Husky Soul

Accelerating Glacial Collapse

noreply@blogger.com (Cobey Williamson) — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 15:34:37 +0000

At 1115 on Wednesday, 26 August 2026, I bought two roundtrip airline tickets to Winnipeg, Manitoba, triggering a catastrophic glacial collapse in Lāṅṭāṇ National Park, Nepal, near the border with China. The debris flow and flooding the collapse of this glacier caused travelled nearly 100 km and impacted populated areas downstream along the Lende Kholā and Trishuli̇̄ Kholā rivers. Satellite imagery and reports from the ground depict a scene of unprecedented devastation.

In his book, The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson describes a calamitous heat wave that kills untold thousands of people in India. But it is this glacial collapse, precipitated by my wanting to take my wife to see her best friend via air travel that will release ≈1.50 tons CO₂e into the atmosphere, that has proven to be the first large-scale disaster of the climate crisis. It won’t be the last.

Broadly speaking, I have become an accelerationist. Not the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit kind, although I generally agree with their line of questioning, but more the “let’s just get there already” type. Of course, this isn’t really new territory for me; I have a long history of assuming Mad Max was a foregone conclusion. But here I’m more referring to the self-deprivation I’ve made a practice of in hope of somehow averting what increasingly appears as inevitable.

For the longest time, I lived out of my backpack. For well over a decade, I alternated between mooching space to throw my sleeping bag and renting rooms in houses and apartments from my friends. This was both a rejection of the 80s Risky Business through Cocktail lifestyle I had initially imagined for myself, nicely bookended by actor Tom Cruise, and the capitalist system that engendered it. My rationale was, while I don’t wish to speed our arrival at Fury Road, there isn’t much I can do to stop it beyond non-participation. That opinion has long since reversed.

As this blog documents, albeit spottily, upon occupying our smallholding, Brandi and I did practice a low-impact lifestyle, to the extent we could. But somewhere between then and now, my indulgent Eighties tendencies began to bleed through. It started with Legos and advanced from there, usually through the channel of buying for the lads things I myself desired. At this point it has reached expensive Premier League replica jerseys and tickets to the 2028 Olympics in LA. I, admittedly, very much want an electric Porsche Macan.

But as much as this is wish fulfillment and keeping up with the Joneses, it is equally a symptom of my impulse to accelerate the crisis. I don’t actually want to live this way - it causes me immense amounts of undue stress to continuously engage in a manner that is antithetical to my values - but there are no incentives to do otherwise. Send my sons to school in haggard second-hand clothes and listen to other people’s stories from their World Cup experience, with the only reward being an alienating sense of self-righteousness? I think I’ll take the Road.

It was this surrender that motivated my buying the plane tickets to Winnipeg that caused the glacial collapse in Nepal. People will say, oh you didn’t cause that, but they are wrong. I did, along with every one of my peers in the global 1%, which includes basically anyone reading, or having the ability to read, this blog. As Robinson foretold, these are the catastrophes that will become commonplace, slowly at first, as Hemingway said, then all at once. And they are the direct consequence of the lives we are living right now.

The Cobra Effect

noreply@blogger.com (Cobey Williamson) — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 22:09:00 +0000

In 1989, I saw the film Say Anything, and my whole life changed. I was 17, going into my senior year of high school, and inhabiting a purgatory much more capricious than that of the film’s cavalier lead. John Cusack’s Lloyd Dobler gave voice to the sense of purposelessness I felt.

“I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.”

For me, it wasn’t kickboxing. I was really into car stereos. Hooking up boom was when I was most content. But what I truly wanted to be was a novelist. I just didn’t know how.

Any dream I had along those lines was battered into flotsam one random day in English 101. I was attending the University of Idaho, simply because that is where my girlfriend went and they offered WUE tuition. I was sitting there minding my own business while the professor lectured us about how to write a proper cover letter. Now this, she said, is an example of what not to do. And I sat there bewildered as she began to recite a firsthand account of my childhood.

“I live in a trailer without running water or electricity in the forest of northwest Montana where I raise my four boys.”

It wasn’t my perspective, but it absolutely was my life, so after class I stopped the professor and in the most surreal daze asked her who the author of that letter was. At first she resisted, citing confidentiality concerns, but finally relented when I told her I was utterly certain it was my mom. And it was.

For the longest time, in keeping with Lloyd’s imperative and my reading of the Tao and the Gospel of Matthew, I pursued a practice of non-participation. I worked only as much as I had to, taking seasonal gigs in various non-skilled labor roles and spending the rest of my time playing basketball, studying philosophy and political economy, watching re-runs of Northern Exposure, and reasoning at groundings. Of course, one can only go so far in eschewing modern civilization, so I was supported in this exercise by my friend’s family, who fed me and provided me a place to sleep. It sufficed for several years, but the winter of 1996-97, which buried Troy in feet of snow for what felt like eternity, made remaining there untenable.

That spring, I got a job at a tree nursery in Bonners Ferry, the hardest work I have ever done in my life. In August, I signed on with a farmer there and harvested wheat. With money in my pocket, I was thrilled to receive a phone call from my brother asking if I wanted to share an apartment in Missoula.

I spent shy of two years there, working random jobs and slowly reintegrating with society. I still maintained a largely ascetic lifestyle, but I participated. As 1999 opened, I had even found something I wanted to do.

For many years, I had thought that working outdoors with people, as a whitewater or mountain guide, would be something I could do that aligned with my values. A harrowing near miss that found me rocketing down a snowfield in the Bob Marshall had largely quelled this interest, yet that general arena still offered a glimmer of light. The path coalesced around a position with the Montana Conservation Corps in Kalispell leading work crews of “at-risk” youth.

As part of that program, I had the good fortune to receive basic wildland firefighter training from the local Montana DNRC Land Office. This wasn’t the first time. In 1990, I had joined a pick up crew formed by the Kootenai National Forest, although we never actually made it to a fire. In 1994, I spent 21 days living along the shore of Lake Koocanusa in a massive fire camp, working in the Supply Unit. And in 1996, I spent the summer serving as the lookout on Richard’s Peak overlooking the Thompson River drainage.

Fighting forest fires has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. As I like to say when introducing myself at agency trainings or meetings, my first fire assignment was in 1977 as a Junior Forest Ranger on Blue Mountain Lookout, where my dad was staffing the 80 foot tall steel tower. Some of my earliest memories include him leaving to fight fire on the Olympic Peninsula, and I recall his excitement as he shared the story behind some photographs he had taken of air tanker drops. Later, after we had moved to Montana permanently, he made the cover of a California newspaper, standing in the chow line with other members of a Kootenai crew to receive Thanksgiving dinner during the Siege of ‘87.

Wildfire was ever present but always in the background, but as the millennial clock rolled over into the year 2000, I seized on a thought. 1988 had been a huge fire year in the Northern Rockies. Again, in 1994. It appeared these things came around on a six-year cycle. If you want to make money, I started telling people, get on a fire crew. 2000 is going to be epic.

When we had completed our training with the Kalispell Unit, the fire forester, a lean, stoic man whose pulaski swing I’ve yet to see bested, informed us that, if we wanted a job on the fire crew, we should be sure to apply. “We’ve had good luck with MCC folks,” he said. By April, I was signed on as a first-year nozzleman. And by October, I had found my niche.

There is a lot about wildland firefighting that appeals to me. The nature of the work, especially in the initial attack sphere, aligns with my personality - nothing for long periods, then go, go, go. Right about the time I would be completely fed up with it, and would have quit another job, they laid me off. There is a team dynamic and potential for catastrophe. But most importantly, at least for me, it fulfills Lloyd Dobler’s directive - other than consuming vast quantities of gasoline and Gatorade, fighting wildfires doesn’t really do anything.

Or so I thought.

By the time I was working permanent full time, now the assistant manager at Missoula Interagency Dispatch Center for the Southwestern Land Office of the Montana DNRC, I had begun to see something was amiss. Since I had started fighting fire routinely in 2000, fire seasons had become more regular and substantial. The six year cycle was broken, with the Northern Rockies experiencing severe fire in 2003 and again in 2007. Sitting in Missoula Dispatch, where I oversaw the initial attack operations, I began to note that, every year, we had to put out fire in the same spot, until finally there was a day when we couldn’t catch it.

The forest wanted to burn.

In the mid-2010s, it was basically accepted knowledge that fire suppression in fire-adapted landscapes was not only futile, but actually counter-productive. However, almost no one was willing to put that knowledge into practice. In my agency, the reason was clear - the DNRC was the protecting agency, but we didn’t own the land. We had to put the fire out. But I got crosswise with the then Lolo National Forest Fire Staff Officer one day for questioning why we were dumping mud on a new fire at the edge of the Bob Marshall Wilderness in a relatively wet year, suppressing a fire that should clearly be let go.

I had, at this point, made it my mission to catch every fire. Some of this was rooted in my inherent competitiveness, and some was overcompensation for being stuck in dispatch. I learned how effective fighting fire from the desk could be while working on the Kootenai in 2007, where the Fire Staff had not only given me license but directed me to order 2 tankers and a lead and immediately launch air attack at the first report of smoke. While the neighboring forests all picked up at least one large fire, the biggest in our zone was less than 200 acres. I was sold on a robust, pre-planned initial response.

But after the third Alder Creek fire up Sawmill Saddle, I was beginning to have my doubts.

A huge part of why I liked fire was because it didn’t involve selling or buying or anything I associated with capitalism. Here was a collective enterprise, financed by society, with minimal externalities. Whether we caught the fire or didn’t catch the fire didn’t really make a difference in the big scheme of things. Success was really only predicated on whether everyone made it home. Still, as the years went by and the fires kept getting worse, a nagging skepticism began creeping in.

I quit the DNRC in 2017, and spent most of that season, the biggest since 2007, outside of fire. For the next six years, my involvement was limited to taking 14-day assignments as an AD, basically an at-will worker for the Forest Service, traveling to dispatch centers around the country as an initial attack and aircraft dispatcher. However, in 2023, the Dispatch Center Manager on the Bitterroot opened up, a position I had long wanted. I applied and was hired.

What excited me most about the position, other than its proximity to home and supervisory capacity, was that the Bitterroot National Forest was engaged in an ambitious program of prescribed fire work aimed at returning the forest to a more historical fire interval. The 2024 fire season, while difficult and challenging, trying to keep the center functioning with a revolving door of trainees, was rewarding for the number of acres we got treated. We left a ton of fire on the landscape, and it burned till November.

Even so, something wasn’t sitting right.

Fire season in 2025 saw a reversal of fortunes. The new Chief of the Forest Service under the Trump Administration immediately called for a return to a full suppression posture, and the Bitterroot dutifully obliged. The summer saw us staffing fires in goat rocks with rappellers and jumpers that, more than likely, would have gone out by themselves. Looking out the window at the mountains, I felt more and more that this wasn’t for me.

It wasn’t until early in February of 2026 that I finally understood why.

At Christmas, my sister-in-law and I got into a conversation about books, leading to her stating that she loathed when someone gave her a book, because she knew it was going to the bottom of an already too-large stack, which would only make her feel guilty for not reading it. I tended to agree. My reading list is always a half-dozen books deep, and those are only the contemporary titles, saying nothing of all the classics and foundational sci-fi I hope someday to read. In light of that conversation, it was funny then when she ended up giving me a book.

I have read all of the fire books - The Great Burn, all of John Maclean’s work, and, of course, the progenitor of the genre, Young Men and Fire. At first glance, this title, When It All Burns, seemed like more self-congratulatory hype in the vein of Murray Taylor’s Jumping Fire. I was actually dreading having to read it. But a Basic CISM course in Coeur d’Alene provided the perfect opportunity to orient myself to the upcoming season with a book about fire.

