BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR "PLACE"

This is a list of books on my shelves, some of them read and reread, and others still unread.  They take totally different approaches.   I’m putting bibiliographies on a blog called prairiemarybibliographies.blogspot.com  which is long but easy to remember.  I won’t annotate them there.  Other bibs will focus on Montana, Blackfeet, acting, neuro-research, and other categories that might be useful to others.  I'll add more books if I run across them or acquire them.

PLACE

ALTMAN, NATHANIEL

SACRED TREES

Sierra Club, 1994, pb

AMATO, JOSEPH A. 

RETHINKING HOME:  A Case for Writing History

University of California Press, 2002

(Most places have active local writers who write about what they know and love.  They won’t be reviewed nationally, might not be much more than pamphlets, and sometimes must be bought on the spot, but for a person who travels, this is an excellent way to connect.)

BACHELARD, GASTON

THE POETICS OF SPACE

Beacon, 1964  pb

(Bachelard is French philosopher who is a dazzling and poetic writer who is worth searching out.  I go back and back to his books.)

BANTING, PAMELA, ED.

FRESH TRACKS: Writing the Western Landscape

Polestar, 1998  hb  (Canada)

(Canada has a vital, active environmental community that is very useful for the northern tier US states.)

BARBATO, JOSEPH AND WEINERMAN, LISA

Of the Nature Conservancy

HEART OF THE LAND: Essays on Last Great Places

Pantheon, 1994

(I tend to be suspicious of some of these big organizations and I’m tiring of the idea of “last” and “great” but still you can’t go wrong with an anthology of well-written essays.)

BOGART, BARBARA ALLEN

IN PLACE:  Stories of Landscape and Identity from the American West

High Plains Press, 1995

(Dunno.  Haven't read it yet.)

BRODY, HUGH

MAPS AND DREAMS

Pantheon, 1981  pb

(I read it but don't remember anything.)

CLOW, DEBORAH AND SNOW, DONALD

NORTHERN LIGHTS:  A Selection of New Writing from the American West

Vintage; Random House  1994   pb

(When I was circuit-riding in the seventies, this was a major dynamic cross between magazine and newspaper.  At first it was pretty dynamic and original, then it gradually became pot-bound.)

DURY, G. H.

THE FACE OF THE EARTH

Penguin, 1959  pb

(One of my father’s basic geology books.  It’s probably out-dated, though you wouldn’t think rocks would change much.  Thinking about them certainly has, esp. since satellites.)

EVERSON, WILLIAM

ARCHETYPE WEST:  The Pacific Coast as a Literary Region

Oyez, 1976  pb

(This is also an old enough collection of writers to be interesting again, as history.)

FIFFER, SHARON SLOAN AND STEVE

HOME: American Writers Remember Rooms of their Own

Vintage Books, 1995  pb

(This is sort of a maverick book -- almost interior decorating -- but many people are conditioned to write in a certain place, and people are endlessly curious about writer’s everything.  I have a couple of others of this category, but didn’t find them this time around.  I think they're big picture books, so on a different shelf.)

GALLAGHER, WINIFRED

THE POWER OF PLACE:  How our Surroundings Shape Our Thoughts, Emotions and Actions

Harper Perennial, 1993

(Very pleasant sort of reading.)

GOODRICH, CHARLES

THE PRACTICE OF HOME: Biography of a House

Lyons Press, 2004  hb

(Another sort of popular book, but what’s wrong with that?)

GREENE, ELAINE

THOUGHTS OF HOME:  Reflections on Families, Houses and Homelands from the pages of House Beautiful Magazine

Hearst Books, 1999 pb

(Close to interior porn.  Prosperity based.  Again, pleasant and reassuring.)

HIGH, LISA AND PLATT, LISS

Felix: a Journal of Media Arts and Communication, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1995

LANDSCAPE(S):  Esta dedicado a la memoria de Juan Downey  pb

(Post Modern high philosophical stuff.)

HISS, TONY

THE EXPERIENCE OF PLACE: A New Way of Looking at, and Dealing with our Radically Changing Cities and Countryside

First Vintage, 1990  pb

(City planner ideas.  They need to tell the rest of us what they know.)

KATAKIS, MICHAEL  ED.

SACRED TRUSTS:  Essays on Stewardship and Responsibility

Mercury House, 1993  pb

(Verges on political)

KEMMIS, DANIEL

COMMUNITY AND THE POLITICS OF PLACE

U of Oklahoma Press,1990  hb

(Frank politics of the left-handed persuasion.  This is a Montana author, much beloved.)

LIPPI, ROSINA

HOMESTEAD:  A novel

Mariner-Houghton Mifflin, 1998   pb

(A good story that gets you thinking.  European.)

MILLER, J. HILLIS MILLER

TOPOGRAPHIES

Series called “Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics” edited by Werner Hamacher and David Wellberry

Stanford, 1995  pb

(Fancy thought.)

NEWBY, RICH AND HUNGER, SUZANNE

WRITING MONTANA:  Literature Under the Big Sky

Montana Center for the Book, 1996  pb

(I might move this to the Montana list, but people seem to like to think of it as place-defined.  Or did.)

NISBETT, RICHARD E.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF THOUGHT:  How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why

Free Press-Simon and Schuster, 2003  pb

(This is a seminal sort of book that will challenge assumptions.  Vital.)

PARVIN, ROY

IN THE SNOW FOREST:  Three Novellas

W.W. Norton, 2000    pb

(More environment-dependent thought that’s attached to stories.)

POLLAN, MICHAEL

A PLACE OF MY OWN:  The Education of an Amateur Builder

Random House, 1997

(I may move this to architecture, but it’s a very hands-on detailed account.)

RAWLINS, C.L.

