Did we all not revel in Jeff Bridges’s channeling of the Dude in The Big Lebowski? How we all pitied and yet envied his quixotic, weed-altered relationship to time. In this day and age the danger of overworking is far greater than that of underworking. While there are little eruptions of ambition in my psyche that urge me to get back to my desk for the real work—one novel left in my life, two, maybe three?—I’m proceeding with something akin to the same restlessness with which I began as a writer, back in my twenties, pretending I still have all the time in the world.
I arrive in Spokane later in the day after leaving Erin’s, and drop my rental at the airport before continuing on in my ancient Subaru to Montana, to my secret cove in the woods. Bumping down the boulder-strewn, rutted driveway of home, past the dusk wildflowers, with the windows rolled down. Home, where Lowry, and the pup Callie, and now a kitten are waiting. The snipe are making their winnowing sound over the marsh.
I want nothing more than to stop and get back to writing. But I’m going to be home for only a day: unpack, do laundry, repack, then keep heading east, to pick up Cristina in Missoula, then on to Bozeman, to collect Molly Antopol, who last visited Denis with me, and Skip Horack, another young writer friend whom I met at Stanford when he was teaching there with Molly. From Bozeman, the four of us will descend upon Tom and Laurie McGuane for what is becoming more of a party than an intimate dinner of counsel—the McGuanes have also invited a dozen or so of their friends and neighbors.
But if it has to be only a day at home, what a day it is. Falling asleep in my own bed. Awakening early, looking out the upstairs window at the sun stretching across the green of the marsh. Coffee. The wood floor familiar beneath my feet. Existing for a while in the fantasy that the road is not reaching, even now, to snatch me back up.
I sink deep into the perfect summer day. With school out, Lowry is doing survey work in the forest, but she’s off today. She and I cook and eat a leisurely breakfast on the porch—morels, elk, fried eggs, more coffee—listening to the drumming of woodpeckers and the calls of ravens. Later in the afternoon, we ride our bikes to the trailhead that leads down to the lake, a perfect glowing blue eye in the middle of the forest. We walk through the forest under cover of lupine, so sweet-scented that the fragrance of it sticks to our clothes and skin like smoke, the blossoms burning the cool blue of a pilot flame, while bees maul and caress the flowers.
The lake water is cold. There’s a bald eagle up in one of the giant cottonwoods; tree and eagle are reflected in the perfect bowl of the lake. As we swim, our wakes cleave the surface. The loons nesting at the far end of the lake yodel and howl. Now and again a tiny trout flips, rising to a midge or caddis fly.
Right now, mid-journey, midlife, I just want to shut down and rest. With half of my life having been knocked out from under me, it’s starting to dawn on me that my initial impulse, flight, while understandable, might in the long run not be the best. It’s a younger man’s idea, one where stamina is not a factor. Tell me again why I’m going back on the road?
And yet it’s great to see Cristina at the Missoula airport. She’s as upbeat and enthusiastic as Erin and I have been angst-ridden. I’m buoyed by her energy—she’s radiating vacation, not work—and I remember now being in my twenties and thinking, I love writing. I couldn’t possibly possess that energy again—but it’s fun to be around it and draw sustenance from it, to be pulled out of my funky dark-woods headspace.
We drive through the lengthening twilight, following the Blackfoot River for a while, and now I find myself excited to be back on the road. The old rivers of adrenaline return. As we drive, Cristina catches me up on her life. I haven’t seen her for a few months. Although she is hard at work on a novella and hopes to someday make a living as a writer, for now she’s taken a job teaching kids at the Quaker school where she went as a young girl. She asks me about Molly and Skip, who are both due in to Bozeman tomorrow, and I give the basics—Molly, Jewish and raised in Brooklyn; Skip, an easygoing Southerner. We’ll all have fun, I assure her.
The SUV I’ve rented at the airport the next day is, alas, tiny, like one of those cars you see in children’s sandboxes. A tiny depth charge of anxiety flares in my solar plexus, but I snuff it out, and once we have gathered Molly and Skip, we roll on, grocery-laden, toward the McGuanes and their friends.
