A TOWN MEETING IN DEADWOOD -- er, VALIER.

The mini-Bakken boom around here has changed the dynamics of Valier, adding itinerant oilfield labor to the demographics.  Once Swift Dam and the canal construction that is the heart of the town's economy had been completed in 1910, the previous boom dynamic of male gypsy labor moved on to other territory.  Cut Bank became the saloon town and petit professionals like school teachers did their relaxing in more upscale emporiums in Valier, places more like restaurants.  Froggies, which had been closed down, reopened as a pizza parlor with beer.  Since then, it has become more of a dive, though the parking lot fistfights have been kept to a minimum.

In fact, Froggies, its growing clientele, and the general weakness of the town council as they struggle with the fraying of infrastructure built a century ago and a constant stream of imposed requirements from the state, has meant that the malcontents and the mutineers have solidified into a kind of alternative political hub, though they have no background or information that is current.  Froggies is their headquarters.

This came to a head last night in a council meeting during which the Froggies crowd expressed huge outrage at the lack of respect for their fireworks event on the Fourth.  On the one hand the owner actually wept over the grievous insult of a town council member, gentle and quiet Dave Widhalm, coming into the bar and asking whether they had remembered to get insurance for the fireworks in a year so dry that in many places fireworks were flatly forbidden.  The indignation focused on Dave asking these questions in front of his clientele.  Also, this man felt that the posting of the Valier regulations for fireworks was an assault on his dignity.  He had a handful of notes detailing these failures of respect.  After a half-hour of being harangued, Dave humbly apologized.  I didn’t see why, though it was a generous thing to do.

In addition, the Froggie owner spoke out about the constant fury from people who want to do things that are blocked by city rules.  This news must be conveyed by city employees who are personally blamed.  

Then there was a diatribe over the failure to properly respect and support the older man who has volunteered to run the campground, so full on the Fourth this year that four spaces were double-camped.  He and his friends prepared the camp before the fireworks and then cleaned up afterwards -- all for no pay.  Among the other indignities, he has to go around to the camps to collect the fees because the town has not provided registration boxes the way the national parks do it.  

Valier fish cleaning station

One wonders at the enormous popularity of the campground this year.  This is the first year there has been a full-time resident camp tender.   One of the more peculiar complaints about the campground was that the very bright lights by the fish-cleaning station and the wash house should be turned off at night.  They were installed to deter persistent vandalism.

The campground (and the lake) is owned by the Pondera Canal Company and the head of THEIR board gave permission for the fireworks.  Again, rather strangely, no one seems to have consulted the fire department, though it’s only volunteer.  The Pondera Canal Company is a sort of “third government” of the town, but very quiet in most circumstances.  It is the whole reason for the town’s economic existence -- NOT tourists, nor fishing nor even ranches.  Froggie claims that the fireworks display was not advertising for his bar but rather a benefit event for the library (the most vibrant and irreproachable institution in town) and the VADC which springs into being whenever the ladies of the town want to undertake some improvements of a cosmetic nature. 

In fact, two ladies were there to propose more grant applications to improve the looks of the town, because surely money would follow if only the weeds were gone.  Of course, they propose to write the grants, as they have done before.  (The town can barely get the old ones paid off since they are usually partial funding.)  Many of the complaints by the Froggie crowd are demands for repairs to streets and so on that simply can’t be afforded without going into even more serious town debt which must be repaid by property taxes.  Maybe a third of the town is “owned” by Pondera County (the county -- not the Canal Company) because of unpaid taxes.  The county does not pay itself taxes.

Valier grain elevator

This is a collapsing town.  The grain elevator is old-fashioned and there is talk of abandoning it, esp. since the railroad spur may be closed down.  One grocery store is left and a proposition to sell it to someone younger has broken down.  The cafe has been sold to people who don’t have the vision of the previous owners.  The engine rebuilder of great talent is seriously ill.  The bank provides less and less service.  The owner of the Medicine River Trading Post is too ill to open.  One large and prosperous family, reaching critical mass, has bought the only service station (the other one closed) and the motel.  The car dealer is gone.  The other major business in town, a construction company, has an adjunct office in Kalispell and the company wives would rather live over there where there are many amenities.