BROKEN COUNTRY:  Mountains and Memory

Henry Holt, 1996  hb

(Poetry by a philosophical sheep herder.  Recommended.)

RORTY, RICHARD

PHILOSOPHY AND THE MIRROR OF NATURE

Princeton University,1979  pb

(High flown stuff)

RYBCZINSKI, WITOLD

CITY LIFE: Urban Expectations in a New World

Scribner, 1995  hb

(This may be outdated now -- twenty years later and much, much, bigger cities in what begins to look like an intransigent Old World.)

STEIN, HOWARD F. AND NEIDERLAND, WILLIAM G.

MAPS FROM THE MIND:  Readings in Psychogeography

U of Oklahoma Press, 1989  hb

(Also a little dated, but sometimes that’s useful.)

STRONG,DAVID

CRAZY MOUNTAINS: Learning from Wilderness to Weight  Technology

SUNY Series in Environmental Public Policy, ed. by David Orr and Harlan Wilson, State University of the New York Press, 1995, pb

(Environmental rules, technologies, laws, and public uses are not my fav aspect of place, but important.)

TOBIAS, MICHAEL AND  COWAN, GEORGIANNE

THE SOUL OF NATURE: Visions of a Living Earth

Continuum Publishing, 1994  hb

(People keep trying to connect spirituality to landscape.  Sometimes it works.)

TUAN, YI-FU

SPACE AND PLACE: The Perspective of Experience

U of Minnesota Press, 1977  pb

TOPOPHILIA:  A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values

Prentice Hall, 1974 pb

(Yi-Fu Tuan is not Chinese -- it's a pseudonym.  Why are they sometimes honorable?   Tuan tries to take a sort of Buddhist approach.  He's from the past, but a key person.)

VILEISIS, ANN

DISCOVERING THE UNKNOWN LANDSCAPE: A History of America’s Wetlands

Island Press,  1997  hb

(A category of land that is pretty crucial in these water-short times.)

WEST, ELLIOTT

GROWING UP WITH THE COUNTRY: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier

University of New Mexico Press, 1989  hb

(This is another cross between territory and history, through the eyes of a human developmental stage.  It’s a friendly book but still eye-opening, esp. in our cushy liberal times.)

WHAT'S UNDER THE SKULL

The human brain is capable of deep ceremonial feeling because of evolution, which created a cumulative set of subdivisions capable of supporting each other, as well as doubling back synergistically to create new abilities.  The physical structure of this sequence that reaches back to paleo dawn-time is based on the upright spine where at the top of the vertebrae is balanced a heavy head between two shoulders that enable the movement of arms to throw, to cradle, to lift.  (Under where shoulders meet arms is a furry place where human pheromones accumulate.  Smell as identity and emotion.  A product.  A sensorium loop.)

The top of the spine, the “BRAIN STEM” has three parts which go back to reptile days.  The three parts are the “Midbrain”  (basic vital life functions such as breathing, heartbeat, and blood pressure),  the “Pons” (sleep, hearing, posture, movement), and Medulla (breathing and heart rate).

The “LIMBIC SYSTEM” is the mammal part where the emotions are rooted and contains  four main parts: 

the Thalamus (Axons from every sensory system (except olfaction) synapse here as the last relay site before the information reaches the cerebral cortex)

Hypothalamus (homeostasis, emotion, thirst, hunger, circadian rhythms, and control of the autonomic nervous system. In addition, it controls the pituitary).  

Amygdala (involved in memory, emotion, and fear. This is a component of the limbic system.), and 

Hippocampus (converts short term memory to more permanent memory, and recalls spatial relationships in the world about us)

The CEREBRUM looks like a shelled walnut.  It is in halves.  Each half has four “lobes” which are named for location: front, back, top, sides, 

 Frontal Lobe- associated with reasoning, planning, parts of speech, movement, emotions, and problem solving

Parietal Lobe- associated with movement, orientation, recognition, perception of stimuli

Occipital Lobe- associated with visual processing

Temporal Lobe- associated with perception and recognition of auditory stimuli, memory, and speech

The NEOCORTEX is the “rind” of the cortex and has six layers, labelled from the outer layers in, I to VI. In humans, the neocortex is involved in higher functions such as sensory perception, generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning, conscious thought, and language.  These layers are the location of consciousness, both one’s ability to feel like oneself, to introspect, to know where you are, to remember consciously, to reflect and reason.

________

It now becomes clear that the prefrontal neocortex, behind and above the eyes, contains specialized cells.  We don’t know what they all do, but they most crucially enable empathy, which is our access to communication and community with other living beings.  Von Economo neurons are spindle shaped cells found only in humans, primates, dolphins and elephants.  There are not many but they are found in the anterior cingulate cortex (the part that wraps around the corpus callosum that connects the two brain lobes) and the frontal insula.   These cells monitor, edit, and respond to perception, motor control, self-awareness, cognitive functioning, interpersonal experience, pain, hunger, realizing a mistake, empathy, trust, guilt, embarrassment, love, responding to infants, recognizing and reading faces, “gut” feelings (intuitions), itching, temperature discomfort, “sense of humor,” and other human “feelings.”   This area has something to do with schizophrenia.

Allman, a researcher, says that it's the link between self-monitoring and awareness of others that makes it possible for us to understand the feelings of other people. "The basic proposition that I'm advancing is the notion that self-awareness and social awareness are part of the same functioning.”  These functions are the crux of what religious institutions try to touch and mold into the institution’s basic understanding of the culture.

But my understanding of the design of deep ceremony is not interested in an institutional point of view.  What this theory of deep experience revolves around is the use of the senses and the neocortex to affect the unconscious parts of the brain and body as it interacts with its surroundings, both taking in information and creating responses. When the conscious, the unconscious, and the entire body is in harmony, then the experience registers deeply.

