I’m wearing suspenders. Most of the loggers I’ve known slur the word so it comes out ‘spenders.’ I got ’em because of this last hernia surgery – doctor’s orders were to wear something loose around the middle, so I got out my old fat pants and bought a pair of suspenders.
I have 5 more weeks with a 15 pound lifting limit and the caution to wear “loose fitting clothes.” The 15 pound limit translates to “make a lot more trips carrying firewood to the house.” The suspenders, though, mean that even though the pants are so loose I expect them to fall down, they don’t.
I’m not sure I shouldn’t have tried suspenders a whole lot earlier. Also not sure I’ll stick with them after my six weeks lifting limit is over – but with the incisions healing on my stomach, right now the suspenders are pretty wonderful. Now, if I can just remember not to lift anything over 15 pounds.
It’s time to update the annual county taxation article. From a secessionist point of view, with three high school districts, it’s easy to figure out which communities provide the funds that keep our county going.
Market value has increased dramatically, taxable value has gone down. Troy’s taxable value percentage has increased by 0.4%, while both Libby and North County have slightly decreased. While the reduction in taxable value looks nice, it is an easy number for them to change.
The Census offered these population estimates from the American Community Survey in 2024 (the ACS is not an enumerated census and its accuracy suffers in small communities)
Since Eureka, Trego, Rexford, Fortine, and Stryker are all in High School District 13, the relative populations calculate:
Population Percent Population Tax Base
Libby 9,545 (47%) 36.3%
Troy 3,505 (17%) 18.8%
LCHS 7,107 (35%) 44.9%
The tax numbers are both precise and accurate – the source is listed should you want to check. I am not satisfied with the quality of the American Community Survey data, but it is the Best Available Data. It is probably coincidental that the abbreviation for best available data is BAD.
Looking at the end of the year, the biggest loss was John Mee. If you didn’t know Big John, you have my sympathy. He was one of those rare people whom it was always a pleasure to know. In the past several years, less than stellar health has confined me more to home, so I hadn’t seen him recently – and I will not see him again. And that is not just a loss to me, but to all of our community.
So be it. Big John was always bigger than life, not just in size, but in personality and character. Let me write some of my memories – if you knew John, you may enjoy the snapshots of his character. If you didn’t know him, you may get a glimpse of the man and of a boy that it was a privilege to know.
One memory is of a time when 4-H was helping set things up for a LEC annual meeting. I was still in high school, so John was ten or less. I’d been given the task of organizing kids to handle the lunch tables – so I dropped the task of setting up the dessert table (all the pies and cakes) onto Big John. If I was 15, John may have been 9 or 10. He had the size to handle the task, and, more important, took his work seriously. An adult 4-H parent (from a community other than Trego) appointed herself to correct Big John, yelling and confronting him about being too young for an important job like handling cakes.
He took it well – far better than I. My response was to explain that she needed a better view of reality, and might get it if she would only remove her head from her fundamental orifice. She left John alone, and went off to complain to my parents. So be it – both John and I liked cakes and pies, and he handled his task competently. On the other hand, I left with the suggestion that I might learn to be a bit more tactful.
Big John had challenges reading – he was a victim of our education system. Figure it was 1966 – Trego had a challenge hiring teachers, and Wilda B. Totten, the County Superintendent, passed on the names of a young married couple. Oklahomans, I believe. Long story short, they were hired before their transcripts arrived, and I remember Dad’s comment: “They didn’t even attend college long enough to flunk out.” Somehow, in the rushed schedule to get school going for a massive increase in students, they had hired a pair of non-readers to teach. To be fair, it was an easy mistake to make, and they left shortly thereafter. I think this story comes from the last conversation John and I had, with him reminding me of the importance of good teachers.
