drunken Dream
As did you all, I read with great enjoyment Craig’s “Tickling The Wire” post, which set me to ruminating upon his observation that our bad-tooth, grisly-and-bubbling-infections-and-finally-death past is a mere camera-flash away from us. This, of course, set me to contemplating the wild, colorful career of Donald McBane. As one does. You see, Donald McBane should have died young […]
The Pandemic Please, With a Side of Vertigo
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.
Badger Theory Blues
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.
