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A venerable log building, a blustery November day in a small country community, the Pledge of Allegiance, the tolling of a bell. A scene repeated hundreds of times across the nation, yet as each name was read the personal, local feel of loss hung in the air. We think of great wars with legions of soldiers, but they are composed of young men and women from Seeley and Condon with moms and dads. Last Monday, Nov. 11 was Condon's ceremony at the Community Center, followed by a lunch prepared by the...
In August my wife Pam and I concluded our seven-month boat journey around the eastern United States and Canadian provinces, a version of “America’s Great Loop.” Our future plans include cruising the “Inside Passage” between Vancouver Island and British Columbia, with the eventual destination being southeast Alaska. We chose our boat, Treasure State, because of its relatively shallow draft — for all the sandy canals of the east coast — for its low bridge height — hundreds of bridges along the way — and its ability to get up and scoot — 32 kn...
There are certain things that simply aren’t done. Despite the constant flux in society — changing mores, legalized weed, our lives an open electronic book — there are some behaviors and actions that remain unacceptable. For instance, during prayer time at church, you don’t ask the congregation to pray for healing for your monstrous hangover from pounding tequila the night before. You don’t put a large car top carrier on your ride, then try to enter a parking garage. The particular desecration, the abomination, the violation of sacred space, of...
On Tuesday, Oct. 22, 20 Missoula County officials participated in the “Swan Valley Community Conversation,” held at the Swan Valley Elementary School. The event, designed to foster communication between county government and the more outlying Swan Valley community, had a unique format and was met with positive reviews by attendees. Rather than a large open meeting, eight “stations” of citizens were seated at tables, and the officials rotated every 10 minutes, so that each group of three to five attendees had face-to-face interactions with re...
Steve Lamar has only lived in these parts for 48 years. I asked him if he was a rich out-of-stater who doesn't understand our Montana values. He assured me he isn't running for political office. Perhaps you have heard of the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone National Park, the Lamar River or Lamar Mountain. An ancestor of Steve's was head of the Interior Department under Grover Cleveland. An army friend of Mr. Lamar was sent to the Yellowstone area to survey it and was given the responsibility of...
For a good deal of my medical career there worked in my office an avid quilter. She participated in quilting groups, received quilting magazines and periodically went on quilting junkets, riding around a multi-state region on a bus with other quilters, allegedly stopping at quilting stores and networking with other quilters. I always wondered about quilters. If, for instance, you wanted to run a secret, special-ops, counterintelligence sort of thing, who would ever suspect quilters? We think of...
Have you ever had one of those relationships where, when it is good, it is great — a synchronized dance, a symphony, fireworks and flowers. But when it is bad, it is very bad — angry noises, smoke, disillusionment. For years, I’ve been locked in such a love/hate quagmire. Not with my wife, Pam, we’re pretty boring in that regard, but with a Vermeer BC625. Some might say that such strong feelings for a wood chipper are abnormal. (Before throwing stones, have you ever used the term “my baby” referring to a car, truck, boat, or snowmobile?) But wh...
I've been back in the Swan Valley for a little over a week now, having parked the boat in Pasadena, Maryland and prepared it for sale. Naturally, the boat market has completely tanked, with everyone trying to get rid of that impulse-buy boat from the pandemic. We have the preternatural ability to find the bottom of any market when we have something to sell. Our quick response unit in Condon had six medical calls the first four days I was back. The members suggested that I take my black cloud...
Does anyone know Where the love of God goes When the waves turn the minutes to hours Those lyrics from Gordon Lightfoot's famous ballad "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" were passing through my mildly seasick brain as the predicted 3-foot waves were clearly significantly higher. Moving our boat from New York City back to Chesapeake Bay involved 122 miles of open North Atlantic Ocean, and I had waited patiently for a benign weather forecast. On the day of departure my many weather apps predict...
It was an interesting start to the morning. I was sitting in the cockpit (back deck of the boat) in the Liberty Landing Marina, just off the Hudson River, looking directly across at Manhattan. The "Freedom Tower," the replacement for the destroyed Twin Towers, dominates the skyline, a magnificent rebuttal to the cheap shot terror vendors of the world. I glanced at my phone-delivered morning news feed, and the lead article related the plea agreement between the 911 perps and the US government -...
It's a rainy day on the Hudson River, about 35 miles north of New York City. About every 30 minutes our little floating house will be rocked by a wake from the many giant barges that travel the river. Hold on to the coffee maker. The recent discussions regarding the brain function of certain prominent persons has me musing about my own experiences. When I finally finished my surgical training, all of 16 years after high school, I began my adult (getting paid) career in Billings, Montana in...
Tonight I am witness, to my surprise, to a waterski exhibition. We have stopped in Amsterdam, New York, on the Erie Canal, and apparently there is a very active waterski academy here. While entertaining, the jumpers and balletic skiers put up prodigious wakes, which rock us continually. Between that and the trains paralleling the Erie Canal every 30 minutes, it is an active place. We have traversed northeast Canada, crossed Lake Ontario and are now transiting the Erie Canal on our way back to...
We have been up the Champlain waterways, through the Chambly Canal, down the St. Lawrence River to Montreal, up to Quebec on a train, and now on the Rideau canal, having passed through Ottawa. The foliage is verdant, the sky alternately weeping or dazzlingly blue, the churches ancient and towering, and the towns along the way quainter than quaint. There are a plethora of monster vacation palaces with 200K wake boats along the way, but they don't quite fit the narrative. This adventure is way...
