I do not concern myself with my inability to feel such comfort amidst humans (other than with very few friends and family), but, rather, am simply thankful that at least dogs exist, and I’m humbly aware of how much less a person I’d be – how less a human – if they did not exist.
Rick Bass
On our morning walk in Cass, West Virginia, I realized Marti had never heard a train whistle. Cass has several old coal-powered steam locomotives that take tourists up and down the mountain on tours. The train chugged by us slowly, belching out steam and smoke and blowing its whistle and Marti stopped and stared and gave a low growl like she does when she isn’t quite sure if she should be scared or angry.
Do I attack or run? We neither advanced nor retreated, but held steady and enjoyed the moment.
The smell of burning coal is an odor I remember well from my childhood. My grandma had a coal chute in the basement and a big furnace. We went down and shoveled and fed the beast. At night, grandma taught us how to bank the fire so it would burn slowly all night and be easy to get back to strength in the morning. I think the coal dust in our lungs made us stronger.
I was meant to ride the entirety of Greenbrier River Trail this weekend. 80-miles from Cass West Virginia to Lewisburg. Weather was not on my side. I slogged through 30 miles of slick mud that at times grabbed my tires and the next moment threatened to throw me to the ground. It was a battle in a cold rain that I wasn’t prepared for. I bailed off the trail at Marlinton. Too old for that bullshit so will give another go next summer.
Brittany and Martini met me and we enjoyed the evening. We drove back home to Black Dog Ridge Sunday morning and I managed to cut, split, and stack a decent load of firewood.
Marlinton felt a little like being in a Steven King movie. We met some groovy people but there was a vibe that the town had a dark secret. Like maybe there was a history of tourists disappearing, never to be heard from again.
We saw a young kid, perhaps around 12, riding his bike towards us on the street. He was riding with no hands and had his head laid way back and his arms stretched out wide. It was weird and not in the innocent way young kids just have fun on a bike. Hard to describe but I’m telling you……
Then we happened by an old man with long white hair wearing very holey coveralls with no shirt underneath and the pants were capri length, reaching just between his knees and his bare feet. He mentioned to us he was out ‘worshing his porch’ because it was raining, as he furiously waved an old straw broom over the 4’ x 4’ battered old porch. No further explanation requested or provided.
He also had an odd vibe that we could feel from 20 feet away.
We saw a very old man riding what looked like a 70’s era mini-bike that was converted to e-propulsion riding around town looking like he was on a re-con mission. Looking for vulnerable tourists we imagined. You guessed it, super weird looking guy that again, just didn’t fit any mold we were conditioned to.
These examples might seem innocent and unexceptional, but they were not normal. I’m good with quirky; love it. But each of these folks had some eerie quality that just didn’t sit right. We felt something in the air that wasn’t exactly scary, but definitely a bit off.
If I decide to start writing horror stories, I will consider moving there for inspiration.
The town is surrounded by mountains, and the mist hung low against the trees. A few Boo Radley type of homes added to the mystique of the little Appalachian town.
And the wine selection. Vile.
But we escaped and will likely return. Cute little place in a peculiar way and maybe the cool hippies have turned the tide against the serial murderers.
The firewood work is something I enjoy. It’s a lot, but not too much and I always know I can call Easton.
I recall Rick Bass writing extensively about cutting firewood for his home in Northern Montana but I could not remember exactly which book and could find no quotes. So I wrote him a letter instead.
You become famous because you’re lonely
And more lonely when you’re famousJames Baldwin
I think that must be true. You’d have to be crazy to want to be famous. Or a narcissist. I doubt famous people ever get the chance to meet anyone spontaneously. They live in a tightly controlled facsimile of the real world. Every movement and every human interaction anticipated, or contrived, and managed and used to some advantage to shape their reputation.
I think I am getting angrier with age. Crankier to be sure. Companies continue spending massive amounts of money to replace humans with technologies we all hate. They don’t care. They are chasing profit at any cost. They do not care about the people they will fire or how their customers feel about the changes.
Who loves automated phone systems? Self-checkout at grocery? Where are the savings to us that they profess is coming when they fire people and replace with inferior technology.
