The Long Trail of Posts

I’ll keep it brief because a steaming summer thunderstorm has parked over the top of the Figure 8 and I need to spend some serious time on fire watch.  I’d meant to ride my colt this afternoon, and continue roping …
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Things are weird in the USA — and over the next few months they are going to get weirder. I find it necessary to lay out where I stand and the line I will walk as we turn and turn …
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“If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.” — Edward Abbey …
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Part of the natural evolution — and devolution — of language is that useful terms of art gain popular acceptance and then are debased through overuse. This process is accelerated in the sticky, humid and overwrought hothouse conditions of cultural …
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It was late June, but there was frost on my bedroll when I woke up in the dark at the Murphy Ranch cow camp on South Flat, about 25 miles up the Chewaucan River from Paisley, Oregon.  I was there …
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For some lighter fare, I give you a Hound and a chicken. Better make that two chickens. We are living in a time of Maximum Bloviation. Everybody has a platform, and discourse on all of them seems to have fallen …
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From childhood, when I stood at the end of a long dirt road waiting for the school bus to come grinding through the Honey Lake Valley, and where in spring the irrigation sprinklers created a kind of rhythm-section background to …
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I’ve been mighty quiet on The Running Iron Report. I don’t feel good about it. Actually, I feel negligent. The strange and disconcerting thing is that, now that the Crash that Rullman and I have been anticipating for years is …
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No words committed to paper have ever had greater impact than those we celebrate this Saturday, on Independence Day: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with …
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This is a very brief post to announce the release of the movie trailer for my passion endeavor: The Len Babb Movie Project.  Sam Pyke and I have been hard at work filming, editing, spitballing, desperately seeking coffee in the …
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There’s battle lines being drawn And nobody’s right when everybody’s wrong — The Buffalo Springfield, For What It’s Worth * In another case of the uncanny synchronicity that often strikes like a bolt from a Sisters Country lightning storm around …
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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 …
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I feel extremely fortunate to have escaped much of the Cat 5 Garbage Tornado that is Big America while down in Paisley, Oregon, with videographer Sam Pyke last weekend – where we began filming for the Len Babb Movie Project …
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As COVID-19 began hitting urban centers in March and governors began issuing lockdown orders, sheriffs began quelling rumors of checkpoints and mass arrests. “This is not Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia where you are asked for your papers!” wrote Sheriff Scott Nichols …
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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 …
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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 …
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