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Today, I’m into the recovery stage after 13 days of a head and chest cold. I woke up breathing through my nose. It’s hard to find words to describe how good it feels to move into breathing that is only slightly impaired – and I realize how much I have learned to enjoy the body’s recovery from injuries and diseases. There are still the swollen sinuses, the lungs are still marginal, but the beginnings of recovery are there.
It has been a good year for recovery – the knee replacement has returned walking to my pleasures. Along with that, the drugs for the surgery and the mild opioid pain pills gave the stomach time to recover – and for the first time in several years, the pain of GERD is gone.
One of the good things about becoming elderly is how much enjoyment there is when strength and abilities return. The problem is that losing those strengths and abilities is also part of the aging process.
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I’ve been reading the collection of essays that compose Robert Ruark’s book The Old Man and the Boy. The tales are from a century past – but Ruark makes a case that having the old man around is good for the boy. I recall my own grandfather, who died when I was five – but whose positive regard for me has been a big part of the good things that have happened, the successes and challenges of my entire life. Any failures, any rough spots, were eased by the memory of an old man who treated me as the most worthwhile person of his life. Yes, I was heartbroken when he died. At five, I didn’t get the experiences Ruark did – his grandfather lasted until he was 15 – but like Captain Ned Adkins and Robert Ruark, Gust Fahlgren has been a pleasant memory away for my last 70 years.
Remi got me thinking of these things with his first complete sentence to me: “I need a goat.” He was right – and I have enjoyed watching the two little Nigerian Dwarf does I purchased for him. The goats, as former 4-H animals, just regard me as the supplier of hay. Remi, on the other hand (or hoof, as the observing species may have) is their kid, whose pockets need to be sniffed and examined until he learns to always have treats for them. The old man is a significant part of the boy growing up.
But I am a demographer who will soon turn 76. Unlike Captain Ned, I have actuarial table that can provide some idea of how much time I have for Remi and Nathaniel – for the next 10 years and 4 months, we will be living the story of the old man and the boys. My grandfather died before my brother could develop memories of him – he wasn’t yet two – and couldn’t make the memories that have left me with a feeling of unconditional support all my life.
Captain Ned left Ruark with memories of fishing, hunting, building and making repairs, developing competencies. I’m planning for the next 10 years. The pond offers a place where, with a slow hull, two little boys can learn to sail, as well as row. My little bailer, turning out 30 pound round bales, will provide a task where small boys can help with haying. I’m not certain that I will have the time to provide the training in pistol marksmanship – but I will have the time to teach the self discipline of a single shot 22 at official targets and measured ranges. Possibly the beginnings of gun repair on the simple break in the middle single barrel shotguns. I don’t believe I will have the years left to teach the more complex pump and lever actions.
The sawmill will provide a source for the lumber little boys need for their projects. As we continue to thin the forest, they will have an opportunity to make their own firewood business – Remi already insists on hauling the wood blocks to the pickup, and loves watching the hydraulic splitter. The firewood from thinning will teach valuable life lessons – using something that would be useless without your work, deferred gratification, and conservation in the real world. I need to get the skid-steer back online – it offers a power that is much easier to learn than the tractor.
I heard a country song on the radio, where the singer sang about what he would be doing for his next thirty years. I don’t have a next thirty years – but I can be with those two little boys for their next seventy years, like my grandfather was for me. Come to think of it, Captain Ned got Robert Ruark a goat.
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A million seconds is about 11 days.
A billion seconds is about 31.5 years.
A trillion seconds is about 31,790 years.
May help make the federal budget and deficit easier to understand.
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They brought Warren Zevon into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I’m fairly certain that they brought Willie Nelson in last year, so I should have expected it – but I didn’t.