Through my ongoing inquiry, I was very much aware of the fact that capitalism cannot abide subsistence. People who can produce their own sustenance from common land have no need of wages. Although the Enclosures had begun as early as the 13th Century, it wasn’t until they were codified by the Inclosure Act of 1773 that their service to industrialization was fully realized. Now having land meant paying rent, and very few could afford to do so. The resulting displacement fed the ranks of working poor the burgeoning factories required.

In the New World, this process proved even more sinister. Page by page, enthralled, anthropologist and author Jordan Thomas laid out a history of fire suppression as purposefully employed to deny native Americans subsistence as the killing of the buffalo. I was stunned. In trying to avoid participating in this system of oppression, I had inadvertently stumbled into serving its primary weapon.

When I was driving combine on the wheat farm, I was struck multiple times by how my mind would rebel against the work. Here I was, doing the single most important thing a modern person can do, making bread, and yet I still wanted to be free of it. For all its convenience, I don’t believe humans were ever meant to be industrialized, for the very reasons of alienation that Marx ascribed. The industrialization of fire suppression makes an already questionable practice all the more objectionable.

There must be something productive that I can do. I’m not sure what that is, and until then, fire will have to suffice, although I am going to seek to limit my engagement to supporting large fires, the ones that already got away, rather than trying to catch them. And I still subscribe to the message Lloyd Dobler was trying to impart. I’m not selling anything, but I’m not buying it either.

Panels Versus Plants

noreply@blogger.com (Cobey Williamson) — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 14:23:00 +0000

Let me be clear. The only true solarpunk is tending plants. It isn't solar panels and electrification. That's simply industrialization of the sun. Mining, smelting, and forging are not solar in any real sense of the term. Neither are they punk.

That said, I'm a big fan of solarpunk.

Why should be readily apparent. I live in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, which only averages 158 sunny days per year, well below the U.S. average of 205 days. The sun, in addition to improving my mood, powers photosynthesis, which miraculously turns solar energy into mass that can sustain animals both directly and indirectly, as in the grass-fed beef that gets us through the long winter. It drives the evaporation and transpiration that leads to the snow and rainfall that recharges the Bitterroot's water cycle, providing us with drinking water and irrigation for our pasture, orchard, and garden. In other words, the sun is crucial.

My neighbor Todd is a perfect foil. Although we have known him and his family since 2016, he and I really got to be friends during the pandemic, when we would take long walks along the county road on which we live. Todd is a tinkerer, and he is constantly engaged with projects. Whereas I tend to theorize on many subjects, Todd is hands on with them. While I was reading and learning about the societal potential of blockchain and cryptocurrency, Todd was building a mining rig in his crawlspace. He didn't really care what the point of the crypto he was mining was; mining it covered his electric bill and gave him something to tinker with.

Todd's most recent project is a photovoltaic solar system to power his house. I'll try to follow up with some of the specifics on the system he installed but suffice to say he has a smart inverter that is grid tied so that he can access electricity from the grid when necessary and operate independently when the power goes down. It's a wicked cool set-up, if a bit too complicated for my tastes, and I'm truly jealous.

When we started this conversation half a decade ago, Todd asked when I was going to get solar panels. He knows I'm an independent type, keen on self-sufficiency, and into that sort of thing. At the time, our vehicles consisted of a Chevy 4x4, a Honda Civic, and a Volvo XC90, so I explained to him that, having done the math, I was prioritizing an electric car over solar. It was Todd himself who had first begun seriously looking at EVs, and he was constantly cracking me up with his admitted "range anxiety".

The population of the Pacific Northwest enjoys access to relatively cheap hydroelectric power. Todd and I are served by the Ravalli Electric Co-operative, and our rates are some of the lowest in the nation. Nearly 60% of the electricity he and I use comes from hydroelectric, produced by dams that were built before I was born and are thus, if we exclude the environmental externalities, some of the cleanest energy sources in the United States. This means that buying an electric car would "green up" my transportation footprint while reducing my financial outlay, assuming that the EV was replacing one of our ICE vehicles that would otherwise need a major overhaul, which they all did (as I've noted in this blog before, the cleanest vehicle is the one you already own - drive it till it drops).

Admittedly, Todd bought an EV before his solar system, but I beat him to it. I also wonder whether the things we do on our smallholding - keep goats and chickens, maintain a garden and orchard, constantly plant shrubs and trees - are more solarpunk than Todd's solar panel-powered suburbia. Considering the hydropower we have access to and the limited sun we receive, photovoltaic solar seems more prepper than punk. Not that I won't be getting some of my own, especially now that Todd has done all the work to spec out the ideal system; only that it's down the list from grapes, blueberries, and more bur oak.

End of an Era

noreply@blogger.com (Cobey Williamson) — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 01:01:00 +0000

Isis is gone.

She bookends an era. It began with Kona, my first Siberian.

She was black, with a white diamond where her neck met her shoulders and a white mask that was like a reverse widow's peak. The next one looked almost identical, which is how she came to me - the folks at the doggie daycare thought she was Kona. They were both such great dogs that, after watching an episode of Nova about Russian experiments with foxes, I decided I wanted two intact dogs that would throw more of the same. That is how I came to get Tensaw, and Isis as well. I wanted to recreate Kona.

What I came to understand is that there is never a dog like your first one.

But the postulate that this particular set of markings is indicative of other desirable qualities was absolutely true. The black and white, blue-eyed Siberian Husky is the best of the breed.

Vaya con dios, mi corazon.

What Makes a Husky Soul?

noreply@blogger.com (Cobey Williamson) — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 20:40:00 +0000

Last night I realized that I may soon be without a husky. Admittedly, we do still have five of them, but Isis is not long for this world, the three remaining Saws will be twelve this year, and Vaxie is more timid lap dog than Siberian. We can leave the gate open and she won't even look to escape.

I've thought about getting another, but nothing will ever replace those first ones. That is something I've learned from all this, at least. We thought about breeding Vaxie and Bucksaw, and that is still on the table if she happens to come into heat before he turns twelve (AKC will not register a litter if the sire is older than 12 years), but I'm losing interest. I'd love a dog out of Bucksaw, but Vaxie has not impressed me. It may say Siberian Husky on her certificate, but she does not exhibit the qualities I treasure in the breed.

These days, I'm inclined toward the Cursinu, a French working dog from the island of Corsica. I am in discussions with a breeder in France, and I am seriously considering adopting one. The breed exhibits many of the same traits I appreciate in the Siberian, along with a degree of obedience and loyalty that the other typically does not have.

Technically, the term "husky" refers not to the Siberian specifically but to any dog bred to work in the northern latitudes. The preeminent Alaskan Husky is really a mutt, with varying degrees of native Alaskan dog ancestry tempered with genes from any number of other breeds, predominantly Eurohounds today. Siberian dogs were first brought to Nome, Alaska by the Russian fur trader William Goosak, but the breed we know today as the Siberian Husky owes its existence to Jafet Lindeberg, one of the founders of Nome. Lindeberg acquired a number of puppies and gave them to Leonard Seppala, who, along with Elizabeth Ricker, a New England musher and afficionado of the Siberian, created the kennel at Poland Spring, Maine that established the line of dogs now recognized by the AKC.

I say this to make the point that perhaps I don't need to own a Siberian Husky to have a Husky soul. Maybe what drew me to the Siberian was that I am a Husky myself. We share similar attributes - vocal, independent, endowed with endurance - so it seems plausible. There is even some science to back it up.

But even if that really is true, I'm in no hurry to see it realized. I would have been perfectly happy had Kona and Blue lived forever.

A Continuously Evolving Paradigm

noreply@blogger.com (Cobey Williamson) — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 18:28:00 +0000

This is my favorite blog, even if the regularity with which I update it makes it seem otherwise. In contrast to a fine wine, the quality of the writing has declined with age, but like that particular vintner who first revealed to you the enchantment of the grape, I still love it. Even if it is only a cheap merlot.

We've been forced to accept that to try to push back against the tide of ecological irresponsibility is nothing more than an act of self-flagellation. The entire system is aligned against such behavior. It actively discourages it. Doing the right thing equates to punishment, if you're fortunate enough to find a way to the do the right thing in the first place.

I've somewhat adopted the attitude assigned to the so-called Gen Z, that of "nihilistic optimism". I disguise it under the cloak of no longer forcing my family to uphold my values, of allowing them to decide for themselves what they desire their ecological footprint to be. But it is, at least to a certain extent, a giving up on my part. Sans a total commitment, living as the unhoused, for example, or outright rebellion, there is nothing to be gained by green incrementalism. It is merely delaying the inevitable.

Not that I am giving up entirely. We continue to work our smallholding, support the local food system, buy organic cotton clothing, and minimize the throughput of plastic on our account. But I've abandoned the fantasy that such activities are more akin to living as homesteaders than an average middle income household. And it's clear that no degree of incremental mitigation is going to stave off the impending catastrophe.

One facet of green capitalism that I've latched onto with both hands, however, is electrification. It makes sense for those of us living in Nch’i-Wàna, with our abundance of hydropower. The electricity it produces offers the potential for the highest sustainable standard of living, assuming the rest of the thermodynamic equation can be approximately balanced.

Montana residences consume more energy per capita than any other state. That doesn't include transportation, a category in which we still rank in the top 15, owing to the long distances that separate our communities from one other and the manufacturers of the world. Our cold climate does not allow for much to be done to reduce the amount of CO2 produced in heating our homes, as air-source heat pumps only go so far while ground-source, the ideal solution, is prohibitively expensive. But knowing that we are going to continue commuting to work, driving kids to sports practice, and traveling for competitions, the highest return on our mitigation dollar is in obtained by spending it on electrifying our transportation.

This spring, we bought Brandi a new Kia Niro plug-in hybrid. The greenest car is the one you can hold onto the longest, a point my brother Dagan often makes in comparing his oil-burning early 60s Volkswagen to a new Tesla, but Brandi's old car, a 2005 Honda Civic unusual in that its engine only lasted 200k miles, didn't make sense to repair given its age and the cost of replacement.

The compact plug-in hybrid SUV is the car every household in the rural west should be issued. It serves every need and is incredibly efficient. Brandi is able to complete her commute and get the boys to their extra-curricular engagements on an overnight charge from our Juicebox home charging station. When we have to travel beyond the Niro's 30 mile electric range, the car averages 45 miles per gallon.

I was so taken by the Niro that I bought a second one, this one a used 2020 full EV. While its sub-200 mile real range makes the prospect of it serving as a rural household's only automobile untenable, as a second commuter, if needed, it can't be beat. The 2019-2021 model years are particularly enticing, considering that low mile, one owner examples can still be found for less than the $25000 cutoff to qualify for the federal tax credit and even the lowest EX trim level comes fully equipped. Just be sure to get the optional Cold Weather package if you live north of the 45th parallel.

While the book is yet to be written on whether battery electric vehicles prove less environmentally harmful than their internal combustion powered cousins, they beat them hands down otherwise, for every use case involving distances less than 200 miles. The driving experience is sublime, if arguably not as engaging as an air-cooled Porsche 911 or fire-breathing V8 from Detroit. Combined with a high-speed electric rail system and adequate bicycle infrastructure, electric vehicles have the power to utterly transform the paradigm in personal transportation without sacrificing the North American's continued desire for total mobility.

Tumblewater

noreply@blogger.com (Cobey Williamson) — Mon, 27 Sep 2021 16:51:00 +0000

I have to admit, I've been struggling.

I had intended this to be an update about where things stand on the smallholding, but I find myself caught in tumblewater and unable to think in such simple terms. Tumblewater is the term for the churn below a falls in a river or in breaking surf, where you get caught and tossed about until you don't which way is up or how to get out. Fight though you might, it just holds you there, no matter how hard you try, rolling you over and over until it saps the life from you and finally, sometimes after a very long while, spits you out.

Still, as I sit here, Isis is lying curled up in the driveway, the rising morning sun on her face, the dew sparkling on the grass in the pasture beyond. Keegan's cat, Russell Wilson, a creature obviously raised by wild boys hell bent on destroying everything in our home (he has a particular affinity for annihilating Brandi's house plants), is crying in the background. Every so often I can hear Tensaw snoring softly. He is the epitome of senile and spends the bulk of his time sleeping under the truck and the rest baying at any of the other dogs that dare come too near him.

