GRIZZLIES AND HUMANS SHARING AN ECOTONE

It is well-known that the best way to exclude unwanted populations is to address the habitat.  If there is no place to shelter or to eat, animals and insects will move out.  This is a matter of considerable anguish for humans in cities where nearness to jobs and the cheapness of living can smash into each other, as they are in San Francisco where techie workers have pushed out artists, poets, and other traditionally low-pay people, who often have temperaments that cause them to value and attach to unusual and low-status places.

People assume that population pressure among multiplying, protected, grizzly bears is what is driving them down to the flats.  But let’s consider the interface: is there anything driving people up into the mountains?  What about rising population pressure in cities, but emptying of the prairie by industrial farming with machines and chemicals?  Shrinking small towns have dynamics and cravings of their own.  The romantic seeking of spiritual renewal in mountains means backpackers everywhere.

The east slope of the Rockies is an ecotone, meaning it is slanted up towards the mountains.  The four towns that abut Glacier Park (Heart Butte, East Glacier, St. Mary, Babb) are all at about 4,500 feet of altitude.  All occasionally have bears in town.  

Browning is at 4377.  Valier, just off the rez, is 3816.  With a little strategic sheltering and a good growing season, you can grow a tomato in Valier.  In fact, the garden plunder late in the season is enough to attract raccoons.  The Sweetgrass Hills rise to 6983.  Logan Pass is at 6,646.

Bears den as high as the tree-line which can be higher than 7000 feet, or recently a few bears have denned down along river bluffs where soil is easy to dig.  “North- central Montana lies in the severe climate of the "chinook wind belt" along the east slope of the Continental Divide. It is distinguished by being too cold for Pinus ponderosa, but having extensive Populus tremuloides groves and Pinus flexilis woodlands.”  A populus tremuloides (quaking aspen) cluster is a great place for a nap: softly fluttering music, soft bedding.  Approach with caution.

Grizzlies, being large animals, logically eat large animals, whatever takes the least effort.  Carrion, of course, is the easiest.  If wolf packs are in the area, they may abandon kills or a bear is big enough to run them off and take over.    Cows will chase bears, esp. if there are calves.  Cows can’t climb fences, but a bear can, so confined livestock is more vulnerable.  Electric fences are effective if they are carefully built, but I read an amusing account of a bear stung by a single strand, swatting it on the principle of smashing a hornet.

Blue camas is a meadow plant that grows maybe five inches under the surface.  The grizzly needs its claws for this.  No doubt there are more corms and rhizomes that bears eat but that people pay little attention to anymore.  Most of it has been eliminated by human ag.  Cow parsley and other understory growth is often edible for a bear.  Vegetation needs water, so that patterns the location of growth.

Of course, dearer to bears even more than meat, are berries.  The advantage of an ecotone is that they ripen in sequence according to altitude, beginning on the sun-warmed river bottoms and going on up to the highest vegetation in the mountains.  Chokecherries along the water, sarvisberries (related to huckleberries) all the way to the top, stickery bull berries along the lower fields, thimbleberries up high.

The human population along the East Slope has varied greatly over the centuries.  At first were the nomadic tribes who followed the buffalo up and down the slopes and north to south along the buffalo trails.  When Ryan Heavyhead and Narcisse Blood made their maps of old-time camp spots, they were along waterways and marked by big patches of sarvisberries, which were carried by the people both internally and externally (dried) and naturally physiologically “planted” near camps.  Berries will freeze-dry on bushes.

Tribes had no livestock at first except dogs which could evade bears and sound alarms, and the People didn’t stay in one place very long.  Fish, as in the great salmon migrations on the west side, were not a main food for bears or Blackfeet.

When the wave of depopulation due to smallpox left whole villages of people dead in their lodges, carrion eaters had a bonanza.  Because the disease had jumped to humans in Europe through domesticated animals, it left North American wildlife untouched.  For a little while, grizzlies were kings of the prairies — except for the challenge of a healthy adult bison.  For a little while there were no buffalo jumps and the piskuns whitened with bones.  This was before the railroads and guns wiped out the bison to eliminate the tribes and also eliminated bears on the prairie.

