Living The Big Sky Life: Dr. Doolittle Raised A Duck Hunter

As I’ve mentioned before, Chef and I grew up together in The OC surf city community of Huntington Beach, California. We have, in fact, known each other since we were about six years old; and as far back as I can remember, Chef’s dad was the local veterinarian who treated my family’s pets whenever they needed treatment, which wasn’t very often.

What I didn’t know growing up was that, although his father’s day job was that of animal doctor, Chef’s father wasn’t interested in bringing his work home by having a house full of family pets. Because Chef was never permitted to have a pet of his own, his minimal hands-on exposure to domesticated household pets was limited to a big tom cat that was never even allowed inside the house. Consequently, the bulk of Chef’s beliefs about animal caretaking were compiled, not from experience, but from years of subjective and desensitizing vet-isms occasionally uttered by his emotionally detached father at the dinner table.

It wasn’t until we arrived in big sky country with my daughter’s cat, Newt, that I discovered just how inflexible and unrealistic Chef’s compilation of animal doctrines could be.

Newt had a twin brother, Ziggy, who didn’t survive the coyotes of south Orange County. Where I come from, anyone who has a cat has no business leaving it outside after dark when the coyotes emerge from the hills looking for dinner and a midnight snack. And bringing them inside before nighttime is still no guarantee of their safety because poor Ziggy got snagged in the middle of the afternoon.

My youngest daughter was about six years old when she named and claimed the 8-week old Newt as hers. He was devoted and docile, and he was without question her favorite doll. She was known to regularly wrap him up in a tight receiving blanket like a new born baby and place him in her doll’s cradle to rock while she sang and talked to him for hours. More than once did I walk into her room only to see his round green eyes widen and look up at me pleadingly from that cradle, yet he never made a move to hurt her. Never a hiss, never a scratch.

Newt

But when Newt arrived in Whitefish, Montana with us in May of 1992, he too became traumatically subjected to a new way of life, and that included non-negotiable principle #1 of Chef's animal doctrine which firmly declared that cats are nocturnal animals who belong outside at night so they can hunt and wallow in all of their nocturnal-ness.

Talk about kitty culture shock. This new lifestyle was completely contrary to every reality Newt had known since infancy, and while he managed to get through those initial warm summer nights with little trouble, all of that changed at Halloween when the first snow fell and the temperatures dropped to freezing. Newt stubbornly tested Chef’s rigid animal ideals all winter long. And not to be outdone by a cat, Chef remained callously committed to dismissing Newt’s pitiful manipulations, as if the cat had nothing better to do than fake his uncontrollable shivering. There wasn’t a lot we could do as Chef repeatedly rejected Newt’s loud front porch cat-pleas to exchange the icy outdoors for the sanctuary of a house heated by a wood stove. The best option we had at the time was to sneak Newt into the house when Chef was at work in the evening, but overall, it just wasn’t a frontline battle priority when we were all struggling to acclimate to a new situation.

Unfortunately for Newt, he wasn’t the only one suffering from culture shock, and in the name of new home peace promotion, I felt I had to be selective about the battles I picked. My hair crusade undoubtedly led the battle charge, but that first year of being squeezed into the Unabomber bungalow saw us all making challenging compromises and personal sacrifices.

Being left out in the cold that first winter eventually triggered some dormant, yet instinctive, survival mechanism inside of Newt’s brain, and I watched him go from domestic docile housecat to wide-eyed wildcat intent upon survival in the wilderness. It only got worse when we left downtown Whitefish and moved into the home on the range where there were no limits to his domain, or to the always present life-threatening risks posed by roaming wild creatures.

  

Anyone with open acreage and horses knows that flies and mosquitoes are a fact of life, hence the ceiling fan. Nothing keeps flying insects at bay inside of the house better than the turbulence caused by a ceiling fan. And anyone with open acreage and horses also knows that mice are a fact of life as well, hence the cat. Having a couple of good mouse-cats in the yard is essential for keeping the rodents at bay and out of the house.

We may not have had horses like our neighbors, but our fields were filled with voles (aka field mice), and thankfully no rats. Ten acres was a lot of territory for one cat to do vole patrol on so it wasn’t long before Newt got a baby black buddy named Inky. Chef built an insulated protective cubby inside the garage for the cats to use at night, but Newt refused to occupy it. He preferred to alternate between the neighboring hay barn belonging to Steve and Sue Ellen and the attic in Paige Ochenrider’s garage. Inky, on the other hand, knew no different and grew accustomed to staying out at night in his cubby without complaint. Although he was known to have a motor mouth most of the time, Inky usually spoke with the purring voice of a contented cat. And the louder he purred, the more he drooled.

Inky

Newt and Inky weren’t the only sentinels roaming our property however. They shared the range with Chef’s yellow Lab, Bucky. Bucky was a gift given to Chef by Jack and Deanna Frazier, his employers and the owners of Jack’s Diamondback Restaurant and Casino, several months before we moved out of the Unabomber bungalow. Jack and Deanna had gone down to a Labrador breeding farm in Creston (near Big Fork) to select the 8-week old pup for Chef, and frankly, they couldn’t have bestowed it upon a more grateful recipient. Chef may have grown up with a veterinarian for a father, but for the first time in his life, he found himself responsible for raising and caring for his very own dog.  

And like any new parent, Chef wanted to do everything right. The critical voice of his father’s vet-isms interrupted the natural course of my life with pets once again. This time it took the form of principle #2 of the animal doctrine which firmly declared that bad dogs are almost always created by bad owners.      