The chief method of thought in the six layers of the neocortex is metaphorical.  There are two “maps” inscribed on the layers.  One is a simulacrum of the human body with the distortion being that areas that get the most use have acquired the most neurons, most thickly connected, and are represented by being much larger on this mental map.

The other is a kind of GPS system that monitors our orientation in space: up, down, moving forward, going sideways, tipping over, and so on.  It records connections between bits of information.  Most thought metaphors are geometrically organized.  People sketch out little diagrams of their ideas.  Metaphor study is separate from brain anatomy and it is metaphors that are most crucial in the organizing of a ceremony.  (See the work of Lakoff and Johnson).  To make good sense, metaphors depend upon the skillful handling of sense memory and spatial relationship.  

The Gungan Sacred Place on Naboo

The most common deep metaphor (unconscious) for ceremony in Western anthropological terms is that of the Space.  A ceremony is like a room, a place, where it is safe enough to be vulnerable, to share, and to change.  For Victor Turner, whatever is used to take the person’s consciousness into that “space” is a threshold (a limen).  When you go over it, the “space” or “sanctuary” is felt.  (See Eliade, “The Sacred and the Profane”)  Ideally, the physical enclosed space of a church, a temple, or other holy physical place would coincide with the “felt” sacrality of the person’s frame of mind (connectome among the responding neurons).  

If the person visits this “place” regularly -- either as a physical location or as a mental state -- the threshold will be helped by habit, which is a memory function.  Some people simply never manage to achieve this “frame of mind” and will not be able to understand those who do.  Whether this is an unlearned skill or some kind of anatomical defect cannot be known because it is so subtle and so dispersed throughout the brain structures.  But it can be achieved by surprise if the environment, including other people, evokes that “frame of mind.”  This is where the stream of consciousness flows, and it is almost hydraulic in its nature.  Sometimes sheer intensity, as in combat or other moments full of adrenaline (which is a very powerful drug) will push (or pull) people over the limen.  It is linked to intimacy.

Thresholds vary according to culture and also respond to individual experience and temperament.  The task of ceremonial design is to find the triggers that open the doors.  The “deeper” one can empathize with the people present, the more likely to find the assumed, unconscious, ingrained, sense and metaphor triggers that will take the group across the threshold.

Now we can talk about communion, it’s origin and enactment.  You’ll notice that it’s a word similar to community, and therefore depends upon a shared metaphor that is very basic, that of eating and drinking together.  What that shared metaphor means to the persons involved and what they are actually consuming will be linked by their daily lives.  The liturgist who can use that as a poet will be able to touch hearts.  No divine intervention is necessary.

WHAT'S UNDER YOUR PYRAMID?

Once years ago I was taking a workshop around the Unitarian circuit that was about “place” and the importance of knowing the place where you lived.  A man pondered this and objected, “But there’s NOTHING under my house!  I live in a housing development and there is nothing there!”  This produced an image of his house floating in the air.  But -- just like every other place -- there was plenty of history and geology under his house -- he just didn’t have a consciousness raised enough to get past the bulldozers.

Indigenous and autochthonous and First Nations and aboriginal are all about the place where the people found a way to survive that melded them together into a tribe.  The values, the “ethical space,” of those conditions is what has made them what they are.

I don’t know how I failed to meet Candace Savage when I was in Saskatoon and visited Eastend.  http://www.candacesavage.ca  A woman who kisses giraffes is fairly memorable!  It appears that I just missed her, coming after she left for a few years and leaving before she returned.  She is ten years younger than I am, which means nothing, really, except that time is always a part of place.  Stan Rowe, a soil scientist and also a Saskatoon person, talked about “slabs of space-time.”  Our slabs didn't coincide but they echo. 

Here’s a quote from Candace’s generously illustrated photo book, “Prairie: A Natural History.” It’s the epigraph to the preface in the second edition:  “There is no way to hold back the future.  But we can shape the course of events by engaging -- fully, deeply, and passionately -- with the present. . .  This approach is sometimes referred to as a strategy of “no regrets,” because the work is worth doing now, no matter what happens next.”  The accompanying photo shows a huge moon hanging over prairie where faraway cows graze in what is called “wolf light,” when the sky is dark purple and the land is shadowed.  It is liminal time, but especially on the prairie where there is nothing to block the horizon.

This book makes an excellent “bible” for those who are autochthonous to this place in the rainshadow of the Rockies and a little farther east.  It includes the point of view expressed by a scientist when we stood in a group near Eastend at a site where a dino skeleton had been found.  He said,  “You must understand that at that time here was not here.”  He meant that the continents had shifted radically so that this point on the planet had moved far away from where it had been at the time, and the skeleton came along for the ride.  So ancient a land is revealed by the constant erosion that exposes new bones from the past around Drumheller and the Tyrrell Museum which some people exclaim is a temple to evolution.  www.tyrrellmuseum.com/ “Features ten signature galleries devoted to paleontology, with 40 dinosaur skeletons with more than 110000 fossil specimens.”

One of the great grasslands of the world, though seemingly inexhaustible to the First Peoples, has suffered from constant resource exporting, the limits of water use, and inexorable climate change that have certainly altered and are exhausting the great resources left by the glaciers who ground across the land ten thousand years ago and then melted, leaving a huge underground aquifer.  The wind blows away and storms run off topsoil, so that carcinogenic chemicals must be added in order to achieve ag goals.  Now the land is criss-crossed by railroads, pipelines, highways, high tension electrical wires, drainage canals, and wind farms with their red night lights that drown the stars in blood.  The profits do not stay on the rez and, in fact, do not even stay in the United States or Canada, since the investors may be in Japan or Europe.

