WRITING A BOOK ABOUT VALIER

I sometimes frankly say that I’m writing a book about Valier, but I think what that conjures up in minds, esp. the ones here, is quite different than the outline I’ve been developing and will continue to research until it amounts to a book.  Many people here think in terms of stings and tattles, because so many pop books are based on sensationalism in order to sell. 

My plan and goal is to trace out the relationship between the land and the people over millennia from the glaciation intervals over thousands of years and the eruption of the Rockies.  Then after that last withdrawal appear the rain shadow that created grasslands and Chinook winds and the formation of the Old North Trail.   I will NOT be discussing dinosaurs!  Just their bones and the last of the mega-mammals and the people who preyed on them.

Next chapter is the bison-hunters and the beginning of white contact.

Rockies and wheat = irrigation

The real meat of the book will be the effect of industrialization, the beginning of the Anthropocene.  Dams, railroads, sea shipping, the formation of nations, the addressing of population explosions through raising grain to prevent famine, the impact of world wars, the infiltration of the land with manmade molecules (pesticides, herbicides, meds), alfalfa, species extinction, coal mines, oil wells, wind turbines, boom towns, and so on.  Getting order and continuity out of this will take research and time.  I don't know how many chapters that will require.

Valier cherishes its "Belgian" roots, but Belgium is a composite country divided by language and history.  This calls for more research -- WHICH part of Belgium did Valier come from and what impact did the bloody European Thirty Years War have on the people.

The last chapter will be an attempt to project what a sustainable future might be.  What comes AFTER reservations?  What would governance in general look like -- would it go to ecosystems instead of today’s states and counties?  What would the landscape look like?  Should we restore the original animals?

I will NOT be looking for a publisher.  Today’s publisher-based book producing system is a phenomenon of profiteering.  There are consortiums and organizations but even they by now have developed elites that control the others or have let the mass stifle the inspired individual.  Books in libraries are controlled by practical demands and increasingly becoming access points through computers rather than storing information in books.  This is not meant to be criticism.

The bottom line is change and how to survive in the midst of tumultuous new forces.  Part of that is being able to predict at least a few years ahead.  The great institutional stabilizers of schools (including universities), churches, economic systems, and transportation/communication/energy regulation are already rocking and shattering.  We in this small town are already seeing the imbalances from in-coming people who imagine the town other than it is, maybe hoping for a return to an earlier century, or possibly nefarious wayfarers not responsive to local standards.  Health and welfare issues are no longer supported by extended families.

Valier is particularly interesting because some of these newcomers, including the very early written-down historical population, arrived as a group.  An entire Belgian village was imported to tend the new irrigation-based grain growing made possible by the building of Swift Dam.  This is the real spine of the story I’m after, the industrial web of canals/fields/grain elevators/railroads/ocean-going ships/international politics and today’s international ag corporations that control whole countries.

Hutterites

In addition, Hutterites arrived as groups related to a network across countries and time, trying to preserve a different culture supported by religion.  Compare to the Blackfeet, forced to coalesce into a captive nation, but now demanding sovereignty and participation.  They present themselves as issues of culture, even religion, which gives them some protection, but -- in fact -- they are economic phenomena.

Economics is always ecological, meaning many small forces of survival that amount to general prosperity in the luckiest of times.  Human life is short.  The Anthropocene is only a little more than a century old and already we approach the tipping point of climate change, more extreme, warmer, moving insect vectors and vegetal patterns that carry coded diseases already epidemic.  The right to carry guns will do nothing to defend against malaria.

Militarized police

But guns and near-military force and surveillance may become part of the social dynamics as things become more unstable.  I hope to be gone by then, but some predict big trouble will start within five years and others laughingly point out that we’ve got plenty of instability right now, with the US Congress teetering at the edge of chaos after years of gridlock.  

But I don’t think of equality as a good thing.  Too often it is an assumption of uniformity and that every person should have the same sort of desires and sources when it is plain that successful ecologies are those based on interacting variety.  Even the most extreme outliers, surviving on crime or oppression, suffering from stigma, can have their use in terms of the whole.  They may be explorers, they may be secretly providing something the culture denies, they may be necessary counter-actions in the face of crushing forces from inside or outside.  They might be artists.