Scattered Europeans had at first come up the rivers and west from Hudson’s Bay, fur-hunting.  The Great Falls of the Missouri which would give their name to a city were teeming with grizzlies when Lewis and Clark came through.  The bears knew nothing about guns and the guns of the time were limited.

The Homesteader Act of 1862 was urged by railroads to increase population enough to make a profit and produce tax-paying citizens.  It was also hoped free land would take some of the energy out of the Civil War (’61-’65).  The Act specifically forbade anyone qualifying if they had borne arms against the US.  That meant British soldiers as well as Southerners.  For American veterans, used to firearms and hardship and anxious to start families, which were the only way to create protection in old age, homesteading was a God send.  The east coast populations fed by the Irish potato famine — among other forces in Europe — were bulging.

In Europe the practise had been for farmers to live in towns, going out to their fields daily.  Homesteading specifically required people to live on their new fields and pastures, isolated.  My grandmother lost her first baby because she was tempted to take a wagon ride to town out of loneliness which triggered birth too early and there was no help nearby.  Towns were thirty miles apart because that’s about as far as it was practical to travel for supplies with a team and horses.

It was decades before the bears were driven up into the mountains, just after WWI.  The railroads brought people to the Big Hotels in the major parks and for a while the bears fattened on the food-laden dumps, so engrossed in eating that people sat on bleachers with electricity lighting the spectacle.  Bears have always had a dimension of “spectacle” which nowadays causes traffic jams in Parks.  After a few bear incidents, the dumps were closed and camping became highly regulated, frustrating the bears.  

Even so, a black bear got into my cousin’s car parked in a Washington state campground, evidently was stuck in the window for a while, and shredded his nice leather upholstery.  He and his family are hikers and campers, but essentially city people.  Some badass bears destroy to relieve frustration or curiosity or in the throes of hyperphagic phases before hibernation when they are food junkies, craving and driven.  This period coincides with what some people consider the climate climax of the mountain year when it’s cool and the leaves are bright.

If hunting were restored, in a highly regulated form, bears would soon learn to be cautious.  With tools like drones, the humans could also learn caution.  But the real force behind intrusion into the mountains is international corporations looking for mineral resources.  If livestock growers used to low fees for grazing are cut off or charged more, they are going to react about like bears used to garbage. 

The real interface between people and grizzlies is political and it is as intense and dangerous as fighting a bear.  Much of it is covert.  Bureaucrats are not used to Saturday night fights and react with horror when they get a nasty email.  But people who are used to controlling herd bulls do not proceed with diplomacy.  The result in town meetings is mixed.  As in "mixing it up." 

The “impact,” to use a favorite bureaucrat word, creates and sustains NGO’s of many kinds.  If there is no tax money to do what is needed, then voluntary citizen groups can raise money, but then they get to call the tune.  They are often city people with good connections.  They feel urgently that the planet is in danger.  Locals are generally invested in denial and the status quo.  They are likely to be aging and resistant to change.

There’s a book in all this.  Maybe a shelf of books.  Probably whole long bibliographies.

WANDERING ON THE COMPUTER AFTER A NAP . . .

East Slope -- new snow

So I come back from Cut Bank with a new load of cat food, driving against a high wind because another front is pushing over the Rockies, and I take a nap, because I’m sort of blitzed.  When I get back up, the fat cats are collapsed on my reading chairs, so I go

to the computer to write the post for Saturday, because I’ll post it tonight at 10PM.  That’s as late as I want to stay up.  It’s midnight on the east coast.

Check messages.  Nothing exciting.  A few exchanges between Philip Red Eagle, who’s been asked to suggest books for a new library of Native American literature, and David McNabb who’s teaching at York University.  I’ve known these people a long time.  We’re on a list that is almost inactive, but still valuable.

Philip Red Eagle

Next I decide to follow up something I ran across a few days ago, daylighting  Larry Sanger’s complaints about Wikipedia, which he helped to found.  In fact, he’s both a guy with advanced computer expertise and a formidable “philosophy of knowledge” academic background.  He has been in on the start of a predecessor Nupedia and also the start of another following wiki he hoped would be more responsible than Wikipedia, called Citizendium.  It's slow and has few posts, but it's reliable.  Sanger is a “Reedie,” which means that his undergrad degree is from Reed in Portland, a famous place where people value thinking above almost everything else.  I grew up in Portland.

