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 …
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 …
Will the Crazies Kill Seattle?
How could a city with so much wealth allow conditions to erode so badly?
Progressive virtue floated on a seemingly bottomless sea of New Money.
Shit got real, and very, very dumb.
I arrived in Seattle in the summer of 2002, trying to outrun a heroin addiction that had worn out its welcome. This time — thank you, Mother Methadone! — the cure took, which was a good thing, because I was running out of westward real estate. And so I stayed, now approaching a quarter century. And rooted myself, and bougified my chakras, and shamelessly hitched a ride on the rising rocket of this city’s economic success, fueled by Microsoft and Amazon. Which is how it has come to pass that I have enjoyed a front row seat to watch, with some mysterious alchemical mix of horror and bemusement, as a city with so many advantages found so many ways to try (so far unsuccessfully) to squander them all.
Let me be clear about one thing at the outset: Seattle isn’t dying, and it’s not about to get killed by anyone. For all of my frustrations and my complaints — which are well-founded and widely …