Ivan Doig

One of the strong forces in Valier is the constant demand for uniformity, “respectability,” even as admiration is awarded to ostentatious wealth.  Another troublesome tendency is to do what every other town does rather than seeking out the uniqueness of this set of circumstances. I talk about high school rules and one-celled cultures, that don’t want to hear about anything except their own way of doing things.  Maybe these demands for what seems like safety are best addressed in fiction.  But the novels of Ivan Doig, which DO address some of these things, is resented in Valier even though it’s about them.

Our awareness is now forced way out to the near unimaginability of the sedimentary shell of space debris around the planet, molecular saturation of the world’s seas with plastic particles, growing piles of nuclear waste, and the culture of sensational mass communication replacing what was once fitted to an extended family, a local institution, and an embracing ecology.  Some of us will find niches for survival or be able to adapt, many will not survive, and a few may be the beginning of a new species.  I often say that we can’t even find the factors that would allow sorting, and that’s a good thing because we would try to skew it to suit our prejudices, our OWN elements for survival.

Anyway, there is no way to stop the present coming out of the past and zooming on into the future, sort of whacking us in passing as a side effect.  How do we withstand that?  With beauty and pleasure!  Participation, appreciation.  It’s the old Zen story of the monk falling over a cliff and on the way down plucking a raspberry growing in a niche so he knows one last sweet taste.  Much better than balking until one can't hold on any longer.

So much to find out!  So much to do!  Such stories to tell!  Do you  know about Robaire, the town too wicked to survive in spite of the priests living there?  Do you know about the Original Kipp who may have been even more powerful than the Conrad brothers?  Do you know about the decade during which Valier was technically not a town because someone didn’t turn in a document on time?  Do you know why our houses constantly writhe in and out of their original rectangles?  I'll tell you that one.

It's because of the volcanoes in the Cascades.  Sensational after all.   

TOWN COUNCIL: A Rainy Night on the Prairie

Entering Valier

The Town Council meeting last night was immediately preceded by a preliminary Valier Local Government Study Commission. It’s supposed to determine which of three “forms of government” the town would like. Presently it’s “Commission Executive.” (Four commissioners and a voteless mayor who manages.) The main change recommended was merging the town’s two wards into one, since the population is shrinking, it becomes ever harder to find people to serve as commissioners, and the whole town is fairly mixed as to prosperity, history, desires, and so on. (75.9% in favor when surveyed.) There was strong support for keeping the nonpartisan elections (93.7%) which is in line with the county and also previous practice. People want their elected officials to get training for the very complex and layered issues and therefore an ordinance is recommended requiring that all elected officials attend classes.

That’s the official story. Unofficially, on the level of gossip, three prominent citizens are moving away: one for a bad reason, being caught in an FBI pedophile sting; one for a neutral reason, moving to be closer to work; and one because of increasing discomfort, partly caused by drifters. Her house is in an area where floaters tend to try to squat, between a drinking establishment and blocks of wheat bins once owned by the government and now clustered on the land of one individual but owned by various grain farmers who separately own the bins according to their needs — some only one, and some more. There are no alarms or lights and poison use is liberal in order to eliminate vermin. In such a shielded but easily accessed place near the highway, it’s not hard to imagine “poisons” in the form of drug sales to finance adventures.

A Memoir about Valier, MT. and the east slope of the Rockies

In the beginning I only idly wanted to write about Valier, but was a little wary. The town is hostile to Ivan Doig, whose memoir “This House of Sky” is one of the “ten best” on lists of literary scholars and popular readers in other places. This is a strange phenomenon that’s also true of James Welch, Jr. on the Blackfeet rez and was true of Wallace Stegner in Eastend, Saskatchewan, until they realized they could make money from his reputation. (The book is “Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier.” (1962), in which the town is called “White Mud,” because of a deposit of white clay quite famous for its use in porcelain.

Stegner’s boyhood was just north of here on both sides of the 49th parallel.

Both Doig and Stegner wrote the same story again and again, Doig drifting towards a popular and sentimental fiction style; Stegner becoming more essayist, environmentalist, and universal. Welch was far more inclined to try new subjects, but his readers didn’t like it. Readers, or at least publishers’ understanding of them, are highly conservative and resist anything new or different. “The Indian Lawyer” (1990) offered insight into what he’d learned on the Montana parole board and “The Heartsong of Charging Elk” (2000) explored the French love of Native Americans, but readers cling to “Fools Crow” (1986), a traditional 19th century tale. It remains to be seen whether “Winter in the Blood” (1974) will be read on account of the movie version.