It's remarkable how able the dogs are at finding their spots, the place it is they are meant to occupy. Of course, once they have found their spot, one can argue it is simple reinforcement that accounts for why they return there, but this doesn't at all explain why they choose their particular spot to lay in the first place. It brings to mind one of my favorite passages in The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castenada. Don Juan directs Carlos to find his spot, the place in the house where Carlos is supposed to sit, the place where, when Carlos is seated there, all the present forces come into balance. As is typical of his teaching style, Don Juan gives this direction, then promptly leaves without further instruction. Carlos, confused as always as how he is to accomplish this, hits upon the idea of rolling back and forth across the floor. After awhile, he notices that one spot feels more "right" to him than the others. When Don Juan returns some time later, Carlos has found his proper place, which he continues to occupy thereafter.

I've been having a hard time gauging whether or not I'm in the right place. I've been trying to follow the signs, let the path show itself to me, which was a goal of mine for the year, but all I really feel is discombobulated. I've become acutely aware that I've lost touch with the Tao, that I've been chasing things in the material world rather than addressing the spirits of which they are merely artifacts. It happened when the boys came. Some kind of paternal instinct kicked in, and I more or less lost my mind. Now that they are essentially self-sufficient, I have somewhat come to my senses, and I am more confused than ever.

Okanagan, the breeding female we obtained from Mark Nardin, is gone. In her place is a new pup out of Tumnatki Siberians, Vaxie. I've come to realize that, as obnoxious as it may sometimes be, I can probably never live without the howl of a pack of huskies. It is a bridge connecting me with the ways of the past and the spirit world that I otherwise find missing. I often whine to Brandi that I want to move away to some place a bit more like-minded, but I could never do it if it meant giving up the sound of canines howling in the distance.

Fall is here, and winter fast approaching. I am attending classes at the University of Montana, which is a story unto itself, and the lads are running cross-country. From their performance, it is clear they suffer a lack of confidence, an affliction that can surely be lain at my feet. It drives me literally crazy to witness. Despite my despotic efforts, I have largely failed in my attempt to prepare them. For, like my dream of occupying a seat at the Round Table, my energy has been misdirected and applied, counter productively, in all the wrong places.

I am looking to acquire some goats. The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the pace at which it feels the world is falling apart, and I am doing things aimed at increasing our resilience. It seems as though reducing your footprint and building soil are the only two things we should be doing right now, but they don't appear to be getting much attention. It's a source of consternation in our household, how to resolve what the world needs with what it requires. Most likely, the goats will be a total disaster. When I fenced the area where I plan to put them, I chose the wrong kind of fencing. I should have strung No-Climb but unwittingly went with field fence instead. It was cheaper, and it seemed to be what everyone else with goats and sheep had. But now that our chickens are freeranging in the neighbor's yard, I have realized my mistake. Every man is an island in this day and age, but, when it comes to the Bitterroot, only fencing separates the Dominican Republic from Haiti.

Mitigation has given way to adaptation, which is something I used to consider myself pretty adept at. Now I just find myself stuck in the tumblewater, caught between the need to adapt and a raging desire to see us intervene on our own behalf. My friends tell me that work begins and ends with ourselves, but I can't be sure they're not merely regurgitating some misconstrued form of American individualism at me. For one, the math doesn't really add up, because some people seem to have an outsized effect on the world, affecting outcomes that I don't believe could be achieved with the attention focused only inward. Still, no matter what the case, one thing is absolutely certain - nothing gets done when you're stuck in the tumblewater.

Extinction Rebellion Isn’t About Climate Change

noreply@blogger.com (Cobey Williamson) — Sun, 17 Jan 2021 22:04:00 +0000

It is funny how the universe delivers us all the right things. Or perhaps it is just our penchant for recognizing patterns that makes it seem so. In either case, it is remarkable how often the signals come through the noise exactly when we need them to.

Only recently I began thinking how the outcries around climate change and mass extinction were actually manifestations of a greater longing, that of a need to transcend our previous modes of social organization — tribes and kingdoms, empires and nation-states — to create a new, planetary entente, one that treated the rest of life on earth, not as competitors, but as fellow stakeholders in a common enterprise.

Then I came across this:

“Such problems both require and provide opportunities for learning new ways of problem solving as a global society.”

It was in a paper titled “Carbon dioxide from fossil fuels” by Kan Chen, Richard C. Winter, and Michael K. Bergman, published December 1980 in the journal Energy Policy. I would never have known anything about it were it not for the fact that Google served a Scientific American article that referenced it up to me. The first two sentences of the abstract alone are enough to make one place their head in their hands and weep.

If present scientific information is reasonable, the world is likely to experience noticeable global warming by the beginning of the next century if high annual growth rates of fossil fuel energy use continue. Only with optimistic assumptions and low growth rates will carbon-dioxide-induced temperature increases be held below 2°C or so over the next century.

I first heard the term ‘global warming’ in January 1990. We were just pulling into the small town in northwestern Montana where I grew up, having spent the holidays visiting my father’s family in southern California. My brother Jeb, an avid skier, was looking out the window of the ragged Ford van my dad’s band used to haul their equipment around, his profile silhouetted by the reddish glow of high pressure sodium lights. There was hardly any snow.

“God damn global warming,” he said. I was stunned. I had never heard him swear.

Global warming. I didn’t know what it was, precisely, but I had heard it mentioned enough times, had collected enough data somewhere in the back of my mind, that I understood what he was referring to. But I was 17, and much more concerned with getting together with my girlfriend after being gone for ten days than how much snow was on the ground, or why. I believed in peak oil and thought that would be the first catastrophe that our petroleum fueled economy would visit upon us. Cars were woven into the very fabric of American society, especially for a teenage boy growing up in rural Montana in the latter part of the 20th Century, and there was no reason to expect we would abandon them.

But still. My brother’s words haunted me. Global warming. He seemed so sure of it.

My brother Jeb is a scientist, and he doesn’t talk much. When he does, he is usually correct, at least in the sense that he has his facts straight. Unlike me, he doesn’t draw many conclusions. Once, I asked him to make a judgement on a matter of ecology, one that he had been studying for the previous five or so years. His response: “Need more data.”

As it turned out, he was correct in attributing the lack of snow to global warming. Not only that, he was referencing a scientific theory that was already a decade old, at the very least, a well-documented one that had very little need for ‘more data’. This wasn’t knowledge I should have had some vague recollection of. It was a fundamental law of physics underlying the current, past, and future existence of life on earth.

And yet I still don’t think that global warming is what this is really all about.

(By the way, I don’t call it climate change, and I don’t think it was a good idea to pivot away from the original term. Climates change. The issue at hand is that the earth is warming, beyond that narrow (Overton, for those buzzwordy among us) window for which the current crop (yes, I did that deliberately) of life forms on earth is adapted, which will likely cause another ice age following a brutal period of excessive heat. I don’t know if changing it was a PR play on the part of the science community or a psyop on the part of the sequestered energy industry, but, in either case, we should go back to global warming. And we should repurpose Nancy Reagan’s infamous ‘Brain on Drugs’ ad in doing so. “This is the Earth. This is the Earth on sequestered energy.”)

There was a time, when we lived as tribes, that, should you range too far from the group alone, you stood a high likelihood of encountering another tribe and being either captured or killed. Later, that fear expanded to include assault by army or boat, culminating in the threat of a thermonuclear weapon (or precision drone strike) incinerating you without your ever even knowing it was there.

Somewhere in the middle of all that (right around that atomic bomb point, in fact), that fear went from being a valid one, to being absurd.

There is never going to be another global conflagration. I have said this elsewhere, and you may tire of hearing it, but I will never tire of saying it. They aren’t my words, I borrow them from Dwight D. Eisenhower, who presided over the last great war to end all wars. A cliche, except this time, it really was.

“The only way to win the next world war is to prevent it.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower at a rally in the Civic Auditorium, Seattle, Washington, October 17, 1956

During World War Two, and certainly throughout every single conflict we engaged in since, we traded with our enemy. What this means, in an economic sense, is that this wasn’t a war that needed fighting.

Fast forward to today, and we are so entangled in a web of global supply chains and overseas markets that a world war would not only be unthinkable, but infeasible. Who would ally with and supply whom, and to what end? And who would fight it?

In times past, we were limited in our knowledge of the world outside our own by a singular limiting factor, the horizon. We had notions about what was on the other side of the mountains or the sea, but the only way to test their validity was to physically move beyond that horizon. Today, we not only know what is on the other side of the Pacific Ocean (it’s Asia, in case you were wondering. I just looked on Google Earth), we can observe it remotely in real time, or at least get eyewitnesses accounts (the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming — they should be there in 18 hours or so).

“What we do not understand, we fear. What we fear, we judge as evil. What we judge as evil, we attempt to control. What we cannot control … we attack.”
— Author unknown

The thing is, we understand just about everything, at least about what’s lurking over the hill. Thus, we have nothing to fear, nothing to control, nothing to attack. The Chinese or Russians have no more need to fear our attacking them than we do their attacking us. Again, the preeminent Dwight D. Eisenhower:

I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.

Which brings us back to global warming. Our concerns about global warming are as much about the potential for it to shake this final and tenable peace as they are about its very real physical dangers. That existential threat — of crop failures or an outbreak of some virulent pandemic — posed by climate change is real, but the potential for violent conflict brought on by fears arising from that threat, aroused or otherwise, even more so.

But does that mean we should arm ourselves and prepare to defend our shrinking coastlines, flooded crop lands, and drying wells from hordes of climate refugees fleeing even worse off places? Or better yet, launch a preemptive strike and rid the world 3 billion CO2 spewing East Asians? I realize there are voices in the crowd, loud ones, crazy ones even, that say ‘yes, that, exactly’. But the answer is no.

What we need to do, have to do — what I would argue we truly long to do — is reach out, despite our fear of the unknown (because we can never really know what is going on in the minds of people halfway around the world, even with the technological wizardry of CNN and the International Space Station at our fingertips), and extend the olive branch of peace to say, “we understand that we share this world with you and we want to figure out how we can best do that”.

This, more than anything, is what is driving movements such as Sunrise and Extinction Rebellion and whatever similar such movements in Russia and cloistered China and the Muslim world call themselves. The concern isn’t with global warming. It can’t be; we’ve had 40 years to do something about that and have done nothing but make it worse. The concern is with missing the opportunity to finally free ourselves from the fear and distrust and competition that have so long shackled us and to begin crafting a collaborative commonwealth that does justice to the magnificent gift that is planet earth and the existence of life upon it.

The rebellion isn’t about stopping climate change, even though that has become the latest in its rallying cries. The rebellion is much older than that, easily dating back to the times of Christ and Buddha, probably to the very dawn of civilization itself. It is an expression of our collective desire to move beyond these governments, these oligarchs, these nationalists, these fascists, these cultural norms and primeval instincts, to realize our true nature and answer the call for love and kinship that resounds within us.

A Lot Can Happen In A Lifetime

noreply@blogger.com (Cobey Williamson) — Fri, 09 Oct 2020 12:28:00 +0000

It has literally been a lifetime since I updated this blog.

Betty’s Isis of ByDog, the Siberian Husky who was a puppy when last I posted, just turned 10 years old. The command leader I spoke about, the one we were going to get from Mark Nardin, dotters about the yard like an old grandma walking around the mall. She is fifteen and could go at any moment, and would, were it not for the key to her longevity, doggie yoga. We have lost Kona, Blue, and Paluk, two of those tragically. Tensaw, as Brandi puts it, has lost his marbles, but at twelve is still as spry and energetic and talkative as he ever was. He has lost the habit of sitting atop things, preferring to yell at his kids to stay off the lawn or curl up in one of his three spots and mutter to himself.

