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Ask a Trooper

Local Columns

Question: I feel like I see so many vehicles tailgating and following too close. I remember people talk about a so-many second following tip. Can you remind me and others what that is? Answer: Applying the “Three-Second Rule” helps you keep a safe distance between your car and the vehicle ahead of you. This rule is for standard-length vehicles driving in ideal conditions. 1. Choose a fixed reference point at the side of the road ahead, such as a telephone pole, signpost, tree or bridge. 2. When the vehicle ahead of you passes the reference point, begin counting: ...

Hurry up!

Local Columns

When’s the last time you had someone tell you to hurry up? Over the years, I’ve heard that admonition many times. Naturally, it wasn’t that I was late for anything, but that the other person didn’t know what they saying and to whom they were saying it. I was always on the ball — don’t ask my family about that because you’ll hear a whole different story. However, I must share this factual story. Back in the day when we lived on the farm, the school bus would arrive at our lane about 7:45 every morning. I can’t tell you how many times I had to yell at my two younger ...

A houseful of memories

Community Voices

I have found that it’s difficult to clean out an ancestral farmhouse when history keeps getting in the way. Especially when it’s my family’s history. After delaying the chore for far too long, I have thrown myself into clearing out the home where my seven siblings and I grew up. A house that was built by our homesteading ancestors and is freighted with more than a century’s worth of memories. Deciding what to toss and what to keep is taking longer than the actual act of cleaning. Here’s a black-and-white photo of my Norwegian immigrant great-great uncles, Jens and Ole ...

Feeling the consequences of election

Letters to the Editor

To the editor: Trump is refusing to use emergency funds for food stamps even though the courts are ordering him to fund them. Instead of helping people that are starving, many of them children, he is appealing the court order to use the emergency funds, and that is after he and Republicans already cut food stamps by $187 billion dollars in the big dumb bill. They also cut the USAID program that gave food and medicine to the poorest people in the world, which has already resulted in 600,000 deaths of which 2/3 of them are children. What happened to all the pro-life people? Don’t ...

Man without a knife

Local Columns

So many of the lessons and learnings and sayings we have in and take from the outdoors translate over to life in ways both metaphoric and tangible. “Don’t step on what you can step over,” means that unstable log you’re thinking about balancing a footstep on as you proceed on your way hunting pheasants or grouse is likely best bypassed with a long, lifting stride, to prevent even the off chance of a twisted ankle. Like in life, some obstacles are best to be avoided altogether, instead of tempted, even if they don’t appear that big. “Do the little things right, and nothing ...

Edmund Fitzgerald: a lasting legacy after 50 years

Community Voices

There’s something special about landmark anniversaries and the media coverage that they attract. We’ll have one such event on Monday. It’s the 50th anniversary of the wreck of the Great Lakes freighter Edmund Fitzgerald. It sank to the bottom of Lake Superior in a fierce storm that produced massive waves. I remember hearing talk of the shipwreck as a child. It put the Great Lakes in the spotlight. Even out on the prairie on the opposite side of Minnesota, people were very interested. It was the biggest shipwreck since the Titanic went down in 1912. History is filled with ...