Dave Carty's Blog, page 2

The Birds

I may be the only sentient human being in the country who enjoys driving across North Dakota in November, but there you are. And there they were, a flock of blackbirds paralleling the interstate that extended as far back and as far forward as I could see. I stared in awe at what must have been tens of thousands of the little blackbirds, stretching ahead of my truck in a ragged, undulating line until they blinked out on the horizon. Belatedly, it occurred to me to check my mileage, and when I guesstimated the distance I’d been watching them, my thumbnail estimate of the flock’s size was four to five miles in length. 

I’ve loved birds all my life. That includes hunting them – my trip across North Dakota was following a grouse-hunting trip to Wisconsin – but just as often, I simply love watching them, or caring for the flock of pigeons I keep or marveling at the fall and spring migrations of their distant cousins.  A hummingbird, a creature the size of my finger, may migrate thousands of miles south every year. Certain species of geese may fly a quarter of the way around the globe and fly hundreds of miles in a single night. 

When I was a child, I dreamed I could fly. I still remember those dreams, and the intoxicating freedom I felt as I soared suspended above the earth, en route to places I had not yet seen. Most of the birds that migrate each year are doing it for the first time, to places they too have never been. But where they go doesn’t really matter. That they’re still going is everything.

This Is Patriotism?

On January 6, 2021, I sat before the television until early in the evening shocked and then infuriated by the act of domestic terrorism I was witnessing: thousands of Trump supporters storming and breaching our nation’s capital building, something that hasn’t occurred in this country since 1814.

I long ago predicted this would happen. Not the storming of our nation’s capital – I had no way of knowing how such violence would manifest -- but a similar cowardly act of comparable and pointless stupidity.

For four years, President Trump has catered to and encouraged the lunatic fringe of the Republican party. No disgraceful act he has ever committed is worthy of their condemnation. When he attempted to solicit a bribe from the Ukrainian president, and was rightfully impeached for doing so, every Republican senator in the senate, save one, voted to acquit him. When he has, over and over again, not so subtly encouraged his supporters to commit violence – equating white supremacists with “fine” people, encouraging them to rough up protesters at his rallies, calling an armed mob who earlier this year stormed the Michigan state house “patriots,” labelling the press the enemy of the people, alternately threatening and cajoling the Georgia secretary of state to overturn a democratically decided election, congressional Republicans, at best, have looked the other way, but have far more often justified his despicable behavior with the feeble explanation that, well, the Democrats…

His supporters, of whom there are many, are unable or unwilling to see through the blatant hypocrisy of his actions and words or beyond their unshakable faith in him. They are impervious to reason, data and facts, as unreachable as a stone in the bottom of a cesspool. Instead, they insist that the presidential election was thrown because it is inconceivable to them that Donald Trump, a man whom many of them believe, with the fervent conviction of zealots, was anointed by God, could possibly have lost. And so they bring endless, pointless lawsuits to the courts, and demand endless and pointless recounts, none of which have, nor will they ever, change the results of the election one iota. All this based on nothing more than what they profess to know: that only an election decided in Donald Trump’s favor is valid. 

Trump and his craven enablers in congress, including Greg Gianforte and Steve Daines, whom I am ashamed are the governor and senator in my home state of Montana, should be held to account for their actions, which have allowed a mob of delusional fanatics to storm and vandalize our nation’s capital.

I’m not going to hold my breath that that will ever happen. Already, conservative talking heads are ginning up conspiracy theories – that the mob was led by undercover antifa agents, that it was composed of patriotic citizens frustrated by not having their voices heard, at nauseum. These self-serving lies will never end, for there is no end to the self-deluded who believe them. 

But the rest of us need no longer pretend that the willful ignorance and stupidity of Trump and his supporters have no consequences. And we should not forget.  

Bring On The Cold

I see I have some explaining to do. I’m out of sync with virtually everyone else I know in enjoying cold weather. Not for me the baking hot days of summer, tans, and flip flops; I love the hint of fall in the air and the season’s first snow.

Maybe it’s my heritage. I’m a typical American mutt, a mix of Irish, Dutch, and German ancestry, but it’s the Irish part people notice, or did until my red hair turned gray. I was the kid in grade school who wore long pants on sweltering midwestern summer days because even brief exposure to the sun gave me a fierce sunburn. I was the pasty-faced kid covered with freckles from head to foot. Yup, that kid. 

But when October arrived, I was given a new lease on life. In the cool air, I could finally breathe, and my coarse, heavy jeans weren’t quite so out of place. I could disappear into the woods for hours at a time, lying in the grass and feeling the cool earth press against my back, sensing more than hearing its insistent reminder: cool weather ahead; winter is coming. 

That’s the same message, incidentally, that my vastly more sane friends hear when they start getting antsy for a vacation to the coast of Florida. But for me, I enjoy nothing more than being out in the thick of it, and at least for an hour or two, feeling the cold against my cheeks, the bite in the air, the knowing of what will come.

