From lost to found in the Badlands

Posted on November 5, 2025 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

WATFORD CITY, N.D. — If you missed the news, I’m here to tell you that the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, located in western North Dakota, has been named as one of the Best of the World for 2026 by National Geographic.

That’s a big deal for us because we love to sing its praises. It’s a magical place indeed, because of its rugged and unique beauty, but also because somehow, it’s remained a bit of a secret. That means it’s a national park where you may be lucky enough to actually find yourself alone out there, which I consider a pretty special gift.

So to honor the honor, I want to share a piece I wrote several years ago when I went searching for a quiet moment in the north unit of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

And if you’re looking for a place to be inspired, make it the Badlands. Stop into the Visitor Center in Watford City before you go, we’ll be happy to sell you some treats and give you some tips!

From lost to found in the Badlands

Well, fall came dancing along in all its glory and we sure didn’t need the calendar to tell us so. Just like the uncharacteristically warm weather, the leaves on the trees were not about to take the subtle approach to the season change.

Overnight, the ash leaves turned from green to gold, the vines bright red, the grass and flowers exploded seeds, and even the slow and steady oaks began letting go of their acorns and turning one leaf over to gold at a time.

After a challenging week, I was ready to celebrate autumn the way it deserved to be celebrated. I was ready to let go of my agenda and frolic in it, climb a big hill and feel the warm breeze in my hair.

After a trip to the big town for an appointment, I pointed my car down the busy highway filled with lines of trucks, pickups and SUVs that moved humans at full speed along that paved ribbon of road that winds through buttes and half-cut wheat fields, across the Little Missouri River that sparkles and meanders under the big blue sky and slowly sinking sun.

I wanted to meander, too. I wanted to meander among the things out here that are allowed a slow change, a subtle move toward hibernation, a good long preparation for a show like no other, a recital of how to slow down gracefully.

And I couldn’t help but wonder while I tried to keep my eyes on the road despite the neon yellow trees waving at me from the ditches, if these people who were sharing my path were seeing this. Did they notice that the tree was waving to them, too? Were they commenting on how the crows have gathered?

As we came down through the brakes that move us through the Badlands, did they notice how the layers of the buttes — the line of red scoria, the black coal, the clay — did they notice how, in the late afternoon light, the landscape looked like a giant canvas created with wisps of an artist’s brush?

Did they see that river? I mean, really see it when they passed over the bridge? Did they take note of how it has receded a bit? And as they approached the sign that read “Theodore Roosevelt National Park-North Unit,” a sign that indicated they were indeed on the home stretch to their destination perhaps, only 15 miles to the town to stop for gas, to make it home, to take a rest on a long truck route, were they enticed like I was that afternoon to stop for a bit?

Because what could be better than breathing in fall from inside a place that exists raw and pure? A park. A reserve. A spot saved specifically to ensure that nature is allowed to go on doing what it does best while undisturbed by the agenda of the human race, which at that point I was convinced didn’t have a handle on how to live gracefully in a world designed for us, let alone accept and live harmoniously among what we can’t control or may not understand — like the change of weather and the seasons and the sun beating down on the hard earth.

And I was guilty as well of taking this for granted. I was guilty of driving by this spot time and time again as it called to me to take a rest, to visit, to have a walk or a seat or a climb.

But not that day. That day I needed its therapy. I needed to park my car and stretch my limbs and take a look around.

From the top of Battleship Butte. From the trail at the river bottom. From the flat where the bison graze.

So as I pulled my cap down and took to the familiar trail that wound up that big, daunting and famous butte along the road, I took notice of the breeze clattering the drying leaves together, the birds frantically preparing for the chill, the grasshoppers flinging their bodies at the dried grass and rocks …

And then I noticed I was alone.

Alone as I scrambled and pulled my tired body up the steep and rocky trail toward the top of my world as two bison grazed on the flat below the buttes.

Alone as I reached my destination with no other ears around to hear me catch my breath and then sigh in awe at the colors and solitude.

Alone as I watched those bison move and graze, a spectator in a different world, a spy on a giant rock.

Alone to take my time as I noticed how the trees sparkled on the river bottom against the sinking sun. No one to tell me that’s enough, enough photos, enough time, enough gazing.

Alone as I walked toward the river and there was no one there to stop me from following it a little bit farther, to see what it looked like on the other side of the bend.