Wikipedia quickly took off, but just months after it was launched, things started to go off the rails, Sanger says, and by the summer of 2001 the new online community was being "overrun" by what he described as "trolls" and "anarchist-types", who were "opposed to the idea that anyone should have any kind of authority that others do not".  Sanger responded by proposing a stronger emphasis for expert editors, individuals with the authority to resolve disputes and enforce the rules.  Tired of endless content battles and feeling he had a lack of support from Wales, Sanger eventually left the project.”

So -- all the time that some of us were struggling against what we considered character assassination and erroneous information by predatory journalists, the Wikipedia management knew very well that it was happening and simply tolerated it.  Maybe because controversy draws eyes.  The ultimate goal was always advertising, against the scruples of Sanger.  So a generation of kids, immigrants, rural students and other credulous folks read a lot of slanted and prejudiced information -- often about THEM -- writing it all down, maybe verbatim.   

Backstage, we hopeful reformers of Wikipedia DID have a little knowledge of Bomis, the porn site that offers Bomis Babes, a sort of babydoll version of females that attracts “lads,”  naive beer drinkers who value cars and sports.  This was the original source of Wikipedia venture capital.  To the Reedie crowd these guys must have seemed hungry for information that would make them seem sophisticated and adult.  But men who were threatened by women who weren't babies didn’t want to put in the effort it takes to develop thinking skills above high school level and probably wouldn’t qualify for admission to a decent university education anyway.  They’d have the money, but not the attention span.  And they like wrangling and powering people down.

So that was fun to chase around the Internet for a while!  Ripping the bandaids off the scabby outfit that operates unseen, but generally suspected, where the money lurks, ethics gives way to profit, and anonymity trumps [sic] expertise.

The happy video dolphin who rehabilitates stroke victims.

Next my regular feed of newsletters brought up http://www.statnews.com/2015/11/13/after-a-stroke-reteaching-the-brain-by-gaming/  STAT is a new online science magazine.  Carl Zimmer is a science writer with a blog of his own and a column in the NYTimes.  This little vid is a brilliant strategy for stroke rehabilitation that is based on a video game of dolphins trying to catch fish.  The player’s arm is in a cradle that controls the dolphin as it dives and twirls.  This causes the brain neurons and the arm muscles to regrow and recover skill.  It’s a lively little vid that’s fun to watch.  The scientist developing this suggests we stop taking grapes and magazines to our friends in the hospital, but instead take a video game like this, maybe one that can be played by two people, but even a single player is a HUGE improvement over lying in bed all alone for hours, or staring passively at a TV.

But you COULD write a book.  Here’s a call from Frontenac House, “Frontenac House, a medium sized publishing house in Calgary Alberta, is currently looking for poetry, short fiction, creative non-fiction, and/or essays on the environment by Canadian authors. 

Authors are invited to submit before Dec. 15th, 2015

Here is the direct link to call on the web page:  http://www.frontenachouse.com”

Hotel Frontenac House in Quebec

I do not know why a Calgary publishing house should call itself after a famous and fabulous hotel in Quebec, though I have no objection since this is where memory meets research.  My family ate in the dining room there in the late Fifties.  We had breakfast, hoping that was the cheapest meal.  My pre-teen brothers, receiving their grapefruit halves in stemmed glass dishes, immediately thought of wine (very intriguing topic in our teetotaling household) and began a series of toasts, which greatly entertained the otherwise sober titans of industry who were actually staying there.  Morning light glinted off the spectacles of gray-haired men peeping over the top of their newspapers.

But it was summer and gnats were about.  One flew into my milk.  I was at the age when I would have swallowed a mouse to avoid drawing attention, but my father put up his finger, like a person in a movie, and the maitre d’ hustled over to see what was happening.  Staring aghast at the minor insect drowning in my milk, he exclaimed,  “Mon dieu!” and, holding it high to avoid contamination, he bore it off into the kitchen.  Soon he was back with a replacement.  SUCH drama!

