Living The Big Sky Life: Cater To You

My girlfriend, Soho, was a frequent guest at Chez Montana. One year saw her staying with us so much that we basically considered her a permanent part of the household. She entered my life within weeks of my arrival in Montana, and she was there for the duration and thereafter. She was, in fact, the only true witness I had to all that comprised my big sky life, and much to Chef’s chagrin, she was often the only reliable reality standard by which I could measure my sanity.

Whenever she’d stay in the green room in our home on the range, Soho typically made it a point go into the office with me every morning where she spent the days working her fashion business in Florence, Italy out of the back room of my title office. This scenario made her daily exposure to the locals and the way business was done in Whitefish all the more inevitable. What I saw, she saw. Who I met, she usually met. She was a firsthand observer of how I was treated and by whom, and this caused her to form very strong opinions about who she considered good and who she considered bad. She quickly developed a highly protective sense of who she deemed worthy of me and who she deemed unworthy, and frankly, more than most seemed to fall into her unworthy category.

And she used me to express her opinions about this in a very unique way.

Not long after the catering business had become fully operational, Soho left Whitefish to handle some business in Italy. When she returned to our home several weeks later, she handed me a blue velvet-coated ring box she had retrieved from the safe in her house in Florence and said, “This is for you. I want you to wear this ring every time you serve hors d’oeuvres to these people who are beneath you so that they can't help but know you are better than they are with each morsel you offer them.” Inside the box was a 14K gold ring set with a huge (¾”h x ½”w) emerald cut topaz citrine beautifully embellished with several small diamonds. Apparently the ring was to say it all.

Because she was part of our household, Soho couldn’t avoid participating in the planning stages of our catering business (albeit cautiously), and aside from Scope, she was the only other person who knew about “The Door.” She watched me pull double shifts for months when, after a full day of working in the title office, I’d come home at night to work the demands of a catering business. The weekends offered no reprieve or day of rest either, merely double the duty, because the majority of our catered functions were scheduled on the weekends. Whether it was marketing, office business, contract preparation, chopping and dicing in the kitchen, washing dishes, or serving at a function, my assignments and duties were numerous and never ending. As were Chef’s.

It took us months to settle on the perfect name for the new business, and the winner was: CATER TO YOU. As soon as the name for our company had been selected, I paid a quick visit to my dear friend and favorite Artist, KA Collins, for the logo design, and wasted no time in putting together "CATER TO YOU" marketing materials and event contracts. The only thing that got in my way was, believe it or not, Chef.

I believe part of the problem was that he’d never been in business for himself as I had. It seemed that his lack of experience fueled his ignorance when it came down to how common business principles can be universally applied to almost any endeavor. Every time I’d try to openly walk him through the developing nuances of our business operation as I was setting it up so that he would understand what I was doing and why, he’d regularly criticize and challenge the majority of my efforts, sometimes to the point of undermining. There were more than a few occasions when I had to hotly remind him that when it came down to running the kitchen, I was of the opinion that he reigned supreme which thereby obligated me to totally trust him to do what he did best. Why couldn’t he offer me the same courtesy when it came down to allowing me to do what I did best in running the business?

After I’d left Montana for good, he called me one day and humbly admitted that he didn’t realize, until I wasn’t there to do it anymore, just how much I’d done and how well I’d done it. It was an empty vindication however –too little, too late- because by the time he’d gotten around to acknowledging the significance of my contribution, I was long gone and he’d fatally driven the business into the ground (within three months of my departure, no less.)

No sense crying over spilt milk. It seemed to me a better solution under the circumstances was to simply slip on that glorious ring, go out into the yard, scoop up a big bowl of freshly fallen pristine (white) snow, and promptly blend it into something worth drinking ... like a strong margarita. Ole'!

Living The Big Sky Life^TM

© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: The Door

While I have every intention of serving up a smorgasbord of “day job” anecdotes from my big sky dealings in a downtown Whitefish title office, I’m going to continue with the home on the range theme a little longer as I expand on what it took for us to start up a home-based catering business and “The Door” that spoiled everything. 

The overall business set up took about six months and most of that time was spent constructing and outfitting the licensed restaurant kitchen around which the entire operation revolved. There seemed to be a beautiful logic to our catering business plan, and the partnership made sense at the time because Chef and I brought different skills yet mutual goals to the buffet table. We both knew from experience what it took to run a restaurant and that was definitely not a direction we wanted take. But with a catering business, we could beneficially combine Chef’s professional training and local food industry knowledge with my years of business management and customer service experience. And the fact that we had more than enough space to keep the business literally in-house was clearly the icing on the cake. Some might’ve called it kismet.