The highway is empty this far out into the prairie, and beyond the interstate every mile is new. Having not learned my lesson after the episode in the Alps, I have transcribed the directions from Tom in pencil onto the back of a tattered brown envelope. With no one else able to read my writing, I glance at it as we rattle down the gravel road, plumes of white dust rising from our passage, pebbles chinking against our undercarriage, and grasshoppers fanning away on either side of us toward the tall grass along a rushing creek. Mourning doves perch in the branches of cottonwoods, resting from the heat of the day. Tiny kestrels hover in the blue sky; harriers rise and fall, surfing waves and currents. The green light of beauty comes rushing into me like a great and terrible drug. My joy may be a little too desperate, but damn it, if one is to start critiquing happiness, what hope is there for anything?
I glance back at Skip, whose window is half down, the wind blowing his overgrown curls, and he’s grinning like a dog, as if feeling that same delighted shimmering in the blood. Molly’s toenails are a just-painted bright red—summer vacation—and I think she’s thrilled to be between things, with her first book out in the world. Cristina? I can’t tell. Perfectionist that she is, she might be at the edge of nervousness, thinking ahead to the meal we’ve promised.
When at last we arrive, Tom saunters out onto the long shady driveway. It feels like we’re home. Speckled bird dogs gallop ahead of him in figure eights, and sleepy horses ease down the fence line to study us. Tom, craggy-handsome, looking easily a decade younger than his seventy-four years, calls the dogs to come back. They won’t hear of it, are wild to be head-patted and belly-thumped.
I find myself remembering a letter Tom sent to me perhaps fifteen years earlier—Mary Katherine and Lowry would have been around five and eight—in which, responding to my inquiry about what he was up to, he wrote that his days were pretty much spent “blackening pages” and waiting, listening in vain for the sound of his children, who were grown, to come back down the driveway, home for a visit. A chill of loneliness broke over me, reading that, and I set the note aside and went out into the bright sun to play with the girls.
Tom has aged with grace. This cannot possibly be the same man who, in his late twenties and early thirties, down in Key West, reveling with Jim Harrison and Russell Chatham, was christened Captain Berserko by those who witnessed his antics. Something immense has happened in the intervening forty years. A life rescued by art. Maybe you don’t have to go all the way to rock bottom. Maybe just way, way down is enough: and then, back up. Those Key West days were characterized by drugs, alcohol, sex, rock and roll, divorce, and fishing. It’s astonishing—a testament to the vigor and luck of youth—that any of them survived, much less prospered. Tom stopped drinking in 1981, which helped. “It’s true that I’ve had a life that’s, shall we say, wild,” he once told Will Blythe of those bygone days. “When I was in Hollywood, I took quite a lot of drugs, I drank an unnecessary amount. People think you’re going to die, and that excites them.” Tom had simply wanted, Blythe reports, “as the girls used to say in the romantic dramas, to live a little.”
There’s no real way to identify all that I love about his work. The early electricity of his novel Panama, about a delusional rock star adrift in Key West, the classic short stories in To Skin a Cat, the beauty of An Outside Chance and Some Horses—the latter two books collections of essays, which highlight McGuane’s intellectual power and honesty as well as anything he’s written. But mostly I just love him for how he’s chosen to live his life.
Skip, like Laurie, Tom’s wife, is from Mobile, Alabama, and the two of them are chatting about people they know, about streets and creeks and rivers, about fishing for sheepshead and crawfish, as if they are long-lost relatives.
“Chili!” Tom cries, when he hears about the meal. “Chili in June?” But he’s pleased. He keeps looking at the door as if believing there might yet be more of us, an unending arrival of Merry Pranksters.
The McGuanes’ kitchen is more than a kitchen; it’s spacious and well lit, like a French farmhouse, reminding me of Peter and Maria’s, and of David and Hugh’s. All these similarities of elegance!
There’s still a whole chunk of afternoon left, and Tom excuses himself to the river that runs just beyond us, some forty steps away. And do I imagine, as he retreats, that he’s whistling? Such a jounce in his step. Oh, how much I want to be happy when I’m old!
Our group reconvenes. We’ve unloaded food everywhere, and we delegate, casting about for available pans and boilers in Laurie’s neat kitchen, until even Laurie finally retreats, with a nervous but happy smile. She believes in us, against all odds.
The kitchen is ours. We talk, drink, laugh. My other chefs are young and energetic—garlic is being minced, jalapeños diced, tomatoes cleaved, cumin toasted in the skillet. The knives flash and blenders whirl. We have no concept of the time, but we trust that the food will be ready when it needs to be; that somehow, and just when we need to, we will all get to where we’re going.
