Dan's Writings
Basing Decisions On The Unknown
I am imagining a call to the United States Park Service where the phone simply rings and rings: nobody home at one of our countries premier land-managing agencies! How can this be? What could bring us to such a state of affairs?
Conversations with the Vegetable Guy
A dozen years ago, during a semester when I was teaching at Carleton College, I wandered down to the Co-op to see what it was all about. I had never been inside a food co-op and I was curious to know what drove the people who worked there.
Waiting for Summer Rain
Last night, the wind woke me about 12:30. It whipped the cottonwoods and I lay there hoping to hear it mix with the eerie, welcome lashing of rain against the roof. It has been a good summer, but if we could just get another couple decent rains - just another inch or two while the days were still sweltering - there would be grass as the ranch moved into autumn.
The Strenuous Life
We harvested buffalo just north of the small southwestern North Dakota town of Bowman. It was our first time harvesting in North Dakota, and we drove up the night before to meet the Director of North Dakota’s Meat Inspection Program and her Senior Inspector.
The Displaced Bison
Last winter, I wrote a monthly musing that talked about a group of buffalo that had recently been gathered on a cattle ranch in south Florida.
Frog Symphony
I have heard Chorus Frogs every spring for my entire life, but I never saw one until May of 2008. I was following Mike Forsberg around southeastern Montana in search of stories and photographs for Mike’s book, Great Plains: America’s Lingering Wild.
April Can Break Your Heart
The month of April always gets me thinking about T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land. Well, not the whole poem. All I can ever remember of The Waste Land is the first four lines.
Reminiscing the Redwing's Cottonwood and a Grand Buffalo Ranch Wedding
It has been a whole year since we began getting the ranch ready for our daughter’s wedding. The reason that this came to mind is that we heard our first redwing blackbird this morning and I remembered that last year, when the tree trimmers came, a redwing sang proudly from the first cottonwood snag I pointed out for trimming.
The Valentine’s Dinner
Jill and I invited three other couples out to the ranch to test Jill’s Valentine’s Day Dinner. It wasn’t intended to be the kind of Valentine’s Day party with paper mache hearts and cupids hanging from the ceiling.