Splendid Isolation

Longtime Readers may recall that a bunch of my friends and I used to get together once a year for the Feinstein-Daley Memorial Shoot at the east Texas ranch of Reader Airboss (sadly, since deceased).  It was always a festive affair and featured the occasional gun.

It was at one such event where I met Doc Russia, at the time still a med student at UT-Houston, who had a blog entitled Bloodletting (which I miss dreadfully, even though I still see him regularly for shooting and dinners etc.).  Another blogger also came along at that same meeting:  Jim Siegler from Smoke On The Water, which featured guns, politics and details of his life on board his beloved yacht, the sloop New Dawn.

While Doc was an excellent shot, Jim was likewise;  actually, Jim was easily the best all-round shooter — pistol, revolver, rifle and shotgun — I’ve ever met.

(that’s a youthful Son&Heir spotting for him, btw)

We played all sorts of shooty games, potting bowling pins and plinking at golf balls.

If not doing that, we “tested” each others’ guns (uh huh) and shot impromptu IDPA- or rimfire rifle competitions.  In the former, the competition was usually between Jim and Doc;  with the .22, I was occasionally able to keep up, but mostly, it was always Jim.  Not even the S&H — a competition handgun shooter — could match him, especially when Jim unholstered that ancient and worn S&W Model 14 (K-38 Masterpiece), his favorite gun.

It’s probably true to say that some of the best shooting fun I’ve ever had was with this man, because over the past two or so decades whenever he came up to Dallas or I went down to Galveston, we sent many thousands of rounds downrange together.  To call us “shooting buddies” would be a total understatement.

Then he met a lovely woman, and his life was complete.  (I nicknamed her “Irish” because of her thick, occasionally impenetrable Belfast accent.)

Then Hurricane Ike hit Galveston in 2009.  It destroyed the New Dawn, which ended up in pieces closer to Houston than to Galveston.  Jim’s normal procedure when faced with storms was simply to batten down and ride it out;  but this time, for some reason, he and Irish left Galveston and stayed with friends up in Livingston.  Had he stayed on the yacht, as he usually did, he would have perished.

Afterwards, Jim and Irish bought a small house, still on Galveston Island — which itself was almost destroyed by Hurricane Harvey in 2017.  When the floodwaters receded, they discovered that the insurance would only cover repairs up to the sub-floor;  so Jim rebuilt the rest of the place himself, carefully and meticulously:  floors, kitchen and bathrooms.

In fact, “meticulous” was a word that could describe Jim best:  his house looked as though it had been put together by a master builder, his guns were all in perfect working order, his reloaded ammo was faultless and wonderfully consistent, and his various trucks looked brand new even though they were decidedly not, and all ran like a sewing machine.

I need to make a comment at this point.  Frequent Readers of this website may remember that I have always referred to Jim as “the Layabout Sailor”.  That was a total lie, because Jim was one of the hardest-working men I’ve ever come across, and the ironic nickname was the complete antithesis of him.  Having come from extreme poverty — his first job was washing dishes at a restaurant, at age eight — Jim worked his whole life at a number of jobs, sometimes two at a time:  insurance adjuster, car salesman, bus driver, roofer, whatever paid the bills.  He used to joke that his best-paying job was when he enlisted in the Air Force in his late teens, so you get the idea.  College was never an option because there was little money and he refused to get into debt.  But he was always well-groomed and impeccably dressed — and by the way, very intelligent, well-read and well-spoken, his soft Texas drawl a welcome sound always, along with his impish sense of humor.   (His online signature: “Jim S.– Sloop New Dawn” became “Jim S. — Sunk New Dawn”, which masked his despair at the tragedy of its loss.)

Last November Jim wrote to me to tell me that he was suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — Lou Gehrig’s Disease — and of course as we all know, ALS is incurable.  His prognosis was grim — perhaps two years — but the cruelest part was that while ALS can affect both the brain and the muscular system, Jim’s brain was completely unaffected.  So his body was starting to collapse, leaving his lively, intelligent brain intact.  He became weak and his speech began to slur.

Doc Russia and I visited him in April this year following a warning from an alarmed Combat Controller;  and while Jim was in bad shape, he was still able to get around with a walker — we went to his local bar in the evening, and to his favorite breakfast place the next morning — but his speech was barely intelligible, and Irish had to translate much of it for us.  He was much thinner, of course, because he wasn’t able to eat much.  But we left him doing okay, albeit a shadow of his former self, and were comforted by the fact that we’d be able to see him again over the next year or so, at least.  We were wrong.

My friend Jim died two weeks ago, in late June 2025, after only nine months since his diagnosis.  Rather than a slow decline, his condition simply went over a cliff, and he died of pulmonary failure, as his lungs — even with a respirator — ceased to function.

And the world became a little worse for his passing.

Of course, Irish’s world became a lot worse, because Jim had been her whole life, and her his.  New Wife and I spent this last July 4th long weekend with her down in Galveston, and to see one of the nicest people I know in such a state of unutterable grief has taken my normal good humor completely away.  To put it bluntly, I’m in a state of deep melancholy, and it’s going to take a little while before I feel better.  Expect blogging to be light for the rest of this week — most of what will appear is post-dated — while I try to come to terms with all this.  Details will follow when I’m able to tell them.

So long Jim, you rotten layabout.