Bucky had as much pressure put on him to be the perfect dog as Chef placed upon himself to be the perfect owner, and those perfect standards were clearly set by Dr. Dad. My father-in-law wasted no time in warning Chef that Labradors have a tendency toward hip problems, and the best way to minimize this problem was to never let your Lab become overweight. So Bucky’s diet was strictly regulated from the beginning to always keep him lean and fit. No snacks, no treats, except when Chef was training him to retrieve dead ducks from our pond on his quest to create the perfect hunting dog. I’m happy to report that Bucky did not disappoint his master when duck season arrived.   

Bucky

By this time, it should’ve come as no surprise to me that Chef didn’t believe it was right for a dog to have roaming privileges inside of the house. OK, whatever. I’m all for well-behaved, house-trained pets, but I’ve never needed to restrict their mobility within the house in order to achieve that. Good thing Bucky was basically an outdoor dog anyway. What Labrador with his own pond and plenty of room to run wouldn’t be? He had a secured pen with a dog house to sleep in at night, but when he was allowed inside the house, Chef confined him to an ugly green carpet remnant placed strategically on the floor between the dining room and the living room so that Bucky could see everything going on around him.

Obviously the cats were harder to restrict once they were inside the house, but Chef made sure that we all knew there were no exceptions to principle #3 of his animal doctrine which declared that no cat should ever be allowed on top of the bed he slept in because to discover a cat licking itself on his pillow would be the lick of death. Our cats weren’t stupid. If they were going to lick themselves, they made sure to do it in my daughter’s room when Chef wasn’t looking. And the only evidence he ever had of their grooming habits took the form of regurgitated hairballs left violently at his feet.

 

Living The Big Sky Life^TM

© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: Sterilizing Sutton

Chef deserves full credit for the house hunt that ultimately led to our acquisition of the home on the range - he was the one who found it. He’d been driving around the neighborhoods of Whitefish he considered suitable for about nine months before finally spotting a local broker’s for sale sign posted on the street in front of “The One.”

He might’ve been able to find his dream house sooner had we enlisted the house-hunting services of one of the local real estate agents, but my prominent position at the town’s only title office made taking that approach difficult, especially when there were so many pitbulls fighting over the same scraps. The catty fallout from giving the impression that I might be playing favorites with any of the area’s real estate agents I was dependent upon for business just wasn’t worth it. There was no doubt in my mind that the prudent approach in this circumstance was to circumvent any unnecessary big sky drama by finding the house ourselves, and simply contacting the listing agent directly when we were ready to view the property. As snipy as those agents were in the habit of being, there wasn’t one of them who could find fault with that.

The seller of the house we hoped to call home was a retired man in his late 60’s named Sutton. His wife had divorced him about two years earlier after bolting from big sky country with a younger hillbilly buck. It was obvious that Sutton had grown tired of living alone on a property that was too large for one old man to maintain, but it was the need to pay his ex-wife her share of the equity in accordance with the terms of their divorce settlement that really forced the sale.

When our purchase was under contract and put into escrow, Sutton invited us over to the house for a personal tour with the objective of educating us on how to operate and maintain the homestead. This would typically be unheard of in a big city home sale, but in rural Whitefish, it was commonplace. We were stoked, and didn’t waste a second in accepting his offer because we were all about doing anything we could to shorten our learning curve.

Obviously Chef and I had toured the house before making our offer to purchase, but viewing a property with the intent to purchase tends to have an abstract emotional detachment associated with it. For us, that emotional detachment had no choice but to quickly alter into attachment when the reality became hands-on, and that was the minute we pulled into Sutton’s driveway for our new homeowner instruction. With a copy of our home inspection report in hand, we emotionally embraced our new reality with ambitious anticipation.

As far as I was concerned, the inside of Sutton’s ranch house was an old man’s homage to the 1970’s. It was like a time capsule; replete with dark brown hi-lo shag carpet, wood paneled walls, yellow countertops, ugly wallpaper, and heavy orange Aztec print drapes that were always drawn. But I figured all of this was merely aesthetics, and not worth stressing over too much until escrow closed, when the house became officially ours to update.

Unfortunately, the whole décor thing took on a very disturbing dimension for me during that home tour with Sutton when he began to personalize the house by casually dispensing way too much information about his lifestyle for my sensibilities ... thereby reaffirming my belief that sometimes there is no bliss better than ignorance because once known, it cannot be un-known. And because his Suttonisms were intermingled with the important knowledge we were there to acquire, it made it next to impossible to stop listening altogether in case we missed something significant.

Consequently, I silently suffered through the tall tales pouring out of this pot-bellied Moby Dick in overalls who possessed the sensitivities of a caveman as he described for us just how easy it was for him to entice the casino chicks over to his man-cave (and my soon-to-be new home no less). Apparently all he needed to do to hit the jackpot on any given night was to dangle the irresistible amenities of his bachelor pad in front of some lucky lady tipsy enough to take the bait. Each room seemed to have its own salacious anecdote, but the topper was when we got to the large sun room on the east side of house. The sun room was home to the hot tub.

Hot Tub Sun Room on the right (east) side of the house

Let me preface this next part by saying, I’m not a big fan of hot tubs, never have been. I’m of the opinion that they’re basically gigantic, gurgling petri dishes, chlorine infusions notwithstanding; and besides, chlorine makes my sensitive skin burn.