Eastend, Saskatchewan, where Wallace Stegner’s early years were spent (for the specifics, see his memoir, “Wolf Willow”) is now a writer’s retreat, thanks largely to the efforts of Sharon and Pete Butala.  The ranch that Sharon writes about so eloquently in "The Perfection of the Morning" is now a refuge where the original grasses are grazed by today's buffalo.  Stegner has been an object of love/hate for some people because they feel he ought to have given more attention to the indigenous peoples.  The truth is that in the years Stegner was there, the Indians had been extirpated: removed to reservations.  He never knew any -- but he knew the land in much the same way they did, and came to about the same conclusions.  In a way, his love/hate relationship with his wildass father is something like the struggle of the indigenous against the empire builders.  Stegner’s desire to be a proper academic, more in the frame of his mother’s world view, took him to universities and New England which separated him from indigenous tribes even more.

Those who remain are divided between lovers and opportunists.  I will say that opportunists' pyramids are somewhat shorter than those of lovers.  They will not reach as far up as transcendence, nor do they touch the ground.  The same division exists on reservations among the enrolled tribal peoples.  All those people who thought the key to life was getting a degree from a fancy university were not wrong, but it’s not enough.  If they want to be Real People, Nitzitahpi, they will need to return and walk all day through the grass like Narcisse Blood and Ryan Heavy Head, just as the ancestors did.  You could take your dog along.

When all those children, sent away at great cost in both dollars and emotion, come back to the high east slope -- which they have been doing for years now -- they have a lot of questions and a lot of new ideas.  They will not be backpacking mountain climbers who try to get higher than everyone else, but rather prowlers of the sliding shale where one can find the old dream beds.  They might even try lying down in them for a while.  The songs up there are not from meadowlarks, those operatic carolers, but rather the harsh and incisive “grawk” of ravens that may remember the old timers who came to fast and hallucinate.  (Well, maybe YOU think it’s hallucinating -- but maybe it’s something else entirely.)  Consult a raven.

In sci-fi vids and movies we often see floating islands of cities and even jungle and that can give us the illusion that our lives can separate from the planet, escaping from all the pitfalls of history and the bedrocks of geology.  But it can’t be done.  Shouldn’t be done.   Instead my advice is to deepen and intensify your own “sensorium” so that no matter where you are, you really hear the rustlings, smell the dust, taste the wind, feel some big boulder erratic pressing against your back when you lean there to rest, and possibly stoop to pick up a buffalo stone from the grass, somehow hearing its small seductive chirps left over from when it was part of a sea creature long before here was even here.  Then you’ll have something to dream about.

Quoting Stan Rowe:  "The reality of the world is not people and separate 'other things'. . . it is -- beyond all understanding -- an integrated ecosphere of marvelous creativity."

THEY CALL IT NARRATIVE PSYCHOLOGY OR STORY THEOLOGY

These are recent photos of the house where I grew up, 1939 to 1961, and returned for emergency shelter twice, once in 1973 and again in 1991. My mother came here as a bride in 1937. The mortgage payment was $35 a month. She said that the house was what tipped the scales to persuade her to marry. I think my father knew that, though he bought the house to help his brother, who had a job selling re-possessed houses for a bank. It was beautifully made, an investment by a hardware business whose owners had built a much bigger house across the street.

All the doorknobs were glass and the windows had retractable screens that rolled up into the top frame like shades. Built-in cabinets. The sunporch is on the north side and had French doors to separate it from the rest of the house. My mother died in that room in 1998, at her request.

Her bedroom had always been upstairs on that north end but in the end she couldn’t go up stairs. There were two bedrooms upstairs and we kids shared the south one. There was one bathroom upstairs, but she always had plans to build a bed/bath suite out the back. Never did it. My father balked.

Christmas in this house was the first one I knew. I flew back from college but never from Browning. My mother didn’t go all out for decorations, but she always had a nice tree and enjoyed doing it with flair. At one point she made candles because my dad’s co-op (Pacific Supply, ag wholesale) was selling the wax and she did demonstrations. She made snowballs, casting two halves in a bowl, whipping the wax with a fork to make snow, throwing on glitter, lots of glitter. We had a mantel clock with a curve that she converted into a roof with Santa in a sled. There was an embossed aluminum foil angel wrapped around a candle in a coffee can. More glitter. We never put the tinsel on the tree carefully enough, strand by strand, as she thought it should be.

It was hard to buy for her, but one year she got an electric coffee percolator and thought that was just about the best ever. She perked her morning coffee right at the table. She wanted it HOT. Her bedroom was not heated, the door was always locked, and she hid our presents there. But the locks worked with skeleton keys and someone had given us a box of them, so we tested until we found one that worked. When I was nearly too old for dolls, I yearned for a life-sized crying baby doll, its lifelike plastic face all contorted. She tried to talk me out of it, but in the end she bought it. Looking for our presents when everyone was gone, I found it, unwrapped and stuffed into a paper bag with its muslin body unclothed. What would have been magic became guilt. It’s in a box out in the bunkhouse right now. I can’t quite bear to abandon those dolls.

To my father’s family Christmas was always books, generic reading glasses, and fountain pens. The big healthy prairie-raised brothers and tight-knit family were in my mother’s opinion another characteristic in favor of marriage, since they could back each other up. That was before WWII, which somehow scattered everyone. We had to go to prescription glasses, and fountain pens barely hung on, but books have stayed. I still have some of our childhood books, mostly Christmas presents.

This time of year is rainy in Portland, more chilly than cold, with surprise snowstorms. If it gets to single-digit cold, things freeze up and crack open. This house was always cozy. Our fireplace was in use most of the time if only to burn trash. If it wasn’t, there was a white-painted plywood screen to stick over the hole. It had a map glued onto it, but I don’t remember what it was a map of. Mostly I remember the sounds, rain tapping or wind teasing, the pipes shuddering when the water went on or off, the trickling of gutters, the individual sounds of door latches -- some creaked, some snapped, some jingled. The most chilling sound was the flap on the mail slot in the front door which shrieked like a banshee when the wind hit it just right.

