Once you find the road in—the place is very much out of the way--the signs tell the story. I’ve visited twice, often enough to guess the state of Kansas gives other historical sites first dibs on overall maintenance. Marais des…
Got it this morning. Had no idea mature human beings could or would hunt hogs from helicopters, but this Texas outfit thought I might just take a shot.Ten years ago, we stayed at a gorgeous South Dakota hunting lodge, way…
It's all so understandable. From the vantage point of 75-plus years, the war seems ancient history. Besides, so many of those who fought had no desire to bundle up memories and lug them home in a service bag. Many wanted…
"Some of them just got too big for their britches." People said that occasionally, that some farmers who went down during the Farm Crisis of the 1980s, went in too big too fast and got blown off the land by a…
You’ll drive a long way to find a sandy beach on Minnesota's north shore. That humpy stuff roiling beneath your feet looks and feels like lava, which it is, surprising as that may seem with not a mountain anywhere close.…
Truth be told, there weren't all that many people around. I was a little disappointed in the size of the crowd--three or four dozen, most of them, like me, decidedly on the far side of their forties. A pandemic is raging…
A couple of weeks ago, out west on the Oregon Trail, I couldn't help being astounded by both the clockwork and the sheer number of Union Pacific long-haulers passing, one after another after another, on their way east, each heavy…
"It was a test," he told me, after pulling me aside. "It's a story I thought you'd like, a story I wanted to tell you." We were in the den, a couple rooms away from the jabbering coming the family…
Found it. I just hadn’t read the small print. I had turned right off the gravel road and headed to the scruffy Cather Township cemetery where a number of Cathers are buried. Not Willa--that I knew. But I was hoping…
We were blessed to get into the place. The blasted Covid stuff is closing everything these days, and with good reason. But our permission to enter had some contingencies: "you can come and I can let you in, but if…