His progeny, the ones we call the puppies or, alternately, the Crazies, are seven. There are four of them - Buck, Jig, Whip, and Buzz. In the tradition of sled dog kennels, we named the litter after a theme, in our case, types of saws, in honor of Tenny. Together with Flier, a rejected intact male we acquired from the kennel of Kim and Kelly Berg, they make up Brandi’s race team. Buzz does not race, having been afflicted with seizures. He still likes to run, but cannot maintain the level of fitness that the others have, and the heat seems to trigger his Grand Mals.

Of all the losses, besides Kona, the cat was the most painful. Her name was Montana, but we mostly just called her Cat or Kitty. She was odd, as cats typically are, but she was terribly sweet and important to me. She quit eating for some reason while we were away at Brandi’s parents’ over Christmas last year and went 70 days without food before succumbing. I miss her immensely.

We have another feline, Priscilla, the barn cat, who guards the metric ton of dog food we keep in the Sled Shed from the hordes of mice that had been decimating it before we got her. She thinks she is a husky and she torments Okanogan, the old lead dog who is now nearly deaf and blind, by being constantly underfoot, but refuses to come inside, even though she wants to. Only the old dogs tolerate her, the others all want to make her lunch. Tenny and Isis got into her once, when we forgot to lock her in the Sled Shed before letting them out. They tore into her pretty good, but she is a scrapper and, ultimately, recovered, seemingly none the worse off for it. The experience certainly didn’t lessen her love for the puppas, although she is wary enough of the younger dogs to seek refuge under the deck now whenever we mistakenly let them out in the yard together.

As is nearly always the case, Isis has lived up to her namesake. The terrorist group was not even a thing when we christened her, at least not in mainstream media, but she has certainly lived up to the title. She was a terrible fit for our kennel, wanting only to be a single dog and a family pet, and we would have found her a more appropriate home long ago were it not for the fact that Keegan refuses to allow it. She is a horribly spiteful and jealous creature, barking ceaselessly when the other dogs are running or playing, but utterly fearless and unwilling to ever back down, even when she knows she’s outmatched. Shyla, Tank’s sister from Paluk’s litter, nearly killed her on one occasion, and Isis would have gone down fighting had I not been able to break it up. To her credit, despite being completely unfit for it, she has always sought to run and keep up with the team, and I have always respected her for that. Some of us with the will and desire simply weren’t gifted the athleticism.

Of all the mistakes I have made in the past 10 years, Isis is least among them. I have come to realize that life is actually all mistakes, in between mere survival. Those rare glimmers of success we enjoy are built upon mountains of wrong decisions, lessons learned, trial, error, and reiteration. Any experience to the contrary is really just luck or good fortune, whether that is being born into privilege or having a mentor to guide you.

I sold the tractor last week. I had forgotten I once called her Bertha. It was sad to see her go, and not only because I lost money on the transaction. I don’t do well with loss, and I get hung up on things easily. The tractor was a sound investment, even if I sold it for less than I paid for her. It is hard to fathom how much value there was in that machine. When it came off the lot some time around 1960, the sticker price was in the neighborhood of $3500. I paid $6500 for it in 2008, which means it was worth nearly twice as much, and that without even considering all the value it had provided in the course of its 40 year lifespan. I am definitely glad I bought the tractor, but I hardly made use of her anymore, so I thought it best I pass her along to someone else who would. I believe I made the right decision.

I got out of fire in 2017, although not really, because, like the Marines or the Mafia, once you join, you are in it forever. It’s an addiction really. You get addicted to the tension, and the ultimate release, when a fire breaks and all that anticipation floods out in a fury of action. And then it becomes a grind and you can’t wait for the season to end. It is much akin to the military in many ways, only you always have the option of retreat. I still work as an AD through the Bitterroot, going on assignments. This year I spent the months of August and September operating a remote, virtual expanded dispatch from my bedroom office. I have been promoting the concept for years, and it was fun to finally get the opportunity to test it in practice.

The property has changed, although coming back to this blog, I realize not as much as I had planned or would have liked. I went on a few detours along the way, disappearing down a rabbit hole of micro-distilled spirits and several other endeavors, that didn’t yield as much fruit, or at least not as quickly, as I had expected. It has been a remarkable learning experience, and I made a few new friends along the way, which is all anyone can really ask for.

We put a lot of effort into the place this year, however. We had come to the jarring realization about a year and a half ago that the house was well beyond due for a paint job. When the painter came by for the estimate, he said, “A paint job is the least of your worries,” and put his thumb through the siding. So one of last summer’s fire assignments went to replacing the bottom third of the siding. Lesson learned: water your lawn, not the side of your house.

Early this summer, the paint crew returned and prepped and sprayed it. We looked at a lot of options but, in the end, settled for a khaki because it was the color that clashed least with the roof. Brandi is certain there is no harder color to match than that of our roof, and she may well be right. We have never seen another house with a roof the color of ours painted anything other than khaki.

We also put in underground sprinklers around the lawn. I had plumbed the pasture with new irrigation piping last year and needed to get it buried anyway, so we said what the hell. It was a gift to Brandi for her birthday - no more dragging hoses around the yard and fighting with sprinklers while I’m gone on fires. It turned out to be a disaster, and we kind of regret it. Before, we watered the lawn with ditch water, and this system is connected to the well. The hum from the pump keeps me up at night, and that’s to say nothing of all the other problems that came along with the installation. Dealing with contractors often leaves me shaking my head. At least it will save us from watering the siding.

Our garden this year was outstanding, and, on top of all the wonderful produce, I seriously believe it saved my sanity. I would go out there at least once a day, sometimes just to stand and look at the plants. Tending a garden is the most important thing a person can do, in my opinion, after tending their family. I truly believe that.

Speaking of family, the boys … wow, it has been a long time. I only just hit upon the fact that Rohn had not even been conceived last I updated this blog. Well, they are boys now, and all that comes with it. I love them like crazy, but that’s a tale for another day. Rohn and I have to go pick up Keegan from cross-country practice.

Do We Have the Will to Change the World?

noreply@blogger.com (Cobey Williamson) — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 22:20:00 +0000

There is no love lost between the boomers and me. I couldn’t explain it better than this, so I recommend the read if you care to understand my reasons. But I have to give them credit for one thing. When it came right down to it and the game was on the line, they put their money where their mouth is and changed the fucking world.

It might be why they did little to impress afterward. Maybe they figured they had triumphed, that the revolution was complete. Maybe they felt they had done their part and deserved the rest. It must have been incredibly taxing, altering the human narrative as they did. Perhaps it took it all out of them.

1968 was the single most pivotal year in modern history, comparable only to 1945, the year when the boom began. For the boomers, at least the cohort I’m referring to, although many of the principal actors in ’68 were actually born years before, it was their Midway, their Stalingrad, their Ardennes, literally their Khe Sahn. It was a turning point in the war.

The list of achievements that year is too long to do it justice here — 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apollo 8, ASC II, hypertext, The Beatles’ White Album — a litany of innovations that defined the next 50 years. But none of them hold a candle to what was truly accomplished. For all of its subtext, Planet of the Apes doesn’t fully capture the political and social upheaval that marked 1968.

It’s telling that current Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, was sworn into that same office in 1968. The corollaries between that year and this — a conservative political climate committed to the restoration of “law and order”, black athletes protesting entrenched racism, a long standing American military occupation of foreign soil, nationalist politicians speaking out against immigration — are numerous enough to give pause. There is one marked difference, however. When the powers seeking to maintain the cultural and economic establishment they aimed to dismantle came out to crush them, rather than sit around and complain about the status quo, the boomers actually took to the streets and did something about it.

And they had every reason not to. One by one, the leaders of their movement, beginning with JFK in 1963, had been assassinated, often right before their eyes. Their government, society at large, even their parents, were all aligned against them. They were literally attacked, jailed, beaten, shot. And still they struggled on.

Compare that to today, when, faced with levels of inequality and injustice that rival the days of serfs and emperors, the best we can muster is a hashtag campaign on social media. It’s sad really. Every attempt at moving forward, at creating the level of fundamental shift such as the boomers achieved in 1968, is consumed from within, sold out before it can even begin to assume its true potential. Sure, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates went corporate, but only as a means for achieving their greater goal, that of enabling others. The money just followed. Gen X spent no time at all devolving the internet into a commodified caricature of its original intent. Those attending the current analogue, cryptocurrency and blockchain, with their arguably greater capacity for moving humanity into the next epoch of prosperity and enlightenment, didn’t even wait that long.

Could it be that we are incapable of such conviction? That this is one of those things, like so many others, that the boomers neglected to impart to us? Can we hope to regain the fortitude necessary to persist in the face of seemingly insurmountable social, economic and cultural forces, to endure suffering, almost certain failure, maybe death? Is it possible that, as they did in ’68, we need the boomers to take it to the streets, that we might actually need Joe Biden to show us the way?

The problem is, I don’t think they have it in them. And it’s not just my personal “hang-up” with the boomers, to borrow a term they popularized, that leads me to say this. They have told me so themselves.

“We really need the college students of today, and the Gen Xers of today, to take over the world, sooner rather than later,” climate scientist Dr. Steven Running informed me during a recent podcast interview. “Because I have to admit, my generation doesn’t have enough guts to make the changes, they’re too wed to the fossil fuel life, and I think we’re more of the problem then we’ll ever be the solution.”

Still, I wonder if we have the courage, or the skill set. Because, on this golden anniversary of the Year of Protests, the very same war rages on, and we’re not in the streets, and least not like the boomers were. We’re still wed to the same systems — political, social, economic — the majority of which are completely incongruous with our new global civilization, to say nothing of the ecosphere, and I see no indication that we’ll change. It’s clear that, as demonstrated by the successful memes of Brexit and MAGA, all we really want is for things to return to some romanticized vision of the past.

So now we’re putting it on the next generation to save us. But the trouble is, even if the college students of today were to heed Dr. Running’s exhortation, we’re asking them to do so while bound by a straitjacket. We make up the system, the framework, the infrastructure in which the millennials and their younger counterparts are forced to operate. Their generating the impulse necessary to change its momentum would be challenge enough even with our cooperation, let alone when half the available energy is either at rest or actively opposing it.

In other words, this is hard fucking work. No disrespect to Dr. Running, who is still in the trenches, but we’re going to need all hands on deck. Because, unlike the boomers, we’re not merely upending a prevailing culture. What we’re dealing with isn’t just a change in mindset, although that is still an important part of the equation. We literally have the entire apparatus supporting our existence to remake.

Prior to 1968, it was okay to treat people like second-class citizens. It was okay to exploit developing countries through imperialist policies and military action. Those practices were de rigueur. Post 1968, it’s no longer okay, but we continue doing so because our system requires it. And that system is what we have to change.

For all my personal animosity toward the boomers, I readily admit we’re indebted to them, and not just because they gave me life. They spawned an entirely new breed of idealism, one that advanced the notion of equality beyond de facto to make it a priori and then extended it to the rest of the living and non-living systems as well. They altered our very expectation of how the world should be. Quite unlike the virtual nihilism we practice today, the boomers actually believed they could make a difference, and, in 1968, did everything in their power to see that occur.

But this is 2018, not 1968, and it’s high time we manifest that expectation in reality and make incarnate the ideals that the boomers fought to enshrine. Arguments that these things take time or that we must work within the constraints of the current system are worse than denial or outright refusal, only serving to highlight the fact that, while we recognize the need for action, we intend to do nothing about it. Largely because doing something quite likely means enduring the personal discomfort, hardship, and pain that we are currently externalizing to someone else.

via Dollar Street

Our predicament only becomes all the more vexatious with the realization that there is no one to turn our anger on, no establishment to rail against, no others. In 1968, the battle lines were clear — a new and progressive counterculture united against the forces of an old guard overtly and conspicuously intent upon ensuring the continuation of its ways. Today, we are the establishment, begrudgingly upholding the status quo through a mix of fatalism, apathy, and the understanding that the only confrontation we can expect to have is with ourselves.