When we eventually got around to the sun room, Sutton wanted to show us how efficient the on-demand hot water heater in his walk-out basement was when it came to filling up the hot tub. I was immediately bowled over by the hot, humid wave of chlorinated air that hit me like a wall when I stepped into the sun room. Sutton was already rambling on about the wild hot tub party he had last week while fast at work removing the hot tub’s protective cover in order to show us his fountain of youth percolating underneath. A steam cloud of concentrated chlorine billowed straight up into my eyes when the lid came off, and so it was through watery eyes that the unbidden dream sequence surged forth and did its damage …

... An image flashed before me of old man Sutton lounging naked in the hot tub with his arm around some shriveled big sky mountain mama; half empty wine glasses sitting on the deck behind them. Then I saw the soaking effects of hot, chlorinated water as it violently circulated through the unit’s jets, and exfoliated the dead layers of Sutton’s flaky skin from his body, only to co-mingle with the other body fluids seeping simultaneously into the churning cauldron. I watched the resulting brew of nastiness create a thick, oily film on the surface of the foaming bubbles that had frothed to the top. In horror, I blinked my eyes and snapped to like I was waking up from a horrible nightmare …

There wasn’t enough chlorine in the world to sterilize the ick of that unsolicited vision from my brain, and once the house was ours, I asked Chef to drain the hot tub right away. Draining it wasn’t even enough though; and when I ultimately told Chef I would never, ever use it, he decided to pull it out and sell it. Good riddance.

All procrastination aside, Sutton had too much stuff for one old guy to move, so he couldn’t manage to get himself moved out the house before we arrived with our first truckload. No surprise there, we were half expecting it, but we had people moving into our old house and were on a tight timeline.

In the end, Sutton left a lot of junk behind that we had to pitch for him, nor did he bother to clean up the house before we moved in. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve come to believe that household dirt is a personal thing – it’s never disgusting when it’s my dirt and grease, but when it’s someone else’s dirt and grease, it’s gross. And with Sutton, it was extra gross. So before I would let anyone even use a toilet, I put on plastic dish gloves, filled a bucket with some kind of sanitizing Pine-sol mixture, and wiped down everything in that house. And I mean everything.

By the time the sun had set late on moving day, those ugly orange drapes were in a heap on the driveway, and Chef had ripped out a hideous juniper tree in the backyard that had the misfortune of blocking his view of Big Mountain from our living room windows minus those drapes.

The brown hi-lo shag carpet, on the other hand, ended up staying with the house until I left. It didn’t take me too long to realize that it did a phenomenal job of camouflaging the dirt from ten acres, a yellow Lab, two cats and an adolescent daughter with a lot of friends. Replacing the carpet simply kept moving down on the home improvements priority list until it just never got done, at least not by me. That’s OK though, because it was our dirt the carpet was hiding.

Living The Big Sky Life^TM
© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: Home Improvements Impart EnLIGHTenment

The incident surrounding the construction of “The Door” proved to be an irreversible turning point in my partnership with Chef. I can say in hindsight that it proved to be substantially more divisive than the now infamous hair affair. Yet unlike my unwavering long time stance on the subject of hair care, “The Door” wasn’t even a conceptual consideration until a year later - when our move from the Unabomber bungalow to the home on the range fatefully set the stage for the second act in my big sky life.

Courtesy of: www.Commons.Wikimedia.org

But there was plenty of other big sky drama to be had long before that curtain came up. Just dealing with the daily demands of keeping a house four times the size of our previous residence was dramatic enough, even in the mildest of seasons. Add to that the looming angst that came with constantly trying to minimize the perilous side effects of an unpredictable (and usually rising) water table, our lives basically felt like a simmering pot that was always on the verge of boiling over.

Living in a big house on ten acres meant there was always something that needed to be done; there was always something that needed to be fixed. We all have our strengths, and unfortunately for Chef, being handy or mechanically inclined wasn’t one of his. He was, in actuality, quite the opposite, and one of the several nicknames I affixed to him over the years was “the un-handyman”. His desperate desire to possess the kind of handyman skills one would think a prerequisite to live on a property like ours was evident, but he just didn’t have it. I can say with all sincerity, however, that it wasn’t for lack of trying. And Chef’s heavily dog-eared copy of “Home Improvement for Dummies” was, without question, a faithful companion for every do-it-yourself repair job he ever attempted. But alas, his honey-do list was infinite.

Perhaps a bizarre saving grace in all of this was the fact that my ex-husband had been a building contractor, and I had paid attention. It was not uncommon to find me standing over Chef in the attic with a flashlight, not merely because he needed light to see what he was doing, but because he needed me to provide him with step-by-step illumination on how to properly wire the new lighting fixtures we were determined to install.

This reminds me of one of my mother’s big sky visits. We’d been living in the ranch house less than a year, and had done quite a bit to open up the kitchen-living area because a 360˚ view was simply too good to waste with unnecessary impediments. By the way, demolition duty ultimately proved to be the perfect outlet for a very un-handy man to shine.

One fine fall afternoon during her visit, my mother and I were playing a game of cards at the dining table which happened to be unsurprisingly situated in the dining area underneath one of the new ceiling fans Chef and I had installed months earlier. At some point during our card game, Chef breezed into the kitchen for a little break from riding the lawnmower. He walked over to the refrigerator to retrieve an icy Heineken, then he bellied up to the kitchen counter directly behind my mother, and between sips, began to chat with us about some of the recent home improvements.

