A happy June to you and yours. I was fortunate enough to ring in the month with four days of general puttering about and farting around at our cabin. If puttering about and farting around were Olympic events, the cabin would be a world class training center for all those that have made it their life’s ambition to be atop the puttering about and farting around podium.

Generally, a requirement of a world class training center is that it have world class coaches. People that have made it their life’s ambition to stomp around scowling in a polyester track suit and an ill-fitting polo while attempting to hammer and meld the best of the best into something better than the best.

These people aren’t invited to the puttering about and farting around training center. Polyester track suits are a liability around a campfire, and all that stomping, scowling, hammering, and melding would frighten my dog. Labs are sensitive.

Would I be their coach? I’ll mix their drinks and make sure they get an appropriate ration of bacon each day, but the puttering about and farting around is on them. They must arrive at their own particular style and technique, develop their signature moves, the moves (or lack of) that will define the very essence of their being.

When you’re at the cabin (no electricity, no phone service, no nothing…but everything) you find those moves, or perhaps they find you. It’s hard to tell. The days take on a rhythm, a rhythm that stretches in all directions, unhindered, but rather enhanced, by the tree’s and hills that stand sentinel, protecting you from interruptions attempting to ride the waves from the cell tower.

Puttering about and farting around is simply moving to that rhythm, which, at times, may bare a suspicious resemblance to not moving. One can move without the outward appearance of movement, and will possibly cover more ground doing so.

Speaking of “moving”, north of Billings there was a prairie dog trying to hitch a ride. He was standing on the shoulder of the road, little thumb up towards the traffic, and a more obnoxious finger pointed towards the residents of the prairie dog town he was trying to distance himself from. I stopped to inquire as to where he was headed, and was told that he was working his way west, he’d had enough of the prairie, always wanted to see the ocean.

I was heading east, back to South Dakota, but offered him a ride my way if he was so moved. He declined. Something about a jilted lover in Wind Cave National Park that, rumor has it, had hired a couple coyotes to rough him up if he dare burrow in those parts again. I didn’t prod him for any details, prairie dog business is best left to prairie dogs. We chatted a bit, the air-conditioned cab of the pick-up was a welcomed reprieve from the asphalt and hot sun I suppose.

I wished him luck, gave him the number of friend of mine that lives in Oregon that would put him up for a few nights if need be, and we parted ways.

Get a move on.