John Carlson, my best man in my FIRST marriage to Libby (we didn’t get divorced in between). Who but a biologist bor in Eastern MT would use his limited baggage allowance to Antarctica to pack a tux to the home colony? Read his blog at Prairie Ice… To the left, Aldo Leopold; center, Frederick “Hammy” …
Author: Steve Bodio
4000
Not just the blog, but selected life. Enjoy, enigmas, in- jokes, and all… My old school, J d’A (fomerly the Slater and then the Flint mansion… You know, Jeanne d’Arc Academy, with one of these in every room. John Davila at the chickenfights, ’84 “Trouble ahead..” “The Lady in Red THERE”S A CHICKEN!!!!”
A Little About Dan and Jule Mannix, (and Saul Bellow, and Hitch, and Bad Bob, and George Higgins: Post #3,999…)
Dan Mannix was a popular magazine and book writer in the fifties who was a formative influence on many naturalists who grew up then. His most popular if not necessarily best book was A Sporting Chance, which is in my “Book of Books”, about such things as falconry and ferrets and fishing with cormorants, all …
Helen on tour in Santa Fe
.. as promised. My camera refused to charge, so all photos are Reid’s or Helen’s. The more “formal” ones are Reid’s, at the signing; the others, in the motel room, Helen’s. I am changing meds and screwed up my doses, so had to leave the dinner; the whole crew just came to my room at …
A few Images
Some images to hold you–we are heading up to to Santa Fe to see Pluvialis! (Perhaps better known today in our crowd as RockStar Helen, to her embarrassment..). We’ll be back Sunday. Reid may report on their dinner in Denver later… he and Connie, Anne “Anyushka” Price and Chas and Mary attending… And the countdown …
RIP: Merle Haggard,1937- 2016
We are losing a lot of the great ones…. UPDATE: a great tribute from Wisconsin’s Kirk Hogan, MD, scientist, patent lawyer (!) elk hunter, gourmand, and neo- beat, whose letters often read like poems… Great “Kern River”. My top pick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aILGaYsv_bc Didn’t even make the list of Merle’s top 35! A day hasn’t gone …
A Little more poetry…
I want a couple free to use before the fateful 4000! One on his own death by critic Clive James, who has been entertaining us with the subject for several years and three books- really! And a funny one by my old friend Marilyn Taylor in Wisconsin, who used to hire me to run …
They’re Killing Pigeons Again
Tyrants end up killing pigeons; I don’t know why, but they do. Franco almost made the traditional old- fashioned competition “thief” pouters of southern Spain, like the Rafenos I keep, extinct. The Taliban’s mere sixteen “Commandments”, including ones against sorcery and NOT growing beards, include one, the fourth,”To prevent keeping pigeons and playing with birds. …
Harrison Poem
They used to say we’re living on borrowed time but even when young I wondered who loaned it to us? In 1948 one grandpa died stretched tight in a misty oxygen tent, his four sons gathered, his papery hand grasping mine. Only a week before, we were fishing. Now the four sons have all run …
Another Wind River Poem
From Tim: Wind River Justice Alan riding his first horse from Big Sandy to celebrate his thirty-seventh birthday: his mare reared in the lodgepoles when a spruce grouse flushed and nearly pitched him down a switchback. My own gelding stampeded through a meadow, and our young wrangler called those ponies “gentled.” We braved Pyramid’s boulders, …