Valier is less than a hundred miles from the Canadian border, next to the Blackfeet reservation, and on dealing terms with a half-dozen Hutterite colonies.  Our population is divvied up into compartments.  The whole situation is ideal for people who like to evade the law without attracting attention.

Lethbridge, pop 83,000, was originally Fort Whoop-Up, based on the whiskey trade (the Whoop-Up trail went past here), and after that a coal mining town.  It has always been a sin city with a veneer of upper class culture: universities, art galleries, and so on.  It is 131 miles from Valier.   Apart from the many 18-wheel haulers,  traffic up I-15 is fast, sporty cars with Canadian plates.  Great Falls’ population is not quite 60,000 with the same bourgeois cultural features (museums, universities, orchestra) but also Malmstrom Air Force Base.  It is 86 miles away.

Lethbridge, Alberta

When the cultured ladies who want to propose grant applications think about small towns, they do not think of the larger context or the opportunities for evading the law.  They do not think about the world wheat economy or the international corporations who own it.  They do not dream that a new water agreement with the Blackfeet tribe might very well cause ranches to fail, if the lack of snow pack in winter doesn’t end irrigation first.  They haven’t penciled on the back of napkin how many major construction projects on the northern prairie remain on the federal agenda, which have been what sustained the company.  Nor are they aware of how federal funds are steadily dwindling.

Their thinking is all on nice domestic terms, which is how they don’t notice the drug scene.  They drive up government costs simply by bustling around imposing surveys on people who never fill them out.  It’s not a glass wall that seals them off from the handsome, wolfish, money-making men or makes them the tools of the steak-eating, red-faced, heart-attack bait who hold office and run businesses.  It is a mirror.  But this has always been America’s problem.

I think that I will honor my grandmother, a staunch Women's Christian Temperance Union member in her prairie homestead years, by putting a referendum on the ballot this fall to make Valier a "dry" town.  Let the soreheads drink in Cut Bank.

WESTERN ART AUCTIONS, GF, 2015

"The Russell"  Three days of auctions in Great Falls, Montana

The Big Auction days are coming close now, and the catalogues are going online.  At first there was a tendency to hide or sequester them, but now they are necessarily online so we know which pieces are meant.  The numbering in the catalogue tells you when to hold up your bid paddle.  You might not want everyone’s head to swivel in your direction when you’re in the room, because maybe you’d like a low profile -- just there to speculate on value.    This IS a fancy gambling game.  You could monitor and bid via phone.  Or you could use the web.  But there are advantages to watching the crowd.  With a good smart phone, you could do both.  Some people go to their car in parking lot to bid via cell.

I only follow Bob Scriver’s work for obvious reasons -- I am not an art dealer, though I’m happy to involve Jerry Gorowski when I get questions from customers and Gorowski can  advise on the current situation.  What I know covers a decade: the Sixties when Western Art was catching fire. 

Bronze sculptures are exceptions from the usual flow of paintings because the manufacturing is necessarily teamwork.  Sometimes the titles have drifted from the ones originally inscribed on them.  Bob’s portrait of his brother, for instance, is often listed (even by the Montana Historical Society who does NOT consult me and is curated by people young enough to be his grandchildren) as “portrait of an old cowboy.”  So I’m here as a kind of curator, an educator if you like.   If you need educating.  Don’t we all?

For what it’s worth, here is a list of Scriver bronzes that the Manitou Gallery offers in its auction.  Go to  http://www.marchinmontana.com/lots  for the rest of what’s on offer.  It looks like Van Kirke Nelson is finally selling off his hoard of Ace Powell paintings, if you're young enough to remember Ace.  

#35  THE WHOLE ELK

This is the little figure that was created by Scriver to sell in volume enough to ransom the Russell painting of the “Royal Ruler” that had hung in the Great Falls Elks Club for many years.  The painting was about to be caught in the mania for de-accessing art work that
had been in place for as long as a hundred years, all for expansion or building maintenance.

#36  ELK HEAD

A casting of just the head off the elk above, a smaller piece suitable for maybe keeping on a desk.

#37 ON THE LOBO TRAIL

This is one of five figures created by Scriver in collaboration with Bill Ukrainetz to be cast by a New York City company.  They were to be sold for window dressing to men's clothing stores.  The idea of this one was to be a funky outlaw.  It was so early in Scriver's career that he didn't know to put an armature in the clay to support the body on the thinner legs.  One day he left it in the evening, returned in the morning, and found that it had warmed enough to squash the legs.  Everyone agreed that it was somehow more appealing in its gnarly state, so he corrected the anatomy and kept the pose.