When we moved in the neighborhood was European immigrant craftsmen. No kids around. Then wartime and the two apartment buildings on the corners had single women with kids living in them. After the war there was a kind of pause, then a lot of people moved up in society, meaning out of the middle of the city. The Vanport flood displaced Southern blacks up into our part of town. Things slid for a while, then I was gone for decades, and when I finally came back in 1991, my mother was living between a terrifying woman who had lived there since she was a child but who had gone insane from drugs and whose feral daughter was FAS. The original dignified black parents were dead. On the other side was a man who rented driveway space to camp trailers housing addicts. Now and then one of them turned up dead in a trailer or under the bushes in some nearby yard.

Once a teenager crawled up on that sunporch roof and in through that north bedroom window. My mother wasn’t home at the time but she got the shudders about it for a long time. Then my brother was hurt and moved in or she might have sold out. When I came to visit, I slept in my van at the curb and was just drifting off when a shotgun exploded a hundred feet from my head. Then a lot of other shooting and gunning of motors. No cops ever showed up. It was Crips and Bloods playing guns. Often we heard gunfire in the evening and my mother and brother would turn off the lights and sit on the floor.

But now it’s all turned around. We sold the house to a symphony conductor and then there was a new baby born to two lawyers. It’s close enough to downtown Portland to walk -- an easy bike trip. The street briefly went gay, then bleached to white again, but mostly young -- I guess. I haven’t been back. My cousin seems to think things are getting better. The main cross-street a half-block away is a major art street now, hispanic in flavor. The proud black woman who ran a coffee shop with a sideyard that had a flowerbed shaped like Africa is still there, I think. And it was brilliant to get rid of the grass in front of my mother’s house. She’d love the way it is now.

Here she is with her hanging basket for the season.

My cousin took the house photo last summer. She lives at the top of the hill that the street runs up. It’s on enough of a slant to push a car to get it to start and if it weren’t for a jog at Killingsworth, you could coast on down to the Columbia River. This cousin and I only found each other recently and I didn’t live there anymore when she moved in. Our great-grandmothers were two of five sisters in Scotland who emigrated at the beginning of the 19th century. Some day I’ll write a novelized version of their five fates, which were quite different. The narrative will be as much about place as events.

CASSOWARIES

CASSOWARIES
Cassowaries are close to being the oldest living descendants of dinosaurs -- not the big ones like diplodocus, but the fast ones like the velociraptors in “Jurassic Park.” They are rattites, which means they have no keelbone in their breasts -- the anchor-point for the broad wings that allow eagles and geese to fly. Cassowaries like emus and ostriches, are without wings fit for flight. They look a little bit like guinea fowl on steroids, which is natural since they are found in New Guinea these days. The rattites evolved in Gonwandaland, the continent that pre-existed what today is South America, Africa, Madagascar, Antarctica, India, other parts of South Asia, and Australia. At one time it even included Florida and most of Southern Europe. “Science tells us that the Continents of Australia, India, South America, Africa, and Antarctica, existed together as a separate landmass as long as 650 million years ago. And as these continents only began to break up some 130 million years ago, this great supercontinent had a life of around 520 million years; making it perhaps the most important geological structure of the last billion years.”

Dinosaurs crashed about 65 million years ago. By that time Gonwandaland had reconfigured very slowly but quite a lot, changing ocean currents -- which changed weather -- and slowly separating in some places while staying attached in others, so that the evolution of those animals stayed connected as well. But the evolutionary paths were QUITE different, as platypuses, kangaroos and koalas demonstrate.

The inhabitants of the little complex of villages studied by a man named Andrew Gell in the 1960’s didn’t know anything about this plate tectonic geological history, but they knew a lot about today’s cassowary. The bird lives in jungle, has a five-inch blade of a claw, and can disembowel an adult human. They are the second biggest bird on the planet (after ostriches) and the third tallest. (After ostriches and emus.) So elusive that they can stand within a few feet without a person realizing it and then slip away without ever being sensed, they sometimes go on reckless crashing flights through the thick tropical growth, even smashing headlong into tree trunks, achieving speeds of over thirty mph and jumping five feet in the air. They are good swimmers.

A cassowary might be five and a half feet tall and weigh a hundred and fifty pounds, roughly the size of a sow grizzly. Like grizzlies, they are frugiverous (they love to eat fruits) and are interwoven with the forest in part because their droppings distribute the seeds of the plants (well-fertilized) over a wide area. Unlike grizzlies, cassowaries lay three to eight pale aqua eggs at a time, each one three and a half by five and a half inches. “The female does not care for the eggs or the chicks; the male incubates the eggs for two months, then cares for the brown-striped chicks for nine months, defending them fiercely against all potential predators, including humans.” And that scourge of wilderness, pigs.

On the tops of their heads is a kind of callus structure that is evidently a sort of crash helmet. But they are also very aggressive, ferocious fighters, which might make a protection like that an attractively potent silhouette for the ladies. Birds seem to admire headgear (which is ironic since so many were almost stamped out when they became popular decorations for human ladies). One experimenter “helped out” a certain kind of songbird with a plume on its head by gluing on additions and then showing the augmented suitors to females. They became ever more attractive as, like Bartholomew Cubbins, their heads became more elaborate -- until they could hardly hold their heads up. Google reports no athletic teams called “The Cassowaries” though one could easily imagine someone in a mascot suit disguised as a big aggressive bird with a helmet. (I note that there is no school mascot called the “The Pigs” either. “The Boars”? The Bores?)