With a 1,600 square foot walk-out basement that was only half-occupied by the blue and green guest rooms, we were left with about 800 square feet of open space to build our catering kitchen in. That was more square footage than the entire Unabomber bungalow. The previous owner had originally finished the space off as an open rumpus room replete with wood stove, recycled barn wood wainscoting, and wall-to-wall shag carpeting in some Irish Setter shade of rust. This room also had four windows installed throughout right above the paneling close to ground level, and there was a standard size sliding glass door that opened out to the yard on the east side of the house right in front of the hot tub sun room. This east door was very important and although it was eventually replaced with a commercial fire door, it wasn’t “The Door” that ultimately divided our household.     

For the first time in his life, Chef was faced with the exhilarating task of designing what was nothing less than his dream kitchen, and he did a fabulous job with the layout and procuring the equipment necessary to fill it. The entire kitchen was designed around his favorite piece of equipment: a ruby red walk-in cooler he’d acquired from some restaurant going out of business.

Walk-In cooler

As is customary just about everywhere, in order to obtain the licensing necessary to own and operate a commercial kitchen, we had to meet local health department specs and standards. This meant plan approvals, a checklist of requirements, inspections throughout construction, and regular unannounced inspections during operation.

The Flathead County health department “case worker” assigned to our project was a woman named Charlene. Because I worked in the title office all day, I never had the opportunity to meet Charlene, let alone have a conversation with her. All of her business was conducted during the day with Chef since he typically didn’t leave to work the dinner hour as head chef at Jack’s Diamondback until early afternoon.

We were required to make several alterations to the kitchen design in order to meet code and while this came as no surprise, some of the requirements seemed a little over the top. Take the handicap parking/access and handicap bathroom for instance. Our kitchen was not open to the public so the requirement seemed a little excessive, but it was the law and not worth arguing about. We simply complied.

In all of this, my biggest and perhaps only concern was that I be able to gain access to the kitchen from my office upstairs without having to go outside and around the house, especially in the winter. Charlene from the health department approved the plans provided with only one entry door which happened to be the outside door on the east side of the house next to the hot tub sun room. This meant that I’d be forced to go outside and walk all the way around the house, often in inclement weather, every time I needed to get into the kitchen, when I really should’ve been able to walk down a few stairs and easily enter through what later came to be known as “The Door.”

The moveable freezer, handicap bathroom on left

Including “The Door” in the kitchen’s design was my only request and it was extremely important to me. And I had the perfect spot for it right behind a freezer in the back corner next to the handicap bathroom. This point of entry would inconvenience no one, and would be hidden behind the moveable freezer on wheels.

Apparently Charlene told Chef that the “The Door” I wanted wasn’t possible because of fire barrier issues. The wall that separated the kitchen from the west half of the basement was heavily insulated under the drywall to create a firewall because of those fire barrier requirements, but I told Chef that’s what commercially insulated fire doors are for. Clearly the denial wasn’t acceptable. I’d offered him a viable solution, yet had to repeatedly ask him to negotiate a compromise.

Chef would hear none of it and refused to pursue my request because he didn’t want to rock the boat with Charlene (whatever that meant). Every time I brought up “The Door” issue, he’d blow up like volcano. All the while I suffered through months of listening to him and his “Charlene said this” and “Charlene said that.” Yea, well, Darlene said everything except the magic words I needed to hear about “The Door” that meant everything to me. It got so bad I thought if I heard Darlene’s name one more time, I was going to have to a put a hit out on her.

Kitchen work area

While I deeply resented having my request relegated because it was apparently not worth the bother, it wasn’t in my nature to stand idly by and let the kitchen be built without creating options for myself down the road when Charlene was out of my life.

This is where Scope came in.    

We hired Scope to build out the kitchen and one day when he showed up to chalk out the room, I had a little private chat with him about creating my option. I asked Scope to frame in “The Door” without telling anyone, which he gladly did. He then casually sheet-rocked right over the door frame where it laid hidden, waiting for the moment when I could cut out the drywall and seamlessly install my door.

Kitchen work area and sinks

Once I felt safe in the knowledge that my one and only concern had been adequately addressed, and regrettably not through any effort made by my husband and partner, I relaxed my daily petitions to him for “The Door.”