The rest of the story is not about the sculpture itself.  Ukrainetz failed to pay the company doing the casting, so to recover their investment in molds and so on, they began casting the sculptures and selling them on their own.  Scriver discovered this and invoked the copyrights he had so carefully prepared and registered.  They were of no use -- no one would enforce the copyright law, though he could hire his own lawyer for a civil suit.  The advice was to get his lawyer to send a letter, which he did, and the company stopped reproducing.  By then they'd probably made back their loss anyway.

This white version is hydrocal, a very hard plaster, meaning that it was cast from a mold either as a guide for making waxes as part of the bronze casting process or it was simply cast as a blank and stored until there was time to apply a lacquer bronze-imitating finish.  Considering Manitou's roots in the Flathead, my guess is that Scriver sent it to one of the ceramic shell casting outfits there and they just kept it, so it escaped the destruction of all blanks, molds, and other precursor materials that his estate demanded.  

Lawyers never know enough about the processes and protocols of art to be thorough enough to achieve the wanted goal.  For instance, they never considered the second and third layers of profit for a sculptor:  books, photos of the sculpture, posters, tools, even the clay itself.  Their attention is only focused on prestige value.  One of Scriver's values (which I think he got from Ace Powell) was always to provide something for the person who doesn't have a lot of money.  But lawyers know a lot about bitter ex-wives, so that's the category they put me in.  Not smart.  Trapped by their own experience.

#137  INDIAN ON REARING HORSE

This is an uninspired but popular cliché subject.  The naive Indian fan will love this example of one of Scriver's main themes, the Blackfeet.  Nothing wrong with that!  It paid a lot of bills.  But it is not "high art."  It stoops to the American fascination with mythic warriors.

#180 BUFF COW AND CALF

Scriver had a strong domestic side which he sort of displaced over to animals for fear of it being seen as "feminine."  He loved the intimacy and nurturing of mother and child and he was well-aware that the most vital key to Blackfeet life was the buffalo.  Anyway, this is an appealing bronze, small enough to be affordable and to keep on a tabletop.

#184  BOY OFFERING SOMETHING TO A HORSE

Of course, this is from the cowboy bag of clichés and a sentimental favorite.  Beautiful horse and cute little boy, though he's a bit stiff.  People were always telling Scriver what he "should" make next, though some would directly commission something.  I'm not sure which this was.

#227  WARRIOR HOLDING GUN OVERHEAD

A cliché for everyone, but a good marker for the importance of the gun trade in the dynamics of the prairie tribes confronting Europeans.  Now the action has shifted back to the MIddle East, but in those days the symbolic weapon would also be a gun, not even the notorious AK47, but an early rifle.  

It wasn't just a war weapon, but an accurate rifle.  A careful hunter could set up a tripod far away to become a buffalo sniper, picking off as many buffs as could be skinned before the carcass spoiled -- without spooking the animals.  They had no brain imprint about danger that came as a small pellet from a great distance -- just a template for large moving animals coming close, like a wolf.  A rifle meant feeding a lot of people with little danger.

Bob became a gun collector mostly to use them for reference -- the Hawken, the Golden Dragon, the Winchester they called "Yellow Boy" because of the brass works, a Sharps.  They're all in the book he self-published called  "The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains."  This  was another small popular bronze meant for everyone.

#257  PONY EXPRESS

Winchester commissioned this and promoted the hell out of it, which means it sold well.  Harry Jackson also made a piece on the same subject.  He and Scriver were friendly rivals, Harry being a decade younger and far more sophisticated.  Not necessarily an advantage.

#420  TRAVOIS WOMAN AND DOG

Another domestic scene.  It might be nice to pair with the warrior holding up his gun.

#448  CMR MAQUETTE

Many of these were sold to pay for the monumental version on the grounds of the CMR Museum in Great Falls, the beneficiary of all this auction commotion, at least in part.

https://www.cmrussell.org/2015-catalog/The-Russell-2015-catalogue.html#p=246

The main CMR AUCTION, called "The Russell," now managed by a consortium of artists.  It includes only one Scriver bronze:    #257  THE NINE MILE WOLVES  #7    You'll have to go to the online catalogue to see the sculpture as images can't be downloaded from this catalogue.  It's meant to be a portrait of a specific pack of wolves described by Rick Bass in his book by that name.  Maybe it looks better in the actuality.  It is a very late piece when Scriver was losing control of both design and anatomy.