Prince of Wales Hotel, Waterton, Alberta

Wikipedia, which can probably be trusted in this instance, tells us:  “The Château Frontenac was designed by American architect Bruce Price, as one of a series of "château" style hotels built for the Canadian Pacific Railway company (CPR) during the late 19th and early 20th centuries; the newer portions of the hotel—including the central tower (1924)—were designed by Canadian architect William Sutherland Maxwell. CPR's policy was to promote luxury tourism by appealing to wealthy travelers. The Château Frontenac opened in 1893, six years after the Banff Springs Hotel, which was owned by the same company and is similar in style.”

This is the tourism style, closely related to railroads, that led to the development of lodges in Glacier National Park and the adjoining Canadian Waterton Peace Park lodges, though they tended to emphasize the frontier by using Douglas fir logs brought in on their railroad.  The Prince of Wales in Waterton is rather elegant and features a “high tea.”  It was publicity for these lodges and the park, large portraits of Blackfeet tribespeople in their regalia by Winold Reiss, that established in the minds of so many people just who these people were.

This is Mary Ground.

She sat next to me in ceremonies to make sure I didn't bungle.

And so we have come full circle and it’s teatime on the East Slope of the Rockies.

THE OTHER GENE ROBINSONS

Eugene Harold Robinson

"Eugene Harold Robinson (born March 12, 1954) is an American newspaper columnist and the former assistant managing editor of The Washington Post. His columns are syndicated by The Washington Post Writers Group, and he is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009.

"Robinson is a board member of the IWMF (International Women's Media Foundation)." 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/people/eugene-robinson

Booknotes.org  interviewed this Eugene Robinson in relationship to the publication of his book, “Coal to Cream: A Black Man’s Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race.”  The title comes from his grandparents: a very dark man and a very light woman.  He is formally addressed as “Mr.” but the transcript rather curiously put in every stutter, every misspeak, every stopandstart, of what he says. 

This Robinson grew up in an academically centered all-black community, so was only vaguely aware of color-based discrimination until he was assigned to South America as a journalist for the Washington Post.  In Argentina where he lived and Brazil where he often traveled, he became aware of how skin-color interacted with status and class assignment, splintering “black” into a lot of sub-categories, whereas in America, if you were a little bit dark, you were considered black.  This forced unity gradually became a political entity with some real power.  The book is how that happened and the people involved.

http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/153355-1/Eugene+Robinson.aspx

Rev. Eugene Robinson

The white Eugene Robinson is MORE controversial.  He is a gay man, a recovering alcoholic, married to another man for twenty years (he had been previously married to a woman and had two children with her), ordained and consecrated as a bishop, though he had to wear a bulletproof vest under his liturgical vestments at the ceremony.  The event split congregation, the American denomination, and world-wide Anglican networks, which roughly follow the British Empire.  He has resigned by now after seven years of turmoil.

He wrote two books:  “In the Eye of the Storm: Swept to the Center by God,” and  “God Believes in Love: Straight Talk About Gay Marriage.”  Basically he is defending the right of an individual to have a relationship with both "God" and social respectability while committing to an unconventional marriage that the group disapproves.  He has been a highest level religious leader, but in a small context (New Hampshire) that stood by him personally.  This is a definitively Protestant stance, which means that the Roman Catholic church and the “high” Anglican denomination find him disruptive enough to label him evil.  

What I’m seeing in these two men is a much more global tension between the individual seeking a personal stance and the category, which in terms of the black community is crucial to the preservation of power.  Since I’m currently feeling very anti-institutional and since the institutions themselves have fossilized and eroded, it seems an important issue, even a central issue to everything else, generating a host of questionnaires and theories of change.  Add in the other two Gene Robinsons, and we’ve got two more versions, one noisily (literally) counterculture and the other quietly but supportively conventional, though progressive. 

Entering Valier

Like most things in life, one must seek balance if not harmony, but how do you do that?  As a flaming liberal thinker whose lifestyle is even more conservative than this Belgian-diaspora irrigation community I live in, but who is affiliated over fifty years with the violently splintered Blackfeet rez community just to the north, and who is merely tolerant of the Southern Baptist congregation at my elbow (If only they were Progressive Baptists!), I am rather urgently pressed to work on this.