At Delta crown rooms now, they have 2 or 3 agents standing by self check-in machines. It would be far easier just to use the RF device to scan everyone’s boarding card and let them in. But instead they stand there and watch people fumble around, trying to figure out the equipment and the options and then eventually come over and check you in anyway.
What’s the point? If you are going to have the agents there anyway, just fucking check me in. Or, if you are going to have me do it, let me do it. Don’t hover, watching and correcting me while I try to figure it out. Are you doing it or am I?
So yes, I do get cranky and I am unapologetic for pushing back on this ridiculous bullshit. I do not return grocery carts to their stalls. That is the job of young boys and girls who need a little extra money for beer and drugs. I have no choice but to comply with this forced transfer of customer service to self-service if I still want to participate in commerce, but I will not do so quietly or gracefully. I’m just disappointed in how few people are joining me in this crusade.
The secret to sanity in these times is self-deception. Pretend as if humans are not the worst of the worst. We point towards the innocence of children as a reminder of our potential for good, or the occasional outlier adult who is amazing: Jane Goodall, Mandela, Jimmy Carter, MLK. Surely there are thousands more. Many who are unsung or undiscovered heroes, doing amazing, altruistic deeds as a matter of course.
But for every one one of those good ones, there are an equal or greater number of vile, nihilistic, entitled, evil sons-of-bitches. These are the Trumps (all of them), Musk, Bezos, Pol Pot, Hitler, white supremacist, the millions of MAGA morons and any number of racists, sexists, misogynists and general assholes walking around and doing their best to damage someone.
Aldo Leopold on Wolves.
Leopold recalled that “in those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf.” They fired into the pack until their rifles were empty, and the old wolf lay down while a pup dragged a leg into rocks. Leopold watched “a fierce green fire dying in her eyes” and wrote that he realized there was “something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain”
He described this as a moment when he sensed that “neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed” with the idea that removing wolves would create a “hunters’ paradise”
This happened when Leopold was a teenager and a product of his environment. He went on to write ‘A Sand County Almanac’ and become one of the earliest and greatest environmental activists of our time.
I read an excerpt in ‘The Guardian‘ from a new Michael Lewis book called ‘Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State’. Depressing as fuck in macro, but this story underscores how a few government employees tried to impeded DOGE when they attempted to do things that were illegal and/or unethical.
In this story, of course the bad guys eventually won. The DOGE dipshit (Gavin Kliger), a few years out of college with limited work experience and not a single redeeming quality, was assigned to convince IRS leadership to illegally provide DHS with addresses of immigrants who had filed tax returns. This was a very large number of people. Kliger was a documented white nationalist and racist, posting his views loudly and proudly on multiple social media sites. A real gem.
DHS wanted this information so they knew where these undocumented immigrants lived and they could raid their homes and deport them. Bear in mind, these were people who intentionally filed tax returns because they wanted to do the right thing. They wanted to pay taxes to a government that denied them access to any federal benefits. They did this out of duty and hopefully show their good intentions which may eventually lead to a green card or citizenship.
Kathleen Walters was the Chief Privacy Officer for IRS when young Gavin walked into the IRS offices demanding everything from laptops and phones to unfettered access to any and all IRS data. Kathleen was the blocker and one of the heroes of Michael’s book. She graciously and doggedly resisted DOGE’s efforts (incidentally, while she was also dealing with a very scary breast cancer scenario).
Ultimately, DOGE got what they wanted. They simply went over and around Kathleen’s attempts to hold the line and not break the law. DOGE got their address database and unleashed their particular brand of hatred and chaos on hundreds of thousands of families. Kathleen resigned from government service, just a few months before her 20-year service milestone. Had she stayed those last few months, she would have been entitled to a very generous retirement package and lifetime health care. But she resigned. Because she is a badass and has principles.
So we lost that one, in spite of Kathleen (and a few others) who tried to do the right thing. Because even though there are good people out there, there are more bad people than good. And the bad ones find themselves in positions of power more often than the good. And they use that power to damage others; to damage the planet we live on and all the other animals and plants and trees that enable our existence. They are destroying it so they can become richer.
Any fool can see we are losing all the key battles.