With my constant stream of comment and (often) criticism, I’ve inadvertently slowed sales of some of Bob Scriver’s work, the ones with origins and manufacture in the Flathead Valley ceramic-shell-casting foundries, a process that took little skill or investment up front.  Scriver ended up using some of those foundries to produce smaller more numerous pieces, even after he had recreated his own Bighorn Foundry to cast the larger ones.  The consequences of making something previously difficult and therefore valuable -- undercut by ceramic shell casting -- went the same way as the arts that shifted to electronic distribution, like music, books. information.  The relative cheapness and ease of copying meant that a lot of lower-grade work was widespread.  The pieces above circulate around the auctions that are like pop-up galleries across the country.  The major "high art" pieces don't move, or if they do change ownership it is privately, still through established and trustworthy dealers.  Even things as solid as a bronze can be bought online at an auction through the websites, so the buyer remains cloaked and doesn't have the effort of travel.

Bronze Inside and Out by Mary Scriver

Available at the major on-line sources.

Now that computers can make 3-D copies of objects, some acquisitions will move to them, if only because of the novelty.  There will be a lag while even the ceramic-shell foundries that are left, many fewer than a decade ago, are dismantled.  Then the original Roman block bronzes, esp. the ones that were cast and patined by the sculptor himself, will by their rarity and quality become more valuable.  They are often more careful, accurate, and beautiful than the grifter and pirate versions, but buyers must check out the provenance of each piece they consider buying.

THE BIG CITY

A rare winter trip to Great Falls in fifty degree weather.  Recent snow is mere streaks, like a man who has shaved with lather and left a few traces just before rubbing his face with a damp towel.  Bright clear blue sky when I started out but smudged with high clouds on the way back, like a poorly erased chalkboard.  A storm shelf barely nudges over the Rockies.  Due in tomorrow night -- pushing the air before it as wind.  Sun River has thin ice; Missouri has none at all.

I had a game plan, which didn’t take much work since it’s always pretty much the same.  Straight down to GF (80 miles) then out Tenth Ave South, which is the big truck and commercial artery, to Van’s which was Teeple’s when it started out in Browning.  Tenth Ave South is often reviled by those who hate traffic, big signs, and 18-wheelers roaring alongside them, but politics will not support a by-pass around the south side.  It's the money hub. 

The Van's end is close to the Malmstrom housing, which means it’s next door to bars with exotic dancers and the massage parlor where the elderly provider was recently beaten and sexually assaulted with a "metal object".  Sometimes the businesses along here are put off-limits for Airmen, but that’s always soon relaxed.  Too much money at stake.  There are new gun shops: one called SWAT and one called something like “Paradise.” 

Brief stop to drop off the toner cartridge recycling at UPS.  The delivery truck in Valier won’t accept them.  Clerks used to be older women; now they are young men.  Wonder what that means.

Then back to Jo-Ann fabrics for waistband elastic and blanket binding.  Amazing stuff on bolts, huge spangles attached to net, all sort of gold lamé and fuzzy squiggles in day-glo colors.  It looks like stuff for theatrical events.  The shop windows in Conrad are already displaying prom formals, so maybe that’s what it’s for.  Proms are no longer demonstrations of maturity, girls in virginal white dresses, formal dancing.  Now the girls wear movie star garb with sneakers underneath.  They dance imitations of coitus.  They say their preferred method of birth control is anal coitus.  They got that from "Downton Abbey."   If you get pregnant In spite of all efforts, there are dresses for you. http://www.lovingdresses.com/Prom-Dresses/Pregnant

At Jo-Ann there’s a new manager, a man who was actually sewing when there were no customers.  A little cluster of non-buying customers around him, listening to his wisecracks.  One woman had a strange laugh, like a bird call.  An older woman over to the side was asking an older woman clerk how she could learn how to sew a quilt.  She had started one and got stuck.  The clerk suggested that she search among her friends for quilters, invite them over, provide a bottle of wine, and just happen to have her quilt on the frame.  