No one there but me and a head full of thoughts and worries that were being pushed out of the way to make room for the scenery, the quiet, the wildlife tracks and magnificent colors and trails before me.

And because I was alone, I was able to notice that after a few weeks gone missing, I was becoming myself again. The self that understood this was my habitat and my home. The self that knows the seasons will always change, the leaves will dry up, the acorns will fall, the birds will fly away from the cold or prepare for it, the grasshoppers will finish their rituals, the snow will come and coat the hard earth, then melt with the warm sun, changing the landscape, as the water runs through and cuts the cracks in the earth.

And the bison will roam, and the antelope will, too, and the prairie dogs will burrow, the pheasants will roost, and the bugs will hum and buzz and disappear, knowing, or not knowing, that their lives are fragile, just like ours out here where we can find ourselves alone.

Who I am here (in this small town diner)

Posted on April 23, 2025 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

When my husband and I take road trips together we have an unspoken rule that has developed over the years that we continue to abide by: when it’s time to eat, and if we have the time, we search for a local diner. Or the local diner, depending on what size of town we’re passing through.

It’s my informed opinion as a road warrior that nearly every small town, if they’re lucky, has one they’ve held on to through the ebbs and flows of economic booms and busts. Not necessarily the tiny towns, but the small ones. If you’ve spent any time on the highways and county roads in America, you’ll know the difference. And then you’ll also know that sometimes they’re attached to truck stops on the edge of town or along the interstate or major highways, but a lot of times you’ll find that diner serving country fried steak and BLTs downtown tucked among two bars and renovated buildings standing shoulder to shoulder that used to be theaters and Five and Dime stores back when they were new.

Throughout my twenty-plus years on the road as a musician, I have made small towns my preferred stop. Because I like the way the storefronts line up. I like those old diners. I like the flower shops and drive-throughs that have been painted and repainted and still have the best burgers. I like the quiet little rivers that run through them or the surprise fishing pond I might find. I liked the almost antique playground equipment and the walking paths and the old men who meet for coffee at the Cenex Station.

Each small town manages to be uniquely its own flavor while simultaneously reminding me of the last one I visited, or the one I grew up in—houses repainted standing behind tall and neatly placed trees, fresh pavement outside the old Tastee-Freeze or, if they’re fancy and the economy’s good, kids riding their bikes to the new Dairy Queen, or swimming pool or school.

If I have time when I’m on my own, I like to drive through the residential streets and admire the freshly cut lawns and imagine what my life would be like if I lived there by a small lake in Minnesota, or the one in the middle of a field in Nebraska or in the heat at the edge of Texas. There’s a weird sort of wistfulness that happens when you find yourself alone in an unfamiliar but familiar town so far from home. You catch yourself thinking for a moment that you could stay there and become a whole new person in a place that will wonder where you came from. I think that feeling is where songs come from sometimes, the wondering what it could be, or who these people are inside those houses with the paint sort of peeling.

But when I’m with my husband we contemplate this together while I navigate him to the Mable’s Café or the truck stop diner that someone recommended on our way through Montana. If it’s breakfast time I will order a caramel roll as big as the plate and the server will bring it out with my coffee. “It’s her appetizer,” my husband will explain as he orders chicken fried steak and I get my eggs over easy with hash browns. I like my coffee out of their heavy brown ceramic cups. I like their paper placemats. I like the caddy of jelly packets and the sugar dispenser and the plastic water cups and the pie menu sketched in a waitress’s handwriting even though I never get the pie. I like how all of this is generally the same as the old Chuck Wagon Café that used to be on the corner of Main Street in my hometown when I was growing up. I like how it’s the same at the Little Missouri Grill today, the busiest restaurant in Boomtown. I went there three times last week because it’s always the right place to go with the girls when we have time to kill between school and soccer practice and they feel like a pancake at 4:30 pm. And it’s also the perfect place to go when your in-laws are in town to watch their granddaughter play soccer on Saturday morning and they feel like a hot cup of coffee and I feel like a burger and fries and the girls get the nuggets because is it lunch yet? And then, it’s the perfect place to go with your husband after a late night dancing and the kids are with those grandparents and we have a moment to just be the two of us in a diner. Well, the two of us and the relatives and neighbors that I inevitably run into because it’s there favorite place too.