This is a traditional “feathers and horses” story with a strong moral spine.

These three writers are all dead and their books are decades old. Have the rules changed enough to allow writing about Valier? One woman leaned into my face and spat, “If you EVER write about me or my family, I will KILL you!” Why so emphatic? What’s at stake? Nothing less than survival, which they are convinced depends upon reputation. They believe a reputation is something that can be controlled. If you watch Masterpiece Theatre very much, you’ll soon acquire this mindset. It is a Brit bourgeois understanding of culture, dependent on prosperity.

When one drives through Valier, many of the houses and yards seem bright and tended, esp. if one doesn’t go up and down all the streets. Darrell Kipp, when he went through Valier on the way to the Great Falls airport, used to drive up and down all the streets, trying to understand White Town. It remained a mystery to a boy who grew up in Blackfoot, for a long time the terminus of the Great Northern Railroad, so a concentration point for writers and anthropologists, people who wanted to drive up and down the rez. As an adult, Darrell’s house was more elegant inside — good furniture, fine paintings — than most in Valier. The yard was shaping up. It’s yards that obsess Valier — they don’t necessarily want fences, but they want lawns and landscaping as indicators of propriety.

Someone in our quiet little conversation last night said they had noticed that the people who were constantly besieging the town council with complaints and demands tended to have moved to town about the same time I did — 1999. I suppose it was a recession, but I lose track since there is always a succession of recessions. There’s supposed to be a study somewhere. I came from the city, but these tended to be retirees moving in off the ranches and farms that were formed in their youth. Or industrialization in the form of giant machines made their homesteads redundant. Some of the houses followed the people into town.

As the oil industry shrinks and reshapes itself, responding to the world economy and to earthquakes caused by frakking (there was one, very small, north of here a few weeks ago), the Hutterite boys who went to make their fortune on the Bakken are likely to be filtering home, quite changed. What will that do? The Hutterite communities are more involved in Valier than the town thinks. Their schools are managed by ours.

When I inquired about the town’s archives, I was told that most of them have been shifted to Helena. I wonder how much care has been taken of what must seem insignificant to them. But some boxes remained here and among them might be a very interesting period during which Valier was technically not a town because the state had required something the town didn’t supply. They managed to regain their status.

The webwork that ties this town into a potential book is a kind of vascular system of irrigation with its head in the Rocky Mountains where the snowload diminishes yearly. The end is not here in town, but far away by railroad and ship until it reaches nations that the US can control by bargaining with its vast store of grain, more powerful than the threat of bombs, more powerful even than bargaining based on response to disease. Famine is the ultimate, most ancient, killer.

Grain storage bins right in town.

This isn’t just a little town that’s always in the throes of family feuds or mercantile arrogance or entangling fees and regulations. It is a source of life-blood that we are beginning to understand is threatened by experimental grain seeds, climate change, political gridlock at every level, and the constant hydraulic-like pressure of diseases on plants, animals and people, some — like pesticides — ironically turning against our families with cancer and miscarriage. The planet is a sheet of relationships looped together like the fragile fabric of sheer stockings, easily rent and "run" into what the Brits call “ladders.” Going down.

There’s a Finnish man old enough and big enough that he can speak the truth. Last night he was frank: we are all at stake, but only a few will address the problems. They ride on the efforts of others and don’t even admit it. How can they NOT know what is at stake? Their own lives.

"THE FORGOTTEN PEOPLE" by Michael Holzach

The Hutterite Anabaptists are not “The Forgotten People” around here.  We see them in their black suits and polka dot head scarves all the time.  They believe that a child does not have the wisdom and self-discipline to obey all the rules and practices of adults and so they do not allow baptism until a youngster can comply.  Almost every blunder and misstep that a child makes is wiped away by baptism in adolescence.  After that, life is serious -- even grim.

But younger adolescents just before baptism have once a year about four hours of unsupervised freedom when all baptized persons except the littlest children go to a long service of communion and dedication.  The kids do not know that they spontaneously enact “liminal time” in which they reverse every rule just as ancient European festivals have done for millennia.  The king is replaced on his throne by a fool.  The mass that normally celebrates saints is performed in honor of the donkey Mary rode to Bethlehem and the braying of an actual donkey prodded up the cathedral aisle becomes part of the liturgy.