Back to Marketplace at the other end of 10th Avenue S, which is sometimes as far into town as I come -- it’s a sort of compound of big box stores.  On the floodplain of the Sun River, it could not legally be developed for housing.  For fantasy I go to the faux Starbucks in Barnes and Noble.  It serves Starbucks coffee but one writes the check to Barnes and Noble. Quiche and a latte, $8.50.  (They are not doing very well.  Nooks are not selling.)   The clerk had an exceptional tattoo, very pretty and graceful with aqua and peach details.  I asked her whether she knew about glow-in-the-dark tattoos (I’m thinking about a story that has a woman tattooed with roses that glow in the dark) and she showed me hers.  You couldn’t see it without a black light but the skin was different.  She got it there in GF in a “nice” tattoo shop in the proper downtown.  As in the authentic Starbucks, she is not required to remove her piercings for work.  She only had three.

I saw no book or magazine I wanted to buy.  They haven’t changed -- I have.  I’d brought along my newspaper from home and read that instead.  This bookstore briefly had a shelf of black male erotica -- I presume for the Airmen.  (Today a letter to the editor objected to officers being called “Airmen” but the newspaper said it was an accepted term for any Air Force member.)  In the nearby movie complex I once attended a matinee (don’t remember the movie) where two Airmen (white) sat ahead of me in the nearly empty auditorium, holding hands throughout.  As I went out of Barnes and Noble, a woman came in with her children.  "Pick out what you want," she said.  "Then we'll go home and order it cheaper from Amazon."

On to Office Max next door for 3-hole punched computer paper and red 3-ring binders to file Indian articles.  My binders are color-coded -- is it racist to use red folders for Indians?   At Jo-Ann’s I had had to sign on a machine that debited my account directly instead of processing a check.  The machine malfunctioned so my signature was totally unintelligible.  It’s always like that.  They accepted it, as always.  The office supply store’s machine wouldn’t even record a mark and the register kept spitting out my check.  “Why is it that the office supplies stores always have office machines that don’t work?” I asked the barely-out-of-high-school clerk.   “Cheap junk,” he said, tight-lipped.

Then to Smith’s, which is a NW-connected grocery that has swallowed both Fred Meyer and Krogers and that caters to the Malmstrom Air Force Base, which is just above at the top of the butte. It carries exotic foods for people who have lived overseas.  No fighter jets went screaming overhead only a hundred feet off the ground.  They’ve been transferred out and soon the base will be receiving huge cargo planes.   The hangars must be enlarged.  The pilots will be a different demographic, steadier and older.  They will be welcomed by some.

Missile Silo

Morale is low here.  This is where the missile silos are based and there has been scandal.  Sleeping on the job, leaving access doors open, failing regular tests of knowledge plus lying, general slackness.  Penalties are falling on all, even up the chain of command.  Also, more silos are being decommissioned and the ones that have been closed down long enough to deteriorate are being put into a final state of disabling.  Apart from the nuclear scandals, young Airmen have been indicted for killing babies.  

This time as I entered Smiths, a little group of junior high girls were coming in with an overweight chaperon, evidently a mother.  They wore tight jeans, very high heels, and camisole tops with string shoulder straps and stayed close enough together to touch.  Their demeanor was a mix of defiance and shame.  The mother pushed them along.  "Get in there."  It echoed bordello.  I wonder.

Driving the way I do -- slow and sort of half-hypnotized by scanning the horizon -- takes about an hour and a half to get to Great Falls, good thinking time.  When I got gas before leaving Valier, one of my former students from Heart Butte was there and we visited a bit.  Then again when I stopped on the way back at the grocery store in Conrad another student from the same class was just going in and we talked.  I was only in Heart Butte two years, but it was a vivid time.  My “book” about it is posted as a blog:
www.heartbreakbutte.blogspot.com.  The yearbook is also posted there.  Only a few people have found it so far.

So this is the tension of people living on the planet earth: that we can go all out for domination and money, gathering goods and ideas from across the planet, or we can hunker down, depending on human relationships.  If we choose the former, the quality of life will depend on making enough money to buy goods -- IF they are available.  Family will be scattered, friends will be transient.  If we choose the latter, the quality of life will depend on the quality of our relationships, how we interact with each other.  At least that’s been the story until now.  