Some of the singers I have enjoyed aren’t the real smooth types. Warren Zevon wrote words that told a story – and was basically the gunnie’s composer – “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner”, and the serious title “Send Lawyers, Guns and Money”. I used to listen to “Desperadoes Under the Eaves” while trying to calculate how many men with crowbars on the San Andreas Fault it would take to lever California into the sea. After all, it was the eighties.
I don’t recall him ever making it to Montana – but, like so many people I knew in Libby, it was mesothelioma that took him out in 2003. If you didn’t listen to Warren Zevon in the eighties or nineties, get on Youtube and listen to Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner and Send Lawyers, Guns an Money.
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Mary Pat Campbell has written an article based on the Veteran’s Administration most recent report on suicides. She’s an actuary, so I tend to take her work a bit more seriously than a lot of others. The article is at: https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/movember-2024-vet2erans-and-suicide?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email For folks who need a bit of encouragement to follow the link, here are a few excerpts:
This graph reflects the reality before I retired – from 2001 to 2015 veteran suicide rates (age 55 to 74) were actually slightly lower than the nation’s suicide rate:
At my age, 75+, Veteran suicide rates are a bit lower than the general population:
Campbell is worth reading – my excerpts will, hopefully, provide incentive to read the whole article.
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Last month, Rock Island Auction sold John Buhmiller’s African rifle (along with a lot of memorabilia). It’s on a large commercial Mauser action – and, frankly, not one of the Buhmiller rifles that interest me the most. I’d prefer to see the rifle he used at the end of his African hunting – either 470 or 500 magnum, built on a model 1917 Enfield action.
The Mauser failed him once – he was running dry, dropped a cartridge in the magazine, and the controlled feed in the Mauser action jammed the rifle as the old man was running from an angry elephant. I admit, the Mauser makes a prettier custom rifle – but I heard the story forty years ago from Leonard Bull – who once hunted large game (and men) on the African continent. Leonard described the stock as ‘fence post ugly’ – so I suspect it might not sell for as much as the rifle that was sold in October.
My own Buhmiller barrelled rifle is in 257 Roberts – built on a Springfield 1903 action. When Laird Byers was dying (the iron crab) he had his attendant call me – offering to sell the rifle for what he had in it. When Leonard Bull looked down the bore, he agreed that I did have a Buhmiller, and pointed out what he termed the ‘square cut’ rifling. Leonard was a Kenyan – Buhmiller’s hunting was in Tanganyika. Little things like national boundaries didn’t keep Africa’s big game hunters from meeting each other in the mid-1950’s.
So what’s the relevance? John Buhmiller started making rifle barrels in Eureka, where he spent his working days in the rail road office, as a telegraph operator. My small caliber Springfield probably comes from those Eureka days – though the barrel may have been made in the early fifties before he moved operations to Kalispell. I’m guessing it was Eureka – by the Kalispell days he was stamping his name onto the barrels. Come to think of it, I don’t know if he was stamping the name onto barrels that wound up installed in P-17 Enfield actions.
Buhmiller, as an old man, managed to make friends with Tanganyika’s equivalent of Fish and Game, and served that bunch, unpaid, hunting problem elephants that damaged crops and fields. He had a farmer who provided meals and housing, Tanganyika’s game department took all of the ivory, and life was good.
Before Africa, Buhmiller was a competitive service rifle shooter, competing at places like Camp Perry. Even then, he was producing some of the world’s finest gunbarrels – though Leonard (who knew him only in his African days did look at my 257 Roberts and comment, “I didn’t know he made barrels in such small calibers.”
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As always, I find graphs and charts to be a fast way of getting information on trends. These are taken from https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/make-america-affordableagain on Lairwyn’s Linx. There are more than a few implications, and the format doesn’t require intensive study.
There is a lot more information – and conjecture in Bezmenov’s essay – these graphs are good, but Yuri Bezmenov is worth reading.
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Tyler Durden, at ZeroHedge, published an intriguing map covering the use of th Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by state. The article is at https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/new-mexico-state-most-dependent-food-stamps – and I’m including some highlights to encourage people to follow the link and read the whole article.
