Yesterday I was in Great Falls for an early-in-the-day eye exam, so I dropped by the faux Starbucks in Barnes & Noble in the middle of the morning. There was Scotty Zion, starting another book, though his daughter, Candy, has said she’s not up to formatting a fourth one. Well, she’s young. Scotty is over ninety now though he had a stroke last spring (he’s about recovered) those old guys just don’t know how to stop.
I’ll give you a little sample of his writing, so you can see why I like Scotty. (One reason is that I know he won’t sue me for doing it!) in his books are lots of photos, but I’ll stick to the covers. This is a good subject for writers: PENS.
“I just got a new writing pen. A nice fat one that fits in my big mitt pretty good. A drive-up bank teller was nice enough to give it to me. It’s sure a lot better than the pens I grew up with with the self-fed on ink.
“Now, the pens we had in the old Zion School were all equipped with a slightly upturned point made of steel and split down the middle from a hole a quarter inch up from the point. You dipped the point into your inkwell, which was an inch deep, and one and one-half inches across, with a hinged lid. The teacher kept a bottle of about a quart capacity on her desk to fill the inkwells as needed. I remember when the weather turned cold, inkwells, bottles of ink, drinking wataer, along with everything thing else, frozen up. Probably because the coal fire left at the end of the day wasn’t usually tended until rekindled next morning.
“Those of us who were lucky enough to have a longhaired girl in the seat ahead of us discovered that little girl’s hair soaks up quite a bit of ink, especially if their hair was braided. The trick was to dip their braids without getting caught by the teacher or the victim. At least not immediately.
“The old-time pens were pretty useful for things other than writing, too. They made great spears to throw and stuck in almost anything, including children’s butts! I can just imagine in later years one of those kid’s spouses asking, “Honey, how did you get that little blue spot on your ass?”
What makes this good is the specificity, the measurements and the timespan both remembered and imagined. Here’s another couple of paragraphs from a later page:
“Ever wonder why the farmers in the early days sat on a stool that did not have two, three, or four legs, but rather one? Well, the answer is simple. Much of the milking was done in the corral which, of course, wasn’t very level or suited for more than one leg.
“That meant you had to hold the milk bucket between your legs, and by holding onto the cow’s tits, balance yourself and pull at the same time. There was always a certain amount of squeezing involved to get the squirt of milk to come. As kids grew older and more adept at milking, some of the squirts ended up in the gaping mouths of cats that surrounded the milking site. That is, until the nearby parent heard the squirting sound in the pail stop and instead yelled, “Forrest! In the bucket, not in the cat!”
He describes a few disasters, then says, “Boy when I grew up I found that moving houses was a lot easier than milking a bunch of wild cows by hand!” Alongside a few other little projects, Scottie built and moved a whole lot of buildings around North Central Montana. In fact, his brother Bob built my back garage and so-called bunkhouse in 1964 for the crew rebuilding Swift Dam, but I forgot to ask whether he moved them down here after the rebuilding was finished. The original dam is the one in Ivan Doig’s book, “The Whistling Season.” Until a few years ago, most people knew each other and the history of their buildings as well. Now a lot of buildings don’t seem to have histories. They were just built a short while ago.
But the mountains stay and the back cover of this book shows Scottie and his daughter Candy, with their faithful dog “Arm rest.” (I forget his real name, but he’s a Kelpie, a working dog.) This view is about twenty miles directly west of me, where Scotty grew up near Choteau. That’s A.B. Guthrie, Jr.’s Ear Mountain over Scotty’s left shoulder. You have to include the “junior” when you talk to Scottie, or call him “Bud,” because Scottie remembers the “senior.”
Scottie is looking Mr. Death in the eye now, like Max Van Sydow (whom he resembles) playing chess with the Grim Reaper in "The Seventh Seal," and he figures he and his wife’s mingled ashes will become part of this landscape. Mine, too, wind willing. This little “butte” where the three are sitting has dino bones embedded in it and probably if you looked, you’d find evidence of Indian burials.
Gettin’ old ain’t easy, but the hard part int decidin' where to be scattered. It’s witnessing as the others slip away and the life across the country changes both for better and worse. Neither Scotty’s nor my books are for sale in Barnes & Noble, which is managed from Manhattan by a corporation boss. (My theory is that they’re thinning out the local books because they’re getting ready to bail out of Great Falls.) But we both carry copies of our books in our pickups, so we fetched them and exchanged money. I came up short by a dollar, which I’ll mail to Scottie along with a print-out of this blog. I guess neither of us ever imagined a coffee shop in a bookstore, but we ain’t above enjoyin’ it while it lasts.
If you want a copy of this book or the two earlier ones, “Been Any Bigger, I’d Have Said So!” or “Piece of Cake, Scotty, Piece of Cake”, contact Scotty Zion at 460 McIver Road, Great Falls, MT, 59404. 406-454-3394. He don’t do Internet. When I gave him my bookmark, he carefully tore off the little stub with my mailing address and put it in his pocket, but threw the rest with the blog url’s away. But if I showed him some of my actually printed Lulu.com Blackfeet books, he’d whip out his money. If he wants me to, I’ll format his #4 book and get it onto Lulu.
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