Big John liked lever action rifles – one of my treasured memories is watching the lengthy transactions – it wasn’t really haggling – between Big John and Dad about one Winchester lever gun or another. Or a Marlin. It wasn’t a commercial transaction – it was a friendly visit, over a topic that the two enjoyed. I recall catching guff from Dad for no greater misconduct than selling a rifle ‘before Big John had a chance to even see it.” Selling it at a good profit wasn’t the point of business – the sale, the negotiations that could go on for most of a week was. Lever action – his father’s bolt action Swedish rifle was just a bit too modern. The gas-operated semi-automatics I used after a shoulder injury just never held the appeal of the old lever guns – and that was in the 20th century.
I don’t know if Big John ever had a drivers license – he told me he didn’t. I always suspected it came from the poor instruction at school during those early tunnel years. He explained that he had to be more law-abiding on the road than I did because of the lack – and I’m sure he was.
I remember John’s comment a few years back – that the best paid years of his life were in the seventies. I suspect the seventies ran from 75 to 85 for Big John – but it was a time when a strong man with a chainsaw could make a good living in the woods. I guess, in a way, Big John was born 30 years too late – but if he hadn’t been, a lot of us would have never known him.
So my farewell to a man whose life often brushed against mine. My condolences to Sylvia, and to all he left behind. There are more stories I could tell, memories I will revisit – but we shall not know his like again – a friend, a good man, larger than life in stature, personality and character, born into a time where he almost, but never quite, fit. A heart attack somehow seems appropriate – no heart could ever be strong enough to last the man I knew. I think that losing John was the biggest loss to my community in 2025.
As a kid, I knew all of the names – Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Joe Dimaggio, Roberto Clemente -the list goes on. My knowledge of professional baseball came from the radio. In 2006, driving across South Dakota, I listened to an interview that epitomized the love of the game.
Edgard Clemente, of the Sioux Falls Canaries, was being interviewed – and he was happy to be able to make a living playing the game he loved. His uncle was Roberto – whose baseball career was much more successful than Edgard’s – but I didn’t know that when I listened to the radio. I was listening to a young man who was overjoyed to be playing baseball, for the Canaries, in Sioux Falls, and was willing to tell everyone in the listening audience just how great it was to have the opportunity to play professional baseball in Sioux Falls.
Over the years, I watched Clemente’s career. He’d started out playing 3 years for the Colorado Rockies, where he hit all of his 8 major league home runs in 1999. He had been a tenth round draft pick. From the Colorado Rockies, he moved to the Anaheim Angels in 2000. In 2005, he played for Puerto Rico in the World Cup – and performed well enough that when I listened to the happy young man, he was on his second year with the Canaries. From the Canaries, he went on to the Somerset Patriots – it was Atlantic League, but he was briefly back in league ball. I’m sure that he felt Sioux Falls was the place that gave him a chance to get back into league ball, even if it was the minors.
In 2010, he played for the Broncos de Reynosa in the Mexican league. The last mention I found as I followed his career was 2012, when he played first for the New Jersey Jackals and ended with the Puebla Pericos (parrots).
His professional baseball career ran from 1993 to 2012. It was rare for Edgard to spend two years with the same team, playing for 23 different teams over his 20 year career. I never saw Edgard Clemente play – but I listened to an interview with a once major league ball player who was happy to be able to continue his career in South Dakota.
How much do you engage with others when you’re out in public? Lots of people don’t actually engage with others much at all. Think of commuters on public transportation staring down at their phones with earbuds firmly in place.
As a professor of social psychology, I see similar trends on my university campus, where students often put on their headphones and start checking their phones before leaving the lecture hall on the way to their next class.
Curating daily experiences in these ways may appeal to your personal interests, but it also limits opportunities for social connection. Humans are social beings: We desire to feel connected to others, and even connecting with strangers can potentially boost our mood.
At the same time, our attention is increasingly being pulled in varied directions within a highly saturated information environment, now commonly known as the “attention economy.”
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that so many Americans are experiencing a crisis of social connection. Research in social psychology helps to explain how the small behaviors and choices we make as individuals affect our experiences with others in public settings.