As the three of us conversed, one thing led to another, and eventually we got to talking about the off-center installation of the ceiling fan whirling with a muted hum right above our heads. From my seat at the dining table, I could see the faces of both my mother and Chef as we all gazed upward and silently stared with pondering mouths agape at the imperfection being contemplated.

Chef and I had been scratching our heads about the flaw from the moment we noticed it in the process of replacing the light fan fixture. Why any builder would intentionally install a prominent light fixture’s electrical box six inches off center when the room demanded it be dead center was a complete conundrum to us. And of course, once we’d become unavoidably aware of the defect, it became glaring, and then it was too late. We couldn’t not notice it now, for it was predictably the first thing we’d see the minute we walked into the room.

My mother, on the other hand, was unmoved by the problem. She casually offered up her solution without even batting an eye while looking up at the crux of the matter and saying, “Well, just move the box.”

The solution was so obvious that I was ashamed I didn’t think of it myself, and admitted as much on the spot. With some relief I might add, because moving the box was not only an “oh duh!”, but very doable with my skill-set.

Chef apparently didn’t hear the same thing that I heard because his face began to redden with anger, almost as if he’d been personally attacked, which I found puzzling at the time. My mother was oblivious to Chef’s reaction partly because he was standing behind her and she couldn’t see him; but primarily because she had no reason to be sensitive to his disproportionate reaction for she’d said nothing detrimental or critical. Quite the opposite, in fact. She’d merely offered what she thought was a common sense solution – and a good one at that. But did he ever let me have it that night in the bedroom when he directed his upset toward me as he dramatically re-enacted his interpretation of my mother accusing him of being inept by mimicking her remark in his snidest voice, “Well, just move the box, YOU IDIOT!” What??? Was I invisible, or did he forget that I was there and witnessed what really happened?

I suppose, when you distill it all down, we hear what we want to hear, and insecurities do have a way of filtering our perceptions and slanting in-coming commentary to fit those perceptions.

I think my mother’s “attack” that day somehow morphed into the mother-in-law equivalent of the old hair affair; and while it rankled Chef’s sensibilities almost as much as my hair commitment, it motivated him to get the box moved the minute she left town … indubitably with my help. What we learned up in the attic that day on our mission to “just move the box” was that some careless electrician didn’t measure out enough Romex during installation and lazily popped the box through the ceiling when the wire ran out, even though it came up short and six inches left of center.

When that melodramatic episode eventually burned itself out, it boiled the issue down to this final reduction: Hand me a screwdriver, and I could replace all of the electrical outlets, light switches and standard light fixtures within the house. Hand Chef a Henkel knife, and he could be deadly … Death By Chocolate that is. Trust me, it was a killer cake, but it was the fresh raspberry sauce that made it soigné.

Living The Big Sky Life^TM

© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: What About Steve?

No sooner had the basement of our Montana Unabomber bungalow been stacked with the last of my moving boxes, when I got a phone call from a long-time girlfriend back in Huntington Beach. She steamrolled right over my obligatory “Hello” and got straight to the point, “You’ll never believe what I just found out about my cousin, Steve!” What else could I say to an intro like that except, “What about Steve?”

Now my girlfriend and I go way back - so far back that her nickname, ‘Mamasan’, has practically overridden her real name in my vernacular, and vice versa (her nickname for me is ‘Dudette’). She goes just as far back with Chef since the three of us grew up and went to grade school together in the “land of the beautiful people”. I always believed that Mamasan was in her own way one of the “beautiful people”. And boy, could she attract those beautiful boys to her like bees to honey – a true force of nature.

In contrast to her nickname, Mamasan came from a large Italian family. She had two pesky little brothers that we were known to boss around on occasion, and plenty of cousins, four of whom grew up and went to high school with us in Huntington Beach as well. The oldest of the four cousins was Steve, but many of us simply called him “Scope” instead. He was one of the “beautiful people” too.

My history with Scope goes almost as far back as my history with Mamasan and Chef. Scope was about three years older than we were, so he tended to hang with an older crowd, although there were some overlaps. One big overlap was my first husband, the deadbeat-cum-sperm-donor that the courts refer to as the father of my children. His name, by the way, was Steve too.

Scope was a highly skilled finish carpenter, a musician, and all around free bird who went with his own flow. He could build just about anything in my opinion, so when my first husband (the other Steve) and I were enticed to move from California to Colorado in 1978 during a Rocky Mountain construction boom, the free-spirited Scope wasn’t too far behind. He even stayed with us in Littleton for a while before eventually landing an opportunity in Vail, where he lived for several years thereafter … until the Colorado construction boom ultimately came to a crashing halt in the mid-80’s when the mid-west energy crisis hit, and interest rates bordered on usurious while property values plummeted, which pushed the banking system to the brink of collapse. Sound vaguely familiar? Scope ultimately made his way back to The OC where he managed to marry his wife, Karen, and secure a nice job with a local university.

Until Mamasan’s phone call that day in Whitefish, the last I knew of Scope was that he’d left his job at the university and taken to the road. He and Karen had decided to sell everything, buy a motor home, and roam the country like nomads for a couple of years. Apparently the last of Karen’s two sons had graduated from high school, and they no longer felt any obligation to stay put. And with Scope’s skill-set, there was little doubt he could find work anywhere they chose to land along the way.

Mamasan couldn’t contain her excitement when she learned of her cousin’s coincidental relocation to Whitefish, Montana, and understandably couldn’t tell me fast enough. And he didn’t just settle in Whitefish, he moved into a house they’d purchased only two blocks away from the Unabomber bungalow – and all of this within a month of my arrival. Imagine Scope’s surprise when I showed up at his front door unannounced the next day.