All the feminists and enviros will urge me to look to the land: identify with the larger East Slope community but it is also split -- not splintered, but cleaved between those who (religiously) think the point of human life is prosperity and those who think humans must respect their participation in the planetary interwovenness.  Prosperity is individual (unless you’re a Hutterite) and interwovenness is the ultimate in community, without limits unless you consider the planetary troposphere as the boundary.  And we must do that or suffocate ourselves.  ALL of us.

Browning, MT

This week the Eloise Cobell Trust Fund settlement checks are going out to individuals, whose financial fortunes have been separated from each other by the US Government through the Dawes Act and the imposition of the rules of property developed in Britain and spread through their pre-empted empire.  At the same time the Blackfeet Tribe is trying to consolidate and “clean house” as a community in the interest of keeping at home the profits of a new wave of oil discovery (among other things, like fighting poverty).  The next couple of years will be fascinating to watch.  It is important to realize that there are more players than the tribe at this poker table, this bone game, but that the tribe’s players are new, just elected.  The government, the corporations, the underground culture of booze and drugs, and now new categories, local academics, and check-receiving diaspora Blackfeet are all keeping time with their sticks.

At the same time, the issue presented by the land -- water produced by the Rocky Mountains -- is an uncomfortable but real unifying force.  There is a famous experiment in which two summer camps of boys were encouraged to be rivals, to strive hard against each other in competition and make that opposition central to their lives.  It worked, all too easily.  But the two camps were dependent on the same water system.  The experimenters deliberately interdicted the water in a way that could only be repaired by the cooperation of the two camps.  The boys worked together -- carrying rocks, digging, planning, joining pipes.  By the time the water was running again, the boys were a single community, connected by many small friendships.

There are two water systems originating in the East Slope: one runs north/south in a rain and snow run-off belt;  the other is man-made and runs along the boundary between Canada and the US which happens to be high land due to volcanic activity, but not high enough to draw much water.  The pipe and diversion systems run parallel to the east-west railroad which prompted settlement dependent on that water.  Now the system is aging out.

The water coming off the Rockies is regulated by water law, a water master, a water court.  The trouble is that the humans have mostly ignored it and now the differences in development between the rez and the rest must be reconciled.  It will hurt, but there are guidelines.  The water along the High-Line is dependent on non-governmental sources and one-time funds.  The two communities created by water use face different problems.

It seems to me that the same split is between human-dependent systems and land-dependent systems throughout the world.  As much as we are in tension between individual and community, we are also in tension between places that are easy to live in and places that are pretty damn tough.  But the binary is on a sliding scale.  In summer and fall the East Slope and even the High Line are wonderful windswept spaces of light and grass.  In winter you might as well be at the North Pole.  

The easier the environment, the more the emphasis can be pushed toward the self-sufficient individual.  The tougher it is, the more people must unify to address survival.  Tough social conditions produce one kind of “Gene Robinson” and clearly supportive institutions help another sort of “Gene Robinson.”   It’s the transitions and reconciliations that are turbulent.

TWILIGHT AT THE GETTY (fiction)

The Getty Art Museum in Los Angeles.

It was barely dusk with the sun lingering at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.  The two old friends -- only approaching retirement age -- stood side-by-side, looking out over the city.  They were at a wall instead of pipe railings, for which Meier was famous, and they said nothing.  His son-in-law had left them alone in case they did have something to ask or confess or admit.  But there was nothing.  Silence is sometimes eloquence.

The long plaza in front of the building had a reflection pond in it, not deep, but the water was exactly level with the travertine so that if there had been a shower, one couldn’t always tell the solid from the liquid and people walked into the water.  Carefully designed benches had been strategically put along the edge to guide people away.  But they didn’t want to sit.  And they thought they could tell the solid from the water.  At least in the architectural world.

He was a major success in Tinsel Town, making his living off preposterous assumptions that she had long ago discarded.  They had parted ways after college, where they had been film buddies.  Outsiders might have thought they paired off like birds in a courting context, but not.  It was the Fifties and film was a revelation, even if a person weren’t enrolled in a sophisticated university.  Not until Netflix was it again possible for a person with only a computer connection to watch film on that scale again.  The impact on her was now quite different.