The turning point in our relationship occurred one night after Chef got home from work around 11pm. I was in bed reading a book when he walked around to my side of the bed to talk to me about the kitchen’s progress. It was about half completed with my door frame secretly in place. He’d already showered and was dressed only in a T-shirt sans underwear.

I had to look up at him standing over me because at eye level all I could see was his free swinging scrotum. He excitedly went on about this and that, and somewhere in the mix I had to ask, “What about ‘The Door’?”

He went berserk, and turned to the wall next to my side of the bed and put his fist through it leaving behind a huge hole. I barely noticed any of it because the only thing I could see during the eruption was his nutsack flailing near my face in sync with the erratic rhythms of his rage. It was one of those visuals that’ll never go away … kind of like Sutton in the hot tub.    

The next day saw Chef shamefully contrite. And determined to repair the large 4” hole he’d left behind in his fit of uncontrollable rage, out came his faithful home repair companion, “Home Improvements for Dummies.” He worked on the patch for weeks, but couldn’t seem to ever get it handled. It didn’t matter really because a month later he made the mistake of picking a mean fight with me over something that was relatively minor and hardly worth remembering. After the fact, and after having released some of his pent up frustrations on me, he smugly went outside to take a ride on the lawnmower, and I was left seething in the middle of our bedroom with tears rolling down my cheeks.

I stood there motionless as I struggled to contain the volatile pressure building inside of me. Like some cheap plastic toy airplane with its spinning propeller powered by a tightly twisted rubber band, I felt as if I had one of those rubber bands twisting within me so tightly that it was either going to snap and break or release in a fury. 

Well, it all released in a fury the minute I noticed that half-repaired hole in the wall. I picked up a large rattan vase filled with heavy rocks and began swinging at the hole like the vase was a baseball bat. By the time I was finished, the hole was 8” in diameter. After I hid all evidence of the weapon by throwing the tattered vase in the trash, I went about the rest of my day as if nothing had happened.

Two weeks later, long after things had blown over, Chef was in bed next to me talking while we were both browsing through magazines. When he turned his head to look at me at some point, I watched his eyes double in size as he finally noticed what I’d done to his hole. “What happened to the hole?” he gasped. All I said was, “that’s what you get when you act like an ass.”

That hole was never fixed before I moved away. It remained as a reminder of all that got broken because of “The Door” that never got built.   

Living The Big Sky Life^TM

© by DK King

"Vulture Culture" defined

VULTURE CULTURE. A cultural mindset.

The Vulture Culture is a parasitical cultural mindset that encourages self-serving individuals to collectively devour the flesh right off of the bones of society like a wake of New World Vultures gathering to feast on the susceptible.

Those immersed in today’s Vulture Culture tend to personify the gladiatorial spirit of “winner takes all”; and like the competitive arenas of ancient Rome where the sole objective of the properly indoctrinated gladiator is to win at any cost, every victory sustained is the direct result of cutthroat competition on steroids. There are no rules, there are no hostages. There is only winning.

In this myopic quest to win, disciples of the Vulture Culture think nothing of pissing all over everything they step on, and the corrosive uric acid that rolls down their legs unchecked does little more than leave in its wake a wide trail of scorched earth. 

Those belonging to the Vulture Culture have absolutely no desire to contribute anything new or of value to the very society they feed on. They prefer instead to feed upon the remains of the day like scavengers, for what they lack in creative innovation, they make up for in carnage.

© by DK King

“The New GOP” defined

G.O.P., acronym revision for the new “GENDER OVERLORD PARTY”. A cultural mindset.

The “GOP” acronym known for centuries in the United States to stand for the Republican “Grand Old Party” has been updated to be the new signifier for the “Gender Overlord Party”. This turn of the 21^st century revision was made in order to better reflect the bullying nature and evolving cultural mindset of a GOP that has elected to stand on a platform righteously rooted in conflict, contradiction, and condescension.

© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: Houseguest From Hell

Having grown up in a large family, I can say without hesitation that the notion of sharing space with a diverse group of intimates is far from abstract. The social skills one must develop in order to successfully navigate the waters of fishbowl living in cramped quarters with a bunch of other guppies is often underrated, especially when contrasted against the 21^st century style of ‘electronic relationship’ that seems to require no physical interaction to sustain. 

Yet when I was growing up and it came time for the King family to vacation or spend any time away from home, we basically had two choices: Spend the night in a plastic tube tent at some campground, or stay the night in the home of another. Anyone who has read my LTBSL posts will know well my strong distaste for camping, so let’s just say that it was never a voluntary selection for me if given the choice. When it came down to fulfilling my rudimentary desires for a hot shower, clean sheets and real milk to drink, I determined early on that the friendly sleep-over was, without a doubt, always going to be my preference.   

