Driving a familiar highway a few week’s back I was reminded of my former life.

Between the white lines that led me on a straight, flat stretch east across the state and back again in mid-November, I was greeted by passing pickups with blaze orange caps resting on the dash.

Suddenly I was five years old sitting on the passenger’s side of my dad’s pickup, back when pickups didn’t have back seats, barely tall enough to see that landscape as it stretched out before me, bringing us closer and closer to the ranch for hunting season.

When I sat down to write this column that ran today in a couple newspapers in my home state, one out east, one here in the west, it was going to be about the time in my life my family didn’t live on the ranch and how I used to take every chance I…