Where you focus your attention
One factor shaping people’s experiences in public settings concerns where they focus their attention. Since there is more information out in the world than anyone could ever realistically take in, people are driven to conserve their limited mental resources for those things that seem most crucial to navigating the world successfully. What this means is that every person’s attention is finite and selective: By attending to certain bits of information, you necessarily tune out others, whether you’re aware of doing so or not.
More often than not, the information you deem worthy of attention also tends to be self-relevant. That is, people are more likely to engage with information that piques their interest or relates to them in some way, whereas they tend to ignore information that seems unrelated or irrelevant to their existence.
One unfortunate consequence is that a person may end up treating interactions with other people as transactions, with a primary focus on getting one’s own needs met, or one’s own questions answered. A very different approach would involve seeing interactions with others as opportunities for social connection; being willing to expend some additional mental energy to listen to others’ experiences and exchange views on topics of shared interest can serve as a foundation for building social relationships.
It can feel alienating to be surrounded by people who have basically hung out a ‘do not disturb’ sign. Drazen/E+ via Getty Images
How others interpret your actions
Also, by focusing so much attention on their own individual interests, people may inadvertently signal disinterest to others in their social environments.
As an example, imagine how it would feel to be on the receiving end of those daily commuting rituals. You find yourself surrounded by people whose ears are closed off, whose eyes are down and whose attention is elsewhere – and you might start to feel like no one really cares whether you exist or not.
As social creatures, it’s natural for human beings to want to be seen and acknowledged by other people. Small gestures such as eye contact or a smile, even from a stranger, can foster feelings of connection by signaling that our existence matters. Instead, when these signals are absent, a person may come to feel like they don’t matter, or that they’re not worthy of others’ attention.
How to foster connection in public spaces
For all these reasons, it may prove valuable to reflect on how you use your limited mental resources, as a way to be more mindful and purposeful about what and who garner your attention. As I encourage my students to do, people can choose to engage in what I refer to as psychological generosity: You can intentionally redirect some of your attention toward the other people around you and expend mental resources beyond what is absolutely necessary to navigate the social world.
Engaging in psychological generosity doesn’t need to be a heavy lift, nor does it call for any grand gestures. But it will probably take a little more effort beyond the bare minimum it typically takes to get by. In other words, it will likely involve moving from being merely transactional with other people to becoming more relational while navigating interactions with them.
A few simple examples of psychological generosity might include actions such as:
Tuning in by turning off devices. Rather than default to focusing attention on your phone, try turning off its volume or setting it to airplane mode. See if you notice any changes in how you engage with other people in your immediate environment.
Making eye contact and small talk. As historian Timothy Snyder writes, eye contact and small talk are “not just polite” but constitute “part of being a responsible member of society.”
Smiling and greeting someone you don’t know. Take the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” to the realm of social relations, by showing your willingness to welcome other people rather than displaying disinterest and avoidance. Such simple acts may help to foster feelings of belonging and build a sense of community with others.
Acknowledging another human with a smile, even when using an automated system, can help them feel seen and valued. izusek/E+ via Getty Images
Among the most cynical, examples like these may initially be written off as reflecting pleas to practice the random acts of kindness often trumpeted on bumper stickers. Yet acts like these are far from random – they require intention and redirection of your attention toward action, like any new habit you may wish to cultivate.
Practicing acts of psychological generosity, then, can provide you with opportunities to benefit from social connection, at the same time as these acts can pay dividends to other people and to the social fabric of your community.
Mars, one of our closest planetary neighbors, has fascinated people for hundreds of years, partly because it is so similar to Earth. It is about the same size, contains similar rocks and minerals, and is not too much farther out from the Sun.
Because Mars and Earth share so many features, scientists have long wondered whether Mars could have once harbored life. Today, Mars is very cold and dry, with little atmosphere and no liquid water on the surface − traits that make it a hostile environment for life. But some observations suggest that ancient Mars may have been warmer, wetter and more favorable for life.