I burn the cumin but shake off this mishap and begin again. With oven space at a premium, Cristina finds a small toaster oven for her apple crumb. The turkey will take longest. When in trouble, simplify. I can do the turkey and trust all the others to do the rest.
Because we’re a bit tight on time, when I go outside to the gas grill I turn it up all the way to preheat it as quickly as possible. It hasn’t been used since the fall, having slept beneath several feet of snow, and is a little hinky in the lighting, but there’s propane in the canister and—whoompf, fire! (I’ve brought a spare barrel of propane just in case. Like a keg of beer, the canister rolled around in the back of the SUV all the way here, clanging Skip in the neck and shoulder on sharp curves and bonking Molly in the head.) I’ve prepared a dry rub for the turkey—thyme, brown sugar, paprika—so all I have to do is coat the bird, stuff it with jalapeños and onions, and put it on the grill, which I do in short order.
Back in the kitchen there are always potatoes to be peeled, and more peppers to be cut for the double-baked jalapeño cornbread pudding. Cristina’s multitasking, and Skip’s got the chili bubbling: beans and elk and tomatoes and beer. Molly, meanwhile, has mastered the art of taking her own sweet time, stopping mid-dice to gesture with the knife, or to taste a bite of whatever she’s working with—talking, visiting, laughing—and I’m deeply envious of her ability to enter an artificial reality, free of the ridiculous and self-applied constraints of time and perfectionism.
In my memory of what comes next, there is an explosion, one that rocks the sides of the house—a sonic blast. Laurie comes into the kitchen with a look of no small concern. She gestures to the window and asks, with urgency, “Is there supposed to be all that smoke?”
The air in the yard is as blue as that of a Civil War battlefield. Maybe it’s not the turkey, I tell myself, searching desperately for some other possibility. A hired hand burning a trash pile? An early season wildfire? A nuclear bomb? There’s no way one turkey could produce such an emission—perhaps there’s something faulty with the old gas burners, or maybe the rubber hose is on fire and the whole canister of propane is about to blow.
I vault out of the kitchen and across the porch and into the yard, where blackened char and fragments of turkey flesh litter the green. The lid must have blown open, cast a spray of turkey shrapnel, then slammed shut again.
Chili, I think, with a strange calm, at least we’ve got Skip’s chili.
The cooker is so hot it’s glowing, and when I lift the lid with a piece of firewood I see one of the strangest sights I have seen in my life. It’s a phenomenon, like the aurora borealis.
The turkey is not black, but gold. It is on fire, burning like a comet. Seeing it thus is like opening a treasure chest to behold the terrible, glorious rising of the sun: a molten, gurgling, flaming corona of beautiful yellow-gold fire in the shape of a turkey. It looks almost holy, like Jason and the Argonauts’ golden fleece. There is so much fat on the fire, and inside that turkey, that it surely exceeds any known laws of thermodynamics. If I were to set a bird-size bucket of gasoline on fire, it could not burn with more gusto. It’s an Olympic torch of a turkey, and there is no blackening, only the beautiful throbbing gold.
Maybe, somehow, I think, it can still be salvaged. I reach down to turn off the gas valve on the canister, but that supply was discontinued long ago when the rubber hose melted; the turkey is burning on its own now. From the edge of the deep blue smoke that’s pooling in the yard, Skip comes rushing up with a bucket of water, but I ask him to wait. I still have hope.
Everyone else has gathered around, and now Laurie is howling, doubled over laughing—and then Cristina and Molly, who at first look uncertain, begin to laugh, and then we’re all laughing, that utterly medicinal laughter where you laugh so long and uncontrollably that your sides begin to cramp and great sweet gusts of dopamine flood into every cell of your living, laughing self.
All the while the turkey continues to glow and pulse, and we laugh still harder, weeping. It’s a weapon, something you’d put in a catapult now and lob over the castle walls.
Tom comes hurrying up the hill, still in his waders and holding his fly rod, and he cries out, “I saw the smoke from a mile away, I thought the house was on fire!”