Salutations de Montreal. As you can see, I am quite fluent in Google translator. We just arrived in Montreal after a somewhat harrowing trip from Sorel-Tracy at the top of the Richelieu River and canal system. Actually, the St Lawrence Seaway was completely calm with no traffic. Harrowing makes a better story. We are becoming facile in the transit of canals, where the boat is raised and lowered by the filling and emptying of enclosures called locks. We are up over 20 locks now, with quite a few...
It is evening at Liberty Landing Marina, New Jersey, which is directly across the Hudson from Manhattan, New York City. The fading sun is glinting off the glass skin of the Freedom Tower, which replaced the destroyed World Trade Centers. In the distance is the Empire State Building, now dwarfed by more modern edifices. We arrived here after a 132-mile run from Cape May, New Jersey, having toured the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays. We don't usually go that far in a day, but weather might have...
Greetings from the Chesapeake Bay. We have been working our way up through Virginia, now Maryland, through the lands of earliest English exploration, American Revolution, Civil War and other scrimmages/wars/skullduggery that created this country. Last week we visited the very battlefield at Yorktown, where English General Cornwallis blew a fourth quarter lead and surrendered to George Washington. All this history has filled me with patriotic fervor, a desire to give back to honor all the...
When we started this boat trip around the Eastern United States, we kept hearing about Bob423. It seemed odd that a group of retired boomers, who seem to have a bottomless appetite for classic rock (one more rendition of "Margaritaville" in a seaside restaurant and my cranium will fragment like a grenade) would be so devoted to a rapper. Turns out that Bob423 is not a rapper, but a 70-ish retired engineer who looks like your high school civics teacher. His retirement passion has been to cruise t...
Back when Ulysses Grant was President, my fiancé and I attended a - required by the church - weekend seminar called "Engagement Encounter." The idea was to improve the chances of marital success by having the couples engage in serious discussions about core issues - money, communication, in-laws, respect and so forth. We were posed questions that we answered in notebooks, then shared the answers with each other. Messages such as "please don't get fat," and "if you turn into a drunk my divorce...
Greetings from Beaufort (Be-you-fert) South Carolina, where we are precariously tied to the very outside dock of a marina, which is perfectly aligned to allow us to fully experience the 1984 hit by the Scorpions entitled "Rock Me Like a Hurricane." It is not technically a hurricane, but when the toaster oven and the coffee maker become deadly projectiles, it seems that way. We have been cruising up the coast, from Key West now to Beaufort, soaking up the history and geography as well as soaking...
Elton John knew it was time to go into rehab when he called the front desk of his Atlanta hotel and asked that the wind be turned down. I can empathize with him, however addled he was. Our boat, currently in Titusville, Florida, is raucously rolling in a 25-knot breeze. Titusville is across the river from Cape Canaveral and the Space Center, where, this afternoon, we clutched our expensive ticket for three hours, in the viewing bleachers, awaiting the launch of a big rocket. With less than four...
In our younger years we can be awakened by a frightened child, or the on-call phone dagger from the ER or ICU. As we "mature" (get old, fall apart, what-happened-to-me), that renting of our dream cloud is more likely an insistent ringtone from the bladder. So there you are, cozy, maybe the room and the floor aren't so cozy. After a period of deliberation, sometimes lengthy, an impulsive toddle to the bathroom ensues. Now imagine this occurring on a boat. The little boat bathroom can't be used...
Since our last Pathfinder report, we have traveled the 240 miles from Fort Pierce, Florida to Key West. Along the way, I would estimate we have heard some version of Jimmy Buffet 500 times. Apparently, tourists expect a mind-numbing repetition of "tropical" music, none written in the last 40 years. Don't worry, be happy. I have substituted "cheeseburger" in the Buffet song for "humble pie," as I have made about every goober mistake you can make on a boat. I thought I was quite the docking artist...
It is helpful, when your life or job is in grind mode, to have a diverting obsession. At 3 a.m., in a fluorescently lit surgeon's lounge, waiting my turn in the OR to reconstruct a face that, earlier in the evening, had lapped up a dozen beers or so, then flew through the windshield of his Ram 2500, I would peruse innumerable websites related to way cool boats and yachts and exotic locations. The fact that many of these vessels cost ten times more than my net worth (counting the sale of a...
As an intrepid member of the Fourth Estate, I ventured out into the frigid night, determined to shine light on the Swan branch of the Deep State. Parenthetically, the Fourth Estate refers to the press. I’d never actually known what the first three are, so I looked it up (as older people say rather than Googling). The monarchy, barony (people with titles), and the Commons are the first three, with the fourth apparently keeping an eye on the first three. There is now a Fifth Estate, that being social media and other online sewage systems. When a...
For the last five years of my surgical career in Billings I endured two or three sessions a week of “hot yoga.” Seriously hot, 104 degrees with added humidity. I had been experiencing the common occupational hazards of surgery--neck, back, and shoulder pain resulting from twisting, bending, and generally contorting the skeleton into improbable positions to see into the nether regions of the human body. With regular, seemingly tortuous yoga sessions I had none of the aforementioned somatic complaints. A friend of mine suggested that I went bec...