New Guinea as it exists today is the product of a plate tectonic crash that left it with a miserable combination of swampy bug-ridden lowlands, tilted rocky foothills and highlands so tall that they cast their rain shadow over Australia, making it the fire-swept droughty continent that it is. The humans who live in New Guinea have a precarious existence, always on the verge of starvation. The people are among the last to be introduced to the contemporary world. One should not deduce from this that are not smart and resourceful -- indeed the environment is so harsh that the weak and stupid don’t last long and Gell reports that no man was able to point to a grandson -- only sons. Life was only two generations long.

When “law and order” arrived and dealt with a violent incident by removing the most aggressive men, some to prison and some to work on plantations, the seized men took note of the terrain through the airplane window as they were flown out -- over two mountain ranges. In the new place they immediately escaped and headed home. Only a few achieved the goal but none were stupid nor weak -- veritable cassowaries of men, single-minded. There are no athletic programs (instead of “modeling war,” they proceed straight to battle) or even schools to have mascots in remote New Guinea, but the men consciously identify with the monster birds. They feature largely in ceremonies.

My hypothesis is that meaningful ceremonies are as ecological as life itself is -- that is, what people believe is true is very much shaped by the world around them. The efficacy of their symbols is directly drawn from their familiarity with the phenomena. “The Lamb of God” can hardly mean much to an Inuit, but it means a great deal to a sheep rancher who has delivered a real lamb, held it in his arms, and taken it to maturity. Still, raising a lamb in Mexico is different from raising a lamb in Montana or Australia. So knowing that a cassowary is a vital symbol to the Umeda tells us what they think the world and the sacred is “about.” As always, survival. But how? At what cost?

Today most people in the world are no longer “emplaced” as were the New Guinea tribesmen of the Sixties who had never left their valleys. Now we look at ecology on a cosmic scale and see relationships over incredible spans of time. In spite of Planet Earth images, we no longer have as rich tactile and concrete nourishing connections with the local ecology since we don’t know where our food was grown, what it looked like before it was picked or killed, what its habits were, its style, its charisma. But the Umeda knew cassowaries very well, especially how they tasted.

More about this later.

THE ADVANTAGES OF DISPLACEMENT

As any homesteader knows, it’s important to stick -- to plant yourself the a Dog Soldier intending to fight to the death plunges his spear into the ground. But then, how did the homesteader arrive at all except by being displaced one way or another from the previous location? The Indians who had previously lived on the lands now being homesteaded might ask that question if they could stop grieving over their own displacement.

Displacement from a job is as shocking as displacement from a “place,” maybe a house that is underwater either literally or symbolically. But there ARE advantages. Those of us who have been bumped out of our routines and achievements over and over again, are not always appreciative at the time. Some are better adapted for such catastrophes than others are. There is always talk about the importance of community, but what about the individual who has lost community?

My vocational displacements are tied to geographical relocations. Undergrad college, employment on the Blackfeet Reservation, marriage/divorce, animal control, grad school, circuit-riding, congregations, Blackfeet reservation, City of Portland, Valier. (I’ve been in Valier longer than I was in Portland last time.) Each move turned me over inside, rather traumatically, like being spaded up -- “harrowed” is the term. And each move brought up new parts of myself. It helped that I was one of those people who always resists closure, completion. Some would say I was child-like.

Never at any point in my education did I think about being an animal control officer, but when I was more or less forced into the role, I found that I brought a lot to it. Sometimes it’s a big advantage not to have any mental picture of what a thing will be. Seeing it free of stereotyped assumptions meant asking a new set of questions, finding new options, having an entirely different understanding of where it could go. It also means threatening the people who have been perpetuating the assumptions and forcing outcomes that they thought were good for them personally. Coming into Multnomah County Animal Control when I did fortunately happened at the same time that Mike Burgwin came to the supervisor job with a totally new set of assumptions. One of the most basic ways we agreed was that we saw the job as a “street job,” not a shelter maintenance job. Therefore, we concentrated on what would make the street safer. We were “hot,” experimental, high-energy.

For contrast consider teaching in Cut Bank. My assumptions were from the Sixties: idealistic, creative, not pre-determined. The leadership had one goal only: keeping their high paying jobs, which meant preventing any sort of controversy. It was not about the kids. In fact, one of we three English teachers was really a science teacher and the other one, who had a college degree in English, could not correct her students’ grammar quizzes. The previous heavyweight (literally) English teacher had taught despairing Russian novelists, which the kids accepted as truth, but he had promised to flunk the main hell-raiser among the athletic stars -- so was banished to teaching typing (keyboarding) which he only minimally understood. The hell-raisers had run off teachers and boasted about it. I became very attached to them and let the prairie princesses languish with little or no attention. They decided to bring me down and did. I gave them the ammunition. The place nauseated me. I was too old to do what I ought to have or even to figure out what it ought to be. But it will make a good novel: “Prairie Gladiators.”

The good thing about being a writer is that everything is grist for the mill. And I learned about my limits. Bob Scriver had said to me decades earlier: “You know what you CAN do, but you don’t know what you CAN’T do!” (It applied to him as well.) This was an important lesson that some people learn in death. In fact, it has to be relearned in old age.

But I knew enough to buy this house, set it up so it works for a reader/writer, and begin my final job which turns out not to be only writing but interfacing between myself and a highly unlikely co-writer, his cadre of young men full of angst and gifts, and whatever parts of the world are interested. When Montana shut the door in my face to protect the generation ahead of me, which refuses to give up control, it was too late. I had gone another way. They had no power.

Everything back as far as my grade school teachers is relevant now: the Vernon library teacher, the high school drama teacher, the undergrad world of amazing dimensions, the deep experience on the reservation with Bob Scriver, the final acceptance of personal authority and power at Animal Control, the great dreams and aspirations of seminary, and then the amusement (and bitterness) of all that turning out to be something quite different. The nineties were miserable emotional debt-paying years, but meant that the last family deaths arrived paid-in-full, and freed me to go back to my key place, where I am.