“Wait until I tell your girls that you had your caramel roll before your meal,” she stops to poke fun.

“It’s her appetizer!” my husband laughs.

And I may never know who I would be behind those manicured lawns in a small town surrounded by Nebraska corn fields, but I know who I am here, opening tiny cream packets into black coffee sitting across from my husband and his chicken fried steak at the diner. And I like it. I like it here.

“Wait until I tell your girls that you had your caramel roll before your meal,” she stops to poke fun.

“It’s her appetizer!” my husband laughs.

The miles, they sing

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Hi from the ranch! We back from the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, NV after one big week away and two days of driving north under a blizzard warning. I have lots to say about the experience, which I’m drumming up for next week, but for now, here’s the column I wrote in the back seat of my SUV while my dad drove him, me and my guitar player, Mike, through Idaho.

Greetings from somewhere in the middle of Montana. As I write I’m on the second day of driving through this massive state on our way south to Elko, NV for the 40^th anniversary of the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. There’s no easy way to get to Elko from Western North Dakota. You can drive two hours to take three tiny airplanes and hope you don’t miss your one 11 pm connection from Salt Lake to Elko so you don’t have to take the additional three-hour van ride to finally get you there.

Or you can load up your car with guitars and pray the blizzards are at your back or already through as you wind through fifteen hours of desserts and big mountains.

That’s the current choice we’re in the middle of, seeing so much of this America out the windshield of the SUV I usually use to take the kids back and forth from school every day. The amount of ranch mud and snack wrappers I removed from the floors of this ride to get ready for this trip was alarming. But here we are, cruising at 65 MPH through a sagebrush sea with the mountains ahead of us and behind us and the next tiny town fifty miles away. To see North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada this up close and personal gives a sort of perspective that only comes on a long stretch of highway with only the promise of more and more highway to come. I’ve spent a good portion of my life behind the windshield traveling for music. When you head in the same directions you’re reminded of the past trips by little landmarks or gas stations or favorite restaurants you’ve frequented years before.

If you haven’t done the miles this direction it would surprise you how desolate it is. And I use desolate not with a negative connotation but with a lack of a better word for lack of people. Lack of porch lights or streetlights. We’re following the highway parallel to the powerline. “Coyote,” dad just pointed out. About sixty miles back I was the first to spot a bald eagle landing on one of those power line poles. We saw some deer. Some cows. I’m traveling with dad and our musical friend Mike who has been playing dobro and guitar with me since I was just a kid. The fact that he continues to take these long trips with me year after year to stand on stages so I can tell ranching stories to rooms and theaters full of people who want to hear ranching stories is a testament to how much we regard one another and the music.

Inside all of these miles, between pointing out elk tracks and that one big feedlot we just passed, humming along to old tried and true favorites of ours and making them listen to my new favorite (I am every trips’ DJ and navigator and chooser of hotels and restaurants) Mike will come out with a thread of a memory from playing in bands for fifty or so years and dad and I become the audience for a story that never ends the way we thought it would when it started. And you would think after all these years traveling together (here I pause to calculate just how long it’s been? I’m forty-one. Been playing out with dad and him since I was fourteen or fifteen or younger. How long really? Could it be 27 years now? Aren’t I still sixteen?) you would think I would have heard every one of his recollections, that there would be repeat shenanigans I could tell back to him, but that’s not Mike. He has memories for as many miles as we have driven, so there’s always a new one.

“These school busses have a long ways to go between houses,” dad remarks as we bend and weave on ID Hwy 33. It makes the ranch seem downright urban.

We’ll be in Elko before it’s dark. And tomorrow we’ll be on stages telling North Dakota stories in my now foreign accent. And all these miles we’ve driven between here and there, the mountains, the high desserts, the small blips of towns and ranch houses and barbed wire and wide open, their poets and musicians who live and work and call it home will gather to tell its story.

It’s the wide open. It’s the vastness of it all. Miles and miles of it. If you didn’t know any better, desolate could sound lonesome. But in Elko, it sings.

Life in my car

Posted on May 16, 2024 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

“The person who invented pants is really smart,” my oldest daughter’s voice chimed in from the way back seat of our Suburban.

“Yeah, you’re right,” I responded, not really that surprised that the comment came out of silence and, also, out of nowhere. She’s eight and that’s her resting state.