That is not to say there is not an established order, a prevailing modality that shouldn’t be assailed and dismantled with the same ardent fervor and resolve as the boomers afforded segregation. There is. It just isn’t going to present itself in the form of us against them. This time around, it is us against ourselves.

Still, we shouldn’t fear the fight, if only to prove to the boomers that we are as capable of driving change in 2018 as they were in 1968. That the generation who tore down the Berlin Wall isn’t about to let another go up. That our policy of non-participation really was a calculated strategy, not a mere attempt at avoidance.

So what does the fight of 2018 look like in real terms? At its core, it revolves around our putting outcome and purpose back in the driver seat and relegating the pursuit of profit to an impetus, rather than an end unto itself. More concretely, it’s about devising solutions to fundamental problems rather than those created by our failure to do so or our desire for distraction. And it means coming to terms with the fact that we really are one unified global community, no matter if we want to be or not.

There is absolutely no chance that we are not moving beyond this present state. It is inevitable and, at the current rate of change, will happen sooner than we think. The only matter up for debate is whether we want that future to resemble a scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation or one from Soylent Green. It’s a catechism we cannot avoid, and, it fact, the question has already been posed. About that, there is nothing we can do. Determining the answer, however, is entirely up to us.

Always Something

noreply@blogger.com (Cobey Williamson) — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 20:35:00 +0000

Water continues to be the theme in Western Montana, which is good, because it is the most important thing. The grass is tall in the fields and the weeds high in the ditch. Some of the sow thistle between Silver Sage and here is over seven feet. I would have thought the mosquitoes would be worse, but so far they have hardly appeared at all.

The fire season has been nonexistent, which should translate into more free time, but it hasn’t. Most of the projects I had thought to accomplish haven’t even been started, let alone finished. We should get the rest of the dog yard fenced this Friday and that will be nice. The irrigation is flowing and just keeping up with the lawn using a borrowed reel mower is about all we can manage.

We had Melissa from the Ravalli County Weed District come by and identify all our succession vegetation for us. Mostly we got mustard. She did point out some Canada thistle, which we knew about, but she also noted that we had some field bindweed growing amongst the landscaping on the south side of the house. Everyone, even brother Jeb, makes an ugly face when I mention the field bindweed, so I tend to believe it will be hard to get rid of. Fortunately we haven’t seen it in the pasture yet, and I can only hope we don’t. The grass is relatively well established in there and healthy, always the best defense against invasion.

Melissa recommended we use Roundup on the mustard patch around the stable, on the two potentially harmful gigantor nightshade plants we discovered, and on the area where we found the field bindweed. I don’t much like the idea of using that stuff but I don’t know much about it. I asked around a bit and word on the street is that it is has no adverse effects on humans, nonetheless I’m rather hesitant. After a little Wikipedia indoctrination, I’m even more so.

I don’t see mustard as much of a threat, and the nightshade we may be able to beat back with a pair of trimmers. Our neighbor Rod down the road has offered to help us to spot spray the Canada thistle with some Milestone. Brandi dug up most of the sow thistle and a couple more seasons of that should take care of it. She also has been cutting seed heads off the Canada and I’ve been pulling the bindweed before it flowers in some attempt at control.

Getting out of the weeds a bit, the big news in our world is that Brandi has accepted a permanent position at Rocky Mountain Laboratory. That means we’ll be sticking around the Bitterroot for awhile, and I like the feel of it. It gives us the confidence to really invest ourselves in the smallholding and the community for the long term and allows us freedom to consider a greater range of possibilities. Now I can imagine working this place over the course of ten or twenty years. It’s exciting.

In the mean time I’ll just try to keep up with Keegan and the lawn mowing, which may have just got easier since the irrigation has quit again. Guess I shouldn’t have opened those valves in the pasture.

Ah, Peace & Quiet

noreply@blogger.com (Cobey Williamson) — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 21:35:00 +0000

It’s pretty quiet around our place. Not literally, of course, but in the sense that not much has happened as of late. In literal terms, it’s anything but quiet. Howling huskies, squalling pups, clucking hens, and a babbling baby all conspire to ensure that silence only occurs for short periods in the dead of night.

It’s winter, so our world revolves primarily around … dogs! A return to more seasonal weather had us headed up the West Fork again, where we found the recent cold snap and snowfall had vastly improved trail conditions. The dogs all ran well and little Icy got her first taste of the trace. Paluk’s pups are four weeks old and as cute as ever. I get endless enjoyment from asking Brandi which one of them she is going to keep.

“So, we can keep a puppy?”

“No. It’s just a thought experiment.”

“Oh.”

The chickens we got from our smokejumper bro Rogers haven’t been producing any eggs. They got a little traumatized by the inevitable dog v. chicken encounter which occurred the very first day we had them on the property, but they still offered up an egg a day for a week or so. Now they aren’t producing at all. I’ve asked around a bit and it seems they aren’t unique in this. My buddy Sells’ urban flock in Missoula isn’t producing either. He is running heat lamps and we aren’t, so that doesn’t seem to be a significant factor. I should do some more research online, but I will probably just wait until spring when the days get longer and things warm up and see what happens then.

Despite my best efforts, I have more or less come to grips with the fact that the dogs are going to take up a lot more space than I had originally imagined and that their presence is going to seriously hinder our ability to host other livestock. I’m really none too stoked to come walking out the back door to find four of them hanging from the neck of a shrieking sheep, so abstinence is the best policy there. I still maintain hope for a couple of weaner pigs and a cow, but I've finally accepted that flora may be more the focus than fauna in the near term.

I’ve been doing some reading about food forests and garden design and I’m pretty excited about planting some fruit trees and berry bushes this coming spring or fall. I’m thinking about taking a pretty loose approach to gardening this year and basically just throwing seeds wherever there is some bare dirt. I would really like to put some bulbs and native shrubs in as well, and I’m really interested in starting some hops on the fence around the dog yard. But as with everything, how much I can accomplish will largely depend on the availability of those two scarcities, time and money.

Keegan turned one last month and has become upwardly mobile. His favorite thing in the world is taking hold of a pair of fingers and marching back to the bathroom to fetch his toothbrush. He can crawl, pull himself up on the furniture, and stand no-handed for a half second, but he has a terrible habit of not going all the way to the ball and is always pulling up short and having to reach in. We’ve been working on fixing that.

A glorious thing about one year old Keegan is that he speaks. Not English, but a language that is entirely his own. He often sits there and rattles on to himself for minutes on end. You can’t understand a word of it, but he knows what he's saying. I don’t know where he got it but he’s quite the orator. He loves to spout off some longwinded tale and then finish with Keegan’s patented “I Approve” salute, which is always worthy of a laugh.

So that’s what I mean when I say it has been pretty quiet. No sonic booms or explosions. Just a dull roar.

Do They Not Teach Physics in School Anymore?

noreply@blogger.com (Cobey Williamson) — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 21:55:00 +0000

There is something that has been bothering me, and it isn’t the eight puppies that we need to find homes for, the hitch that I’ve noticed in Isis’ gait, the lack of snow in the Bitterroot, or the fact that JFK, Bobby, MLK, and Malcolm X were assassinated, all in a relatively short time span and all by men with rather dubious motives, simply for trying to, as Spike Lee put it, do the right thing.

In truth, all those things are bothering me, especially the concerns I have about the dogs, in whom I have a vetted interest and over which I have at least some influence, but this is something else. It’s a simple thing, one that has been a recurrent theme of late, an underlying thread linking a multitude of topics. I found it in a book on permaculture I’ve been reading, and it bubbles to mind whenever I endure another news story about our faltering economy. It has to do with attitude, and, when it comes to human endeavor, attitude is everything.

The instance in the book was a passage about capturing rainwater. The author’s message: Utilize it. Otherwise, it simply goes to waste.

Now wait a minute. If I don’t intercept it, it goes where? Well, someplace. And it does what when it gets there? Well, something.

Likewise, the economy. According to most, it has gone on hiatus. Retreated, like a turtle into its shell. Consumers, the primary drivers of the economy, are no longer spending. So they must be saving, right? Actually, no. Lending? Nope. Investing? No, that isn’t happening either.

Has everyone forgotten that, sunlight and the occasional meteor/spaceflight aside, we live in a closed system? No matter whether we are talking hydrology or economics, the first law of thermodynamics still applies. Money and water can neither be created nor destroyed. They can only be moved around the planet.

Granted, that isn’t exactly true, especially about the money, but for the purpose of this argument it is. Those resources are somewhere, and they are doing something. The real crux of the matter is that, with both sides of the equation being equal, what we do in one place will have a profound influence on things in another. The question is whether it has a positive net effect (for humanity at least) or whether it sets off a cascade of events the consequence of which we cannot even begin to comprehend.

In the case of the economy, it’s pretty obvious. Take away the rainwater and the earth becomes a desert.

Or does it?

According to the International Monetary Fund, in 2009 the gross domestic product of America shrunk at a rate of minus 2.633%. China’s GDP, on the other hand, grew at a rate of 9.096%. That same year, the GDP of Afghanistan and Iraq increased by 22.545% and 4.5% respectively.

On second thought, maybe I should start collecting rainwater. Better than just letting it run off the roof, down the Bitterroot, and across the Pacific to do God knows what.

I wonder, if they could do it over again, whether the Kennedys would keep their mouths shut about Vietnam. And would anything be different if they did.

Summerdale Smallholding

noreply@blogger.com (Cobey Williamson) — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 19:40:00 +0000

Recently, while searching for information about raising pigs, I discovered a British term that I really appreciate. Admittedly, I get a bit romantic about the Continent, the Isles included, and, even though I’ve never visited (except on Google Earth) and have no real knowledge on which to base such an opinion, I just sort of assume everything is more idyllic there. Pastoral images of English cottage gardens, Italian vineyards, and rural French countryside definitely resonate with me. A subtle formality can be found in the European rustic form that I feel is missing in most American landscapes. It makes me think ‘that’s the way things ought to look.’ So I’m not at all surprised by my reaction to the term smallholding.

Loosely defined, a smallholding is a small, single family farm designed to provide for and sustain its inhabitants, which is exactly what we are looking to accomplish with our new property. Not agriculture, per se, just us husbanding our little corner of the earth and maybe taking a few links out of our food chain. A process more so than a product, perhaps, but hopefully one that also generates some tangible benefits for the effort.

In keeping with the fine tradition of our good friend Thoreau, I feel inclined to document the entire enterprise, and since this be the medium of our times it seems as good a place as any to do so. Expect to see many more discussions, plans, solicitations of assistance, pictures, updates, trials and errors of this nature in posts to come. Sanctimonious non sequitur will continue to be a mainstay, alongside a running narrative on our smallholding activity.

Obviously, it is quite unlikely that we will ever see any real return on our investment, other than those abstruse benefits reaped from living a pastoral existence. Not even considering capital assets such as land, tractor and existent infrastructure, I doubt the operation could ever break even. But since the validity of that skepticism is something I am interested in substantiating, I will maintain a financial record using Google Docs and will share an other-than-quarterly report from time to time. Seeing as they are our only live stock at the moment, I’m split over whether I ought to include expenses related to the dogs. I tend to think not, though I may throw them in just because.

So far, the only cost has been $13.01 in diesel fuel. Bertha and I spent a day getting reacquainted while we peeled six inches of composted straw and manure from the area where the dog yard is going to be. Bertha has two left feet when I’m at the controls and she nearly foundered herself once when I led her into a particularly greasy patch of gumbo. She was definitely a little overaggressive moving the burn barrel, which she squashed beneath her bucket like an elephant might flatten a cockroach with its trunk. In the end, however, the trapezoid of ground laid out as the dog yard was scraped mostly clean and heaps of rotted straw and manure covered a majority of the proposed garden plot.

