Diversions

Fictional sheriff’s fans pack Buffalo for Longmire Days

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Actors

BUFFALO, Wyo.—The no-nonsense team captain and accomplished actor raised a pertinent question before the coin flip to determine the home team for this year’s Longmire Days celebrity softball game.

A Martinez, the actor who plays Jacob Nighthorse in the Netflix series “Longmire” (and who spells his name like that—“A Martinez”), is proud of his Native American heritage and wondered why it wasn’t obvious that his team in the “Cowboys vs. Indians” contest would be the home team. After all, Indians were here first. Continue Reading →

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Opinion

Montana Viewpoint: Remembering Uncle Davey

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Elliott

I don’t know if you need a break from politics, but I sure as heck do, so this is about my mother’s Uncle Davey.

My mother’s parents were Canadian, from southern Ontario, but her father had somehow wound up owning a hardware store in a small town in North Dakota, so that’s where she was born. Continue Reading →

Diversions

Wary Scotsman passes ‘testicle test’ with flying colors

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Oysters

As the only foreigner at the table, I was becoming increasingly aware of the semi-suppressed sniggering that was going on among my fellow diners. We were in a Billings restaurant and, in front of me, was a plate of Rocky Mountain Oysters, a dish that had been highly recommended to me by the assembled company.

I’d never heard of it, but even in my ignorance I suspected that there was more than a hint of the euphemistic in the title. Nothing I could see on the plate looked like seafood. Nothing I could see on the plate looked like it had bobbed around on the beds of the Atlantic or Pacific oceans, and it was hard to imagine this stuff producing anything even remotely similar to a pearl. Continue Reading →

Prairie Lights

Prairie Lights: In accident’s wake, reflections on luck, fate

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Subaru

Like most people who write for a living, I sometimes resort to the use of clichéd expressions.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to make use of “deer in the headlights” again. The idiom will always remind me unpleasantly of the actual experience of having a deer directly in my headlights and then crumpling the hood of my car and causing both airbags to deploy. Continue Reading →

Montana

Gone guys: Remembering a tragedy 50 years on

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Jesus

It’s beautiful, that stretch of highway between Great Falls and Glasgow. It doesn’t gob-smack you, like the Missions do outside St. Ignatius on Highway 93. It’s more like something you breathe in, mile after mile of highway yawning through gently rolling plains fringed with river flora and laced with creeks that dry up or freeze or gush as the season dictates. It has the exhilaration of limitless possibility in the summer, the desolation of an all-encompassing emptiness in the winter. Continue Reading →