“Right because people used to just wear tiny chaps over their privates. And maybe not even over their butts!”

And that was her little sister’s contribution to the conversation as we rounded the corner to school drop off, just another Tuesday under a cloudy sky. Only this one was a little perilous because for some reason my phone had switched itself to Mountain time during the wee hours of the night, something that my husband didn’t bring to my attention until he noticed my level of calm strolling around the kitchen gathering breakfast and snacks and my thoughts for the day didn’t match the level of urgency 7:25 am warranted in our house.

Like we should be out the door in four minutes and all of us were still in our pajamas.

And so, of course I didn’t believe him or the kitchen clock that doesn’t ever change or the fact that it did, actually, look more like a 7:30 am sun situation than a 6:30 am situation, but honestly, I’m hanging by a thread here.

We shifted into warp speed then, but I didn’t have time to look in the mirror if we had a prayer of making it to school on time. And so I didn’t, knowing full well I have everything I need in my car to put myself together in a parking lot somewhere before heading into work. This is a special skill that rural women have. Well, maybe all women have it, but I can only speak from my own experience of living thirty miles from town for most of my life. Pair that with decades of working as a touring musician and I would guess the number of times I’ve applied my makeup in the visor mirror of my vehicle in a gas station parking lot might just outnumber the times I’ve used the one above the bathroom sink.

My husband pointed this out as he was putting the finishing touches on our new master bathroom. He has been making me a little vanity counter right in front of the window because natural light is the best light to illuminate all my flaws, something I’ve come to learn from that visor mirror. Indoor lighting can’t be trusted. I need nature to tell me the cold, hard truth.

He’s been working on a new closet for us as well, something much bigger and more convenient than the front seat of my car where I do quite a bit of my changing. I’ve been pushing my driver’s seat back to change in and out of tights and jeans and boots and dresses for so much of my life it’s a miracle that I haven’t created more embarrassing moments for myself and innocent pedestrians by now.

But then it’s hard to know how many people I actually traumatized in the McDonalds drive-through line as I removed my boots, belt and shapeware from under my dress while ordering a Big Mac for the hour drive back to the ranch.

If multitasking is the pillar from which I run my life, then my car is the sanctuary from which I carry out my last-minute tasks in the few quiet moments between drop off and workday, and workday and school pick-up line. Behind the dashboard is my desk, my phone booth, my five-minute nap space, my quick-bite kitchen table, my vanity, and, maybe most importantly, the place where I get to listen to my growing daughters ponder life as they count the power poles and trees zooming by their windows.

Anyway, if you happen to catch me deep in a rear-view-mirror-mascara situation, just kindly pass on by. The invisible-while-I’m-in-my-car façade is what I have to hold on to these days.

Peace, love and also, Big-Macs taste better when you remove your Spanx.

On the road: Now and then

Posted on November 4, 2019 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

A Cafe Somewhere in Montana...

Greetings from a hotel room 100 miles away from the ranch where I just consumed an entire take-out chimichanga dressed in my jammies while sitting on the bed watching some Learning Channel special about weird ways to die.

And then I washed it all down with six or seven pieces of Halloween candy I bought during my solo trip to Target where I was only going to buy deodorant, but somehow, because I had time to kill, wound up with Christmas dresses for my girls and my nieces, a new makeup regime, three bottles of vitamins, envelopes, a new bathroom color scheme, a 37-pound bag of candy, a witch hat, princess underwear, three packages of toddler-sized white socks and a partridge in a pear tree.

This is life on the road, people. Or at least the evening portion of the program.

I know it well. I spend plenty of time here and have since deciding to try my hand at this professional musician gig a million years ago when I was younger and drove a Chevy Lumina with a 10-disk CD changer sound system installed in my trunk and all I needed to get from a Fargo gig one night to a Chicago gig the next morning was a bag of sunflower seeds, an energy drink and my favorite albums on repeat.

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Turns out what I also needed was some change for the toll booths and probably a plan for where I was going to stay the next night, but that was back before you could book a room and find a husband on your smartphone, so yeah, I did a lot more improvising.

It was back in the olden days when you had to use actual maps. And so my Lumina was filled with one of each from North Dakota to Texas and off I would go to make my way through the middle of America to perform, just a girl and a guitar trying to laugh off the requests to play Free Bird during lunch at a tech college.

