BEAUTIFUL DOWNTOWN VALIER

Highway 44 thru town.

The reason I like reading about brain function and its evolution is that it’s so explanatory.  One thing it explains is that the brain sets up categories and interpretations of the forces it encounters and then refuses to give them up, even when facing facts.

Grain bins in town.

So people insist that Valier is a pretty little town in spite of the fact that some blocks consist of nothing but big metal grain bins, there is a feed lot next to the town limits (very well maintained, I must say), gray chemical fallow fields come right up to the town edge, and the worst “weed” in the mown yards is Roundup Ready alfalfa which comes back as soon as you cut it.  The older folks insist that other weeds be sprayed with Roundup and will not believe it is carcinogenic. (The same as they will not believe that a high sugar/flour diet will trigger diabetes.)  But then one of the complaints at the town council meeting was that the edge of someone's yard had been sprayed against their wishes, rendering it a brown dead strip.  As the complainant said, growing grass is a better deterrent to weeds than Roundup.  What no one said was that you can’t grow grass without water and our water is currently so expensive that only the prosperous can afford green lawns.

Chemical fallow, poisoned land.  The road is the town edge.

Logic has nothing to do with it.  Much of the agitation is driven by the high school fear that the other towns will look down on us, that they’re doing better and that somehow we aren’t trying.  Some of it is people blaming the town for their own aging and for the velocity of time-related change.  Our citizens don’t believe in global warming but if they did, they would be convinced it was the fault of the town council.  When you read what the VADC writes, they sound like advertising copy for a new dress shop.  “Unique, pretty.”  Many women here are in the habit of driving their husbands to try harder without much experience of the real world.

A big part of the problem is “outsiders”.  I’ve been here sixteen years and have spent half a century in the area, but I’m an outsider and will be until the day I die.  They say the only way to become an insider is to raise kids here all the way through to high school graduation, esp. if their year has good athletic teams.  Outsiders speak in terms of safety, raising kids, and Mayberry USA, which was about the past even in 1960 when it started being on television.  Most of our residents weren’t born yet in 1960.

Valier could be a “pretty town” if you only look at the parts where the more prosperous and employed people live.  Its streets are often empty most of the day.   It’s not as industrial as Shelby or Cut Bank where the tracks and transmission lines go off over the prairie in all directions and the smell of sour gas lingers.  Browning is considered ramshackle no matter how much one points out sculptures, shops and -- of course -- the hospital, museum, casino and rodeo grounds. But Valier will never be as historic as Fort Benton, never have as many interesting little shops as Choteau, and can never be a resort town like East or West Glacier, St. Marys or Babb.  No matter the fishing and boating, Lake Francis is always an irrigation impoundment -- not an alpine lake.

This was Ivan Doig's teacher's house, Currently for sale.

In the fifteen years (plus) that I’ve been here this time, maybe half the businesses have closed, but the real change has been in the morale of the town.  It has turned cross and intolerant.  Consider that Valier is the access town for Heart Butte and could double its customer base if it would kick the racism always simmering.   There are 698 people living there.  The estimated median household income in 2013 was $28,259, which is roughly twice mine.  The median resident age is 24.7 (one-third mine) while the Montana median age is 39.6 years.  Do people say life begins at forty nowadays?

One of the complaints has been the volatility of student numbers, but that doesn’t account for the fact that rez kids have the choice of Valier, Heart Butte or Browning and often move back and forth according to the gossip opinion of which is more effective, more fun, or more likely to have winning teams.  When kids realize how much power they have through simple attendance, they use it.

Heart Butte

It’s a strange thing to think that Swift Dam, the source of water for the Pondera Canal Company is on the rez above Heart Butte (which meant HB was devastated in 1964 when the dam broke) but the 1910 boom caused by building it was in Valier, just OFF the rez.  Of course, that’s where the irrigation water went, too.