Most of the people I know understand the common courtesies that go along with practicing good guest etiquette when staying in the home of another, and I made the mistake of assuming that everyone operated under these considerate guidelines until I had the misfortune of housing a guest who clearly didn’t get it. Not even a little bit.

Having played the roles of both host and guest on numerous occasions, I can say from experience that good guest etiquette is a necessary component for any respectable visit. While a clichéd violation might be to overstay your welcome, you know you’ve behaved like a good guest when your host extends another invitation to visit as you prepare to leave. But I would never expect this invitation to be extended to me unless I’d been gracious to my host and respectful to the other members of the household while sharing their living space.

With 5 bedrooms, our home on the range was soon nicknamed “Chez Montana” because it was spacious enough to comfortably accommodate visiting family and friends like a B&B. And this included many of Chef’s out of state friends, which was frankly a good thing because the prospect of living the big sky life was a huge draw for the bros. Whitefish was “Boy’s Town” after all; and any guy looking to ski, snowboard, hike, fish, hunt, or enjoy whatever other communing with nature quality of life crap that big city folk wistfully prattle on about could find it all just beyond our backyard.

I also knew many of Chef’s old school surfing buddies because I went to school with them in Huntington Beach as well, and when they came to stay at Chez Montana, it was often like a high school reunion in our living room. So when Harrow came for a ski vacation during the winter of 1994, I gave it little thought, even though he was a high school chum of Chef’s that I didn’t know very well. What I did know was that he’d been a guest at our wedding, and of course, everything else I’d heard other people say about him, which was plenty. I also knew that he was the half-brother of Mamasan’s ex-husband, that he was a hair stylist, and that he’d always been crudely rumored amongst the bros to be a closet gay. Whatever.

All of the visitors who stayed at Chez Montana were put up in one of the two bedrooms downstairs. One bedroom was called the blue room because of its circa ‘70s powder blue shag carpet, and the other was called the green room, again because of its bilious lime/olive green shag carpet. The bedrooms were across the hall from each other, and aside from the ugly carpeting, they were sufficiently appointed with anything a guest could need including a nice bed and a full bathroom to share between them.

When Harrow arrived for his four day stay in the blue room, we already had one guest in the house. My girlfriend, Soho, was attempting to have a house built for herself three miles west of Whitefish at the time, and could frequently be found staying with us in the green room. She understood the courtesies of good guest etiquette and was always welcomed in our home because of it. 

As most hosts know, life goes on even when there are guests in the house. While we always did our best to spend as much time as possible with the houseguests visiting Chez Montana, the reality was, we weren’t the ones on holiday and our work schedules couldn’t be altered very much.

Harrow predictably arrived on the Delta midnight flight into Kalispell, and since he’d arranged his visit with Chef, Chef was the one who went to the airport to pick him up – the late hour was typically no big deal for a Head Chef accustomed to working the regular dinner shift anyway. Early the next morning, it became clear from the moment I sat half asleep at the dining table clutching a cup of hot coffee that my presence in the house during his vacation was going to be a major irritant for Harrow. I was so resented in fact, that I became invisible and not worth the effort of acknowledging on any level. Whenever I tried to speak to him like any nice host or normal person would, Harrow’s eyes would visibly glaze over and he’d ignore me. Only when Chef was present would he lower himself to offer me some sort of monosyllabic grunt, and it was strictly for Chef's benefit. In four days, I never got so much as a “Hello, kiss my ass, thank you for letting me stay in your home, nothing.”

Buffalo Cafe
514 East 3rd Street, Whitefish, MT 59937

Harrow had absolutely no shame in his game, and he overtly ostracized me as if I were an interloper in my very own house. And to my horror, Chef did nothing to address his friend’s rude behavior at my expense except to insist on day two that Hargett allow me to join them for a late breakfast at the Buffalo Café, primarily because it was next door to my office.

After what happened on the third day, I knew I had to take matters into my own hands.

It began late in the afternoon. Everyone was home except Chef who’d left for work several hours earlier, and Harrow who was up on Big Mountain skiing. Or so I thought. In the middle of my vacuuming, Soho came upstairs to let me know that Harrow had secretly slipped an anonymous female into his room where he was now busy doing the nasty as loud as he possibly could so we’d all be sure to know that he wasn’t gay. Well, Soho was certainly no shrinking violet, but she had tremendous concern for the well-being of my young daughter who happened to be hanging out with her in the green room at the time.