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Or calm my nerves when I dropped my entire makeup bag under an automatic sink in the public bathroom after getting lost in Minneapolis and running late for my gig opening for a national act.

And then there was the time I completely chipped the front part of my tooth off on a granola bar on a highway somewhere in Missouri with no hope for a dentist appointment before they were set to put a camera up close to my imperfections at a campus television station.

Yes, in between those gigs where I could be playing to 3 people or 300, I had nothing but the radio and the miles between the familiar and the mystery of the towns that passed by my window. Traveling and touring that extensively solo before I even hit age 21 was a weird mix of vulnerable, free, lonesome, nervous, proud and utter exhaustion. Some days it was hopeful, when the audience was captive and the stories came easy and some days were more “opening the door to my room at the Red Roof Inn and finding strangers sitting on my bed.”

And all these years later, so many things have changed, like the maps and vehicles, but the road hasn’t.

It’s still hoping for an open gas station at midnight when I’m finally heading toward home and I’m starving. It’s still floorboards full of wrappers and water bottles and dealing with the quirks of a car that inevitably acts up, locking me out of the trunk for no apparent reason. It’s movies and suppers alone to kill the time. It’s changing clothes in the car or a public restroom, and putting makeup on in the visor mirror. It’s meeting new people and inevitably forgetting a microphone stand along the way. It’s calling home at night and recapping the day, only now the voices on the other line are noisier and smaller and sweeter and there’s more to miss.

But I love it out here when I go. I love to see the Main Streets and visit your Cenex stations and your cafes and hear your stories at the end of the night before my tires hit the road again for home or send me out in search of a glamorous hotel bed chimichanga picnic.

Rear View Road

I don’t think Montana wants us…

Posted on August 28, 2017 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Screen Shot 2017-08-28 at 2.44.20 PM

Ok, so the very first time my boyfriend, now husband, took me on a trip to the wilds of Montana, we borrowed his dad’s Ford and loaded his 1970-something pop-up pickup camper to make the long drive across the big ‘ol state. It was 110 degrees and the air conditioning was out in the pickup and I nearly died of heat stroke by the time we made it to our campsite, where it rained just in time for us to get everything unloaded.

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More recently, a few years back, on another trip west to Montana, our pickup broke down pulling our camper on the way home from a music festival.

The time before that, same pickup issue, same music festival.

The time before that, on a family trip to Yellowstone, we had three flat tires before we even made it to Glendive, not even a quarter of the way into our trip. And that was before we hit a deer in our new-to-us pickup and then, narrowly escaped running over a motorcyclist who had wrecked on the interstate, where we spent the next three hours working as first on the scene responders, calling 911 and working with emergency crews.

Luckily I think the man was ok.

And we haven’t been back to Montana for a while.

But my husband thought he would give it another go last weekend and, well, here’s how it turned out…

Coming Home: When the best laid plans go awry
Forum Communications

“Well, I’m on my way home now anyway,” he said on the other end of the phone. I called him for something trivial, like why the lawnmower wasn’t starting, just the kind of phone call every husband likes to get when they’re off on a manly weekend getaway. (The same way he likes that I call it a manly weekend getaway).

He’d been preparing for a trip with his dad to scout for elk in Montana for a couple weeks. The plan was to pack up the pickup and pop-up camper with essential supplies like cans of Vienna sausages, a couple sleeping bags and a spotting scope and head a few hours west into the foothills to see if they could find a good place to hunt during the season.

I was excited for him to take the time away to do something he’s passionate about. He doesn’t golf, participate in fantasy football or go to the bar to shoot darts; when you work full-time and try to run a ranch, build a house and maneuver tiny ponytails in your off hours, it doesn’t leave much time for extracurriculars. But he does bow hunt. Bowhunting is his thing.

So off he went for two full days of no grooming, no vegetables, no broken down equipment and no tiny ponytails, kicking up dust, blaring the radio and howling the primal howl of his ancestors out the window of this pickup on his way to the wilderness…

Or at least that’s how I envisioned his departure that Friday evening.

