Squash. Just listen to that word one more time. Squash … one of the English language’s most painful words, along with maim and trauma and rend and okra and Liberace. Why would anyone want to eat something that sounds as though someone sat on it?
    The bottom-line truth is, cooks all over the place love a challenge, and they have tried valiantly to turn squash into an edible dish. To do this, they take one tenth of a portion of squash, boil as much of the squashiness as they can out of it, then immerse it in nine-tenths something that tastes good and hope no one will notice. You know, stuff like chile, mutton, edible vegetables, nuclear waste, cottonwood bark and even chocolate. Then, when you can’t taste the squash in it, and most of the slime has settled to the bottom, they smile and say,
“How do you like my ‘Squash Canneloni ala Hershey con Brio?”

Mostly, I put the blame for it squarely on the sneaky shoulders of law students. Who else studies Latin? Who else has the need to study Latin?
I personally come from a long line of honest lawyers. Two of them. Father and grandfather. My dad used to say that the only reason to study Latin was so beginning lawyers could read their diplomas.  That view has now stood the test of time, and I believe the only way to fight these show-offs is to beat them at their own game.
Hunting guides, of course, know that alces gigas is that towering pillar of bog terror, the Alaska-Yukon moose.

Hey, I was there to help, right? Right there in the kitchenette loaned us by the Roosevelt Hotel in Anchorage. My wife, Pam, ran the headquarters for the Iditarod Dogsled Race, and it was the second year of the race, 1974, and there I sat, a genuine Alaskan long-distance dog musher who had participated in the first race the year before.

   So when a nicely dressed elderly gentleman with a thick Boston accent stopped by for coffee and questions about the race … hey, I’m there for you.

The moon turned the horses and mules silver with its magic. It gave the packer an unspoken pleasure to look back on a sinuous Sierra snake of eleven animals stretched in a flexible line nearly 150 feet long behind him. And he looked up, straight up on the peaks of Kearsarge where the snow fields always left behind shady patches of dirty white, up where the Inyo moon splashed them with a dream brush and made old secrets come to life.

  “You’ve heard of the ghost of Kearsarge,” the old man said. “Everyone knows about her.” The packers at the table at the ranch looked at each other.

  “What ghost?” one asked.

We’re still curious about exactly where Old Man Jenkins’ cabin is. While he was alive, we never thought to bug him about where he lived, because we also cherish a man’s right to privacy. But Jenkins died on one of his trips to town, and we still didn’t know where his cabin was.

  So that began a number of semi-serious expeditions into our nearby mountains to try and solve the mystery. Hasn’t happened yet, but there’s always hope deep in the souls of true explorers.