“Foxholes”

Sometimes you’re in the middle of a conversation and life blows you into a foxhole. Knocked off balance, confused, ears ringing – the world just stops. On Sunday, June 25, this was the reality facing the family of The Great White Mouse Hunter, as news arrived of him embarking on a new adventure in his Father’s pastures.

This wasn’t the first time Specialist Four Salmond’s number fated him for an unanticipated journey. At 18, he was popping in and out of tunnels in Vietnam, where he had his first introduction to the importance of foxholes – and discovered that God sometimes resides at the bottom of one.

A foxhole even showed Ronald Allen hadn’t been broken by hell, unable to leave a green kid’s instructions unchallenged when they got home. They laughed because that foxhole wouldn’t have saved them, and it saved them from remembering the ones who weren’t spared by a foxhole at all.

Because the thing about a foxhole, as Dad would tell you, is it had to be built the right way. It’s a lesson he brought back with the war he carried. He built his life’s foxhole out of the people he loved. You knew if he counted you in his squad, it was a guarded honor.

He left an impression on your soul like a name imprinted off a traveling wall, while his ornery spirit twinkled mischievously from his eye. Denise, the love of his life, found her Sam was a deceptively vanilla man. From the first “Hey, good lookin'”, she became as essential to his life as the saltshaker tucked in his overalls when he headed out to the tomato patch.

God didn’t stop at a double portion of his love for this man whose heart was anything but hard. He continues an outpouring of his blessing in Maven, Layla, and Charis.

When you emerge from the foxhole, nothing on the outside is the same. You can only take stock of what is left – like pieces of a person’s life scooped into a poncho – and move forward as he did.

This time is too quiet for his time in the morning, the man no longer communing with his Father from his chair. No more hitchhikers to swap stories with. The fish are swimming, but no line is cast today. No more peonies laid by his hand on his parents’ grave. It’s now on his daughters -Amanda, Nicole, Emily – to pick up the remembering.

In the end, for all of us, ”absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love” -especially when he calls his son to come home.

From the deep faith of his eldest to the tenacious spirit of his middle heart to the piles of endless scribbles in notebooks surrounding his youngest, he lives on.

The sack of potatoes has been lifted. Surely Sally’s licking a cone off your face, while you laugh and hold your Crockett hat steady.

He lives on through the unique lessons he continues to teach us. You never know when a car ride will turn to the opossum. Or when ice cream will be the only thing that can cool off your tongue. Spoiled oranges are best tossed in live traffic. Sometimes when the guy behind you is being impatient, you’ve just got to hit the ball back at him.

For these gifts, there aren’t adequate parting words. As he said himself, “Sometimes in life a thank you sounds so inadequate. It is at these times that an extraordinary should be between the thank and the you.”

Yo, ho, Buffalo Bee. Ronald Allen Salmond, Buddy, you were an extraordinary man.

Graveside Service and Interment: 10:00 A.M., Monday, July 3, 2023, Home Cemetery, Tarkio.

There is no visitation.

Memorials: Wounded Warrior Project or Veterans Community Project.

Arrangements: Davis Funeral Home, Tarkio.

www.minterfuneralchapels.com