By the time I arrived on the scene downstairs, the unknown hooch had hopped into her car and was pulling out of the driveway. Wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am. After I got over my initial shock at Hargett’s appalling and flagrant disrespect for me, my child, my home, and my other houseguest, I realized there wasn’t much I could effectively say to an ass who refused to communicate with me. I had to kick back.

The three of us sat on Soho’s bed in the green room and plotted as Harrow whistled happily in his room like a lark that didn’t know it was about to be swallowed by a mama mountain lion. It wasn’t long before he emerged from the blue room to take a shower. As soon as he got into the shower, we sent my daughter upstairs on a mission she accepted with glee. Since we all knew that the on-demand hot water heater that Sutton once boasted about was incapable of producing a consistent flow of hot water throughout the house at any given time, we used that deficiency to our benefit when we directed my daughter to turn on and off every hot water faucet inside the house while simultaneously flushing the toilets.

The blood curdling screeches that erupted from behind the bathroom door as Harrow suffered through the alternating extremes of scalding and icy water did little to make up for the insult of his reprehensible and inappropriate behavior in my home. The momentary revenge his screams offered, however, was humorously empowering, and it had the three of us rolling on the floor in laughter for a long time.

We squelched our guffaws behind the closed door of the green room when Harrow eventually left the bathroom and made his way upstairs to lounge on the couch with a cold beer. He barely had a few sips of that beer before passing out with the beer bottle squeezed between his legs. His wide open mouth sagged as the drool seeped from the lowest corner with every snore. I won’t even go into what might’ve found its way into his mouth as he unconsciously snorted on my couch for an hour as if he were God’s gift to my living room.

Now it just so happened that I was scheduled to take the same early morning Delta flight out of Kalispell that Harrow was booked on for his return to Orange County. Considering the tone of Harrow’s hellacious visit, I found the coincidence to be quite ironic.

Chef dropped us off at the airport together, and it was no surprise to me when Harrow grabbed his bags and bolted for the ticket counter, leaving me behind to handle my own luggage on the curb without so much as a word. I didn’t see him again until it came time for me to board the plane before take-off. Harrow was comfortably settled into his aisle seat when I fumbled past him trying to get to my own seat. It took everything I had not to ‘accidentally’ knock him in the head with my heavy carry-on bag as I passed him by. The only effort he made when I walked by was to turn his head away and ignore me as if we'd never met. No one would've ever guessed that he'd just spent four days in my house as the guest from hell.

When our plane made the usual layover landing in Salt Lake City, Harrow got off first and vanished completely. I never saw him again. Suffice it to say, Harrow was blacklisted from Chez Montana forevermore, and Chef got to feel the unmitigated wrath of my indignation. We never had a repeat performance. 

Living The Big Sky Life^TM

© by DK King 

Living The Big Sky Life: From Scaredy Cat to Wild Cat

Like every politician, Newt Gingrich is all about getting his name out there any way he can, even if his name happens to be inadvertently attached to some scaredy-cat desperately trying to scratch and claw his way into the House.  

Gingrich’s political ambitions aside, I can say with certainty that his existence played absolutely no role in my young daughter’s decision to name her cat “Newt” in 1990 because she had no clue Gingrich even existed. Like many pet owners, my daughter chose to name her cat after something that had meaning for her, and in Newt’s case, she wanted to name him after the sole surviving young girl nicknamed “Newt” in the movie “Aliens”. Little did we know at the time, however, that Newt’s survival instinct would also be triggered by traumatic necessity to parallel that of his on-screen namesake.

In an unforgiving landscape subject to the cyclical whims of the seasons, creatures of the wild do whatever they instinctively need to do to survive. And sadly, not all of them do.

When it came to survival of the fittest for the animal kingdom of the Flathead Valley, it was obvious that the harsh winters were always the most challenging for the animals that don’t hibernate during the deep freeze. Keeping warm enough to stay alive and finding enough to eat just to keep warm went hand in hand, or perhaps it was more like hand to mouth.

It wasn’t unusual for us to see deer roaming through our fields of frosty tundra during the winter in search of a morsel. If the deer couldn’t find enough edible vegetation underneath the snow covered ground, they’d invariably make their way to the shallow flower beds around our ranch house where a delicate feast of flowering bulbs could often be found laying dormant not far below the surface. And I learned the hard way that foraging deer made for a pathetic springtime crocus bloom, but by the time I figured that out, the deer had long moved on to nibbling to a nub any tender shoots that could be found sprouting on the saplings we’d been foolish enough to leave unprotected after planting the previous fall. The deer reminded me of rabbits in a cabbage patch, doing what comes naturally, and it was impossible to get upset. It was simply incumbent upon us to plan better.