Part of me was secretly relieved upon hearing Mamasan’s sensational news. Maybe I wouldn’t be so isolated after all. I liked the idea of knowing someone other than Chef in this remote locale. Although Chef knew of Scope while growing up, the two had never met. The same was true of Karen and me. I’d heard plenty about her over time, but we’d never met either. Clearly Scope and I were the common denominators in this mix.

Scope did a much better job of blending into the cow town of Whitefish than I did, and with relatively little effort I might add. Maybe the time he’d spent in Vail helped him learn to better synchronize with the idiosyncracies of the small town mentality. I suspect it helped that he had always been in possession of a somewhat laid back nature, in a relaxed hippie kind of way.

Courtesy of www.MuseumOfGamingHistory.org

Six months down the road saw Chef working regular dinner shifts and Karen working evenings in a retail job. Scope and I thought it would be fun to spend some of our mutually free evening time learning something new, so we signed up for weekly country swing dance lessons at the Remington.

Little did I know though, Scope couldn’t dance - not even a little bit. And here I was afraid I’d be the ball and chain who’d weigh him down on the dance floor since I knew for a fact that I couldn’t dance. Not the country swing anyway. I had a history of drunken cowboys storming off the dance floor at ‘The Little Bear’ in Evergeen, Colorado because I was unable to follow their lead without damaging both their feet and their pride. Well, dancing with Scope was like dancing with a big plank of wood, but his stiff moves didn’t seem to matter so much since he didn’t know how to lead anyway. In the end, those lessons did absolutely nothing to improve our swing, and it was hard not to get a little discouraged. At least no one got hurt…

Big Mountain from my back porch

…which is a lot more than I can say about snowboarding with Karen up on the Big Mountain. Personally, I think the Big Mountain has one of the best bunny slopes I’ve ever experienced. It was the perfect place to learn a new snow sport, and what made it even better was the fact that access to the slope and its chair lift was free.

When it came to snowboarding though, the first thing I learned was that being able to ski well offered me no edge when it came to learning how to ride a snowboard. And believe you me, to know the agony of defeat is to barely tip the front edge of that snowboard with your big toe, and inadvertently bring all downhill movement to an abrupt halt, which unto itself is no big deal and to be expected. It becomes a big deal, however, when the signal to stop doesn’t reach the upper half of your body until your face smashes into the snow like a speeding missile plunging to earth.

Suffice it to say, my adventures in snowboarding came to a very ugly end one afternoon after finishing up what I thought was a pretty good day of bunny slope practice.

Karen and I had decided to make our way to the car straight off the slope by gliding along the catwalks leading to the parking lot, because frankly, who would willingly walk that kind of distance with a bulky snowboard slung over their shoulder if they didn’t have to? Well, I almost didn’t make it to the car alive.

I was caught off guard deep in the woods by a sneaky patch of sharp ice which threw me off balance, and caused the edge of my snowboard to tip and catch. My upper body continued to propel forward unhindered at the speed of light until my face stopped all momentum with swift finality the second it slammed onto the icy earth beneath me. I literally saw stars … after I heard the back of my skull crack from the force of the impact, that is. No one witnessed my mortifying and quite undignified face-plant, but everyone got to see the damaging aftereffects all over my battered face for weeks. Nothing says “I’m done with snowboarding forever” faster than a black eye; a busted and fat lip; a scraped, bruised and bloodied face; and a concussion.

In reconnecting with Scope like I did, it wasn’t long before I realized that my big blast from the past was to play a big part in my future when we ultimately hired him to build our licensed catering kitchen. And what a fine and trusty co-conspirator he proved to be when I requested that he secretly build me “The Door”…

Living The Big Sky Life^TM

© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: Big Sky Christmas

The thought of buying a pre-packaged holiday tree from the seasonal supplier who sets up shop in the Safeway parking lot after Thanksgiving always seemed to create a bean-counting conflict for Chef.

The Flathead Valley also had plenty of holiday tree farms to choose from. These farms grew enough trees to help fill the nation’s annual demand for Rocky Mountain Christmas trees, but acquiring a fresh-cut and beautifully groomed spruce tree directly from the farmer was again, an unacceptable expense in Chef’s ledger book.

So it was over the river and through the woods for us, for Chef was of the opinion that since we lived near the woods, we should go out into the woods to find our tree. And given his propensity to redirect household funds away from anything he considered frivolous spending, the fact that trees in the woods were free was considered a year-end bonus.

Shopping for the perfect Christmas tree in the woods was a lot easier said than done. After a full day of tree shopping on remote logging roads, we finally ended up with a free tree that looked exactly like we went out into the woods to find it. It smelled better than it looked, and I made the best of it.

Help NORAD’s 'Santa Tracker' out tonight by turning on your runway lights.

Best Wishes and Happy Holidays!

And may all of our dreams for the new year ahead come true...

Living The Big Sky Life^TM 

© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: A Winter Mooning

Punxsutawney Phil doesn’t live in Whitefish for a reason. The odds of a groundhog ever seeing a ray of sunshine during a Flathead Valley sun-free winter is just about nil. And shadow or no, everyone knows those winters will never end in six weeks or less.

