Valier Baptist Church
Stealth ambush scares me. And when I get scared, I take refuge in anger. I’m not alone. And then I talk too much. So I hit the keyboard to work it out. (My version of cowboy “walk it off.”) The subject this time is trees. But also it’s status, power, control and also it’s power lines, the kind on poles. But I'm feeling powerless. I’m feeling as though I have to sit out on my driveway with a shotgun across my knees to keep the Baptist minister from next door away from me and my cottonwood tree. Lucky for him guns are against my principles.
SUNDAY AFTERNOON. The population of Valier is in boats on Lake Francis, getting sunburned. I’m napping with the “marmots.” Tap, tap, tap. It’s “Brother Bru” dithering in the driveway. “Are you all right? Is there anything I can do to help you?”
“The main thing you can do for me is to stay the hell away from me!”
Immediately the syrup is gone. “I want you to know that that cottonwood tree is on the property line and we’re going to cut off all the limbs we want to anytime we want to.”
“You dominating old tyrant! You’re exactly the kind of person who drives everyone away from religion!”
“What is your house number?” He’s standing next to it. I point. He writes it down.
“I see why your wife has to guide you around and run interference for you! You’re a crazy old man!” Looks like Alzheimers. He’s had a stroke in the past.
“Don’t you know that God commands you to love people like me?”
Unprintable response. He wanders off around the block, writing down house numbers.
BACK STORY: Last spring Brother Bru was over to ask humbly if he could cut off limbs from the cottonwood tree because they needed to mow underneath it. I said I’d lived here for fifteen years and the grass had always been mowed without major surgery to the tree. It ended with him declaring defiantly they would do whatever they wanted to do to "their half of the tree." I went shopping a few days later, returned to the snarl of a chain saw, and saw a big section of the tree on a trailer. I screamed, wept, cursed, took photos, but did not strike the poor culprit (NOT Brother Bru who was nowhere around) nor shoot him. (I don’t own a gun anymore.)
All was quiet until this Sunday intrusion. I was so full of adrenaline the rest of the afternoon that I was afraid to wash the dishes for fear of throwing them against the wall. I am not a sweet and gentle woman, nor am I “little” nor a “young lady” as men in this town address me. I’ve worn a badge and carried a ticket book, testified in court, confronted a motorcycle gang, and helped capture a lion. Roar!
I had been out of town most of the day last Friday. Monday, today, was research day. It dawned on me when I walked around the tree that while I was gone they had indeed taken another big section off -- eight-inch limbs. The lawn was very mowed. To the town hall, then to the town workshop where Leo was on the phone struggling with zoning issues. Zoning issues are huge in Valier, which was born higgledy-piggledy, carelessly improvised on top of that, and now wants to be Germanically square and mapped.
Leo is the “tree man” who got Valier on the rolls as a “Tree Town of America.” There's a banner. Most of the trees are exotics planted when the farmers were putting in woodlots, windbreaks, and shelter belts. They are aging out, like our infrastructure. Blue spruce, silverleaf cottonwood, green hickory, lilac. Silverleaf cottonwoods are all over town, all about the same age, all trying to form themselves into a tent with edges that sweep the ground, all with multiple trunks that tend to split out. They evolved to have long limbs stretched out over water, no wind. Leo says the town ordinance only says a person is permitted to “prune” trees and, in fact, seeing that I seemed calm, he took the church’s side. The blue spruce also on the lot line is ailing, so he’ll look at that. And a tree on the line at the alley is splitting. Leo plays the Montana game: “I’m the one who knows.” He promises to come pass judgment.
What I begin to realize is that if these other two trees have to be taken out entirely (hundreds of dollars) half the bill should go to the church. I also realize that the line is not surveyed -- we are presuming that the line is marked by the trees, but they actually might be on either side. And I see vividly that cutting too much off the cottonwood can unbalance the trunk enough for it to fall on my house. I wonder about the church’s insurance.
Froggie's massacred tree
So the next person I run across is my neighbor from across the street. They call him “Froggie.” (He’s French from New York State.) The tree issue makes him explode. “Go look at MY tree!” The power company had come thru and made a tragedy of his silverleaf cottonwood. His tree is the canopy and crowning glory of his backyard, the same as my tree is the summer shade and winter comfort of my sideyard. And he points me to another tree that looks as though a flying locomotive roared through it -- another tragedy if you love trees.
But Leo has been to a workshop. He tells about tree branches that have secretly conducted electricity for years until they are hollowed out by hurtling electrons, and about rows of trees that touch power lines and send it down the line to where it electrocutes someone touching another tree. In fact, the power company guy, who is the chainsaw operator who cut my tree, was badly shocked a few years ago. No mercy there. But people are so passionate about their trees that he -- who has to live in Valier in order to respond to emergencies -- doesn’t go up in the bucket to cut out tops near power lines. Instead, the locations that need cutting are listed for an anonymous crew that comes in like a scourge and cuts them all in one day, then leaves -- quickly.
What we have here is a collision between the organic pre-existing West with its adapted grass and beloved trees, headlong against the industrial West that began with the railroads. The Pondera Canal Company is right on the transition: irrigation with natural snowpack run-off guided by pre-existing streams, then dug-out canals, concrete, and electrical pumps until it hits the big pivots in the fields. The next step is the elevator, the railroad spur, the coastal docks for the international trade. That was the entering wedge for a culture that began in Europe. Cargill grain is worldwide.
Shelby, MT
Our most prosperous neighbor, Shelby, close to the border, is a transportation exchange hub for trucks and railroads. There are high tension wires and oil pipelines running everywhere, garroting nature, draining the wind. All these people are very secretive and well-connected with the higher corporate and governmental authorities. There is a big box store, several big motels, and a private prison in Shelby but the latter mostly houses Indians.
The next people I run into are at the post office: Corky and the mayor, talking about alleys and how much of a guide to the town grid the power lines are. NOT. Sometimes they run at the edge of alleys, but sometimes they are right in the middle. There is a lot of work for a surveyor here. Corky’s neighbor is claiming too much of the alley for him to drive through. Not long ago Northwestern ORDERED the town to clear all alleys because they obstructed the energy maintenance trucks. Things had been sticking out a few feet for many decades, though there were arguments. A small greenhouse is in the middle of one alley. The alleys that are still grass are simply mowed by neighbors.
In my googling research, I discover that the area Southern Baptists are grouped as the Montana Southern Baptist Committee. http://www.mtsbc.org/about.html with an agenda of aggressive growth. No address. Like the Unitarian Universalists they are conflating politics with religion, except they are at the right wing end of the spectrum. That means a facade of prosperity because the idea is that virtue means wealth and vice versa. One of my “experts” knew whose estate is paying for all the expensive upgrading of the church next door. Valier already has thriving Lutheran, Catholic, Jehovah’s Witness, and Methodist congregations. That’s quite a few churches for a 400-500 person town. No one has to look far to find God. But as global warming expands, a lot of people will be moving north.
It turns out that the person who had been mowing the church’s empty lot for a decade -- without any pay -- was Froggie. (He and his family are observant Catholics.) He never found that silverleaf cottonwood impossible to mow under, even on his riding mower.
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