Now we’re laughing harder than ever—that silly, gasping cycle of heave and howl where the merest stirring of a breeze is enough to set off the chain reaction again, and it’s only spurred on by watching Tom’s incredulity at not only the shimmering glowball of turkey but also the sobbing band of monkeys that have taken over his home in the short time he’s been gone. I have the thought that he’s wondering if there are empty bottles of moonshine somewhere, or some strange and fast-acting drug imported from the Yaak, some fungus or spore, to have changed all of us so completely, and so fast. But the puzzle pieces come together quickly enough and now he’s laughing too, and we simply cannot stop.
Somehow, like long-distance ocean swimmers dragging ourselves from the sea, we manage to pull ourselves together. I feel ten pounds lighter, cleansed. The turkey—smaller now, almost cute, save for the horrid blackness left behind, as the golden flame subsides—is gutterstubbing itself out, finally, and though the cycles of laughter continue to wash over us, the tide is going back out, and it’s possible to believe that we might eventually be functional again. We stumble back inside, blinking in the bright sunlight, back into what Robert Penn Warren, at the end of All the King’s Men, calls “the awful responsibility of Time.” We’re each reassessing the menu—how to feed so many from a single loaf, with no more supplies and no running into town—but there’s also a greater clarity: we’re still going to have a party, and with one less dish to worry about. Life has gotten a little simpler.
Once we’re back at our posts in the kitchen, the facade of competence returns, though slowly. Butter simmers; a blender whirs. The air in the cabin is a little charged. Tom, energized by the mayhem, makes a quick tour through his home, inspecting the kitchen quickly for more potential trouble spots—whether out of true concern or a hope for more entertainment, I cannot quite be sure.
Now folks are driving up and wandering in, hugging, having arrived from not insignificant distances in this vast and still mostly unpeopled country. Some I know—the West is a small community. Gretel Ehrlich and her partner, longtime National Public Radio newscaster Neal Conan, followed by a man I haven’t met, a neighbor of the McGuanes’, Breon, who is an avid and intelligent reader, a bird hunter, and who has several bird dogs in his truck, including his great old dog Ranger, elderly and weak but still joyful.
In the green yard, with the sage hills fresh and the river running big and the sky so blue you want to drink it after the long winter, Ranger gallops for a few good moments, and yet there are stumbles, momentary humiliations, signs that Ranger’s end is not far off. Breon watches Ranger carefully, and I watch Breon carefully, and my heart goes out to them. I like him immediately, and see why the McGuanes do. A kind man is a strong man.
The journalist Toby Thompson, from Billings, has arrived—where has time gone? As with Gretel, I haven’t seen him in twenty years. I moved deeper into the Yaak, deeper into my stories. Then I became a father, and moved deeply into that. Now time has receded, leaving me in the bright daylight of new circumstances. One wants to squint and blink.
Over and over I keep turning this reality, as if trying to wear down its roughness and irregularity into a small stone that, when held in the palm of my hand, will finally fit.
More guests: Walter Kirn, and his partner, the journalist Amanda Fortini. Walter was married to Tom’s daughter Maggie, and they have a son, Charlie, and a daughter, Mazie, who is several years younger than Lowry. Walter was edited and published by Gordon Lish while Walter was at Knopf, and has gone on to further success, with novels like Up in the Air and Thumbsucker, and a memoir, Lost in the Meritocracy. He’s just published a nonfiction book about—well, you can’t quite capture it in a few sentences, but it involves his agreeing to drive an acquaintance’s aging dog across the country. The acquaintance has since been convicted of murder, which gives the book a typical Kirnish otherness. With his passion and energy, Walter puts me in mind of what Oscar Wilde might have been like, a raconteur who makes new connections at ultrahigh speed. He has an eye for disaster and listens keenly to the saga of the turkey, such that behind the jack-o’-lantern blaze of his eyes, it is easy to see him thinking, Damn, I miss all the good stuff.
The house is filled. People are settling in, talk flying back and forth. Just in time we send out a few hors d’oeuvres, which are inhaled. Meanwhile, despite the disruption of earlier in the day, all our other dishes are coming together. It’s a party, rather than the intimate conversation studded with delicate and at times intense inquiries into the nature of our work that I had once envisioned—but what a party.
Tom, who has been sober almost four decades, is without a drink, but possesses what is surely just as much gaiety as was ever present in days of yore, giving the impression that the mirth is surely what has sustained him, and those nearest to him, in the hard times. Skip asks Tom about the distance and the difference between those days and now—how one travels from being Captain Berserko to being a mainstream voice of America, publishing more stories in The New Yorker, for instance, during this current run than ever before.