He stood gracefully, a handsome man, expensively dressed.  To her older eye it was obvious that he was a gay married to a sympathetic woman.  And so was the son-in-law.  But she no longer defined gay in any kind of confining way -- more as a center from which to act.  But she was slowly realizing that he and his family thought she was also gay/lesbian and that was what had been the tie.

She was a lover of tough, competent, older cowboys -- Western men capable of both ruthlessness and tenderness, even mixed and simultaneous.  She saw that her friend was aesthetic and psychologically guarded.  He’d been in therapy all his life.  Of course, in this town, one had a therapist the way one had a good dentist -- keeping things straight.  To her, he seemed a shadow.  She had no idea what she seemed to him now.  A puzzle maybe.  Maybe that’s why he had sent for her to celebrate this major award he was receiving.

In the past he’d come -- with his wife -- to visit her on the east slope of the Rockies but it was not a success.  Her ancient primitive phone with a cat-chewed cord was not adequate and her old house was so small that the only way he could have privacy for what seemed to be intense arguments was to sit on the front stoop, which was only a cement slab.  When he had insisted on taking her out to dinner, the best place for miles around had only one dusty bottle of champagne and it wasn’t chilled.  He berated the waitress, who was a friend of hers and who looked at her with wounded eyes.

They had driven up to the mountains and the wife said, “Oh, how beautiful!”  But neither of them was really looking and, if they had, they would not have understood it.  They knew nothing about geology or weather patterns.  Living on the LA delta, there was no need.  So now, aware, she tried to look out over the jeweled valley below them where the lights were coming on.  What did he see?   “That’s Universal City over there.  The studio had to sell it to make up their losses on Caesar and Cleopatra.”  

When the town car chauffeur had seen her recognize her name on his placard, he smiled broadly.  He’d wondered what she’d be like.  They chatted on the way to the hotel which she understood later was very bad form.  He was clearly trying to tempt her into telling him things that would help him curry favor.  He laughed merrily when he left her at the hotel where she was rendezvousing with her host, though he wasn’t allowing her to stay there.  He had arranged for her to stay with a famous editor in her “modest” house on Mulholland Drive, thinking that since she wrote, this would be a career advantage.

The desk clerk would not give her the room number or even use the house phone to call upstairs.  Looking inscrutable, he made a soft-voiced call and soon the elevator had opened on her friend.  It was clearly a place of assignation in a strange combination of secrecy and boasting.  The lobby was furnished like a London men’s club.

She was famished but supper wasn’t until 9.  They met his wife and a couple of screen writers and cinematographers for drinks.  She was a very bad drinker, easily becoming confused, and consumed far too many breadsticks.  He ordered her drinks -- all with fancy names, evidently fashionable.  The place was too dark to read faces and no one tried to include her in the gossip anyway.

So her head went off into memories of university, so long ago that women had to be checked in at the dorm by 10PM and no men could come past the entryway, unless they were relatives.  It sounded almost Islamic now.  But there were ways -- duplicate keys to the back door, for instance -- so she met her friend at a nearby all-night laundromat and they took the El into Chicago to the strange places where foreign and experimental films were shown.  Sometimes they were a little sinister or in dubious parts of town, but the viewers were intense.  No popcorn.  She could not have gone to such places alone.

Bonds formed in such a setting were a strong entwining of emotion and rationality, subject and method, personal and universal, subjective and objective.  Liminal, perhaps,  on the threshold, nearly sacred and more felt than could be described, though they spent a lot of time over the days trying to figure it all out.  They were so engaged in this conversation that others thought they MUST be sleeping together.  But they were disembodied.  No one thought of suggesting gay.  They just weren’t sophisticated or experienced enough.

And now, he had -- she suspected -- fallen into a prescribed, expensive, political way of life while she had such a broad understanding of sexuality -- dimensions, practices, accommodations -- that something so binary as gay/straight was as irrelevant as male/female.  Anyway, sexual desire and sexual identity had shrunk in both of their lives, crowded out by success on his side and something on her side that she called “environmentalism” but it was much more sensory than that would imply.