By the time the local residents have flipped their calendars over to the month of February, the long months of sun deprivation will have visibly taken a toll on many. The distractions inherent with a bustling holiday season can only last so long, and in with the new year comes the cabin fever and depression. Unfortunately any time spent outside, such as on the slopes of the Big Mountain, can offer little in the way of light nourishment for those noticeably deficient in vitamin D.

The Big Mountain isn’t as big as its name implies, and from my experience, it rarely offered the skiers who graced its slopes with an elevation sufficient enough to place them above the foggy cloud that casts a perpetual shadow over the valley throughout the winter. Quite the opposite in fact, for when the resort’s chair lifts drop sun-seeking skiers off at the top of the mountain, it tends to plop them right down in the thickest part of the cloud. It’s enough to make your head spin, hence my personal Big Mountain nickname, “the vertigo capital of the world.”

Around the time Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania is preparing to celebrate the appearance of a groundhog named Phil in accordance with the region’s traditional German folklore, Whitefish, Montana is attempting to revive its winter-weary citizenry with an annual Winter Carnival under the auspices of honoring an old Nordic Snow King named Ullr.

Now old folklore doesn’t always make sense, which is probably why the tale of King Ullr never made any sense to me. Aside from the fact that it was “once upon a time”, I could never understand why any seafaring Nordic King would insist on making his Snow Queen and royal entourage trek inland 550 miles away from the nearest coastline to settle in a place like Whitefish. Just to say he was King of the Big Mountain? And while some would say it’s always good to be king of something, perhaps the legend was simply one of convenience. Even a good excuse to have a parade.

Whatever the story, February’s Winter Carnival in Whitefish is considered a local tradition, replete with surrogate royalty selected from the community’s most prominent socialites. The parade is one of the carnival’s main events, and its participants are recruited from every school, business, restaurant, church, and organization in the area.

I’ll never forget my first Winter Carnival parade in 1993. The skies were as clear as could be expected under the abiding cloud cover, and it was bitter cold, which I suppose was to be expected as well. It didn’t seem to matter to the gathering crowds who were appropriately dressed for the occasion. The Yetis in the parade that were heavily dressed in fleecy costumes were undoubtedly grateful for the freezing temperatures, especially since their primary purpose was to run along the parade route, throw candy into the crowds, and terrorize unsuspecting spectators with creepy Yeti pinches.

I reckon community obligation made it necessary for Whitefish High School to give its show of support by putting a “float” and the marching band in the parade every year. Accordingly, the town could always expect to see the football team, the team’s cheerleaders, and some of the student body notables riding in the back of a large flatbed truck (the “float”) with side panels decorated in the school’s gold and green like a Bulldog pep rally.

This is how the parade predictably floated along year after year … until the year of the winter mooning that is.

Unfortunately my parade position was on the sidelines during the year in question, which didn’t allow me to personally witness the sophomoric prank that gave the local morality police a god complex; but I heard all about it all the same. And then I read all about it every week for months thereafter in the "Whitefish Pilot".

What I gleaned from the numerous accounts swirling around town after the fact was that the high school students in the Bulldog float did exactly what I’d expect of most normal high schoolers - they freely expressed their opinions in a way they believed was congruent with the social consciousness of the time. In this case, it was the nation’s newfound awareness about the far reaching and fatal effects of HIV-AIDS. Several of the students made their point by throwing a few condoms into the crowd and holding up some signs that mentioned safe sex. Nothing disrespectful per se; until they chose to end the parade with a synchronized mooning over the side of the float.

The indignant old fogeys who’d apparently forgotten what it was like to be young and idealistic went ballistic, and unmercifully set out to make an example of the student with the most to lose. And it wasn’t a Bulldog on the football team. Their unlucky target was a senior honor student, and from what I understood, a girl who’d earned several college acceptances and had scholarships lined up for the coming fall. In the end, the powers that be showed her the kind of wrath that only the almighty can exact when they had her permanently expelled from the Whitefish School District without appeal three months before the end of her senior year.

Her tearful pleading and public apologies were published in the paper for weeks, but there weren’t enough mea culpas in the world to appease the hard hearts of the Whitefish morality police.

Having raised independent and free-thinking daughters of my own (and proud of it), I still can’t help but feel some sadness when I think about what happened to this young woman I never knew in person. My greatest hope is that she used her smarts to bypass those small town trolls on the bridge, and showed them all what real revenge can look like when exacted with the empowerment of success.

Chef offers me an unapologetic mooning at

Trestles Beach, Southern California

If all it took was a full mooning finale to irrevocably change the course of one young life, I can only speculate on whether or not Chef’s shameless mooning of my lens ever interfered with his long term prospects, especially when it came to his dream of slinging hash for the gourmands of the Flathead Valley.

Living The Big Sky Life^TM

© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: Geography Has Made Us Neighbors

A continuation of “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors” …

It was a year and a half before we finally got around to having an official housewarming party to celebrate the acquisition of our new home on the range.

Fifteen months of country living had simply flown by in our consuming fury to finish up the construction of Chef’s licensed catering kitchen in the walk-out basement portion of the new house. By the time we had the final permit in hand, we realized that we’d better hurry up and have that fully catered BBQ we’d been talking about for over a year. And we’d better do it before the warm fall weather took an irreversible turn for the frigid.

Signs of Fall in our backyard around what's left of the duck pond

Yet with the unintended passing of time, went our original motive for having the housewarming party in the first place. It had now become less about inviting our friends over to see the house or getting acquainted with our inherited neighborhood, and more about introducing our new catering business. The reality was our friends had been hanging out at the house for more than a year, and we knew more about our neighbors than we ever needed to know thanks to the narrated updates regularly delivered by my daughter who enjoyed making frequent after-school visits to the households along our street, especially to those without young children.

