My Page: Bill Vaughn

Tuesday's Meteor Landed in Washington

People from Washington to Montana reported seeing a huge blue fireball light up the sky at around 6:30 am on February 19. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, the streak of light was a meteor, which apparently caused no damage when it hit the middle of nowhere near State Route 26 in Adams County, Washington.

Although spectacular and spooky, celestial fireworks like this one are not uncommon. They've been recorded on stone, tapestry and paper for thousands of years. It's only a matter of time until a piece of the space junk that causes these pyrotechnics wipes us out, a fate we've worked so hard to earn.

My most memorable fireball sighting was on the afternoon of August 10, 1972, a calm, clear and hot day—a dog day, a perfect day to fish. For me, it would turn out to be the crowning day of a memorable year. [more]

In The New West magazine

If Thomas Jefferson had time-traveled to our rural neighborhood he never would have predicted that small landowners will forge the spine of democracy. Because here in the Squalor Zone -- that redneck netherworld of "manufactured homes" and distressed pickups that encircles Western towns like the puffy flesh around an infection -- it's one against all and all against one.

Soon after we moved into our ten-acre plot of Montana floodplain the opening salvos were fired in what would become a civil war raging across two decades and multiple fronts.

First, we discovered that the Smiths (not their real name) had installed a gate in the barbed wire separating our place from theirs so they could traipse around our forest on their nags. Then we found the bloated carcass of a doe gut-shot with an arrow in a copse of hawthorns not far from a steel archery stand these yahoos had installed in one of our Ponderosas. I nailed the gate shut, pulled down the tree stand, and tacked No Trespassing signs on the border. One winter morning Mr. Smith blew these signs to smithereens with a shotgun fired from his snowmobile. So when the Smiths decided to sell half their place, presumably to pay down their liquor bills, I sent an aerial photo to the real estate agent that showed the five acres in question under water during the most recent flood. [more]

Dark Acres

In our cold and remote Montana, July 1 has always been the real start of summer. The air finally warms to 90, and much of the snowmelt that swelled the rivers all spring has been accepted by the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico.

This is when Kitty and I put on our swim suits and river shoes and fill our inner tubes from the compressor. Our little stock dogs, Clara the Border Collie and Lyndon Baines Johnson the Corgi, know what’s about to happen, and sprint toward the Clark Fork River, then back again, trying to make us hurry.

The walk across Dark Acres to the river is a few hundred yards, over our long footbridge spanning a slough and under canopies of dogwood and hawthorn. We’re sweaty when we get there, which is good because the water is a cold green shock. And it’s still high enough to make us careful about the crossing to Radish Island, a hundred yards away. Before we step into the water we always remind ourselves that rivers are devious, and you can drown in a bathtub. The dogs are less cautious, heaving themselves into the flow, instantly swept away with the righteous abandon of children who grasp that Swimming Season has just begun. Until the first frosts of October the Radish Crossing will be a daily event. [more]