THE ADVANTAGES OF DISPLACEMENT

As any homesteader knows, it’s important to stick -- to plant yourself the a Dog Soldier intending to fight to the death plunges his spear into the ground. But then, how did the homesteader arrive at all except by being displaced one way or another from the previous location? The Indians who had previously lived on the lands now being homesteaded might ask that question if they could stop grieving over their own displacement.

Displacement from a job is as shocking as displacement from a “place,” maybe a house that is underwater either literally or symbolically. But there ARE advantages. Those of us who have been bumped out of our routines and achievements over and over again, are not always appreciative at the time. Some are better adapted for such catastrophes than others are. There is always talk about the importance of community, but what about the individual who has lost community?

My vocational displacements are tied to geographical relocations. Undergrad college, employment on the Blackfeet Reservation, marriage/divorce, animal control, grad school, circuit-riding, congregations, Blackfeet reservation, City of Portland, Valier. (I’ve been in Valier longer than I was in Portland last time.) Each move turned me over inside, rather traumatically, like being spaded up -- “harrowed” is the term. And each move brought up new parts of myself. It helped that I was one of those people who always resists closure, completion. Some would say I was child-like.

Never at any point in my education did I think about being an animal control officer, but when I was more or less forced into the role, I found that I brought a lot to it. Sometimes it’s a big advantage not to have any mental picture of what a thing will be. Seeing it free of stereotyped assumptions meant asking a new set of questions, finding new options, having an entirely different understanding of where it could go. It also means threatening the people who have been perpetuating the assumptions and forcing outcomes that they thought were good for them personally. Coming into Multnomah County Animal Control when I did fortunately happened at the same time that Mike Burgwin came to the supervisor job with a totally new set of assumptions. One of the most basic ways we agreed was that we saw the job as a “street job,” not a shelter maintenance job. Therefore, we concentrated on what would make the street safer. We were “hot,” experimental, high-energy.

For contrast consider teaching in Cut Bank. My assumptions were from the Sixties: idealistic, creative, not pre-determined. The leadership had one goal only: keeping their high paying jobs, which meant preventing any sort of controversy. It was not about the kids. In fact, one of we three English teachers was really a science teacher and the other one, who had a college degree in English, could not correct her students’ grammar quizzes. The previous heavyweight (literally) English teacher had taught despairing Russian novelists, which the kids accepted as truth, but he had promised to flunk the main hell-raiser among the athletic stars -- so was banished to teaching typing (keyboarding) which he only minimally understood. The hell-raisers had run off teachers and boasted about it. I became very attached to them and let the prairie princesses languish with little or no attention. They decided to bring me down and did. I gave them the ammunition. The place nauseated me. I was too old to do what I ought to have or even to figure out what it ought to be. But it will make a good novel: “Prairie Gladiators.”

The good thing about being a writer is that everything is grist for the mill. And I learned about my limits. Bob Scriver had said to me decades earlier: “You know what you CAN do, but you don’t know what you CAN’T do!” (It applied to him as well.) This was an important lesson that some people learn in death. In fact, it has to be relearned in old age.

But I knew enough to buy this house, set it up so it works for a reader/writer, and begin my final job which turns out not to be only writing but interfacing between myself and a highly unlikely co-writer, his cadre of young men full of angst and gifts, and whatever parts of the world are interested. When Montana shut the door in my face to protect the generation ahead of me, which refuses to give up control, it was too late. I had gone another way. They had no power.

Everything back as far as my grade school teachers is relevant now: the Vernon library teacher, the high school drama teacher, the undergrad world of amazing dimensions, the deep experience on the reservation with Bob Scriver, the final acceptance of personal authority and power at Animal Control, the great dreams and aspirations of seminary, and then the amusement (and bitterness) of all that turning out to be something quite different. The nineties were miserable emotional debt-paying years, but meant that the last family deaths arrived paid-in-full, and freed me to go back to my key place, where I am.

Many more forty-below zero patches of weather and I may be asking whether I can stay here. The nation and the world are changing the economic, political, infrastructure systems and that may throw me out of here as well -- maybe tip me over into the final displacement. One of the people on my list of contacts whom I had meant to visit to form a friendship was David Baker, an earth scientist who knew Montana in a way I wanted to explore. He was almost exactly my age, born Nov. 9, 1939. I talked to him via email and once by mistake he sent me an email meant for his mother which disconcerted all three of us. His funeral is tomorrow in Great Falls. He was born there.

My most important relationship at present is “placeless,” in a “virtual” place because it’s mostly an Internet-based location. Not time-bound either, since Tim moves through so many time-zones. I do here-and-now as Stays-Put-Woman. He does the Joe Campbell hero (or anti-hero) always moving anytime. And yet, when Tim is at his most desperate, his best time and place is his wife, the True Hero. We honor the complexity of life, the power of paradox.