The afternoon school bus routinely saw my daughter dropped off in the same place it picked her up every morning; namely, at the top of our street in front of the corner house belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Casey. Mr. Casey was a retired school teacher and former coach, which might’ve explained why he had that enormous asphalt ball court with a stand-alone basketball hoop in front of his oversized detached garage, and no one around to enjoy it. After we moved in, Mr. Casey had a postcard-variety big red barn built on the back half of his property which always seemed strange to me. Not because it stuck out like a red sore thumb in that it aesthetically clashed with everything around it (including his house), but because he had no large farm animals or any apparent purpose for it.

I had little doubt that Mrs. Casey probably preferred the retired Mr. Casey to be out of her house as much as possible during the day, so there was rarely an afternoon when my daughter didn’t spend at least a few minutes chatting with Mr. Casey who’d be predictably doing chores around the property when the school bus made its daily deposit near the front of his house.

It would seem that no neighborhood could be complete without at least one family like “The Cleavers”, and the “Ward and June Cleaver” of our lane lived across the street from us between the Casey’s and Mr. and Mrs. Claus (Carl and Milly). We never called them Ward and June though. We called them James and Brenda. They were Florida transplants who brought with them three small children, a substantial net worth from sources unknown, and eventually James’ widowed mother who acquired the vacant lot at the end of the cul-de-sac where she built a custom house to live in whenever she felt the need to swap Florida’s humid heat for Montana’s dry summers.

The first neighborhood Christmas party we attended was hosted by James and Brenda, and I found it hard not to empathize with Brenda’s ambitious attempt to bring civilization to the wild west as she struggled to be the “hostess with the mostess” under the party planning tutelage of her idol, Martha Stewart. It made me wonder if June Cleaver ever felt the same kind of pressure to be perfect from Julia Childs.

Living in the house on the other side of Carl and Milly were the Perkins. Like many of the men throughout the Stumptown community, Mr. Perkins was a long-timer with the Burlington Northern Railroad, and would typically be gone for days at a time while working at riding the rails into eastern Montana and back again. From the many closings I performed at the title company in Whitefish, it became obvious early on that working for the railroad provided one of the best livings (above minimum wage) to be had in the area.

Mrs. Perkins was a homemaker who appeared to keep herself busy with arts and crafts projects, and caring for their three little terriers. She was very partial to my daughter, and so particular about whom she’d let care for her children, I mean dogs, that whenever she’d be gone for more than half a day, it was often my daughter who did the babysitting. In fact, one Friday afternoon she dropped by my office in town to see if my daughter could care for her dogs that night because she had to leave unexpectedly. When I told her my daughter would be spending the night with a girlfriend and wouldn’t be home, I watched my neighbor’s face sink with despair. She was so distressed that I felt compelled to offer to care for the dogs myself. It was only one night after all, and I’ve cared for many a child and pet over the years. I figured I could handle it, but Mrs. Perkins didn’t seem to agree, and left me standing there, mouth agape, as she passed up my generous offer on her way out the door. All righty then.

In the cul-de-sac, next to James’ Floridian mother, lived the Cannen's. Mr. and Mrs. Cannen oozed their New York roots from every pore. They owned the Par 3 Golf Course on the east side of Highway 93, just north of Highway 40 in south Whitefish. Mr. Cannen was a fast talking east coaster who always had a sly twinkle in his eyes which seemed to go right along with his cheery, almost Gollum-like, quasi-toothless grin. Mrs. Cannen looked as if she could’ve been the long-time wife of an old mob boss, and she appeared to fit into the Montana mountain mama scene about as well as I did. The Cannen's seemed to really enjoy the way my daughter would simply drop by unannounced for no other reason than to socialize. I always liked that the Cannen's never tried to hide or make excuses for who they were, east coasters gone west. Take ‘em or leave ‘em. No skin off of their brusque hides either way.

Between our ranch house and the Cannen’s, resided a nice young couple, Sam and Mary Ellen. They moved in with several barking rottweilers and two young boys about a year after we did. They were Flathead Valley natives who were looking for enough space to have horses, and once attained, they expected to never move again. They began acquiring those horses as soon as they were settled in. Their boys should be all grown up by now, and there's no doubt in my mind that Sam and Mary Ellen are still living in that house.

The neighbor who lived in the house on the other side of us was Peyton, with her teenage son, Michael. They also shared our large duck pond in the back. Peyton was widowed shortly before we moved in, and I would venture to say that she was my daughter’s favorite neighbor because she’d often chose to spend her after-school afternoons just hanging with Peyton. Peyton was a nice lady who kept pretty much to herself, although we did share several dramatic episodes when my daughter’s cat decided to get aggressively territorial in territory belonging to Peyton’s cat … a story for another time.

We had a well on the far front corner of our property, and it was a community well that provided water not only to our house, but to four other homes on the street including, Sam and Mary Ellen's, Carl and Milly's, the Perkins', and a nameless neighbor's house on the other side of Peyton. I have to say, of all things to have to share, I was always glad we shared that well because whenever there was a problem, it became a community problem and expense, and not ours alone to bear.

The septic tank and leach lines were another matter altogether. Definitely a story for another time.

Living The Big Sky Life^TM
© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

When our quest to find the perfect house began in June of 1992, we did what most people do when preparing to make a large purchase they expected to live with for a long time; namely, we prioritized our list of top three must-haves to include something for everyone. Everything else pretty much got thrown into the “we’ll know it when we see it” bucket.