But come Saturday afternoon it was apparent it didn’t end well. Actually, it sounds like it didn’t start well either.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Well, it started with the brakes,” he said, going on to explain that they were miles along a dirt road in a primitive land where cellphones are useless and bigfoot originated, when they heard the grinding noise and consequently spent the next several hours using the resourcefulness the two men honed from years of patching together old broken stuff from parts saved and scrounged off of other old broken stuff to get the brakes fixed enough to limp the pickup back to the paved roads of civilization known as the town of Ekalaka, population 343.

And while I admit I might have spoken too soon about that whole “no broken down equipment” thing, they did fix those brakes in Ekalaka, as they often do in those small town body shops.

Which was a good thing, because it turns out brakes are an imperative part of the recovery equation when you’re driving down the highway at 70 mph and the top of your camper blows completely off, sending those Vienna sausages, sleeping bags and a stray shoe or two bouncing down the highway, busted and bruised just like the broken down dreams of your manly man-cation…

“I’ve always wondered how people lose shoes on the highway,” I remarked. “See you when you get home. I’ll have the TV turned to that channel you like where they’re always fishing…”

Sunday Column: Full car, empty tank…

Posted on January 12, 2015 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

In my life, by my own unscientific, not so mathematic, sort of a wild and exaggerated calculation, I estimate that I have driven approximately 7,538,390 miles.

But it’s probably more.

I mean, living 30 miles (give or take) from the nearest town and having acquired my drivers license and a 1982 Sorta Pink Ford LTD I liked to call Rosie when I was only 14, I’ve had ample opportunity to put plenty of road behind me in twenty or so years…

Take that and add the five years I spent touring up and down the country singing for my supper and you think you could call me an expert…in maps, in traffic laws, in emergency preparedness, in flat tires and rear-enders, turn signals and every gas station from here to Ada, Oklahoma.

And I am. I am an expert in some of those things. Like emergency preparedness.

Just take a look in my car right now. I have everything you’d ever need if you were ever stranded…at a party…or a bonfire.

A can of Big Sexy Hairspray. Sunflower seeds. A guitar stand. Blankets. Magazines. An extra pair of Toms slip ons. A beach towel. Wrapped Christmas presents I still need to deliver to my best friend and her kids in Bismarck. Thirty-seven half drunk water bottles and one sorta-full Snapple. Can cozies. A partridge in a pear tree.

Oh, and the backpack my mother-in-law packed for me in case of an apocalypse. There’s that to go along with the winter gear.

I’ve got piles of it.

Yes, I’m a true North Dakotan, so in case the summer kegger doesn’t spontaneously occur, I’m covered for winter too.

So I should have known better…

Coming Home: Car stocked up for any situation, except running out of gas
1-11-15
by Jessie Veeder
Forum Communications
http://www.inforum.com

Hears to full tanks and full hearts.

Happy Trails.

Sunday Column: The miles together

Posted on February 2, 2014 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

photo-64 We’re leaving Nevada this morning, saying goodbye to our first National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. I’m sitting in my hotel room at the Rodeway Inn listening to sound of my husband’s breath rise and fall as he sleeps, cars swooshing past this door on their way to church or the grocery store down the road, and my fingers clicking on the keys, procrastinating the task of packing up the clothes draped over chairs and tables, cords and papers, CDs, toothbrushes and shampoo bottles and to-go coffee mugs strewn about before we hit the road again.

In a few minutes Husband will wake up and jump in the shower. If I can get it together, we’ll be out of here in an hour or so, turning up the radio and pointing the car back toward a beautiful part of Idaho we look forward to seeing in the daylight. When we get hungry we’ll pull in the next town, head toward Main Street and hope for one of those really great diners, the ones where the old folks go after church. He’ll order chicken-fried-steak and I’ll have a burger and we’ll sit and chat and notice things about this place that we like.

When the miles start to drag out before us we might start making plans for the barn or the unfinished house. Or I might wonder out loud what sort of animal I was in a past life. A Canadian goose, I’ll say, like the two who fly away together and return to the stock dam every spring…

In my life I have been given a solid traveling companion (and this week, he’s made a pretty great purse holder, guitar carrier, outfit chooser, audience member, and therapist too). We’ve put on a lot of miles together, back and forth and up and down and home again.