I’m not sure what to do about the garden. It needs to be plowed or tilled or all of the above. As with most of my opinions on the matter, I’m inclined toward an animal powered solution, especially since the area in question isn’t really big enough to warrant the acquisition of tractor implements. Currently, I am partial to the idea of getting a couple of pigs next spring and just letting them root up the place. It would mean we’d be forced to wait a season before we could plant, but on the other hand we’d have our own pork and we wouldn’t have to buy a plow or tiller. I haven’t a clue really but I’m banking on the assumption that pigs would break things down to a point that they would be hand-tillable afterwards, which may or may not be the case.

In that same vein, I’m divided as to whether a permanent chicken coop or an ark is a better bet. I’d rather avoid store-bought feed; the most organic, fundamental solution is what I’m after. And I don’t mean ad campaign organic either. I’m referring to the unadulterated interpretation of the word: of developing in a manner analogous to the natural growth and evolution characteristic of living organisms; arising as a natural outgrowth. Basically I’d like to see all the farm animals on the Summerdale smallholding subsisted strictly from the fodder at hand, and even though I realize that is highly unrealistic, I still think it a worthwhile goal.

As well, there is the question of weed control. We have a proliferation of thistle in our little pasture out front and the corral around the barn is thick with some kind of insidious invader. I immediately thought of sheep or goats, but research and nagging fear of the inevitable Siberian on sheep encounter makes me wary. In the end we’ll probably get some anyway, if not for any useful purpose then just for the fun of having them around, for a little while at least.

Betty's Isis of Bydog

In the meantime, I have been plenty occupied with our, or as Brandi puts it, MY new puppy. A lot of the motivation to buy a house out of town was born from our desire to greatly expand our kennel, and we wasted no time getting started along that path. I have been searching far and wide for a female Siberian pup with features similar to Kona and Blue, and I finally gave into temptation and bought a dog from a breeder in North Carolina that appeared, at least in pictures, to exhibit many of the same attributes.

Blue and Kona

Tensaw in repose

Now that she has arrived, I can see that Isis tends to be a bit more characteristic of Tensaw and is missing some esoteric quality that the other girls possess. It seems her coat is smoother, like Tenny's. If nothing else, she certainly shares his gift for song, a fact she is quite willing to demonstrate.

Our other objective with the kennel was to acquire a command leader from a proven bloodline that could guide our green dogs and get us started toward building a real sled team. In particular, I was interested in Anadyr dogs, as I had helped handle the purebred Siberian team of J.P. Norris at the Tok Race of Champions and I knew the quality of his line. After months of detective work, Brandi sleuthed out a sled dog operation in Pray, Montana, called Absaroka Dogsled Treks who, as luck would have it, had a command leader and an Anadyr brood bitch they were willing to offer us. Our plan is to travel east early next month to check out these dogs and hopefully acquire what would be an exceptional foundation to our kennel.

aerial view with planned improvements

Before we can do that, however, there is the little matter of fencing the dog yard. I called Ken at Bitterroot Fence and made tentative arrangements for his crew to set posts some time early next week, but with four inches of fresh snow and the truck thermometer reading 6 degrees when I left the house this morning I would not be surprised to hear that they were running somewhat behind schedule. Ah, the glory that is winter in Montana!

the Homestead

noreply@blogger.com (Cobey Williamson) — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 19:56:00 +0000

Funny how things come back around. You see it in fashion all the time. Children grow up, become consumers, and their collective buying power forces the revival of whatever stylistic elements were in vogue when they were young. I saw a kid at the post office and couldn't help wondering if he knew he had raided the wardrobe of a John Hughes film. I’m sure the girls will start pegging the legs of their jeans any day now. I’ve even heard that mullets and cheesy mustaches are on their way back.

When I first arrived in the Bitterroot Valley, my brother Jeb sent me an email informing me that our Great-grandfather Spencer (my mother’s mother’s father) once had a ranch here. The story is he also had a hunting cabin up the Rattlesnake north of Missoula. Later the family moved to Southern California because they thought the climate there would be better for the children's asthma. Jeb suggested I go hunt up the old homestead in the Ravalli county records. I figured I could do one better.

Skip ahead three generations, and history repeats itself.

You can’t really call it a ranch, since it is much too small and has no livestock. Yet.

But there will be. My hope is for a Holstein heifer, a few sheep, a handful of chickens, and possibly a pig. Brandi is leaning toward goats and a wee donkey.

Regardless of what shape the hoofed residents take, there will definitely be more of these. The latest addition, our new puppy Isis, arrives today.

The thistle crop in the front pasture isn't very pretty but we enjoy the rest of the view.

Bertha likes hers too.

Reverse angle.

Now pull back

It's not the old Spencer place, but it will do.

We're gonna put the dog kennel here. Bertha and I will be plenty busy this weekend peeling back that layer of compost and moving it to the garden.

Looking east toward the Big Ditch. Gravity flow sprinklers irrigate the pasture on Kona's side of the fence.

We know it will be tons of work but we love our little spread.

a New New Deal

noreply@blogger.com (Cobey Williamson) — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 15:50:00 +0000

Stuff has been happening at a breakneck pace. It’s already two weeks into hunting season and I’ve been out exactly once. I just bought tickets for the Banff Mountain Film Festival’s annual World Tour stop at the UM Theatre. Halloween is gone and Thanksgiving is looming. Snow is an almost permanent feature in the sweeping panorama that now greets us every time we turn our eyes west.

We have moved into our new home on Summerdale Road. Stress that had been building throughout the cumbersome process of purchasing the foreclosed home from Fannie Mae culminated in a mad dash snatch and grab mission to Lincoln County for the tractor. It was done in classic Pintok fashion. In, out, down to Corvallis, and back to Missoula in less than 24 hours. The high cost of renting a trailer meant that I had little time to spare.

Fortunate for a trailering rookie like me, all went remarkably well, meaning no major catastrophes, unlike the infinitely less dangerous undertaking of picking up our trash bin from the alley behind the old place, which cost the truck a rear bumper and quarter panel. I did have to get a little NASCAR in the pits when a sheet metal screw flattened my front tire at the gas-n-go outside of Noxon. No thanks to the trailer aficionado who talked me up through the entire tire change without lending a hand, I still made the cabin and had the tractor loaded by the time night fell, which was my goal. I even got the binders on her right in only two tries. Properly securing a heavy load like our old Ford tractor is paramount to trailering success, and seeing as it is something I had never done before I felt pretty good to have the job all wrapped up by the time my brother Calen arrived to visit me.

Calen lives full time in the home country, working as a surveyor. Money there is scarce and, financially speaking, he could probably do better if he took his skills elsewhere, like when he moved to Texas and went corporate. But a poor day in heaven is still better than a good day in hell, so he prefers eking out his existence in the nicest place no one can afford to live, cultivating cynicism with the rest of the valley’s economically woeful population.

Its tough being destitute in the most affluent country on earth, and living so encourages a certain mocking contempt for the Haves amongst the Have-Nots. The biggest Have of all, everyone knows, is the government, and in no place is this as evident as this place. The only people with a steady income are the teachers, road maintenance workers, postmen, Forest Service employees, and the contractors working for the Superfund operation in Libby.

Once, industry here was extraction. Resources were hacked and pulled from the land in dirty, ugly, bottom line motivated ways. Now those resources are gone, played out or no longer profitable. Only their messes remain.

The biggest offender in the area, at least the one recognized as such by the US Environmental Protection Agency, is the W.R. Grace vermiculite mine outside of Libby. Around the turn of the century, high incidences of lung-related illness and death in and around Libby gave experts cause to investigate, and lingering health concerns bequeathed the site with Superfund status. A clean up operation is on-going, to the tune of some $500 million dollars.

“They spent three hundred thousand dollars cleaning up the Rod and Gun club,” Calen tells me. “Said the whole place was full of vermiculite. Found it six feet deep in the ground.

“Hell, that place isn’t even worth three hundred thousand. They say that it’s a good thing, that it stimulates the local economy, but it doesn’t. Give me three hundred thousand dollars and I’ll clean that place up. I’d burn it to the ground, build a new one. Put a dozen people to work.

“Paying to clean up a trailer park? I mean, c’mon. I’d burn all that, build some nice apartment building that’s energy efficient with sustainable blah blah blah. Tell the people, you want some place to live? I’ll give you a place to live, hell, I’ll pay you to build it, but I’m not gonna waste a bunch of money cleaning up a trailer park. I’d just tell ‘em, you can’t clean up a trailer. There’s no more of that in this valley.

“So they’re gonna dig up all the ground out at the Rod and Gun. I’m like, what? To do what with it? Haul it someplace else? It’s six feet underground, for Pete’s sake. I mean, where do they think the stuff comes from in the first place? What, are they mining vermiculite?”

I’m paraphrasing here, but I was laughing so hard at the time that it’s difficult to quote him exactly. His scorn was sincere but so was his rationale. It echoed a theme I had been pondering earlier that day on the drive up there.

Government can’t create jobs, only private entrepreneurs can, I heard some politico say on NPR. Maybe, if we’re talking about random nonessential niceties. But massive, capital shifting changes in the paradigm? Only government has the horsepower to motivate that kind of thing.

As Calen points out, they say that they’re trying to stimulate the economy, but they’re not. A cursory survey of economic history demonstrates that America only prospers when we’re changing, when there is an ushering of a new era. If the government really wanted to encourage things, they would rouse the slumbering beast of transformation. They would lead us from the desert to the watering hole.

We need a new New Deal. We need a new Industrial Revolution. We need to begin construction on the next incarnation of transcontinental railroad or interstate highway system. We need to embrace the prospect of progress, the challenge of change. Because it is when this country is moving forward that the world is at its best.

A Future Forgotten

noreply@blogger.com (Cobey Williamson) — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 18:41:00 +0000

For some reason, I want to believe that I once heard it said that before the Japanese plant a tree, they carefully consider how its placement will affect the landscape over the course of the next one hundred years. Now this precept may be true, or it could just as easily be something I made up, a product of the same romantic Western notions of Oriental wisdom as Sobe and the Karate Kid. I'm not really sure. What I am sure of is just how much better the world would be given even a fraction of that foresight.

Towering cottonwoods crisscross the Bitterroot between Corvallis and Hamilton in neatly ordered rows. Valley lore maintains that famed Gilded Age industrialist Marcus Daly lined the avenues with these trees so that his carriage would travel in shade everywhere it went. The fact that the Anaconda Copper King passed long before the trees realized their full potential lends credence to more philanthropic motivations than that, but even if the original impetus for their planting was less than altruistic I believe that whoever put them there would be pretty disappointed by our failure to safeguard their legacy.

The trees are all dying. Whole lanes are being stripped as the giant cottonwoods become nothing more than hazards. The avenues, once so elegantly defined, a touch of cultivated formality and order in an otherwise uncivilized landscape, are being denuded. The sentinels, grown old and weary, are falling down. No juveniles stand ready to replace them. Generations have passed yet no generation rises beneath them. In the one hundred years since they were planted, no one has given them much more than cursory consideration.

I find this lack of forethought, this failure to account for the future, this inability to consider the whole rather than the part or the moment, this disavowal of any sort of planned progression indicative of America. Such manner pervades our culture, our economy, our manner and our mode. We are reactive, not proactive. We do not build upon the foundations of the past. We do not invest capital in the future. Ours is a society disposable. This is our zeitgeist.

We have been working on acquiring a foreclosed property from Fannie Mae. Unoccupied for only a short period, it is already quite literally falling to pieces. Owing to a broken hanger, a gutter that listed only slightly on our first visit has since collapsed completely. To the megalithic lien holder the value of this real estate is defined by a set of numbers on a balance sheet. For us, the home has a worth that is a bit more intrinsic.

If not simply to further our own interests, out of respect for Marcus Daly we should have preserved his legacy. We should have accounted for the inevitable demise of one generation and secured the naissance of the next. We should have planted young trees between the mature ones, so that through succession the prescience of Marcus Daly would endure, alive in perpetuity, shading future lanes and carriages for years to come.