Can Someone Tell Me Why?

Can we talk? Why do computers answer a simple question in two parts, between which you’re supposed to choose the correct one? What kind of answer is that? Then when you do choose one, it’s not the correct answer, meaning it has to be the other answer, but the other answer isn’t correct either so what’s the point of giving you a choice in the first place? How come I’m the only person that understands this?

But wait, I’m not done. You’re writing something about something. You’ve spent hours composing an entire page of whatever it is you’re writing, and suddenly, apropos of nothing, your computer blinks and your words are gone, in exactly the same manner any number of computer store salesmen have told you wouldn’t happen, in fact, could not possibly happen. The fact that the essay or letter or best-selling novel you were composing could not possibly have disappeared from your computer screen is cold comfort when faced with the indisputable fact that it has, in fact, disappeared from your computer screen.

I liked the old way better, when I used to bang out stories on a succession of manual and electric typewriters the size of Volkswagens. But computers are seductive, like a full bottle of single-malt Scotch parked beside an empty glass. The first sip is really nice, so you take another. That one’s not too bad, either. So then…but you know how this ends. 

I’ll never go back to writing stories on manual typewriters, just like I’ll never go back to wearing high-topped Keds. Computers can do lots of cool things that my old IBM Selectric could only dream of. But jeeze, do they have to be so ridiculously complex? Can anyone explain to me why turning on a computer is called booting up? When was the last time you booted up your oven?

I’m listening to you, naysayers, but I’ve heard you all before. I know what you computer nerds are going to say. You’re going to say, read the directions, you moron.

But I will refuse to listen. I still have my pride. 

Swing it, Frank!

I’m not exactly sure how all this happened. I began like everyone else my age, listening to the Beatles, and like every other Beatle-crazed kid in the sixties, worshipped them as the demi-gods they seemed to be. That may be hard for some of you to understand, but, well…you had to be there.

But there was a time before the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show, a time when I still wore my jeans turned up at the cuffs and Ked’s high-topped white sneakers, when I listened to a different type of music.

My mother had been a disk jockey, and some of my earliest memories are of her singing along with the crooners of the day – Tony Bennett (her life-long favorite), Dean Martin, Englebert Humperdinck (yup, that was his real name; you can look it up), Sammy Davis Jr. and Louie Armstrong. And then there was Frank Sinatra.

Sinatra wasn’t a headliner in our house, but I certainly knew who he was; not knowing Sinatra was like not knowing the name of the president. Enter the Beatles; this would be around 1964. I was nine. And from that point forward I wouldn’t listen to Sinatra or any other of my mother’s favorite singers for 45 years. Not a song.

Then, in a twist that even I think is pure serendipity, I fell in love with ballroom dancing. Swing music – the wonderful, heavy on the back beat, lilting American-songbook tunes that make it almost impossible not to tap your feet, are a big part of my favorite ballroom dance, the foxtrot. 

So I started listening to Sinatra again. It wasn’t like I had much choice; that’s half of what they played at the dances I was attending. And soon, much sooner than I would have anticipated, I came full circle, back to where I’d been when some of us kids listened to the World Series on transistor radios. When my mother loved Tony Bennett.

She knew good music when she heard it. That’s a talent I like to think I inherited from her. So I listen to Sinatra, in thrall to his voice, and sometimes I dance. But mostly, I just listen.

The Brush Pile

The rabbit showed up early that fall. I was standing in front of the window that overlooks the tiny patch of green grass I’ve deigned to cultivate in my two acres of overgrown wildlife habitat. I may have been holding a cup of coffee. And there he was, munching on clover. Peter Cottontail. 

I love cottontail rabbits. I grew up in the Midwest watching them, examining their nests, and hunting them. I gathered food I thought they’d like and left it for them to eat. I followed their distinctive triangular tracks in the winter snow. And now one had evidently taken up residence in my back yard. I was thrilled.

That spring he took a mate. When I saw the two of them together my hopes soared. Baby rabbits! I couldn’t wait to see my yard full of the little guys, hopping around in fraternal solidarity.

I decided to build them a home. Every couple years I trim away the dead wood in the hundreds of trees I’ve planted, and until recently I’ve piled the slash a hundred feet or so from my house and burned it. But this year, I decided, the brush pile would stay. Rabbits love brush piles. It would be their new home. 

The following spring, however, my rabbit was gone. There were no Mr. and Mrs. Rabbit munching clover in my yard; no tiny babies hopping about in their wake. That winter there was no rabbit at all. After the first snowfall, I checked the brush pile for tracks, but found none. Yeah, I know. It was just a rabbit. And the hawks, and the neighborhood cats, and yada yada. But I still missed the goddamn rabbit.  

