Sweet Home, Barndominium
The log cabin of the 21st century lets you live under the same roof as your boat and your truck.
It’s the F-150 of prefab housing.
Have an indoor crawfish boil.
I like to think I know barns and barn-related edifices. I spent my formative years in small-town Texas, the kind of place with three dining-out options: The Bronco Café (open for lunch), the Rodeo City Café (open for dinner), and the Dairy Queen (generally just open). From Main Street, land stretched out in every direction, dotted by lazy cows, occasional horses, and high-ceilinged barns in various stages of newness or disrepair. We moved to Fort Worth in my teens, and I spent each January at the Fort Worth Rodeo and Stock Show wandering in and out of the cavernous halls for showing horses, pigs, and cattle breeds so fluffy their owners gave them blow-outs there in the holding pens, with blow dryers plugged into generators. I turned 18 on a friend’s ranch, where we rode horses saddled in their working barn, our boots collecting its soft mud earth and smell of hay and horse dung. Barns and barn-like …
Strait is the Gate
A fence in Davidson County offers lessons in responsibility and transience to a young man with a wondering mind
There was no proper latch
If you wanted to run the tractor someday, the gate was where you started
It was eight feet wide and a head higher than the fence. It was made of aluminized steel. In a long line of pine boards painted white for a while and black for longer, its six round bars were cockscomb red. Struck by a stick or a cast-off apple core, it let out a metallic ding distinct from the common thuds and cracks of stone and dirt and lumber. There was no proper latch. A rusty chain hanging from a nail attached it to the post.
Most of the time, it stayed shut. There were other ways of getting to the other side. You could climb the fence, jump it, crawl underneath. To fill the horse troughs with water, you could run a hose through. The smaller gate by the greenhouse, so squeaky on the hinge, gave quicker and more convenient passage to the dog pens, and there was a field gate just off the main road, but to get a tractor or a truck to the back pasture or the pond, you had to pass through the red …
Where the Buffalo Roam
The Old West vs. the Bullshit West
Buffalo took care of us once. They can take care of us again
The scientific name for the Yellowstone bison is Bison bison bison
I’m losing a staring contest with a buffalo. He’s an adult bull, at least a ton, with tobacco-brown eyes set deep in soot-black fur. They haven’t blinked in forty seconds. With him are four others — younger bachelors, but still 1,500 pounds of horned bovine apiece. Late March means half-shed winter coats, means bodies patchworked in shaggy pecan and thin russet undercoats.
We’re in the Gardiner Basin, three miles from Yellowstone’s northern entrance. Sagebrush abundant. Elk, many. Cacti, occasional. The basin barriers are the Absaroka and Gallatin ranges. The valley’s name is Paradise. It smells faintly of wet dust.
The hunters sit patient down the road. The group this morning is Mr. Red Wing, his brother, brother-in-law, and two sons, all from the Nez Perce Reservation in northwestern Idaho, watching-waiting-hoping for a hoof to step onto a wrong patch of grass. Two days ago, in search of …