On a bench above Corvallis, along the course of Summerdale Lane, there are planted ordered rows of cottonwood trees. How long they will remain is anyone’s guess, but let it be known that, should the Williamsons take up residence upon this path, their numbers shall surely increase.

Leave it better than you found it.

Summer Break

noreply@blogger.com (Cobey Williamson) — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 18:27:00 +0000

A friend noted the other day that it has been awhile since I’ve put pen to paper, so to speak. Of course, I fully realized this myself and had, on several occasions, attempted to identify a topic about which I was sufficiently passionate enough to write. The little one keeping you too busy, my friend asked. Or is it the Man and his job? Neither actually. I just haven’t come up with anything worth writing about.

Keegan is doing well. A good natured fellow, he takes it pretty easy on us. He hasn’t shown much interest in self-propulsion as of yet and spends most of his free time sitting upright investigating how useful hands can be. He was first in his age group at Stevensville’s Creamery Days Milk Run and has mastered a raucous belly laugh. His presence infuses my routine with a constant yet pleasant bustle, but I wouldn’t say he demands any undue amount of attention.

Work has been infinitely less of imposition. Weather nationwide has conspired to produce what could arguably be the quietest fire season on record, counterpoint to the Great Fire of 1910 centennial. A rogue thunderstorm did kick off a flurry of activity in the Bitterroot recently, including a fire on the hillside above Hamilton, which gave me an excuse to spend a couple days in the hometown helping out at the dispatch center there. But beyond that and a few other minor examples, fire season has been a snore. So I can’t attribute the long recess to my gainful employment either.

And it isn’t that I haven’t had plenty of time to ponder relevant themes. The lengthy drive into work allows me ample opportunity to pine for an alternative to our current transportation scheme, namely an investment by the United States in high speed rail. Scant produce from our garden reinforces the knowledge that we need to focus time and energy on increasing our personal yield. The pile of disposable diapers stacked neatly on the shelves of Keegan’s changing table constantly reminds me of just how “high-impact” our prototypical American lifestyle truly is.

Recreationally, the focus this summer has been on preparing Brandi for the marathon she is running this September in Salmon, Idaho. Saturday is our day off together, and typically consists of Keegan and me crewing for Mom on her long run, plying her with Brawndo and swapping out huskies when they reach their thermal thresholds. We missed the heart of the huckleberry harvest. The only thing on our plate has been finding and buying a house.

About this, I could probably speak volumes, but they would be more economic in nature than ecologic, though I don’t really believe you can separate the two. The process gave me a chance to get out and really examine the human imprint upon the Valley, a sensory roller coaster operating between the limits of “now that’s a nice spread” and “what an absolute waste.” I looked for irrigated acres, fenced pastures, and outbuildings; Brandi kept me honest and ensured our house would be inhabitable. We sought to split the distance between Hamilton and Missoula, concentrating our search between Florence on the north end and Victor on the south.

What we achieved is a beautiful synergy, if you forgive us our abject failure in shortening my daily commute. The property, on which we hope to close next month, lies east of Corvallis, close enough to our dear friends the Pintoks' place to elicit the comment “guess I better finish siding that eyesore” from Jake. A modest house on two and a half acres, it has mature trees and a barn for the tractor. Gravity fed irrigation from the Big Ditch. A healthy crop of Canadian Thistle. All in all, this American’s Dream.

Before the dream can become a payment, however, we must first negotiate mounds of paperwork, rounds of inspections, and a significant outlay of cash. Signing the buy-sell agreement last night took the better part of an hour, and when I reached the end and affirmed that I had “read and understood” it with one final signature, I just had to laugh. Like a co-worker advised, trying to make sense of it all would be a frustrating exercise in futility. Just keep signing until they hand you the keys.

Why did the Skunk cross the road?

noreply@blogger.com (Cobey Williamson) — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 22:14:00 +0000

I was fortunate enough to get out of the office the other day and accompany my boss on a field trip. Much as the land administered by the US Forest Service is broken into National Forests and Ranger Districts, state and private ground overseen by the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation is organized into Land Offices and Units. Southwestern Land Office, for whom I now work, is headquartered in Missoula, Montana and consists of Hamilton, Clearwater, Anaconda, and Missoula Units. Since I had come on board in May, Mike and I had already made visits to the other three. Anaconda Unit was last on our list.

At Drummond we turned south off I-90 onto MT Highway 1, otherwise known as the Anaconda-Pintler Scenic Route, and passed quickly through a section of pastoral looking ranchlands before beginning the climb to Philipsburg. Around a bend in the road, we happened upon an SUV parked haphazardly along the guardrail. Heads and cameras protruded from its open windows, focused on the highway ahead.

“Little black bear,” Mike said.

As we closed the gap, I too caught sight of the bruin's shuffling form. It was a young male, probably three years old and just now finding his way on his own. He darted one direction and then another, uncertain as to which was the safer path.

We continued past the parked SUV, closing to within twenty yards before the bear vaulted the guard rail and rumbled down the slope, effectively spoiling the tourists' photo op. I turned to Mike and gave him as much grief as one can safely give their boss before settling back to appreciate the fact that I live in a place where such titillating sights are a regular occurrence.

By contrast, the appearance of wildlife during my daily commute has a much more somber tone. Instead of a thrill, it is rather a constant reminder of the price the local fauna pays for our 60 mile per hour lifestyle. My count so far is 3 foxes, 2 raccoons, one magpie, numerous house cats and ground squirrels, an elk, and countless deer. That in only six weeks of driving 47 miles each way. I fully accept that it is only a matter of time before I add my contribution to those statistics, but so far I’ve been lucky.

Passing through 88 feet each second, I wonder how many of my fellow commuters even notice these unfortunate figures. Are they as affected as I am by this wanton bloodshed? The skunks must certainly arouse some attention but what about the rest? I can only assume that since these motorists live in Montana they have an appreciation for wildlife, but such constant carnage makes me skeptical. Too many of us are obviously unwilling or unable to make the sacrifices necessary to bring down the body count. What, I wonder, will it take before we realize the value of protecting the quadrapedestrian's right to cross the road?

Sitting in my car, watching the gas needle plummet and the corpses pile up, this predicament becomes a source of gnawing frustration. How did we come to this, I ask?

Without much planning, is the answer that comes to mind. And in way too big a hurry.

I am sure, as the miles rack up and I surrender more irretrievable minutes of my life to this enterprise, I will too often return to this theme. Our current model for living is seriously flawed. It places value on things that have none and cheapens that which is most precious on Earth. All creatures, great and small.

My mind wandered a mere moment, but that was all it took. I saw a flash of color in the headlights and exclaimed “oh, damn it!” in the instant before the little scurrying creature disappeared beneath the Honda’s tires with an ugly thump.

“What?!” cried Brandi.

Her voice was tinged with panic, more than I expected. A bit further down the road she revealed that for some reason she'd conjured up the thought that I'd hit a person. I hadn’t, but as bad as I felt, I might as well have.

“Skunk,” I replied.

It's called Independence Day

noreply@blogger.com (Cobey Williamson) — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 16:32:00 +0000

During my hour long commute yesterday I saw a sticker on the bumper of a jet black Toyota pickup. The massive globe and anchor decal on its canopy rear window had caught my attention from several hundred yards out, and from this information I already had a made a host of prejudiced assumptions about the driver, all the more so given my recent viewing of the film Jarhead. Still, the bumper sticker astounded me, even despite my lay understanding of Leatherneck mentality, in large part due to the fact that my mind had at that very moment been contemplating exactly the sentiment it disparaged.

“In the face of terror and murder, the call for peace is not patriotic, it’s cowardice.”

Now I never intended this blog to be a forum for this sort of discussion and I don’t plan to let it become one. But since it is Independence Day weekend and I’m still thinking about the subject, I thought I’d indulge myself.

I realize there are few true followers of Christ left in the world, so I understand that the argument that a braver man offers his other cheek falls on deaf ears here. And, really, that isn’t what amazes me about this bumper sticker. No, what truly dumbfounds me is how antithetical its premise is to the notion of America.

First, I have to say that, as a real American, I fully grant this individual the right to their opinion, even if it absolutely vexed and infuriated me. To each their own. The freedom of expression is exactly what America is all about. But I must also add that I honestly believe any logical analysis of this statement proves it to be wholly Un-American.

Patriotism is the defense of the ideals upon which America was founded. America was founded on the premise that each individual has the right and obligation to self-determination. The call for peace is an exercise of this right. To exercise this right is patriotic. Therefore, it is the patriot who calls for peace in the face of terror.

Et in terra pax hominibus, bonae voluntatis

Between a Rock and a Long Drive

noreply@blogger.com (Cobey Williamson) — Fri, 28 May 2010 17:27:00 +0000

No sooner had I finished penning my last post when my cell phone rang with a job offer from Mike Kopitzke, Fire Program Manager for the Southwest Land Office of the State of Montana’s Department of Natural Resources and Conservation. I had interviewed for the position of Assistant Center Manager at Missoula Interagency Dispatch Center on Wednesday, and, although I felt I had a better than average shot at getting it, I wasn’t completely certain how I felt about taking the job.

Ever since I began working in dispatch, my goal has been an assistant manager position at one of the zone dispatch centers in Montana. I had basically circumvented that goal in 2008 by taking the position of dispatch coordinator in Tok, working for the Alaska Division of Forestry, and had personal considerations been different (i.e. Brandi had gone with me), I would have been perfectly content with that. However, given that Brandi’s career path had led her to Rocky Mountain Laboratory and that a series of fortunate events had determined that we would live in Hamilton, I was back to square one. A job at the U.S. Forest Service’s Bitterroot center would be ideal, but any opportunity there wouldn’t manifest itself until sometime in the future. That left Missoula.

Taking a job in Missoula meant partaking of two activities in which I would rather not participate: commuting and daycare. Door to door, it is 46.59 miles from our house in Hamilton to the dispatch center in Missoula. So not only does that mean devoting two extra hours a day to work, but, depending on which vehicle I drive, it also entails burning between 15 and 30 gallons of gas a week. That is definitely not my idea of living simply.

After interviewing several of the local day care providers recommended by our friends, we were fortunate enough to secure a spot for Keegan at the one we liked the most. Even so, the whole concept still bothered me. What did we gain, and at what cost? On balance, I wasn’t sold on the premise that taking a full-time job put us in the black.

I have always had difficulty with the fact that, at least in America, what is ideal and what is practicable usually end up being at odds. In the modern era, simple is not easy. Obviously, the beauty of this country is that you can do whatever you choose. But it doesn’t always leave you standing on high ground.

Brandi’s research position at the lab is a term appointment, which for those unfamiliar with federal employment means it has a finite duration, in this case, three years. With that in mind, there was no way I could pass up a permanent position with the State of Montana, even if it meant missing out on ten hours a week of family time or personally assuring scenarios like the Horizon oil well disaster. Most likely, Brandi will get on permanently at the lab. But should she not, we now have a safety net that will keep us living in Western Montana.

Everything comes at a sacrifice. What I have oft wondered is, does it have to? Certainly, we could stick with the status quo and take our chances. Keegan benefits from being with his parents and Brandi can see our house from her office window. No one knows what the future holds, and it might work out beautifully. That is the paradox of human existence; each decision opens some doors while closing others. But here I am not really referring to such abstractions. I am talking about more concrete matters.

There isn’t any reason why we couldn’t have the best of both worlds. Why aren’t there day care centers at every workplace, so parents can be with their children during lunchtime and at breaks? Why haven’t we invested in an infrastructure that cultivates harmony and cooperation instead of one that promotes isolation and discord? If America had sunk half as much capital into developing a rail-based transportation system as it has squandered building cars and roads, I would be able to hop aboard a high-speed commuter train and be in Missoula in half the time I will spend driving there. A reasonable amount of time, not a ridiculous one.