When he dropped her off at the editor’s house, going past the gate by using the electronic code pad like an ATM, he didn’t come in but the woman met her at the door and showed her the bedroom.  It was mercifully plain except for the sheet of glass that was one wall.  The view, like the one from the Getty, was out across the valley, but on that first night there had been a thunderstorm traveling through with actual lightning striking here and there, occasionally exploding something electrical (transformers?) so that sirens -- faint and far away -- would trail throbbing through the streets behind strobing lights of fire trucks.

The two women sat outside a little while, editor with her customary bedtime Ovaltine and guest with club soda to settle an unaccustomed sort of food.  Was that pureed parsnips with caramalized cranberries?  At home she fried parsnips cut into coins and liked them, but never thought of cranberries.  If she had and if she’d HAD cranberries, which the local stores only carried at Thanksgiving, she’d have just thrown a handful into the pan.  Maybe she’d try it.  Someday.

The editor had inquired politely but guardedly about her writing, but was a bit baffled that she wrote about landscapes and natural history -- not politically, either, but in her own way.  “My dear, you really must develop a platform in order to sell, or no one will know what shelf is for your books or how to promote your image.”  Then she saw the guest’s face and -- since she was not stupid -- said softly,  “Of course, books are no longer put on shelves and you are a reality -- not an image.”

Now, the big celebration (ordeal) over and fatigue making the friends mellow, they stood at the Getty as though on the balcony of a Mediterranean villa in some time-out-of-time, their present lives fading to make room for memory.  Had they actually stood together this way on the El platform with stars barely visible through the heat-trembled air and felt merged, empowered and shaken by what they had seen?  Or was that just a kind of derivative memory of the powerful films?

The son-in-law came up from behind and put an arm over each.  “Ready to go?”  They were.  Flying back home, she decided she and her friend were related but different species who had shared an environment -- all those elms and all those paths.  Crocus in spring.

"LANDSCAPE AND LEGACY" By Dr. John A. Vollertsen

The storm has hit.  Warmed by my reading lamps, one a general ambience and the other a spotlight aimed at my book, I doze.  The book has fallen to my flannel shirt front alongside the cat, though some of what I’m reading is my own writing.  The book is “Landscape and Legacy,” edited by John Vollertsen, and I’m proud to have a chapter in it.  Outside the wind is howling as it stacks snow in inconvenient places.  I know because I dared it long enough to carry catfood out to my feral family in the back shop where they are hyper with hunger but snug in their dog house with two old sleeping bags and my threadbare “satin” reading lap robe from seminary.

Back in the house, the big fat dowager indoor cat has claimed my chair.  She’s not very formidable, but my head is full of grizzly bears and I resettle in a different chair.  

John is telling about watching rival male grizzes squaring off -- first doing “the Cowboy Walk” like gunslingers in the street.  (Cue the music: “Do not forsake me, oh my darlin’!”)  Stalking past each other, waiting for one to trigger, side-on, presenting a target -- dare ya!”)   But they don’t shoot.  Stiff and bristling they part slowly --  “I could’ve if I’d wanted to. . .”  This time they don’t do the Stomp Walk like pow-wow dancers: hit the ground with your foot, then step, hit the ground with the other foot, then step -- but do it hard to show you’re tough and you mean it.  These are Western grizzlies, even if they live on the east slope.  East slope of the Rockies -- that’s the landscape in question.  Cowboys and Indians, yeah.   And also writers, biologists, ranchers, and hikers with bear spray on their belts.  My neighbors.

John tells great grizz stories.  At one point there was a protest about naming the bears as they were trapped for study.  “You’ve got to be SCIENTIFIC!” the purists said.  “Just number them.”  Now their numbers have become their names.   He defends 346, perhaps unjustly accused of being the “Falls Creek Bear.”  And tells about the massive 355 who was repeatedly captured and simply waited patiently for the folderol to be over, but the always enraged 412 from Smith Creek tried his best to lay everything waste.  Often his scariest stories are like Peter Matthiessen’s snow leopard or John McFee’s moose --  the perfect setting for a large dangerous animal, but sans animal.  Maybe.  Eyes felt on the back of your neck.   Yet he includes watching a grizz plunk on its butt in a meadow to zone out on spring and sunshine.  He has worked with two of my personal biologist heroes:  Mike Madel and Chuck Jonkel.

Mike Madel on the left.  Dunno the other guy.