But let’s leave all this for now and think about how Valier might reshape itself for preservation in the future.  I’m not talking about the kind of Sim City  ("simulated") little “improvements” always suggested after busy note takers come around to claim they represent everyone when they don’t even represent the double-dozen people who show up as Seniors for lunch in the town hall or who appreciate Meals on Wheels.

It’s obvious that racism just has to go, though it’s a national problem, like the constant polarizing that can turn into riots between blue and red interests or black and white populations.  We’re small enough to go against the tide.  If we were more activist on the state level we might even be able to head off the forces always trying to force us to do our shopping in Great Falls.  I’m talking about the distributors who refuse to deliver bread and fresh vegetables, who make rules supposed to be about health but really about monopolies (no home-based bakeries) and tending to close down small town grocery stores.

It’s beyond me why missionaries from Georgia are necessary to keep kids busy in summer and teach them their own heritage.  The same in Browning, though it’s more obvious there that the missionaries are enjoying a subsidized adventure in an exotic place.

This is the grizz family just captured on Lake Francis and moved.

Too much underground stuff goes on.  I did not know until I tapped into gossip that there has been a problem with teens swiping coolers from the campground in hopes they hold beer.  I made a swing past the campground last night and saw that it was empty.  Maybe it was just the capture of grizzlies at the edge of the lake.  I did not know that one reason for the bright campground lights is that there are night fishermen who are NOT grizzlies and the diligent use of the cleaning station is to keep fish guts from becoming bear beacons.

Already this town has a number of excellent craftsmen.  The library is booming.  Valier is part of the mystique of “This House of Sky” and Ivan Doig’s nationally beloved books about this area.  It is so strange and self-defeating to say the resentful things that one can overhear people express:  “Doig never did anything for us.”  “Libraries aren’t meant for kids.”  What is going on in their heads that they need these defenses?

If you ask, what you get is a long list of complaints.  If you interrupt the list, they will immediately go back to the beginning as though it were written down or recorded -- often repeating word-for-word.  They cannot take in new information or consider alternatives.  This is a brain adaptation to homestead life where there was no alternative to breaking ground and harvesting -- grueling, painful work that might not end in profit, driven by sheer determination and focus.  The only path to success was repetition, unvarying.

Library art project done by kids.

But in today’s world, the way to succeed is variable, inventiveness, asking the big deep questions.  How can we become stable without becoming paralyzed?  I think it is by trusting each other enough to tell the truth and work together.

AN OLD STORY

The history of the early years of the apostles, when they were just boys, has mostly been lost because they didn’t like writing all that much.  It was hundreds of years more before anyone wrote down the stories.  I don’t know how I know about those boys -- mostly how they look and act -- but maybe I picked it off YouTube or something.  Stuff like this travels every which way these days.  No matter how much authorities try to control it, they are essentially trying to control boys and the whole purpose and motivation of boys is to escape any authority figures, esp. if they’re women.

By the time the boys became the familiar figures in the mythology -- no, not Dopey, Grumpy, Sneezy and all that -- and not Lancelot, Galahad, and so on -- they might have been named Simon later renamed Peter, Andrew his brother, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, Judas the son of James, and Judas Iscariot.  But this is a different version, the early years, and some of the names were Irish, or Chinese, or Bosnian.  Even American Indian.  They weren’t chosen by anyone.  They just found each other.

Their families had thrown them out for being defiant, or maybe they had been taking drugs or something else illegal, or maybe their families had been killed by the occupying army or died of some plague.  The boys couldn’t tolerate the rules of refugee camps, so they left and survived however they could, and were pretty lonely until they found each other.  There’s this theory called “critical mass,” and it applies to humans in a way.  If a group gets to a certain size in a specific place, it develops an organic emergent style that helps everyone.  Unwritten rules, kind of, like “no one goes for medical help alone -- a buddy always comes along.”  Or “never go off with a stranger without a buddy knowing.”  There was always a lot of discussion and many close calls.  Those Roman soldiers were known to have very ambivalent attitudes about young boys.