Does something flicker in Tom, for a moment? He’s so quick, so fluid—like Walter, really, with that high-octane wit—that his hesitation seems to mean something. “Well,” he says, “becoming a grandfather helps,” and leaves it at that.
As Breon and I talk about bird hunting, I overhear Tom telling Skip, Cristina, and Molly a story not from Key West, but from a little later in the timeline, the Paradise Valley days. It’s about Russell Chatham, who, on the lam for one infraction or another, saw flashing lights behind him while driving late one night down the dark river road. Unable to afford capture, Russell pulled over into a snowdrift, leapt out of his car, and began running blindly through the snow and up a hill, like a crazed Dr. Zhivago, straining to remain free for one more day, long enough to apply at dawn the next brushstrokes to whatever masterpiece was in his mind. Stumbling over a boulder, he pitched face-first into the snow, breaking a leg in the process, and then sat up howling, only to watch the slow-moving blinking lights that belonged not to police or sheriff or any other gendarme, but instead the county snowplow, cruise past.
The painter had to gimp his way through the frozen dark back to the icy road, where his car was now stuck, and wait until daylight for the next passerby to hitch a ride to the hospital.
Another tale from the lively times: Russell and Tom were out driving around, somewhere near Chico, on that same river road, when from out of nowhere some ne’er-do-well came charging out with a crossbow and fired it at the side of their car. Russell, who was driving, never missed a beat, says Tom, but instead simply cried out, “Such is the plight of the artist in America!”
For all his robust health, Tom has not avoided the travails of aging. Two years ago he broke his kneecap while bird hunting. He had it reconstructed and kept going, hunting for a hundred days the following year. Then he fell again hunting, and this time broke his leg and was in a cast all autumn. He wrote to me with great joy near the end of December saying the cast was finally coming off and when it did he would throw it in the Yellowstone River and go fishing.
What a splendid paradox: a man whose idea of a perfect year is one in which he spends almost a third of it out in the field with his dogs, seeking Hungarian partridges, feathered buzz bombs that chortle and chitter in an adrenaline-inducing racket as they whir away, yet who was morose for a year, devastated, he says, when his pet parakeet died.
“I like having animals around me,” he’s said. “Horses, dogs, it doesn’t matter. I don’t like being alone.” A further paradox: the man who lives, by his own design, down forty miles of dirt road, nestled in the willows and cottonwoods at the edge of a rushing river, with no other cabins or neighbors visible for miles in any direction, doesn’t like to be alone. It occurs to me that, taken out of context, a piece of paper containing the checklist for the elements of greatness might, at the surface, appear not all that different from one containing the same checklist for batshit crazy: obsessive; solitary; able to hold two competing thoughts at the same time; reclusive; reads a lot, laughs often; generous to a fault.
With the meal concluded, we retire from the long dinner table and pull chairs into a big circle around the living room. Dogs pass between us, crawl up into our laps. Cristina has timed her apple crumb cake perfectly, and she’s back and forth to the kitchen now, dolloping it with big spoonfuls of vanilla ice cream. The room falls into silent bliss, we’re all eating like field hands. Cristina is praised to the high heavens. Night has descended. The conversation whirls around the circle, storytellers telling stories, stimulated by food and wine and company, and by the darkness outside. In the morning, every writer will awaken with the need to go back to the page, but tonight we’re just telling stories the old-fashioned way, and it feels wonderful.
My favorite story? Tom’s, of course. I’ve shared the story of being at my first book signing in France, paired with Jim Harrison, who is a demigod there. I sat at my table, largely alone, for two hours, smiling a ventriloquist’s smile, while old Jim’s line of devotees snaked out of the theater and onto the sidewalk and around the corner for a block. His fans brought him bottles of wine, chunks of devastatingly rich cheese, cured hams, and invitations to their chateaus. I watched him for two hours.
Tom laughs, says he had a similar experience when he was on a panel and book signing in Los Angeles with Michael Jackson, sitting shoulder to shoulder with him all afternoon and into the evening. Tom shakes his head even now, a wry wince, and I’m reminded of Sedaris’s humility. They went out to dinner afterward, Tom says, some exclusive place where the hordes couldn’t bother them. And again Tom found himself sitting next to Michael, who was being super quiet, retreating into that famed silo of shyness. There was a preternatural stillness at the table. Tom says he and Laurie could tell Michael knew he was supposed to be having a conversation with them, but just didn’t know how to go about it. Then he tried, heroically, to rally. In desperation, Michael turned to them, Tom says, and blurted, “Y’all want to come over to my house?” Two long beats, then three, then four. “I’ve got a llama.”