In this colony Heinrich is a natural leader.  On a trip the older men made to town, he went along and spent his waiting time digging through the trash heaps behind businesses, one of which was a beauty parlor.  He retrieved a lot of half-used and colorful cosmetics which he managed to smuggle back to the colony.  Here is Michael Holzach’s account of what happened at the beginning of this annual “time out”.

I see through the window their [the boys] march toward the kitchen.  Heinrich flaunts in the front, on his head a giant black cowboy hat, tall as a chimney and wide as a flying saucer.  They storm into the kitchen, a bunch of freaked-out deputy sheriffs in mutiny; their lips are painted bright red, their fingernails painted silver, gold and turquoise; they wear thick shadow around their eyes and have glimmering make-up on their cheeks in the manner of war paint.  Almost all of them wear high-heeled cowboy boots that are strictly forbidden here; under their jackets, their shirts are opened down to the chest and the rims of the hats are bent upward toward the sky -- a parade of lust of the eye, lust of the flesh, and pride, sneering at everything that is holy to the community and the teacher, a babylonic revolt!  Teacher Samuel can’t move away from the chosen people’s holy communion; he sits there less than 200 yards away while his flock goes crazy!

For the next 3 1/2 hours, square-faced Heinrich, as the oldest of the unbaptized, seizes the ark’s rudder.  Everybody now listens to his commands.

He’s got it all planned out.  He’s got a little money and has nabbed the keys to the colony’s truck.  A delegation is sent to Lethbridge for “Blueberry Liqueur.”  Even the girls, whose idea of rebellion had been to make a batch of “honey lumps” candy, have a few nips.  But the boys go wild.  Pretty soon they are vomiting into the sink.  In hours they have crashed into their beds and the next day they are in misery.  But still planning what they are going to do next year.  Holzach confessed that as a privileged observer (because of being unbaptized in their terms) he found himself not only amused but turned on after months of abstinence.  He didn’t imbibe so was spared the hangovers.  The elders pretended they didn’t see, perhaps remembering their own times “out.”

Roy Rappaport describes survival in terms of a stream, a path, within which life is possible.   The homeostasis of food, water, shelter, and the like seems to be paralleled by a kind of emotional or psychic flow in which identity and growth are possible.  Too far off to one edge is madness.  The culture pushes people into this stream bed between its shores, and yet some folks get beached, dried out, impaled, scooped out by bears.  Beyond that, streams in reality must occasionally burst their bounds in great surges of energy in order to keep the flow going, to make beaches and carry cottonwood seeds.  Likewise, human continuity.  Ya gotta blow out yer pipes now and then.

What Michael Holzach, a German journalist, longs for is simply solitude.  It is then with a fairly bad conscience that I quietly leave the bookbinder’s house every morning one hour before wake-up and, without a sound so as not to alert the dogs, sneak past the henhouse over to the lake.  The feeling of doing something secretly in God’s ark stimulates my imagination every summer morning.  My lake, which reflects the pale morning light between the softly sloping pastures, now seems to me like a lover with whom I unite day after day under the stern look of God.  Stark naked, I swim a few hundred yards and leave a bubbly trace on the mirror-like surface until both banks are the same distance from me.  Then I float on my back, listen to the quiet, and dream after the buzzard couple that flies in spirals in the upcurrent of the foothills. 

Water turns up again in the testimony of a very old man who describes how he was tortured in the United States for being a pacifist: beaten, starved, and held under ice water until he passed out.  Finally word of this treatment got out and the colony appealed to the President of the United States, who intervened.  As soon as they were able the colony emigrated once again, this time to Canada.  The persecution continues today but this time it in terms of taxation.  The larger culture resent their prosperity, their expansion, their failure to buy things and agree with worldly values.

The water trope is beyond ironic since Holzach was accidentally killed, still a young man, when he returned to Germany.  His dog fell into a canal, and Michael went in after it.  He drowned -- the dog did not.

Stephan Lhotzky, a professor of German at Augustana, must be given credit for the graceful translation of what Michael wrote in German.  (The Hutterites were astounded that he could speak German, since they didn’t understand their origins in Germany.  They had believed they were unique.)  I think he understood Michael’s yearning for the peace and order of communal living where no one goes hungry or without a bed, but also the need of human beings to find their own way.  If there is a heaven, it will be the place where the balance has been found.