Afghanistan

Because of technology, it’s ALMOST possible to have both.  It is possible to Skype to dad or mom in Afghanistan or back home in Indiana.  But it’s also possible to operate a predator drone that destroys someone else’s family in Afghanistan before going home to dinner in Indiana.  The forces underlying are the same ones that break out when one band of chimps destroys another because they are Other.  The civilizing forces in Great Falls don’t consider that their business.  They are restoring a beautiful bridge with arches as though they were in Italy preserving the Renaissance. 

I scan the horizon.  Beside me on the pickiup seat are Rio Grande Pinon coffee beans from New Mexico, packets of hazelnut bits, red 3-ring binders, Crackers' fav dry cat food, the right kind of hairball med for Squib, a new dishpan.  But I'm thinking about the two young women from 25 years ago.  They tell me one murderer in their cohort has finally gotten out of prison, but the other one likely never will.   Most of their class has done pretty well.

Rocky Mountain Eastslope

THE DOWNTOWN CHICKS SPONSOR A BROTHEL TOUR

I haven’t heard how the big Brothel Tour in Great Falls went this past weekend.  It was sponsored by the Downtown Chicks (businesswomen) who rented the GF Historic Trolley for the tour after the group gathered at a no-host bar.  According to the GF Tribune, Michelle Chenoweth (don’t know whether she’s related to the Idaho Hen -- er, Chick) said, “We’ve done lots of research in the last several months.  It’s an amazing amount of unheard stories that people are going to be thrilled to hear.”  Chenoweth estimated that at its peak, Great Falls was home to between 40 to 50 brothels, although she said it’s hard to pin down an exact number.

“We really encompass this historically and also bring it up into the modern day,” she said, “(But) we want people to understand that we don’t condone in any way what has taken place.  it happens and it’s a neat history that needs to be told, and that’s why we’re doing it.”  Tickets are $25 and there is a waiting list for the next tour.

Right.  What can she say when the fairly recent former mayor owned a “Really Windy” bar with a “private room” in back.  But it was outside the city limits, so not on the tour.  He and Ms. Chenoweth will be disappointed to realize that the federal government will not give grants to anyone who supports prostitution in any way.  Not Planned Parenthood or any programs to help people with HIV-AIDS or all that other stuff.  The churches can do it, if they want to, and the government will give THEM money, but -- I assume -- only if they aren’t of a faith system that includes temple whores.  

I was in Fort Benton when their historian patriarch mentioned he was writing a book about the last whorehouse in that town.  “How do you know?” I asked innocently.

He was startled.  “What do you mean?”

“How do you know that was the last one?  How do you know there’s not someone doing business now?”  The women present all laughed and agreed.  Finally, I took mercy.  “Oh, it’s probably not a red plush love nest now -- more likely a phone number on a business card.”  He still looked confused.  To him prostitutes were Miss Kitty who never so much as kissed Marshall Dillon.  (Amanda Blake, the actress who played Miss Kitty, died of AIDS contracted from her openly bisexual husband.)  “Soiled doves” were a phenomenon of history like stagecoaches.  Not the Asian massage parlors on today’s Tenth Avenue.

I’ve never asked around Valier about prostitution.  I wouldn’t know how to define sexworkers in a small town.  There are girls who “put out,” and couples that kind of trade around, but nothing very formal, I guess.  Once someone thought it would be a good joke to put my house on Google as a “whore house.”  No one was stupid enough to come knock on the door but if they had they would have found a very limited selection and a bad-tempered one at that.

But seriously, the US government is saying that no NGO dispensing funds for HIV-AIDS is allowed to use money to help prostitutes.  This is like saying you can go swimming so long as you don’t go near the water. Who do they mean?  I presume they mean people who allow intimate access to their bodies in exchange for profit, not necessarily profit for the person with the body.

Do they mean the little undocumented boys of color who will either clean your windshield or (ahem) an alternative for $5?   Do they mean Polish teenaged girls kidnapped and trafficked or do they mean the ones from a Minneapolis mall pimped after running away?  Have they considered guys for hire?  Do they include “walkers,” the suits who “make nice” for old ladies with small dogs and diamonds?  What is sex work and what is sex play and what is not sex at all anyway?

