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Tip o' the Day

Here's a tip that'll work for you: Roland's books make great Christmas presents.

They're easy to order from Roland's website. Simply hit the yellow button at the bottom of this column to go to Roland's & Jane's bookstore.

Twelve great selections; six novels in Roland's Valediction For Revenge series; six thrilling nonfiction titles taken largely from the life Roland and Jane have lived during their years of adventure.

There's two books about grizzly bears; one chronicles the entire life a single grizzly mother and her several sets of cubs; the other portrays Roland's and Jane's own learning experiences about the great beasts.

Let's see, there's a book about elk, a book about the Bob Marshall Wilderness, a book about the Cheek's life of adventure, and a book compiling the best of Roland's 20 years of newspaper columns.

Roland and Jane are offering huge discounts, and Jane will even mail the books for you, to whomever you wish. And as an added attraction, Roland will autograph each and every one.

Again, punch one of the appropriate yellow buttons to go to Roland's bookstore.

Oh yes, one other thing: the first chapter of each of Roland's books is a bookstore feature; there's no reason to take a chance on his books. Simply go to the store, read the first chapter, THEN click on the order form to select your Christmas presents.

It really is a neat way to go shopping.

In fact, it sounds so good I might do my own Christmas shopping there!

I have just finished The Phantom Ghost of Harriet Lou. Wow! It was wonderful! I was transported from my stateroom aboard a destroyer to the wilderness I roamed as a teenager. Your tales were well told, enlightening and dead on the money. The open ocean on a calm clear night is beautiful, but I'll never hear the hoarse bellow of a rutting bull. Driving a warship from the bridge into heavy seas and tailing green water is exhulting, but not nearly as much as stumbling across grizzly tracks that haven't begun to fill in. Thank you for sharing with me. My dad sent me the Thursday Great Falls Tribune, no matter where I am in the world for the last 13 years. I have always enjoyed your writing, but this book was special.

I LOVE YOU HONEY EVERY DAY

It was back on November 27, 1954 when I said "I do" and she said "I do" and our shared journey began. I was 19 years old, she was 17. My memory of then is fuzzy now, but I suspect we began married life without a clue.

I know we began without money. And the little we saved between engagement and marriage, we spent on our honeymoon to Grand Canyon (where it rained on our parade). I know, too, that we were without sufficient imagination to sense all the hairpin turns and potholed life our road to the future would expose. Endurance? Yeah, it took some. Fortitude? Yeah, we needed that too. But all we projected, in reality, was a couple of snot-nosed kids with a sense of wonder and a willingness to damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

We married too young, had children too soon. But we thrived in spite of youth and ignorance because we became a team. Our book, Dance On the Wild Side, of course, portrays what a poor bargain Jane made by tying her knot to a guy with so little prospects for either longevity or financial prosperity. That I've already lived longer on this earth than either my mother, or father, two brothers, and both sets of grandparents might be lucky for the woman I married because she'll inherit no estate in the Cayman Islands, or condo in Aspen.

There are no wheat ranch rocker pumps spewing silver dollars into any of my off-shore bank accounts because there's no Hi-Line wheat ranch to harbor oil wells or gas wells--or even windmills--so how could there be off-shore bank accounts? Actually there aren't even any on-shore banks who'll let us darken their doors?

But Jane isn't bitching! Nor am I. Why? Because, if anything, we're more deeply in love today, 'cause today we know what we really got -- each other! Sure, sure, we had each other 53 years ago, but did we really know then what we know now? Did we really know then that when the cheese gets binding and push comes to shove, that we'll both be there, smiling, and holding hands and maybe stealing an occasional kiss? Were we sure back there in 1954 that we'd still sleep together in 2007? Or that maybe, once in a while, (snicker, snicker) we'd even take a shower together?

It could be there's a modicum of luck involved in marriages made in Heaven -- I don't know. If so, my luck in the wedding game constitutes the one and only time I bought a ticket to something that had "winner" inked on my forehead. Sometimes I think about a few of the dolls I lusted after when my hormones pumped and knees knocked together like castenets at a zocolo festival, and I thank my lucky stars those chicks failed to discern anything handsome or suave in skinny me. And it could be that grace intervened to keep my 17-year-old next-door neighbor girl safe from wannabee handsomes and suaves until the blinders fell from my eyes.

The blinders are off now, however, and I know a good thing when I see it . . . or feel it . . . or talk to it, kiss it, grow passionate about it, or simply be comfortable in its company.

Some years ago I presented my honey with a "talking" bunny with my own poem, in my own voice, programmed within:

I love you honey every day,

the pick of the litter in every way

When I'm not around you can play

with old snuggles--he'll make your day

I'd reckon a dim-witted reader (I have none) might ask, "And what does she do for you?"

What does she do for me? Well, for one thing, she's been constant for 53 years; more, if one tallies the courting time, beginning with the shared strawberry milkshake when we were still in Junior High School.

But love can't be defined on a ledger sheet, balancing the "his" and the "hers." Nope. Ledger sheets fail to show kids sick with the measles and parents sick with worry, or one pacing a hospital corridor while the other goes under a knife for a blocked heart valve. Ledger sheets are woefully weak when it comes to the sighs of contentment when, together, we behold a gorgeous sunrise from a mountaintop, or gasp at a grizzly bear strolling across a meadow we've been watching in hopes he'd grace us with his presence.

Most of all, though, our greatest delight is waking up in the morning and seeing just who it was we slept with during the night just past.

 

 

Roland Cheek wrote a syndicated outdoors column (Wild Trails and Tall Tales) for 21 years. The column was carried in 17 daily and weekly newspapers in two states. In addition, he scripted and broadcast a daily radio show (Trails to Outdoor Adventure) that aired on 75 stations from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean. He's also written upwards of 200 magazine articles and 12 fiction and nonfiction books. For more on Roland, visit:

www.rolandcheek.com

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