Taming the natural world in such a manner as we have has created a geography that leaves us in the exact same predicament as before. A massive amount of resources, in particular fossil fuels whose true value and benefit we little understand and will never again realize, have been wasted, and we are no more in command of our circumstances now than when we started. In the past our lives were dictated by forces of nature such as weather and topography. Today we are beholden to obligations necessitated by an environment we ourselves have created.

For better or worse, we have arrived at the ends of the Earth. Its entire extent has been inventoried, mapped, and catalogued. There is no hidden wealth waiting to be discovered, no New World left to exploit. What we have is all we’ve got. Yet we continue on blindly, indiscriminately allocating capital as if we did not know this. It seems we could do better.

The world has grown so small that we no longer have the luxury of boundless expansion. The huge herds, the great forests are all gone. It is time we came to grips with the finite nature of the Earth’s resources and began operating accordingly. How we do this while maintaining our identity as the Land of Opportunity is a question that doesn’t have a ready answer. But one thing is certain. To continue on the path of the locust, consuming everything in our path, without consideration for the consequences of such action, is neither ideal nor practical.

But for now, that is exactly where I am.

An Ever Changing Perspective

noreply@blogger.com (Cobey Williamson) — Fri, 21 May 2010 15:59:00 +0000

For those that didn’t know, I’ve been staying home with my son Keegan. Brandi’s maternity leave ended about six weeks ago, and since then it has just been us boys. It took a little getting used to, not so much for Keegan as for me, and that first week saw me begging Brandi to let me fly the coop as soon as she got home. But all and all it has been a truly enjoyable experience.

There really isn’t anything better than being able to stay home with your child. As summer approaches and the likelihood of picking up some fire-related employment increases, I actually find myself more and more reluctant about trundling him off to day care and rejoining the workforce. Miss that first word, first wobbly step? Nothing seems worth that.

Of course, if you had caught me earlier today, when my adorable little boy was screaming himself red in the face, I probably would have told a different story. There are those moments, when nothing that I do seems to placate him, where I really start to question my fitness for this duty. Maybe I just don’t have what it takes to nurture a four-month old. If his screaming was any indication, Keegan certainly didn’t think so.

For awhile things were all peaches and cream. Keegan and I had a great little system worked out. After mom fed him and left for work, he would play contentedly in his gym while I would drink coffee and write. When it was time for a diaper change, he let me know. Then back into the gym until the next bout with the Grumpies, which was the signal that he was ready for a nap. By the time the nap was over, Mom was home for lunch, and then the cycle started over, minus the coffee.

Enter the bottle. Instead of a trip to Mom’s All-You-Can-Eat Buffet, lunch is now ala carte. This not only produces discontent at lunchtime, but it also shortens the afternoon play and nap sessions. About an hour prior to mealtime, Keegan starts to think he is pretty darn hungry. That last thirty minutes before Brandi gets home can sometimes be a real bear.

Then young Keegan decided that he would begin sleeping through the night. Oh joy, we thought. Unbeknownst to him, that also meant one less feeding, something I don’t think he fully considered. Surely they’ll make it up to me, is what he probably assumed. No such luck buddy. Doc says you’re way too fat as it is. Ratchet up the discontent a little more.

In truth, I think the correlation between his displeasure and these changes to his routine are coincidental. Though he is obviously going through a period of adjustment, what I really believe is that Keegan has reached a new stage in development and the milieu I’ve been providing simply no longer offers the level of stimulation he requires. Couple that with my failure to interact with him adequately and we have one unhappy little man.

One thing about raising children: if you do it wrong, they’ll let you know.

Perpetuating Optimism

noreply@blogger.com (Cobey Williamson) — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:34:00 +0000

Being a dyed in the wool cynic comes with a cost. It is a condition characterized by an excessive pessimism, bordering on negativism, and it can sometimes bring me down. I try hard to resist the temptation to view the glass as half full and maintain my acrimony, but occasionally I am overcome by the sudden and pervasive need to feel stoked. Fortunately for me, since everything in the human experience is relative to the observer, I always have the option of changing my perspective.

Such is the notion behind Positive Blatherings, a treatise that examines the social, spiritual, and philosophical implications of a practical experiment with positivity. Why choose negative over positive, its authors ask, when each is equally valid? One of them certainly includes a lot more smiles. It is an inquiry worthy of exploration, a daringly humanistic enterprise in a world mired in a morass of misanthropy, and I'm excited to be along for the ride.

Give This Man a Pole and He'll Tangle His Line

noreply@blogger.com (Cobey Williamson) — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 17:06:00 +0000

Buried amid the mass of random ramblings, tedious humdrum, and other exquisitely mundane revelations found on the typical Facebook newsfeed, one can sometimes unearth a real gem. I discovered one such pearl of wisdom just the other day, when my dear friend Josh Tallmadge posted a comment that really struck me. He said, “Thank god for fishing. If we have fishing, we have hope.”

This notion intrigued me. Josh’s observation seemed to be one of those that go a little deeper. It had a broader connotation, implications that went beyond the surface. It set my boat adrift upon the waters of philosophy. Might as well cast around a bit, I reckoned, and wet a little line.

The first thought I hauled up was that by its very nature fishing is an act of faith, at least for a hack like me. An accomplished angler will certainly argue that any real proficiency depends on a whole lot of skill, but I would venture that even they hold out a little bit of hope while they're waiting for a fish to take the bait. For those less consummate, fishing is the definition of optimism. We cast our net into the dark unknown and hope for the best, never truly certain of what, if anything, we might find.

The next thing I hit upon was the absolute imperative contained within Josh’s comment. Logically, if we accept his assertion as true, then its converse must hold as well. So it follows that, without fishing, we are without hope.

Problem there is, fishing is quickly becoming a delicate proposition. Fisheries worldwide are being depleted at ever increasing rates, overfishing threatens marine biodiversity, and human activity such as resource extraction, waste disposal, and power generation destroys habitat. One in five people relies on fish as their primary source of protein. Josh’s statement may have been made in regards to more personal considerations, but it was equally applicable on a global scale. Loss of fishing might dash the hopes of billions.

There is a wonderful old proverb that goes something like, “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll eat forever.” I have long grasped this metaphor, but in the context of Josh’s comment I have come to see it in a new light. Nowadays, a person can go to market and buy a fish without ever having any idea of where it came from or how it got here. He has been given his fish, and today he will eat. But at what cost? The man doesn’t know. Perhaps there is something to be gained from “teaching the man to fish”, from creating a connection between him and what sustains him, something that offers hope for the future rather than just for the moment.

Lastly I landed at the realization that I need go fishing. Fishing for me is frustrating, since I typically meet with little or no success, mostly due to the fact that I have no idea what it is I’m doing. On one trip up the Blackfoot, after casting with my new Ugly Stik for half an hour to no avail, I handed my rod off to my buddy Tyler Hanley, who promptly caught three fish. Fishing is a learned skill, usually passed down from generation to generation. Tyler learned it from his grandfather, and Josh is teaching it to his boys. Since I want my son Keegan to learn it, my only hope is that there is some patient soul out there who is willing to teach me.

There is a reason why fishing so often appears in literature. Its connotations run deep, inhabiting the very depths of human condition. Fishing gives me faith, even if all I’m really doing is just throwing my line around. Josh is right. If we have fishing, we have hope. Thank god for fishing.

A less than able fly fisherman practices his dubious casting technique on the North Fork Coeur d'Alene river during an annual camping trip to Kit Price

If you are interested in getting out on some of the world's greatest rivers with one of the best guides in the business, contact Sean McAfee. His services can also be secured through these premier outfitters:

Kootenai River Guides

Emerging Rivers

Fraternal Order of the White Elephant

noreply@blogger.com (Cobey Williamson) — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 15:37:00 +0000

My brother Jeb has always impressed me with his penchant for saying no to things. Once, when we were kids, our pops took us to a hobby store in Spokane called White Elephant and directed Jeb to pick out “anything he wanted under twenty bucks” as his birthday gift. In about five minutes I had spent that money ten times over, but Jeb was basically overwhelmed by the concept and left the store with nothing more than a few tears to show for his trouble. At the time I thought my brother was a fool, but now I’m not so sure. Perhaps it is the wiser man who will go without rather than burden himself with something that he isn’t absolutely certain is exactly what he wanted.

Obviously, there is no going without when it comes to diapers. They are one of those things that fall into the category of necessity. But if human beings are anything then they are creatures of habit, so when his wife Sharie told us that Jeb liked Fuzzi Bunz reusable diapers the best, well, I was certain they must surely be the Cadillac of the diaper scene.

There was never any question in my mind that we would be using durable diapers, if for no other reason than I just couldn’t stomach the thought of that huge mound of crap I would be contributing to the landfill. Whether or not durable diapers are more ecologic than disposables is anyone’s guess; both exact a sizeable toll, especially when one considers the modern materials with which many durable diapers are constructed these days. Laundering alone consumes a significant amount of energy, not to mention water. Still, the idea of demanding the production of something for the explicit purpose of throwing it away really wasn’t a concept I could readily align myself with.

Flash forward a few months and those disposable diapers have begun looking like the last doughnut on the break room table. I know I shouldn’t, but boy do I want to. Especially when our son Keegan hasn’t had a movement in awhile and I know one is looming on the horizon. Its times like that when I most desire to just slap some Huggies on him, wait for the poopin’ face, and then pitch that thing out like yesterday’s newspaper. Trouble is, my conscience doesn’t seem to discard them quite as easily.

Not that we haven’t used disposables; we definitely have. There was a period where we used them at night to help us get a handle on a pretty bad case of diaper rash. On a recent whirlwind trip to Troy and Brandi’s parents’ home in Kennewick, we used them exclusively for about a week. After a taste of that, however, I couldn’t wait to get back to using cloth, no matter what kind of pain in the butt they might occasionally cause.

So far we have been, if not diligent, at least fortunate in our attempt at a three R approach to baby paraphernalia. Not only have we gotten mounds of gently used baby stuff from friends and Craigslist, but Brandi’s mom invested a huge amount of time and energy into making us a gigantic pile of cloth diapers. And while they aren’t as high-tech as some of the reusable diapers on the market, after some field testing and a little retrofitting, Cindy’s cloth diapers are still pretty darn slick.

If, when you think of cloth diapers, you imagine a cotton rectangle and a pair of clothes pins; forget it. They may get filled with the same thing, but that is where the similarity between modern diapers and those relics ends. Today’s diapers are all about convenience. True, it’s not as effortless as throwing them in the trash and forgetting them, but after seeing how well they work and how easy they are to use, you wouldn’t want to anyway.

Because this is America and durable diapers is a niche market serviced by numerous small producers rather than a couple big businesses, there are quite a few styles to choose from, each with their own set of strengths and weaknesses. Having had the “which diaper to use” conundrum solved for us by Brandi’s mom, we never had to decipher which of the myriad durables would work best for our purposes; we just used what we were given. But after Brandi related our initial cloth diaper woes (which have since been remedied … thanks Cindy) to our sister in law Sharie, an avid durable diaper proponent, a package containing several examples from the modern era promptly appeared on our doorstep. And just as I figured, the Fuzzi Bunz that Sharie had included were as technically advanced as a jet fighter. I couldn’t imagine Jeb appreciating them more lest they be made of recycled pop bottles and sporting a Patagonia label.

In the end, as with everything, it really comes down to personal choice. Is the use of cloth diapers likely to save the world? No. Does it make you a better person than someone who doesn’t? Not even close. But it may change the way in which you view yourself, your environment, and your relationship with it, which could lead to lifestyle changes that, through cumulative effect, may ultimately have a positive impact somewhere down the line. Perhaps you feel durability is a virtue worth embracing, that eschewing disposable society is worth a little inconvenience. Or maybe you figure cloth will still be there when the Pampers run out, so damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. Either way, it’s for each to decide. What’s important, I believe, is that the matter is one well worth considering, and that there is a lot to be said for leaving the store empty handed.