THE PRAIRIE HOLDS ITS BREATH

The prairie is holding its breath before beginning to blow again. The leaves have been torn down, so only the water-drawing structure of the trees remains, a vertical river emptied for the cold. Long dead grass is sheltering small green plants at its feet. Without leaves my poplars look as though someone tied knots in the lesser branches. They are growths from some kind of disease. When I ask, people shrug. My cottonwood and one of the blue spruces are showing signs of stress -- not enough water in the late summer, too much in the early summer. The newspaper today advises a good soak before winter sets in. In some places there is not enough ground moisture to give the winter wheat a proper start. They need to have roots so their vitality will winter over and spring up green.

Summer building, fall planting, are just trailing off now. The Halloween snow has come and gone -- night skiffs will persist with maybe some single-digit blankets until Thanksgiving when the first big snowstorm hits. The bowl of water I keep outside over summer is frozen solid in the mornings. If I leave it and the sun hits it, there will be a little water on top by afternoon, but I’ll dump it out now. Skies are bluer with summer dust settled and water vapor wrung out by cold. The yards are cleared of furniture except for the barbecues. In a meat-eating town some people don’t know how to cook on an indoor stove. The only spots of color are children’s plastic toys abandoned on the lawns.

I’m looking at house skirting, driving around town in mid-afternoon through the empty streets. Many houses have them, mostly trailer skirting, some of it meant to look like stone though it doesn’t. If I put skirting on my old house, it would be warmer. The real old-timers used to bank dirt or snow against the bottoms of their houses, but they were less worried about bugs and small rodents. It’s pure speculation on my part. I can’t even afford a paint job. The present paint is peeling: thinly sprayed-on cheap latex paint. The actual siding is asbestos, which always breaks along the bottom, so that the effect is like bad teeth.

One intersection near the new watertower is completely dug up. No idea why but maybe something to do with attaching the new well. I didn’t get out of the pickup to look. I might be curious enough to go back tomorrow when workers will be there, so I can ask questions. We are all getting very curious about our infrastructure. We’ve just paid some consultants $20,000 to find out why we often fail our sewer effluent treatment tests with the state, which has advised us we need to upgrade. Partly we are maxed out, but there is also a theory that the providing company for the treatment machinery sold us a system that doesn’t work at forty below. Another theory is that the spring was so wet that there was too much water for the “bugs” (bacteria) to do their job.

The people who built the processing megaloads for the Athabascan tar sands have bought land near Bynum where they plan to build future loads, adding 140 new residents to a place that has dwindled to near nonexistence. They say because the place is already on the route approved to haul them. Why aren’t they building in Valier? We’re on the route and past some very risky terrain on 89 between here and Bynum. Sharp curves, steep drop-offs, thirty miles closer to foothill ice storms. A decision by someone back east who has never been here. Everyone was anxious to know who sold the land: Hutterites.

Most people have done their hunting now. There’s been wind for keeping geese down low and snow for tracking elk. The weather was great for pheasant but the bird population is down. The snow geese are on Freezeout in their huge African-style rippling banks and clamouring clouds of moving wings. The managers plant barley to bait them. They’ll be around until the next storm, then roar off to the south. The ornamental waterfowl in Gibson Park in Great Falls have been herded away to their winter confines. I don’t know what the city did to get rid of the slacker geese along Tenth Avenue South. Probably the same thing as Valier did to eliminate the rock pigeons around the grain bin farms in town. I ask about those bins, but haven’t found the right person for answers yet. Taking out the rock pigeons left a niche for the hyperactive noisy doves. I advise the cats to get to work on them. They don’t. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Don’t catch them.

This part of fall -- late, bare -- is always in tension between the stress and abandon of summer and the expected tests of winter. This particular summer for me was braced, paranoid, ambiguous. It never did get really hot. My cherry tomato plant mostly just sat there. My computer died and was restored with the help of friends and relatives, which was an immensely heartening experience that I had not expected and still feel a little guilty about. My intention in this part of my life was to be absolutely self-reliant and on my own, but that turns out to be a silly idea. My other intention, to write with as much risk and passion as I dare, has been pretty much fulfilled but because it was private, only a few people know about it. At my utmost, I was not quite enough. But what I can see in the future might be even more demanding.

A little while ago in my futzing around, I knocked out this computer. Dead. Nada. It took much more pondering -- accompanied by paranoia -- than it should have to figure out the problem. The power cord had come unplugged and I think of power cords as BIG. This one was small. Maybe that’s a good clue. Maybe it’s not so much the events as the way we take them. Emotion can be good, but it can also interfere.

Anyway, there will be more wind. And it will remove many leaves from my yard. Then I can rake and bag what’s left in the corners. Even so do the seasons, our lives, and our feelings weave in and out of each other, encoding as they go.