We have three more days on the road–a yet to be determined stop tonight when we’re road weary and one in White Sulphur Springs, Montana on Monday before heading back home. These miles could be daunting, but they’ve never been for me as long as we’re taking them together, sitting close, moving forward and wondering about things…

Coming Home: Stretch of road brings back memories
by Jessie Veeder
2-2-14
Fargo Forum
http://www.inforum.com

Sunday Column: The Happiest Place on Earth

Posted on December 16, 2013 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Well, Christmas is coming and I’m coming down from a fabulous weekend spent performing winter songs across the state.

Turns out I’m also coming down with the Christmas plague and it’s currently compromising the voice I so desperately need to work during this holiday season.

Because asking me not to talk is like asking me not to breathe.

Anyway, that’s a story for tomorrow. Today, I want to catch you up on what I learned on another trip I took with the nieces and the in-laws to a tropical, magical land known as Disney World a few weeks back.

There were princesses and Mickey shaped ice-cream bars,

castles and spinning tea cups, roller coasters and stuffed animals, a big ‘ol tree house,

a few even bigger whales,

giant strollers running into my ankles, It’s a Small World After All and maybe not enough tequila.

And those are just some of the highlights. Because we did it all.

Since these three little princesses came into this world, this auntie has always imagined what it would be like to watch their eyes light up in the Happiest Place on Earth. Judging from the plethora of pink and purple paraphernalia and the never-ending collection of Disney DVDs I had a hunch the place might kinda be their thing.

And anyway, I have memories from a trip my family took to Disney Land in an RV, picking up relatives along the way. I was five years old and the magic of it all had yet to wear thin, and so there is still magic in the memories.

I wanted that magic for my nieces.

So we talked about it last Christmas, my mother and sister-in-law made plans and eleven months later we were all on a plane leaving the great white north for sunny Florida.

And it was fabulous and frantic and exhausting and unexpected and just great fun for lots of reasons.

Turns out though, that the best parts are never expected, and I think that’s the same in Disney as it is in life.

Coming Home:
Happiest Place on Earth doesn’t always mean Disney
by Jessie Veeder
12/15/13
Fargo Forum

Peace, Love and cough syrup.

Jessie

Sunday Column: The road

Posted on August 4, 2013 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

I’ve had some pretty great adventures in the name of music. This summer almost every weekend has been filled with some sort of gig that takes me away from this place for a bit.

I’ve loaded and unloaded my car and pickup dozens of times.

It’s been months since I’ve completely unpacked my bag.

Please don’t look in my closet. I don’t even want to look in my closet.

Anyway when you live in the middle of nowhere, pretty much everywhere you need to go involves a road trip. So it’s a good thing I’ve had years to master hours of car time. Sunflower seeds. Coffee. An updated play list on my iPod. A mental list of the most convenient places to stop for fuel. Not a bit of hesitation about singing at the top of my lungs, even when pulling up next to you at a stoplight. Windows open when the weather’s nice and the time is right.

The road to and from this place is early mornings, peaceful and dewy, running-late afternoons and evening sunsets where I don’t really feel like it but I’m going.

Some of my most creative times have been behind the wheel of my car, alone out there somewhere on a road in the midwest.

Some of my scariest have been out there too. Blizzard and tornado watches, black ice, flooding and miles and miles of antelope and sagebrush fields with an emptying tank and not a gas station for miles.

In the last few weeks my road trips have involved the men from my hometown band. It’s nice to have a pickup full of voices and stories about the old days playing in bar bands and bowling alleys. I welcome the company in the car and beside me playing guitar.

And it’s nice to have a crew that understands the life of a musician is mostly just an absurd train of events that involves setting up on flatbed trailers as a thunderstorm rolls through town, hauling around and hooking up sound system after sound system, laughing off requests to play “Smoke on the Water, ” to turn it up, to turn it down, to play something faster, or slower or something we don’t know. It’s good to know that this group won’t mind if a gig doesn’t quite turn out the way we planned, or the night drags on into morning, or we have to haul our guitars through a foot of mud to the stage. It’s alright. Because sometimes it’s great, and the harmonies are on and the audience is swaying and singing along and you know that they know that there’s more to music than the miles we’ve put on to get here and home in one piece.

So when you get back to the ranch at 3:30 in the morning only to wake to a call that the cows are in the neighbor’s wheat field, you don’t complain, you just take a swig of coffee, pull on your snap shirt and boots and head out the door to saddle a horse and bring them home.