In 1961 in Great Falls I was attending my first Montana Education Association meeting.  I couldn’t afford the Rainbow Hotel, which was the high end in the those days, but at day’s end after all the meetings, as I passed the “Silk and Saddle,” which was the lounge of the hotel, a man stepped out of the shadows and peed on my feet.  Indignant but not afraid, I told him off and marched squishily on my way to my cheaper hotel.  The shoes were tennie runners and went into the washing machine.  It never occurred to me to report the incident.  It was NOT sex work.  It was perversion, but I didn’t even figure that out until years later. 

Twenty years ago a tribal person told me that a prize-winning author (now dead) who had stayed with the family fifty years ago while writing a book about her ancient grandfather had molested the children of the household.  That was NOT sex work.  It was not literal pedo-philia in the sense of loving children.  It was sexualized abuse of the vulnerable.  Including the very old chief.

Occasionally one runs across women who are living with men they don’t love, cooking and cleaning for them and sleeping with them though they don’t enjoy it, because they don’t think they have any other way of earning a living.  It’s an ancient situation but not necessarily illegal.  Is it sex work?  Does it depend on whether or not they are “married”?  What about Clinton’s intern who wasn’t doing him for money but surely expected rewards?  What about Prince Charles’ two women: one for heirs and one for comfort -- which one was doing sex work?  Is it all right if one is important enough?

What is the difference between sex work that is paid for as a frank transaction of two people and sex work that is enforced by a third party?  Is sex work inside marriage or some other legal arrangement (harems) different from free lance?  Then what about Thomas Jefferson’s two families:  one legal because of Christian marriage and the other one legal because of American law (slavery).

Or does it all hinge on male dynamics: something men pay for so they won’t owe anything except money and presumably won’t get emotionally involved, because to them sex must be separated from falling in love.  For a lot of women it’s the romance that’s the compensation and what divides sex work from freely given intimacy.  What an American idea.  In Africa the custom had evolved of little circles of voluntary sexual relationships that included both men and women, married or not, children or not, all of them necessarily sharing the same HIV virus.  No money was exchanged.  Was this sex work?  

We are totally confused about all this, particularly in terms of the larger social context and the obligation of the government to guide and protect citizens.  We want prostitutes to be punished by just letting them die, but some are thriving better than the norm.  We want prostitutes to be “other” and exotic, or maybe distanced by the past, but we want them to be accessible on demand and not powerful.  Most of all, we want everything to be their fault, even as we beg them to tell about their customers.  We very rarely prosecute the customers.

The Downtown Chicks would not like to be mistaken for Downtown Chippies, but they like to dress up like dance hall girls.  They know Charlie Russell loved to hang out in brothels, but they skip over the part where he and Nancy were sterilized by VD infections and loyally claim he was only a friend to his ladies.  Tickets on the Trollop Trolley are $25.  Don’t expect a government subsidy.

THE MACHINIFICATION OF EVERYTHING

By the time I got past my eye doctor’s appointment and looked in the down-the-hall washroom mirror, I saw a face like a big red tomato, dripping wet.  This was because the doc’s file on me did NOT say “eyes allergic to lidocaine, wash out immediately” as I have made him write in repeatedly.  I don’t know whether the page fell out or they made a new file or what.  It’s a new office, very nice.  Hung with fine art by a man who is the most striking colorist since a certain artist discovered Merlin Enabnit.  (Private nasty joke.  Enabnit's book on color sold in hobby shops.)  My face gets red when it’s sun-burned, wind-burned, very cold, or when my butt is chapped. 

If my eyes are not washed out at once, they will swell shut so I can’t drive home (80 miles) and, as I’ve told the doc only half-jokingly, I will have to stay at his house overnight.  He doesn’t laugh.  I had to grab his arm once to make sure he heard me before he put the drops in.  He doesn’t listen.   The sober quiet girls who used to do the washout are replaced by a young man who did not put in enough saline drops to wash out my eyes -- too little, too gentle.

The doc forgot to order certain glaucoma tests and says there was not time to do them, but the last two times I also had to return for them -- I don’t think he forgets.  I think it makes two appointments out of one.  (My glaucoma scores, each eye, are 19.  That’s below the alarm point which is 22.  I have no loss of peripheral vision.)  It costs $30 per drive to GF.  This time I used my Christmas money.  The doc is part of the “creme de la creme” of arty GF society, which revolves around Charlie Russell.  For them $30 is a lunch tab.

