"IT RUNS IN THE FAMILY" by Richard Manning

“It Runs in the Family” is a memoir by Richard Manning, a hard-hitting, prize-winning, well-married, intelligent, dynamic, handsome man who is hitting middle-age a little later than most.  When I called him on the phone, he was siding an addition to his house in Helena but was expected to start cooking dinner for incoming relatives.  The temps in the desert valley are fierce and I suspect he has a helluva tan since he did the roof last week.

In 1990, just after I abandoned the ministry and returned to the Blackfeet rez hoping to write, there was a workshop in the Bitterroot Valley led by Peter Matthiessen.  It was juried -- one sent in a sample of writing in hopes of qualifying.  I forget what I sent, but it had buffalo in it.  Manning’s sample was full of trees: he was just producing the early drafts of what became “Last Stand,” a Pulitzer prize winning exposé of lumbering practices that used both eye witness photos and deep analysis of statistics.  The crosshairs of these two journalistic methods have been his practice, always informed by close relationships with initiated friends like Rick Bass and Peter Bowen.   His wife, Tracy Stone-Manning, is the head of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality.

The second time I ran into Manning was in Waterton International Peace Park where he was a speaker at another writer’s workshop.  Before he could speak he was called away because his mother was dying.  The memory of his face as he turned to go was just under every page of this memoir as I read.  It was neither sad nor happy but a kind of crucifixion at the center point of the axis and a steely determination to deal with events.

Much of the memoir is the struggle to escape from the disastrous punishment of a woman so damaged by early life that her only refuge was a Procrustean understanding of Fundamentalist Christianity.  Manning, in turn, escaped from that to a religion of work: men’s work.  Since he was growing up in Michigan, that meant the gleaming industrialism of machines like cars, which were a doorway to sex.  He obeyed the culture: married a high school sweetheart, had a baby, bounced from job to job, and finally pulled up stakes to light out for the territories.  As usual, that destroyed the marriage: one person changing, the other one not. 

Manning is one of the few kids (besides myself) who loved diagramming sentences, but he was also great at math until he overestimated and got himself to a college level too rarefied for his nerve, then backed off.  (I did the same thing with physics.)  This was not a waste, but a simple change of plan.  The kind of writing he does requires a mind that works in structure, closely related to hands-on building.  (“Measure twice, cut once.”)  He begins his story with a downturn in his fortunes, but the real story extends back through his family, labeled “working class” but in fact “survival class.”  People who turn their skills to what’s at hand because they must -- and that doesn’t always work out very well, esp. when times change fast.

In the end he comes to a strategy of investigation that arises out of the study of trauma survivors.  It’s kind of way of diagramming disfunction that was devised by Robert Anda.  http://robertandamd.com  The “pot-handle” for the inventory he uses is “Adverse Childhood Experiences Study.”  What’s IN the pot, cooking up fate, is what Manning writes about in this memoir: abuse, poverty, over-religiousity, neglect, and so on.  The actual questionnaire is at http://www.acestudy.org/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/ACE_Calculator-English.127143712.pdf  There’s nothing very mysterious about it and it’s not even very long.  (It omits war and ghettoes.) Anda’s insight (actually one of many) is that a high ACE score is the PRODUCT of social forces and also CREATES those same destructive forces and PERPETUATES them through the generations.  Poor people are often abusive and angry people, imposing damage on each other.  That keeps them poor.  Being treated with contempt and neglect by the society in general creates CREATES CREATES the petri dishes where crime, hatred, disease, starvation, addiction and early death flourish and even prevail over the larger society, invade the larger society.

This is not a new idea, but now it is undergirded with research about what a human being is, how brains form, what really constitutes emotional and cognitive impairment, and maybe the beginnings of what to do about it.  How much of the damage done to a pre-schooler can be reversed in adolescence or in that young adult time when most people are having babies, and how much do those individual stories affect the quality of all our lives?  Not just by needing money for treatment or incarceration, but in terms of creativity, safety, and the blossoming of culture.  Manning sent in a cheek swab for a read-out of his genome: no surprises, except that his are sturdy old genes.

It’s possible that we started going wrong ten thousand years ago when we stopped being hunter-gatherers who carried their babies on their backs and were free of the industrial burdens that have distorted modern life by making everything into separations and conveyor belts, conformity and criminalization.  As I understand it, this is what Manning is working on at present, with his background in industrial agriculture.  His eight books include “Food’s Frontier” and “Against The Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization.”

Manning used reporter’s skills, family informants, plus the safe space created by an intelligent healthy wife and increased clarity as time passed, to develop a new view of life.  He and I are both anchored in the grasslands on both sides of the Canadian border, though he’s far more of a mountain worshipper than I am, but I had the benefit of a long family tradition of humanistic progressive thought.  When I left my mother’s sometimes bitter Presbyterian roots, I already had an entwined fast-hold on the prairie through my homesteading father’s side -- the kind of thought that has led both Manning and I to the work of Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and their precursors, Rodale and Schumacher.  Their living and vigorous eloquence are cherished by many.  The mainstream rushes past them, but they go back to the very beginning:  Jacob and Esau.  (I side with the hairy man.)

The benefit of mortal pressure on generations of families is that only the strong survive, though the necessary strength may not be merely physical.  They may have to struggle with guilt because of the friends and relatives who died, but this is best addressed by working constructively, as Manning does.  Drive the roots deeper, read the signs more carefully, keep a notch stick to note numbers.  This is NOT the same as the high theory of universities where people speculate about mythic and mystical things like Gaea or God or souls, all sitting around a table in an air-conditioned room with no windows.  Manning takes a hammer and shovel approach to problems more than I do, and I admire him for it.  

At an age when many are retiring, he still has stamina for hunting and climbing mountains.  I have a feeling this memoir is merely clearing the way for his best work yet.