So that takes me back to the beginning of this particular tirade (which is a recurring theme on these pages — the general theme remains, only the details and examples change), which is to say that if we want to remain sane in these times, we must deceive ourselves into believing that humanity is more good than bad. That we are more benevolent and tolerant and motivated to use our ingenuity to help rather than damage than what history and current events suggest. We must lie to ourselves, or go crazy over the injustice of being part of a species that is so spectacularly capable and so spectacularly flawed. So flawed that we will intentionally burn down the very planet that sustains us so that a handful of old, mostly white men, can get ridiculously wealthy, which comes at the ultimate cost of destroying earth’s biosphere.
In other news, the state of Tennessee, in an unbelievable instance of imbecility, attempted not once, but twice, to execute a woman. Christa Pike. The fact that capital punishment remains a thing in this day and age is embarrassing enough. But these southern states, you know. They are takers, not givers.
Anyway, these fuckheads injected poison into Christa that was supposed to kill her. It didn’t. So they doubled down and rammed in some more poison. Didn’t work.
Christa is now in the hospital on a respirator in critical care. The state that a few days ago tried to kill her is now working hard to keep her alive. So they can kill her.
This is, by the way, the second time the state of Tennessee has completely fucked up an execution. For a governmental body so committed to killing people, they sure are not very good at it. But again, southern states are not known for intellect in their state governments or federal representatives. They are mostly pretty dumb.
Depending on which newspaper you read, democrats will either sweep the house and have a 50/50 chance at the senate, or republicans will hold the line and maintain their trifecta of control over all 3 branches. I finally no longer underestimate the idiocy of the American voter, so make no prediction.
I learned my lesson when Obama was elected and I let some optimism creep in.
In my lifetime we’ve elected Reagan twice, Bush twice and Trump twice and a host of congresspersons and senators who are essentially retarded. In that, they are spectacularly mentally handicapped, but they don’t seem to know it. So they are confidently ignorant and vocal.
I am talking about Matt Gaetz, Ron Johnson, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor-Green, Tom Cotton, Elise Stefanik, JD Vance, Kari Lake, Greg Abbott, John Kennedy, Erik Schmidt, Mitch McConnell and the like. There are many more of course. People who would struggle to manage a medium sized convenience store but somehow get elected into government.
Letter to Rick Bass
Hi Rick,
I did a quick search to look for a quote from you about cutting firewood. I did not find what I was looking for online but I do remember in one of your books, perhaps ‘Winter’, that you wrote extensively about this topic. I read it a long time ago. I’ve read quite a few of your books. I have turned a small village of readers on to ’The Nine Mile Wolves’ which I found beautiful.
Incidentally, I have worked and at times lived in Namibia for nearly 25 years now, running a charity I founded there many years ago. I did not know you had spent time there and written about the plight of the black rhino. Our program and our kids are big supporters of Save the Rhino Trust and we have a function each year to bring awareness. I just ordered a copy of your book on this topic.
I also see that I just missed a writing workshop that I surely would have endeavored to attend. I will keep watch for future opportunities.
Firewood was on my mind because I went on a long gravel bike ride along the Greenbrier River in West Virginia, where I live when not helping my elderly parents in Ohio. When we got home, I went out and got right after a good-sized pile of logs I had drug to my wood station from trees that had blown down on my property. After fueling, oiling, and sharpening my saw and filing the business end of my axe.
As I was cutting and splitting and loading into the jeep and restocking near the 3 places I routinely burn wood, I thought about the satisfaction that comes with the physical labor of maintaining a rural property. I know I can make a phone call and a young man down the road will deliver a load of aged locust, perfect for burning, at a very fair price. But I like the work. I like the feeling of accomplishment and the sore muscles that follow. And I remembered your long winter of cutting wood out of necessity and the way you wrote about it.
Sorry for the long mail and thanks for the stories.
I’m writing now from my deck with only the light of the fire, a candle, and a kerosene lamp. It’s too dark to see, but I can hear the Greenbrier River below me. Marti is keeping up a conversation with other dogs in the valley, in between naps and when she feels the need to weigh in.
We will leave it there then.
Humbly submitted
Robert Myres – Flanker (ret.), Portneuf Valley Rugby Football Club, writer, comic genius, caretaker of Black Dog Ridge Manor