Many more forty-below zero patches of weather and I may be asking whether I can stay here. The nation and the world are changing the economic, political, infrastructure systems and that may throw me out of here as well -- maybe tip me over into the final displacement. One of the people on my list of contacts whom I had meant to visit to form a friendship was David Baker, an earth scientist who knew Montana in a way I wanted to explore. He was almost exactly my age, born Nov. 9, 1939. I talked to him via email and once by mistake he sent me an email meant for his mother which disconcerted all three of us. His funeral is tomorrow in Great Falls. He was born there.

My most important relationship at present is “placeless,” in a “virtual” place because it’s mostly an Internet-based location. Not time-bound either, since Tim moves through so many time-zones. I do here-and-now as Stays-Put-Woman. He does the Joe Campbell hero (or anti-hero) always moving anytime. And yet, when Tim is at his most desperate, his best time and place is his wife, the True Hero. We honor the complexity of life, the power of paradox.

PRAIRIE COLORS (or colours)

It’s a still gray day, not even the skritching of dead leaves killed by cold before they could change colors and drop from the tree. If you were to paint the landscapes I saw when I drove to Cut Bank (thirty miles north), you would only need a few tubes of paint: Payne’s Gray, Yellow Ochre, and maybe a little Cadmium Yellow for highway centerlines and traffic signs. Some black for cows. But the colors are all muted, not exactly pastel, but a little grayed out. Thin colors in values that are close together, not very light and not very dark. Shapes are long and reclining, except that the edges of mountains and what we call “reefs” or buttes, make a kind of handwriting along the horizon, way far out there.

In the town the colors were Crayola, primary and color wheel stuff, meant to suggest enamel, plastic, flags, toys. . . commerce. I grew up in Oregon where the only crayons you needed were green. Did you know there are twenty kinds of green in the Crayola full set? Not counting the specialty crayons: Changeables (like Tangee lipstick, they go on one color and become another), Magic Scent (they had to stop using food smells like “berry” because the kids ate the crayons), Gem Tones and Silver Swirls. I’ve neither seen nor tasted any “specialty crayons.”

I went to Dick Blick’s website for art supplies to kick up some action in my brain and was pleased. It appears that in this context there are not only new colors but new “media” beyond pastels, oil paints, watercolor, or even craypas, which are a personal favorite -- though I never know quite how to use them -- because of their brilliant colors, highly “saturated” in the lingo. One Easter I wrote and drew on hard-boiled eggs with craypas, then dipped them in black ink. Looked great.

There are things called “color sticks” described as instantly drying oil paint. I’ve never seen one. It makes me think of animal markers (http://www.livestockmarkers.com), which are (yes) for writing numbers or symbols on cows, horses, pigs, sheep. Here’s something I never knew about before: “SHEEP MARKING CRAYON - Designed for marking sheep in varying climates. 4”x 2” (10cm x 5cm) The Ram Crayon is to be used in conjunction with a Ram marking harness. The harness is to be placed upon the Ram. The crayon (which should be on the animal's chest) is fastened to the harness with a split pin. When the ram mounts the ewe the crayon will leave a mark that sticks well. The color of the mark on the back of the ewe allows the breeder to track the correct Ram. Consists of top grade waxes, and pigments which mark in intermittent weather conditions which sticks well to animals.” It makes me think of a naughty story about a woman who was intimately entered without her permission just after a doctor had painted her entrance with purple gentian to treat a fungal infection. The culprit, in his private part, had clearly “voted” for her, though it was not his finger that was inky. It strikes me that putting a crayon harness on a ram might be a little like belling a cat.

More properly, there was a Montana artist (I think a woman in Bozeman) who drew big gorgeous prairie scenes of runaway grass fires and flaming sunsets, using animal markers for their broad strokes and vivid colors. I’m told that over the years the colors, like the auto paints used by Jackson Pollock, lost their punch. I hope that’s not true.

The descriptions and instructions for this animal crayon website are in French. French animals? Cat Urbikit at http://www.stephenbodio.blogspot.com, who ranches sheep in Wyoming, uses Nepalese ranch hands. Her guard dogs are big Eurasian breeds, but the dogs who work with the herders are more likely to be Australian heelers or black-and-white border collies. When they mark the sheep, what language do they use? Is there an international language of sheep marking symbols?

But I’m getting off the point again, which is colors. I discovered that the computer codes for colors are called “hex” colors because they are coded in 16 bits or pixels or whatever. They started to call the system “sexameter” instead of “hexameter” but the designers got all embarrassed. Clearly not French. I suppose the people who are really into it don’t say “blue” or “green” anymore, but rather refer to the sixteen number code. Talk about a foreign language. Usually the choices are presented as a table that automatically translates into “hex.”

I guess we can’t talk about color without talking about language. On the prairie, when speaking of color, it is also necessary to talk about the season. The green hazes of spring, the yellow and blue flowers that follow, the sheets of lupine lavender, then the tawny burn-off of late summer and the red-orange of Indian paintbrush in the mountains. When the day is winter and clear, it shimmers with the Monet iridescence of gold wheat stubble among snow reflecting sky blue.

When the land is wet in winter, which doesn’t happen for very many days, the colors are saturated, the russets and siennas and burnt ochres of old masters’ oil paintings of interiors. I’m always interested that some mud is greenish and other mud is reddish, depending on whether the sea life pulverized into it aeons ago accumulated copper or iron.

I tried to Google around to find out about what makes DayGlo colors so bright, but no luck. One gets lost in phosphorescence, flourescence, until the nuances are too hard to figure out. No one seems to really know.