But people who live along bodies of water know that if they fish, they eat, and so they did.  They also know that wine is safer to drink than some water, and so they did.  But bread was welcome.  They just were not in one place long enough to build ovens, and they had no leavening.  They WERE leavening.  But they didn’t know it.

As they went along the seashore, they left long chains of footprints, looked back at them, saw the pattern and rhythm of them, and this prompted them to make art, using whatever they found, but they went off and left what they made for others to find.  Sometimes they walked in a bunch with their hoodies, their burnooses, up on their heads because of wind or cold.  Other times, as though with a signal, they walked apart, each with his own thoughts.  A few had visions -- realer than dreams.  If they came to a really nice stretch of beach, they peeled off and plunged in, loving the dense salt water that almost made them feel as though they were flying.
  

There were fishermen with boats on this sea and the boys looked at them with assessing eyes, understanding the difference in the shapes of hulls and the tall triangular red sails.  Once they sat with an old man and tried knotting nets for a few days.  Another time they saw a boat had been beached somehow, and they turned out as though they were deckhands in order to push it back into the water, organizing each other with shouts so that they could find the rocking rhythm that would increase their force.  They learned that the best way to do this was with song, maybe with one person using a stick to pound out a pulse.  The Africans among them soon made the drumming so intricate that the fisherman drew up their boats close enough to listen.  Some of the boys wanted to make drums, but others pointed out they ought to travel light.  They settled for bells and little finger cymbals, which had to be wrapped in cloth to muffle them if they were passing sentries and check points.

If they found old walls or big boulders, they used them to work on their athletic abilities, doing backflips and other tricks, wishing for wheels which would let them really fly.  At night the boys who had been used to hammocks missed them, but there were rarely trees, so they all rolled their burnooses tighter around them and nested, cupped together for warmth.  Girls along the way fell in love with them and would have liked to come along, but girls meant babies and though they loved babies, there was no way to protect them as they traveled.  They didn’t even have a donkey.

It was a time of great poverty and oppression, but when is there a time without those forces?  The land was badly eroded and foreign occupying nations kept all commerce in check.  Bodies themselves were the last resource left and people were often trafficked one way or another as labor, or military or for sex.  

Tammuz

The boys kept hearing a name:  Yeshua or Joshua -- something like that.  Others talked about Adonis, Osiris, Tammuz who was a shepherd.  These guys, who might have been the same guy, were supposed to have been torn apart but then somehow pulled themselves together and come back.  The deal was that in pieces they became seed and grew new versions of themselves, but the boys were not farmers.  Did not plow crops.

One evening they were sitting around a campfire and they were grieving because one of them had cut his foot, it had infected, and he died.  But a fisherman had given them a LOT of fish and his wife gave them both bread and wine, so they were putting the fish on sticks to hold them over the fire and singing while they cooked.  They had taken their compatriot’s body high up into the stony hills where they found a cave and left him.  There were big pottery jars stored in there with rolls of papyrus, but they didn’t mess with them.  It didn’t look like a place often disturbed.  They wished for the magic to reassemble their friend.  At least they could kindle fires.  And they knew a lot of songs.  They got pretty drunk.

The thing about boys is that they grow up, whether or not they want to.  The group eventually dispersed as some of them settled down and others went so far away that they were never seen again and more of them died.  But always there were other boys drifting together wherever they could and that was a form of reincarnation or at least recurrent embodiment.  There are stories, songs and lessons about such men, disciples they call them, and the shape-shifter with many names, sometimes a shepherd and sometimes a sailor -- whatever.  Some people consider the whole thing a hoax.

Girls attached their own stories and inevitably there were babies after all, or there would not be any new boys.  Some of them turned out pretty well.  I’m female and old, so I never traveled with these swaggering young men, but I’ve heard about them.  They're mythic.  And not.  Sometimes they're real.