Although Chef didn’t dare insist that Newt prove he was a real cat by hunting down his own food, Newt certainly knew by this point that every day in Montana would see him in the fight for his life. It was in his eyes, and rightfully so. And it was especially so when Chef would lock the cats out of the house at night (in accordance with principle #1 of his non-negotiable animal doctrine), right about the time the hungry wolf packs could be heard howling while on the hunt along the fringes of our backyard.

Newt on the lookout

As predictable as the sunrise in the morning was the appearance of both cats at the porch clamoring to be let in with the sunlight for a proper feeding. Inky preferred to enter from the front door in the kitchen, but Newt always went for the back door. Probably because he’d come in from the back fields since he seemed to alternate spending his nights between the neighboring hay barn of Sam and Mary Ellen and the storage attic in Peyton’s garage.

The back door of our ranch house had the look of a one-piece dutch door – solid wood on the bottom, and a large rectangular glass window securely set into the upper half with a ledge-like rim. Somewhere along the line, Newt figured the best way to announce his arrival every morning was to leap up and throw the full force of his body against the bottom of the door with a loud thud, lodge his front claws into the window’s bottom ledge, and pull his face up to the glass so that he could scan the open living room and kitchen/dining area. As soon as his eyes would lock onto anyone within viewing range, he would drop down and wait for the door to open.   

Some mornings, it was just too much not to have fun at Newt’s expense. And every once in a while, the second we’d hear his unmistakable thud against the door, we’d hide giggling behind a cabinet and peek around the corner just enough to watch him swivel his head back and forth in the window as his alert green eyes scouted the room for movement, and someone to let him in for breakfast. He could hold onto that ledge for an impressively long time, I might add.

One Saturday afternoon, Newt surprised us all by coming home unexpectedly. Monty and Denise were visiting from Helena at the time, and as we sat around the living room socializing, along came Newt with the standard, yet startling, BAM! at the door. Monty sprung to attention as if a bomb had dropped and quickly looked around exclaiming, “What was that?!” And then his eyes locked onto Newt who was staring at him through the door’s window. To my great amusement, Monty freaked a little, but that was nothing compared to his “Hantavirus!” reaction after I walked over to the door and casually let Newt into the house.  

As wonderful as the neighboring hay barn could be, Newt’s favorite place to hang seemed to be the storage attic up in Peyton’s garage. On the surface, this was no big deal, however, Peyton had just as many acres as we did and a cat of her own to patrol it. Newt ultimately became aggressively territorial with Peyton’s cat, and when Peyton would try to scare him off, he would spit and hiss hostilely at Peyton like wild cat. Peyton was petrified of him.

After a serious territorial altercation with Peyton’s cat, Newt developed an abscess on his neck that required medical treatment. In order to take him to the vet, my daughter and I had to go into Peyton’s garage to collect him from the attic. Peyton came out to “help” but was too scared to really do anything except stand there and watch. When Newt heard my daughter (his master) call out to him, he came to the ledge and crouched. He looked at my daughter and meowed, then he turned to look at Peyton who recoiled with fear and panic when Newt hissed at her venomously. As my daughter began to make the climb to grab her cat, Peyton begged her to get down, afraid that the cat would rip her to shreds. I told Peyton not to worry. The cat would never hurt her. The closer my daughter got to Newt, the louder he meowed at her, and the louder he hissed at Peyton. Back and forth it went until, much to Peyton’s dismay, she reached up and scooped him off the ledge. Peyton’s jaw dropped when the cat calmly settled into my daughter’s arms for the long walk home.

Newt lost a great deal of his socialization skills while living in Montana. Isolation can do that. Just ask the Unabomber, although it might be easier to just ask me. Newt exhausted the last of his nine lives right about the time my daughter and I took to the “pray for me, I drive 93” highway for the last time. I may have considered myself lucky to escape Montana with my life, but poor Newt wasn’t so fortunate. 

In spite of everything, Newt never abandoned us, Newt never let us down. His dedication and generous contribution to our household was unquestionable, and let it be said that we never, ever found a mouse in our house.

In loving memory of Newt, 1990-1997 

Living The Big Sky Life^TM

© by DK King

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