Some people do not like the taupe, dun, beige, ecru, sorts of colors and their reaction to the color scheme of the late fall Montana prairie is that there is nothing to look at. But to my eye, that’s when things get interesting. There is only one color I really hate to see: the gray of a chemical fallow field, which has been sprayed to kill everything, creating vegetable ash. In theory, the killer chemical will be gone by the time a new crop is planted. In actuality? I don’t think so.

WILLOW CREEK: Fiction

“You got any hooks?” asked Tad Pinfeathers.

“I think I got three. You got any line?” said Elmer Arrow Hits.

“Lotsa line. And I saved a really good fishing pole I cut last time. Let’s go down to Willow Creek.”

The creek meandered through the town, wandering under a bridge and into a culvert before coming out on the other side of the east boundary. It was a wet year with lots of late snow and the grass and brush were thick and tall. July poured down on the boys’ ball caps and t-shirts as they crashed along, heading for the part of the creek beyond where people had dumped in old tires and bedsprings. They caught grasshoppers as they went, giving their heads a good squeeze to make them behave and stuffing them into a plastic bag that had been waving from a bush.

“What you gotta do,” the boys always claimed, “Is think like a fish!” Look for the deep water, the shelter, the eddies that would keep things like bugs moving past their noses. Pass up the shallow wide water warmed by sun. Though that was very good for wading. They sent the blue heron who lived along there up out of the water and he went lazily flapping on big wings on towards the mountains, legs trailing, easily getting way ahead of them.

“What’s that?”

“Where you lookin’?”

“Somebody’s legs in the grass.”

“Must be a drunk.”

They became very silent and slipped around to where they could see the rest of the person. It was a man. With braids.

“It’s my uncle,” said Elmer. “He’s a wino.” Sure enough, there was a bottle of Thunderbird, almost empty. “Must be passed out.” Elmer liked to point out both the obvious and the more subtle aspects of life. “Don’t wake him up. Sometimes he wakes up really mad.”

“What if he’s dead?” Tad liked dramatic possibilities. Elmer cut a long strand of grass and held it under his uncle’s nose where it pulsed with breath.

“He ain’t dead.”

“Yet!” added Tad. The uncle was certainly deeply passed out.

“Aw, forget him. Let’s go fishin’ -- that’s what we came for.” The boys went on along the bank, testing the water now and then but not catching anything. Pretty soon they felt sweaty and settled under some willow brush. There were few trees out this far. It was the gravel flood-plain of Willow Creek, mostly grass if you got away from the water. Their minds kept wandering back to the uncle.

“My dad threw him out the last time he came over drunk,” reported Elmer. “He was yellin’ and cussin’ and throwin’ stuff around. My mother tried to calm him down because he’s her baby brother, but he wouldn’t listen.”

“What was he so mad about?”

“Flunked the fire fighting exam. Can’t go make money this summer.”

“He might’ve gone fire fighting and hurt his back or something. Like that guy last summer that the tree fell on. They say he’ll never walk again.”

“Yeah, but now he’s got disability. He’s got it made!”

“Can’t fancy-dance no more, though.” They weren’t really old enough boys to consider what the injury might do the unfortunate man’s love life. “Wonder if he could still ride a horse.”

The boys would love to ride horses, or so they thought, though the only time they’d even been on a horse was when that guy was trying to start a program for keeping boys out of trouble by teaching them to break wild mustang horses. They got to sit on some of the tamer ones then. The horse’d put its nose around and blow snot on them, which made them laugh hysterically. They were at an age when all body fluids struck them as funny. They sat remembering the smell of horses. It was really strong.

That’s because there was a real horse on the other side of the willow brush. In fact, it was one of those mustang horses. They were really good at escaping and going wherever they wanted to. This one was mouse-colored, kinda speckled, with a very long black tail and mane. The front of the mane fell over its face and it gazed at them with big eyes like a girl looking through her bangs.

“Should we catch it?” asked Elmer. He liked a consensus opinion. His grandfather always said that if the tribal council could just reach a consensus once in a while instead of pulling in every direction, they might get somewhere.

“Might get kicked or run over. Besides, no rope.” The horse looked at them mildly and chewed a big bract of yellow sweet clover, letting it hang out of her mouth where she hadn’t sucked it up yet. The honey scent of sweet clover mixed with the incense of sun-warmed horse hide. The boys were content to watch and smell. Pretty soon the horse went off and the heron came back along the creek, now heading east.

“Better start home,” said Tad. “Don’t want to miss supper.”

“You know, Tad, we’re gonna remember today all our lives but we won’t remember what we had for supper.” His grandpa often said that. They laughed as they ambled back along the crushed trail they’d made.

Pretty soon they came to the uncle, still passed out and now in full sun because the shade had moved away from him. He was still breathing. “How long does he usually stay passed out?”

“I don’t think he’ll make it to supper.”

“He’s gonna be reeeeeallly sunburned.” Tad looked at the uncle consideringly. “I think we should help him out. We could cover him with branches. I saw elephants doing that on the nature channel. They rip down leafy branches and cover up an elephant on the ground.”

“That was a DEAD elephant! My uncle is not dead!” Elmer suddenly felt panic rise within him. But Tad was already breaking off branches and laying them gently over the uncle in a kind of bower. He was sort of leaning them so there was space under them. Elmer got to work, too. The uncle muttered a little but didn’t wake up. “We should get rid of that bottle, too.” He poured out the last dregs of Thunderbird and threw the empty in the creek.

“Won’t he be mad?” worried Tad.

“He won’t remember.”

“I’m gonna set the last of these grasshoppers loose.”

“They won’t live now that you’ve squeezed their heads.”

“I think they should be free, no matter what.” His hands had “tobacco juice” on them, but he didn’t care.