Even though scientists observing the surface of Mars conclude that it was once warmer than it is today, they haven’t been able to find much concrete evidence for what caused it to be warmer. But a study my colleagues and I published in April 2025 indicates the presence of carbonate minerals on the planet, which could help solve this puzzle.
Carbonate minerals contain carbon dioxide, which, when present in the atmosphere, warms a planet. These minerals suggest that carbon dioxide could have previously existed in the atmosphere in larger quantities and provide exciting new clues about ancient Mars’ environment.
As a geochemist and astrobiologist who has studied Mars for more than 15 years, I am fascinated by Mars’ past and the idea that it could have been habitable.
Ancient carbon cycle on past Mars
Observations of Mars from orbiting satellites and rovers show river channels and dry lakes that suggest the Martian surface once had liquid water. And these instruments have spotted minerals on its surface that scientists can analyze to get an idea of what Mars may have been like in the past.
Today, Mars is very cold, with a thin atmosphere and dry climate. But in the ancient past, it may have been warmer and wetter, with a thicker heat-trapping atmosphere. NASA/J. Bell – Cornell U./M. Wolff – SSI via AP, File
If ancient Mars had liquid water, it would have needed a much warmer climate than it has today. Warmer planets usually have thick atmospheres that trap heat. So, perhaps the Martian atmosphere used to be thicker and composed of heat-trapping carbon dioxide. If Mars did once have a thicker carbon dioxide-containing atmosphere, scientists predict that they’d be able to see traces of that atmospheric carbon dioxide on the surface of Mars today.
Gaseous carbon dioxide dissolves in water, a chemical process that can ultimately contribute to formation of solid minerals at and below the surface of a planet − essentially removing the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Lots of scientists have previously tried to find carbonate minerals on the surface of Mars, and part of the excitement about a warmer, wetter early Mars is that it could have been a suitable environment for ancient microbial life.
Finding carbonates on Mars
Previous searches for carbonates on Mars have turned up observations of carbonates in meteorites and at two craters on Mars: Gusev crater and Jezero crater. But there wasn’t enough to explain a warmer past climate on Mars.
The Curiosity rover has detected carbonates on Mars’ surface. NASA
As my colleagues and I detail in our new study about these results, this carbonate mineral could contain some of the missing atmospheric carbon dioxide needed for a warmer, wetter early Mars.
The rover also found iron oxyhydroxide minerals that suggest some of these rocks later dissolved when they encountered water, releasing a portion of their carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. Although it is very thin, the modern Martian atmosphere is still composed mainly of carbon dioxide.
In other words, these new results provide evidence for an ancient carbon cycle on Mars. Carbon cycles are the processes that transfer carbon dioxide between different reservoirs − such as rocks on the surface and gas in the atmosphere.
Potential habitats for past microbial life on Mars
Scientists generally consider an environment habitable for microbial life if it contains liquid water; nutrients such as carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur and necessary trace elements; an energy source; and conditions that were not too harsh − not too acidic, too salty or too hot, for example.
Since observations from Gale crater and other locations on Mars show that Mars likely had habitable conditions, could Mars then have hosted life? And if it did, how would researchers be able to tell?
Although microorganisms are too small for the human eye to detect, they can leave evidence of themselves preserved in rocks, sediments and soils. Organic molecules from within these microorganisms are sometimes preserved in rocks and sediments. And some microbes can form minerals or have cells that can form certain shapes. This type of evidence for past life is called a biosignature.
Collecting Mars samples
If Mars has biosignatures on or near the surface, researchers want to know that they have the right tools to detect them.
To that end, the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover has been collecting and sealing samples on Mars, with one cache placed on the surface of Mars and another cache remaining on the rover.
These caches include samples of rock, soil and atmosphere. Their contents can tell researchers about many aspects of the history of Mars, including past volcanic activity, meteorite impacts, streams and lakes, wind and dust storms, and potential past Martian life. If these samples are brought to Earth, scientists could examine them here for signs of ancient life on another planet.
Trego's Mountain Ear 