Tom is in a story groove. The hour is still respectable, somewhere closer to ten o’clock than to midnight, at that delicate spot where, having so much fun, the guests could open still more wine and sink down lower into their chairs and couches, entering the party glide. But an old poet learns, by long practice, to guard his moods. Departing in merriment is critical to a diplomatic leave-taking. Tom yawns, rises to his full height, and begins to excuse himself, reminding us he promised his bedtime would come early and he wouldn’t be much of a reveler. And it’s enough. We could carry on longer, but it’s been rich and wonderful, and we’re content to send Tom and Laurie off to bed. Toby is driving back to Billings, Walter and Amanda to Livingston; Gretel and Neal likewise. Breon will sleep in the camper shell on his truck with his dogs.
After everyone filters away, it’s just us now, the four barbarians again. The kitchen is a wreck but we decide, in whispers, to wait till the morning, so as not to disturb Tom and Laurie’s sleep. Blurry and happy, sated and buzzed, road-weary and lit-stuffed, we walk through the tall grass and moonlight to our guest cabin, a bunkhouse so far away we could fire cannons from the porch without disturbing our hosts. We’re sleepwalking already but we stand on the porch in the steady wind, looking up at the stars. The sheaves of grass are blowing, and a rich scent gusts as though from between each blade—a remnant of the day’s sun still hiding there. Then we go inside, each to our own bedroom, like bears heading off to hibernate.
Skip and I are up early, without alarm clocks. We make our way to the main house, back to the kitchen, where we work in careful silence, until everything is pristine again—as if devastation never visited. Slowly, our clan reassembles, rested and strong. We want to be on our way so as not to burden Tom and Laurie with the responsibility of hosting any part of yet another splendid summer day, but Tom does not appear eager to see us leave. He and Breon and Laurie drink cup after cup of good strong black coffee while the light pours through every window.
Instead of seeing us off, Tom takes us down and show us his writing space, a stone’s long throw from the main house. It’s a refurbished old homesteader’s cabin made of big logs that are well chinked. As with the main house, it is filled with sunlight. It’s so close to the river—perched just above it, at the rushing river’s bend, with a cliff directly across—that we can sense the shudder of the river made by the rapids. A flagstone walkway leads around to the front, beneath the long drooping limbs of a summer-green willow. We pause, looking at the river, then pass through the double-paned glass French doors and into a world of books. The one-room cabin is all bookshelves, all of them filled with hardbacks. In the corner closest to the water is an old desk, and I note that to sit there Tom must turn his back on the river.
The desk contains only that which is necessary: a tablet, a pen, and three or four small stacks of manuscripts. An envelope or two. On the windowsills, a few talismans, slight physical anchors to the world above balancing the descent Tom makes each day into the spirit world. “My God,” Skip breathes, “it’s the best writing space ever,” and click, another piece of the puzzle falls into place: they all have a place to work, clean and uncluttered. And looking around at the best writing space ever, I vow, upon my return home, to be better: to alphabetize my own big library, and to cleanse the hurly-burly of my own cabin at the edge of the placid marsh.
The cabin, like a musical instrument, has a memory. You can almost feel the echoes of certain sentences that were made here. We bask, drinking it in through every pore, and then we leave; as ever, taking more with us than we brought.
We’re already packed up; we’ve loaded all our bags, our cardboard boxes of food and cookware, or so we think (farther down the road we’ll discover we’ve left some things behind, and have inadvertently appropriated others). We go out onto the sunny lawn for a round of photographs, as if at a grand family reunion. And indeed, it’s easy to imagine coming back with an even larger busload of young writers, such has been the pleasure and the depth of the hospitality.
For now, it’s time to go. In the full-circle fashion that is his life these days, Tom escorts us out, past his hedgerows of wild roses, and follows us some distance down the driveway with all his dogs, walking beneath the shaded canopy of the old cottonwoods and waving, sending us on our way in the same manner in which he greeted us, smiling just as broadly, with the dogs galloping ahead of him.
Man, he’s got his shit together, I think again. Who would ever, once upon a time, have thought?