It starts with a description of how the map was developed from Visual Capitalist, and that it is based on 2025 data provided by SmartAsset. Here’s the map – and there is a lot more if you’ll take the time to follow the link.
The thing that struck me was comparing this map with the map of the states and how they voted – whether Trump or Harris – as shown by RealClearPolitics:
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The settlers on the Mayflower were committed to live communally (https://drcarolehhaynes.com/index.php/articles/culture/history/488-communism-rejected-on-thanksgiving ). “One of the more familiar stories in American history is the disastrous experiment in a communal social and economic structure in the Plymouth Colony from 1621-1623. The communal lifestyle in the colony resembled a socialist society.
The colony’s storehouse, houses, gardens, and other improved land were all shared. No one could own private land or work at a private business because of their business deal with their investors. The colonists collectively cleared and worked the land. Many worked hard to provide for their families and lay up stores for the winter while others sloughed off, knowing they would receive equal shares from the single pot regardless of how little they worked.
Anger and resentment grew among those who did the lion’s share of the work so they became less willing to work. As a result, the colony could not produce enough food to feed everyone.
After two years of living under communism, only a few of the original Plymouth colonists were still alive. By 1626, to avoid an extinction of the colony and provide a solution for repayment to their investors, a new system with private property rights and the right to keep one’s production — free enterprise – was implemented by Governor William Bradford, one of the signers of the Mayflower Compact and the second elected governor of the colony. Each family was assigned personal plots of farm land according to family size and the common storehouse was abolished. Immediately men and women returned to the harvest fields and produced a large harvest.
Land ownership became a priority of the early settlers. For more than 50 years colonial villages tried to survive under the common ownership system without success.”
The basis for communal ownership among the Hutterites is often cited as Acts 2:44 “And all who believed were together and had all things in common.” And Acts was written a long time before Karl Marx.
Frankly, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” sounds nice. The problem is that we elect leaders whose abilities are small, but whose needs are huge. New England was settled under communism, and succeeded only when the communal ownership was abandoned.
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I’m reading that Martin Paul Gilleard will be spending most of the next 4 years in the slammer for having a hand-written note on making gunpowder. England is a strange place. As I read the article, I couldn’t help wondering why anyone would need to keep the proportions of black powder written down.
The ingredients are simple – potassium nitrate, charcoal and sulfur. The proportions are easy to remember – 75, 15, 10. So long as you remember that the 75% refers to potassium nitrate, you can’t screw up too badly. It still puzzles me that a man pushing fifty would need to write the recipe down. On the other hand, I recall how, at ten years old, finding out the proportions was more of a challenge – but we didn’t have the internet back then. Heck, learning that potassium nitrate was the modern term for saltpeter made the process simple – back in 1960 that substance was sold in fertilizer sacks.
I don’t know why it was important to know how to make black powder – experimenting with explosives manufacturing always seemed like a good way to lose fingers. Still, in England the ability to make your own gunpowder might be handy . . . and is obviously controlled. Finding sulfur is the challenge – though I can list counties where it has been mined in Montana, and any place with hot springs is probably worth examining. I produce charcoal enough by accident just burning a wood stove – and Europe used manure management to produce the potassium nitrate. It seems a brit can spend a long time in a sassenach prison for writing down information that just clatters around the brain of an aggie who once shot black powder revolvers in the US.
So I got on line – I can buy 10 pounds of KNO3 for $37.95 and the stuff is 99.7% pure. Another sack is offered, describing the chemical as “used for high energy exothermic reactions.” Thinking of the cost of Haz-mat shipping for black powder, I can see why folks might want to roll their own. A pound of sulfur is going for about twenty dollars. I don’t think manufacturing gun powder at home is for me – but I can understand why the Brits may get excited over the knowledge being readily available. I’d rather pay a little more and let someone else take the risks.
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