Chuck Jonkel

The most remarkable chapter is very simple but entirely unconventional in biology circles: John went back to a 1974 “cold case” report of a mama bear that chased a boy named Fox up a tree and dragged him back down.  (There were three cubs.)  With the full weight of a trained investigator, which he is, John brought to bear YouTube, Google, finder websites, Historical Society, newspaper, and re-interviews of everyone from reporter to witnesses.  What actually happened was not so much the point as that the story became a revelation about how much information there really was latent in the situation and how emotionally committed everyone became to their version of the incident.  He found Fox, who refused to make contact.  The bears were never found.

The chapter about the Old North Trail is also unconventional: it is the notes taken by Vollertsen at a talk by Brian Reeves, a Canadian archeologist who defends the idea that the Blackfeet were here far earlier than some experts claim.  Like, thousands of years.  He can point to evidence.  Such insights have considerable political power but men like "Barney" are often too busy to write out papers.  ANY record of their ideas is valuable.

Ear Mountain from high above

The first chapter, written by Karen Porter, goes back to the time before there were any animals or any life at all anywhere on the planet -- it’s geological, about the shrugging, wrinkling, buckling, eroding slabs of rock that override each other in a pattern seen plainly from over-flight photos.  This account of a zillion years of developments is clear enough for us to say,  “Oh, THAT explains it!”  Geology is the foundation of every kind of life -- limber pine or mule deer buck.  And it’s STILL changing and moving so that the animal populations are continuing to make new patterns, increasing and decreasing.  The history of the rocks themselves go back to the Proterozoic, 2,500 million years ago, and in spite of jumbling and plugging with volcanic magma, it is ten miles thick and called the Belt Supergroup.

So at last I understand the channeling of air patterns that makes it snow so much in Glacier but not so much from Heart Butte on south.  The passes, the height of the mountains, the intersection of two wrinkle patterns -- the result is that the Blackfeet are sitting on a renewing reservoir of environmental water.

No one can complain that Indians were not consulted for this book because Vollertsen IS one, enough to be enrolled with the Assiniboine, but more than that, he slips around alone with his snowshoes, paying close attention and thinking hard about what he’s looking at.  He's not a library Indian.  The first time I ever went hunting was with Bob Scriver up Blackleaf Canyon about this time of year (1962) in about this kind of weather.  I thought we might not survive and I didn’t care because what a way to go!  John is far more prudent, though not immune to the glory of it all.  He will forgive me for now being a library white woman who wrote my chapter on the writers and others who took refuge along the East Front.

Ripley Schemm, poet, at her cabin on the east front.

Most of the people John persuaded to write chapters are local.  Larry Salois was my UPS man, who endangered his schedule when he made my deliveries because we talked Metis history;  and Stoney Burke was my lawyer, working out of a log cabin in Choteau.  I can see most of the sweep of the East Front from the end of my street.  I’ve been using a photo of the East Front from the west boundary of Valier for my blog banner.  That storm, now here.

There’s a chapter on cougars and another on mountain goats.  Then come the more technical and political coalitions and proposals.  This book will not let you forget that all these technicalities and desiderata are based on the real lives of animals and people, plants and rocks, the webs of interaction that are being stretched too far, even tearing in places.  There’s a lot more at stake than pretty scenery.  Go back and look at the photo of John at the beginning of this post.  Maybe to you he looks like a mild-mannered computer nerd.  Think again.

You can get the book through Far Country (below) or on Amazon.

Sue Johnson

Sales Representative

Farcountry Press

800-821-3874

Sue@farcountrypress.com

www.farcountrypress.com

PS  FROM JOHN V:  Re: The two fellas pictured with the grizzly.  Jim Williams is on the left.  Jim wrote the mountain lion chapter.  Jim is head of the Kalispell region of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks.  On the right is Dr. Rick Mace.  He is the head grizzly researcher for the same agency and is working on the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem grizzly project to firm up the count on grizzlies and makes some projections on numbers.

Stay warm as best you can.  This is just the beginning.

John

Thanks, John.  I get my pics from Google images. Mike must have taken the photo so his name was attached.  

 I'm fairly certain THIS is Mike Madel.

Prairie Mary