My latest column over at Went West reports on a list of demands that 175 residents of the next county over from Missoula have forwarded to their sheriff and county commissioners. Here’s my favorite:

Implement a requirement that the sheriff press county residents 18 and over into a militia, for which he will organize training three weeks out of every year. The Missoulian quotes some amplifying detail from the questionnaire: “Women must serve, but not in a combat capacity unless the men are in danger of being overrun.”

You’ll want to read the rest, especially if you’ve never heard of the “constitutional sheriff” movement.

Did you know you can subscribe to Margin Notes by email? No more than one email per day (and then only if there is anything new to report). What’s not to like?

A Montana hunter recently got stranded in the back country for four days after a heavy snowfall. Sounds like he did everything right, although he was lucky to find some sheds with a propane heater.

Worried that night was fast approaching and that his wet clothes might lead to hypothermia, he trudged to a small collection of sheds he’d spotted earlier in the Tenderfoot Experimental Forest. He forced open the door of a 4-by-4-foot plywood shed with metal siding, stripped off his soaked clothes and lighted a small propane heater he’d found in the shed to dry out. That took five hours.

One thing I always look for in a tale of survival is the moment when the subject recognizes he is lost and “starts surviving.” This step looks different depending on the climate and terrain, but basically it’s when you stop casting around for the trail and start figuring out how to shelter from the elements, as when this hunter realized it was time to kick in the doors of those sheds.

What’s interesting to me about this moment is that (1) survival absolutely depends on it but (2) I think it must be a very difficult step to take, psychologically. It requires acknowledging that you are not going to find the trail “any minute now,” and that you will probably not be sleeping in your bed or camp tonight. You not only have to admit defeat but also have to start thinking completely differently about your next steps.

A lot of people never make it around this corner, and I suspect they account for the majority of people who end up getting carried out of the woods.

When I think about having to survive in wintry weather, I think of John Muir’s essay “Stickeen”, in which he relates his thoughts upon realizing he’s about to be caught by darkness in the midst of exploring a crevasse-riddled glacier. (The “we” refers to his companion, the small dog whose name gives the essay its title.)

Doubtless we could have weathered the storm for one night, dancing on a flat spot to keep from freezing, and I faced the threat without feeling anything like despair; but we were hungry and wet, and the wind from the mountains was still thick with snow and bitterly cold, so of course that night would have seemed a very long one.

For inspiration in the event that I ever have to start surviving, I have tucked away that calm understated “doubtless” next to the image of crazy old John Muir, calmly dancing for his life in howling wind and blasting snow.

Ever wonder what became of Huey Lewis? Why, look, here he is in Montana, feeding the ducks.

Here’s the back-story in a nutshell: First, I and two of my friends lip-synched the Huey Lewis song “If This Is It” for the fifth-grade talent contest. (I did not get to be Huey Lewis.)

Many years later Lewis bought a ranch down the road from Missoula along this little creek/waterway thing called the Mitchell Slough.

More recently, Lewis and his neighbors lost their court battle to have Mitchell Slough designated man-made. Such a designation would have exempted it from the state’s public-access law, which allows fishermen and duck hunters to do their thing on natural waterways that run through private property, even without the landowner’s permission, so long as they remain below the high-water mark.

So, in other words, the court found that Mitchell Slough is just as huntable and fishable as any other natural waterway in the state.

Until two months ago. That’s when Lewis started positioning duck-feeding stations on his property. The Missoulian explains just what a crafty move this was:

It is legal to feed game birds and waterfowl. It is also legal to boat or wade below a stream’s high-water mark, even if it passes through private property. But it is not legal to hunt waterfowl in an area where they are artificially fed.

So Lewis has effectively shut down duck hunting on his property, and he didn’t even have to get lawyered up this time around. The heart of rock and roll is still beating!

[Update] This is a good question:

“How are they going to retrieve ducks they shoot?” Hebner asked. “There’s not a landowner along the Mitchell that will allow any duck hunter to retrieve a duck on his property.”

The groom is in the most trouble, first for punching a woman in the face after she objected to his groping her, then—while handcuffed—headbutting a police officer in the temple. “I’ve got a good lawyer,” he is reported to have announced. He’ll need one, because that last thing got him booked on a felony charge.

Word to the wise: when your own limo driver finds it necessary to pull a gun on you out of fear for his life—before you have tipped him—you may have gone too far.

Her parents redecorated her bedroom soon after she left for college, as sure as everyone else in this town that Melissa Meyer would not be moving back. …

So, how to explain this? Each morning, Melissa wakes up in her old bedroom, scans the foreign decor and thinks: This is the guest room now. I am the guest. I am not supposed to be here.

How to explain it? Pretty easily: “She graduated magna cum laude from the GW Business School in May, applied for 30 jobs at some of the nation’s best-known companies, and it went nowhere.”