This summer, I cut out more dead wood and added it to the brush pile. It has become a fine staging area for my house wrens, who use it as a way point on their darting flights around my yard. 

And then, a few days ago, I was sitting on the porch with a glass of wine. It was summer. I spotted a flash of brown from the corner of my eye. And there, munching on clover in my yard, was a rabbit. Was it the same one? He gazed at me with unblinking black eyes and then darted under the giant spruce I planted many, many years ago. Would he be back? Would he find the brush pile I’d built just for him? For now, all I can do is wait. 

Autumn

The heat of summer doesn’t suit me. Never has. The blazing sun, worshipped by nearly everyone else, burns and peels my fair, freckled skin. I’ve never had a tan, not for a single day in my entire life. It could be worse: many are born with life-long afflictions; I got handed an eternally pasty complexion. So yeah, it wouldn’t kill me to count my blessings.

But when I feel the first cool nights in late August, when an occasional September day reaches a high in the sixties, not the seventies or eighties, I feel my blood flow, like sap rising in a long dormant tree. The waiting is delicious. I know fall is coming, I can sense it days before it arrives. 

My football career as a youngster was brief to the point of nonexistence, but my lack of talent for the game did not diminish my enthusiasm for it. When the leaves began to turn and the weather cooled, I’d don whatever jersey I happened to own at the time – I’m pretty sure I had a Minnesota Vikings jersey I loved for the bright purple color – and harangue my friends into a game of touch football. 

When I was ten my family moved to a three-story frame home that had once been a farm in a rural part of southern Iowa. Suddenly loosed from the constraints of city living – we’d spent the previous ten years in Omaha – I was free to explore the woodlots and cornfields around our small town at will. And explore I did, nearly every day. In the fall, like every other kid I knew, I’d grab my BB gun, my bow, or, when dad finally let me, my shotgun and my dog, and hunt for whatever I found – quail, squirrels, rabbits.  In those days, kids with guns and bird dogs were considered part of the landscape, not a menace to society. I loved it. And all of that – football, hunting, my dog – were inextricably linked to cool weather. 

So all of you sun worshippers out there, god love you. Sure wish I could get a sexy tan (even once!). But when it drops into the thirties one of these nights soon, don’t mind me if I’m smiling while I fish around my closet for a sweater. Now it’s my season.

How I Built it: Chest of Drawers Pt. 2

This video shows the actual, albeit abbreviated, process of building my new chest of drawers from start to finish. In the same way that a book is written, a chest of drawers, to be successful, begins with a roadmap -- although that roadmap may include detours...

How I Built It: Chest Of Drawers Pt. 1

Building a chest of drawers is the process of building one project upon another until the chest is finally complete. Here, I'm practicing hand cutting a dovetail joint, one of several skills required for building a good drawer.

Crick or Creek

It’s become something of a regional sport in Montana, ridiculing new arrivals and the looney contortions they perform to fit in. So and so from a Chicago/Atlanta/New York hedge fund moves to the state and buys a ranch. For some reason, owners of hedge funds never buy homes, they buy ranches. Next stop, the local Ranch Supply headquarters, where they buy Carhartt jeans, jackets and boots. And since they can afford anything they want, a new cowboy hat. For those of you who aren’t from around here, high quality, 10X cowboy hats aren’t cheap. You could spend a few nights in a pretty decent hotel for what a good one will set you back. But what the hell, it’s only money.

Of course, dressing like a local will only get you so far. You have to talk like one, too.

Here’s how that works: See that little stream over there? All that pretty blue water burbling over multi-hued stones and winding through sylvan glades? That’s called a “crick.” It most certainly is not called a “creek.”

Yeah, I know all about the King’s English. I went to Journalism school. So listen up: If, for instance, you planned to go fishing on Horse Creek, and perchance you were to mention that to a friend, you would say that you were going fishing on Horse Crick, accent on the noun “Horse.”  If, on the other hand, the name of the creek had more than one syllable, as in “Cottonwood Crick,” you would still accent the entirety of the word “Cottonwood.” Say it out loud: “Cottonwood Crick.” When you get the hang of it, it almost swings, like a good Sinatra song, the accent always on the word preceding “crick.”

So, for twenty five years or so, that was me. I was a Cottonwood Crick kind of guy, not Cottonwood Creek.  All my years of forced devotion to English Grammar and proper syntax rode out the door on the back of my desire to be like everyone else. I was no hedge fund owner, but I was no fool, either. When in Rome…

And then one day, I just couldn’t do it anymore. By then I’d lived in Montana long enough that I could stake out a claim as a bona fide local. But I just…couldn’t…do it. I went back to saying “creek.” For some reason, it feels more honest to me.

But now I occasionally get the look. I’ll say “creek” instead of “crick” and I’ll get a furtive glance, a flicker of cognition, the trace of a smile. The implication is clear: You ain’t from around here, are you boy?