The ambulance howls at the window, the third one today. I tell myself to keep writing, but my focus is like an oiled piglet. I contemplate lunch again. Umami brine pho? Confit turkey club sandwich? Lengua tacos with sharp, raw onions and flame-ass chiles? Meal...
It’s late September and I’m on the road, a hell of a place to be. I’m in my 20-year-old, 4-cylinder, Ford Ranger pickup, driving coast to coast for what I hope will be a string of uneventful days. Since I have nowhere I really need...
When photographer Dave M. Shumway moved to Billings, Montana, in 2005, he began hiking the mountain trails closest to his new city. For the most part, that meant the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness to the south. “I’d hike the trails, and I’d look up to these 12,000-foot...
Just about everyone in the town of Lewistown, Montana, population 5,800, knew about the 6,000-square-foot stucco home just off Main Street. If not for the structure’s rich history — it was built by one of the town’s founding fathers in 1917, converted into nine upscale...
I’m not one to tease about physical limitations, or take advantage of someone because of them, but last year I found the perfect moment to capitalize on a friend’s frustrations. We were fishing a river in Idaho, just over the Bitterroot Mountains from Missoula, Montana, and...
Sunday morning, first half of June, at the Reid place east of Ballantine, along the Highline Canal. Bluebird day, some cut hay rowed in fields, meadowlarks blasting from fence posts, silty water brimming down the canal, the air blessedly cool. Shannon Kahler pulls up in...
Some days clouds drift over the canyon, horsetails, bits of high cotton. In the afternoon, then, the sky quickens, tumbles — a dark creek crashing down the mountain. Other days from ridge to ridge there’s only a high, dry, guileless blue, and you can fairly hear the meadow grass breathe. You could say, I...
Dinner at The Fieldhouse in Billings just might make you rethink Brussels sprouts. Chef Ben Harman doesn’t dress up the old fashion staple with bacon and some heavy sauce to mask its natural flavor. Instead, he does something entirely different, topping the roasted vegetable with...
With dabs of oil paint edged around her rectangular glass palette, Loretta Domaszewski stands before a three-by-four-foot canvas, one of four pieces she’s working on. Each one in this series speaks to the essential elements: fire, water, air, and earth. Using a vibrant, salmon-colored underpainting,...