Now anyone who has ever worked around the real estate industry for any period of time would’ve undoubtedly heard the three basic rules of real estate preached like a mantra from every professional’s pulpit. And while the timeless rules of “1) Location 2) Location 3) Location” have shown themselves to be typically true during my years in the business, I also knew that sometimes the rules needed a little bending, especially under extenuating circumstances.

I personally considered our need to evacuate the claustrophobic Unabomber bungalow as soon as possible to be an extenuating circumstance. This admittedly influenced our priority list enough to make it look more like this:

1) more room(s)/square footage (something for me);

2) a kitchen layout with potential (something for Chef); and lastly

3) Location - the essential rule of land acquisition, which in this case really meant ‘the neighborhood’ since we intended to stay in Whitefish (something for everyone).

It’s with this list that we ultimately found our new home on the range. The spacious 10-acre lot with a duck pond and circular views we ended up with were frankly bonus, not to mention a great place for the dog to play. Another bonus was the fact that the smallest lot on our long block was 5 acres which made unwelcomed peeping next to impossible absent a strong pair of binoculars.

Thanks, in part, to our urban-styled upbringing in “The OC”, Chef and I tended to be naturally cautious about who we invited to share in our private lives, and we weren’t inclined to quickly immerse ourselves into any neighborhood or community. Nor were we prone to make our neighbors part of our social circle or privy to our personal business simply because they lived on the same street.

My 5th grade daughter was of a different mindset, however, and this became evident as soon as I pulled my urban-mobile into our new driveway behind the truck packed with our moving boxes. She wasted no time in jumping out of the car and onto her bicycle to pedal her way back down the lengthy driveway to the street on a self-assigned mission to visit every house on the block. When she finally returned, breathless from a busy day of making the acquaintance of every new neighbor we had, it became clear that she’d generously shared our life history (as she knew it) with everyone on the block. And we, of course, got the unfiltered lowdown on them as well. All quiet cringing aside, I found this to be a true “out of the mouths of babes” moment that proved to be a nice blessing for her as time passed.

In spite of my daughter’s enthusiastic exchange of personal information at the outset, Chef and I tended to remain neutral and relatively elusive when it came to interacting with our neighbors overall. Obviously this wasn’t the case with my daughter. She’d managed to thoroughly endear herself to most of the neighborhood during that introductory bike ride, and many of them proved to be actively devoted to her during the years we lived there.

No man is an island, and I sometimes think neighbors are there to remind us of that, whether we like them or not. The problem is that we don’t really get to pick our neighbors - we inherit them because they come with the house. Our new house was situated in the middle of a long block culminating in a cul-de-sac which was lined with about a dozen other houses whose occupants had now become our inheritance. And like it or not, we’d become theirs.

The first neighbor we met was Carl, an elderly retired man who lived directly across the street from us with his wife, Milly. Carl and Milly were the poster-grannies of every child’s fantasy, and could easily have passed for Mr. and Mrs. Claus as far as I was concerned, if only Carl had seen fit to grow a full white beard. Carl was a rotund old fellow of medium height who securely belted his pants high above his belly button which thankfully spared us from seeing his low hanging apron of belly fat in the flesh.

Summer had just made its debut when Carl walked over to pay Chef a visit one afternoon as he was out in our front yard trimming debris from a large spruce tree. After some precursory pleasantries, Carl got to the point. He wanted to know if we intended to decorate our front yard with Christmas lights during the holiday season like the previous owner used to do, because it would be a real shame if we were the only house on the block to sit in the dark during December.

At this point, our boxes hadn’t even been unpacked, and Carl wanted to know if we had the holiday display for our huge new house already planned out? Chef intentionally remained noncommittal throughout the conversation because lighting up the house for the holidays was clearly not a priority; the holiday was half a year away. We had no way of knowing in advance how devout Carl was to the Christmas lights cause though, and that made his offer to come over in December to string the lights around our large front trees himself (if we weren’t going to do it ourselves) all the more puzzling.

Apparently a big black 10-acre hole in the middle of the street on Christmas Eve was unacceptable to Mr. Claus.

After Thanksgiving, we had the opportunity to witness just how far Carl’s puzzling obsession with Christmas lights went when he set out to decorate not only his house, but his entire 5-acre lot which was rectangular in shape, and enclosed with a double-railed wooden fence that ran along the entire perimeter of the property. This was about 2,000 linear feet in border fencing alone, not to mention the fences that lined both sides of his long driveway or the fencing that encircled his house. And Carl made sure that every inch of those fence tops and the house too were brilliantly illuminated by a mile-long string of traditional white Christmas bulbs.

It was a sight to behold in any kind of weather, and like Noah and the Ark, clearly Mr. Claus had some deep calling to create the kind of landing strip that Santa could see even in the worst of blizzards. Perhaps this was a classic case of “build it and he will come.”

The angular light show Carl put on for the neighborhood every evening in December was simply too much for his next door neighbor to let pass without comment. So one night in early December, James phoned Carl and announced in the best pilot-to-control-tower voice he could muster, “This is Delta, requesting permission to land.”

And no, we didn’t make Carl come over and string lights around our trees as offered. We did it our way, and never had a problem with Delta looking for clearance to land on our property.

To Be Continued … ”Geography Has Made Us Neighbors”

Living The Big Sky Life^TM
© by DK King