My friend has just had two cataract operations that went wrong, leaving him in pain and blind.  This doc does thousands of operations, so I asked him what might have gone wrong.  I said, hoping to make him stop his scribbling and look at me,  “I want to ask you a question.”   

“Of course,” he said, not looking up and still scribbling.  When I asked, his first reaction was alarm that he might have done the operation or be blamed for it.  Then he settled down and gave me a bullshit ratatat med school exam answer that boiled down to “not in my practice.”  Then he came to the conclusion that I was afraid to have a cataract operation but thought I ought to.  You know,  “I have a friend who. . .” when you really want to know for yourself.  This is the guy who sent me to the incompetent diabetes doc, simply because she was female and he assumed I would prefer a lady doc.

Great Falls is touting “medicine” as their primary “industry.”  Billboards proclaim “top ten percent of total joint replacement doctors” and “industry award winner among hospitals.”  I want you to know that my blog is among the top ten percent of blogs in Valier, or would be if there were any other blogs in Valier.   (Since there are no others, I also occupy the bottom ten percent.)  It used to be that doctors who advertised were openly considered quacks.  And before the sole existing hospital swallowed all the rest, there used to be two hospitals, operated by nuns.   There are two keys to this little gold mine:  one is an aging population that has lived hard, mostly outdoors, and the other is insurance, big ranch-financed personal insurance, plus some Medicare for the lesser folks.

While I was in GF, I stopped by the fabric store to pick up two yards to cover an ottoman.  It took 45 minutes to get waited on.  The management had decided it was a quiet day and had sent two clerks home to save their wages.  The remaining clerks were slowed way down by having to use little hand-held zappers to shoot the codes on the fabric bolts, and then having to double-check with pencil and paper because the machines got it wrong about every fourth time.  One of the sets of tests on the eye doc’s machine had to be done over because the machine didn’t register the first set.  “Shall I hit it hard alongside its head?” I asked the ranch girl giving the test.  “Please,” she said.

I hadn’t been up the main Central Ave of GF for a long time, partly because it’s a narrow street with diagonal parking which people are always backing out of without being able to see, so I puttered along at 25 mph.  (The posted limit was 30, which I think is high.)  Two different motorists behind me became enraged that I was so slow: honking, gesturing, hollering out the window, and finally pulling into the on-coming lane (double yellow no-passing line) in order to get around me.   At the next two red lights I pulled up right behind them, so I don’t know what they gained.

Dave Lull sent me a link to http://www.bryanappleyard.com/rage-against-the-machines/  It’s a review of two books about the increasingly robotic and machine-dependent society we’re creating.  But I live in Montana.  Despite ice on the road in the morning and high winds the rest of the day, the land saves me.  The drive home -- even with stiff red eyes -- was a series of grand baroque panoramas of sky, all purple gauze and glowing amber edges.  The fields are dull and dun, too dry and too often chemical fallow, but the sky show went on demonstrating what the billowing smoke would look like if the Rocky Mountains were on fire or became volcanoes.  I passed a bald eagle on a fence post, way out of his habitat.  If he was looking for road kill, he’ll be hungry.  They’ve poisoned out most ground squirrels and rabbits.  The law just changed to allow citizens to "harvest" the big stuff like deer.  He’d better stick to fish.

The best moment of the day was stopping out at Bundi’s nursery where I generally visit in June when the frosts are finally past.  The winter greenhouse was already June inside.  There was a gorgeous lemon tree with both lemons and blooms and a fabulous huge clivia in a tub.  I bought an amaryllis, which I normally do at Christmas, but somehow missed this year.  We had a nice talk about Agapanthus Africanus. (below)  These last three kinds of plants are bulbs from South Africa.  The cash register was not electronic.  The sound system was blasting Johnny Cash, but the young woman who waited on me (this town is swarming with pretty girls cheerfully doing low pay jobs) was listening on earbuds to “alternative music.”   She told me the name but I forgot.

My friend despairs at the cynicism and machinery of the world, so I am wanting to assure him that it’s not quite too late, that mixed in with the death and greasy steel there are still corners of the world where the sky is grand (no shrieking F15’s today) and gardeners still tend blossoms.   But I wish I could have gotten some good advice for his eyes.