WALLACE STEGNER KNEW THE FLU

"The Big Rock Candy Mountain" is Wallace Stegner's major novel about his barely disguised own life.  In 1918 when the "Spanish Flu" hits the prairie, carried by soldiers on railroads, the family is in Eastend, Saskatchewan (called Whitemud in the book because of white clay deposits nearby) where Stegner's dad built a house.  Thanks to Sharon Butala, the novelist,  it's now a writers' retreat.  Eastend is east and north of Valier, about a four hour drive.

For the first time there was money for the Stegners because the father was bootlegging.  This is true.  He did pretty well until "the big boys from Salt Lake City" shut him down.  Not the cops, the competition.

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P. 254  (The two young sons have been in town and return with news.)

. . ."The flu's in town!" they said in a breathless burst.  "Old Mrs. Rieger's got it."

Bo [the father] shut the door.  "How do you know?"

"Mr. McGregor said.  We were out behind the Chink's, and he called us and said not to play any tricks because the flu was in town and now all the kids are distributing flu masks and eucalyptus oil and we're going back right now."

"No you're not," Bo said.  He looked at Elsa.  "You chase these snickelfritzes up to bed.  I'm going uptown to see what's going on."

"You won't be able to go now," she said, and the relief in her voice made him mad.  [He had planned to make a run with his moonshine.]  "The town will be quarantined."

"That quarantine's nothing but a word," he said.  "The town really needs the stuff now."

"Go where?" Chet said.

His father pushed him into the dining room.  "None of your beeswax.  Go on up to bed, both of you."

An hour uptown told him nothing he didn't know.  Nobody would be allowed in or out of town, but that just made him grin.  He could imagine people sitting out along the roads in the cold to warn people.  Like hell.  They'd be sealed up tight in their houses.  At ten o'clock he went home from the darkened and deserted main street, stoked the parlor heater for the night, and went up to bed.  All the actual coming of the flu did was to make it sure that he could sell all the whiskey the Ford could carry."

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Bo's trip south to Chinook just across the line in Montana is a disaster.  The weather is as it is today in Valier, sub-zero and almost too much snow to travel.  Bo gets lost and spreads the flu wherever he goes.  In Chinook everything is closed and people are hiding.  The old man he tries to help dies in the car just as it turns over and the bottles smash.  But all is not lost. The old man lives after all and gets hauled to Bo's home.  Then both men are taken in a sleigh to the schoolhouse which is now an improvised hospital.  The load of booze is mostly intact and the mom begins to sell it door-to-door.  Soon she and one of the boys is sick.  Chet (Stegner) is twelve and on his own.  He's soon selling booze.  To comfort himself, he begins to write an adventure story.

At first Chet copes pretty well, milking the cows, managing the house.  He sells booze cheap, but then realizes that he could make big money and pushes the prices way up.

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p. 291  On the afternoon of the tenth day he was over at Chance's.  He had spent a good deal of time there the last day or two.  His own home had got heavier and heavier to bear, lonesomer and lonesomer in its dead stillness.  Besides there wasn't much there to eat anymore.  So he took milk to the Chances, chopped their wood, sat for hours in their warm kitchen listening to talk about the schoolhouse and the Death Ward where they put the people who were going to die.  The Death Ward was the seventh grade room, his own room, and he and Ed Chance speculated on how it would feel to go back to school there where so many people had died -- Mrs. Krieger, John Chapman, old Gypsy Davy from Poverty Flat, lots of others.  Mrs. Chance, still so weak she could barely totter around, sat by the range and wiped the tears from her eyes, and when anyone spoke to her she smiled and shook her head and the tears ran down.  She didn't seem unhappy about anything; she just couldn't help crying.

Mr. Chance said, solemnly, that there would be many familiar faces missing when this was over.  The old town would never be the same.  He wouldn't be surprised if an orphan or two had to be adopted by every family in town.  He pulled his sagging cheeks and said, "I'll tell you what, son, you're fortunate yourself.  Many times in that hospital I said to myself that those poor Mason boys were going to lose a loving father, certain as grass is green.  I'd lie there, and the first thing I'd hear, some old and valued friend had passed in the "Death Ward."

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Then the church bells begin to ring and many guns are shooting, "boom boom boom," but it's not about the flu.  WWI has ended.  His parents and brother come home just as the neighborhood had convened at the house to have a drunken celebration with the last of Bo's booze.  He was enraged until Chet -- for the first time -- yelled back at him.  When Bo realized how much money had been made, he softened.  Soon he was back at his plans for how to climb "the Big Rock Candy Mountain," the Westerner's determination to somehow strike it rich and surpass all dreams despite every disaster.

The title of the book is from a song:  "Sometimes alluded to as "The Big Rock Candy Mountains" - from the lyrics - this is a well known and original American folk song about a hobo who discovers a paradise on Earth. ... The first recording appears to be as recent as 1928, by Harry McClintock (1882-1957)."  [Not the McClintock who wrote the "Old North Trail."]  There are many versions online.

This is Burl Ives' version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jx3lYqTAlnE

HOW BAD CAN IT GET?

Bogachev, hacker.

When I woke up at 4AM to check the cat situation and look at computer stories, there was a story in the NY Times that named a master computer hacker who lives in the orbit of Russia, openly, though he engages in world-wide criminal activities, snooping through everyone’s computers, large and small.  A photo of him shows him holding up his “Bengal cat” with jungle spots.  This means that he has probably been through my computer because I talked about Bengal cats on this blog so a “crawler” would turn me up.  Even a simple Google search would find me.  I keep trying to tell friends and relatives that the Internet has done the equivalent of ripping off the fourth wall of every room in their house, but their heads won’t go around it.

In this house the cat situation is not simple.  Yesterday Duckie, the most Bengal-marked cat, gave birth in grisly fashion.  She screamed as her uterus pushed her kittens against her pelvis, forcing it to open enough to let kittens out.  And then she ran.  I followed, trying to corral and comfort her, but the upshot was that each kitten was born some different place and she didn’t stick around to lick them off and nurse them.  Instead she left a series of bloody smears and gory lumps, both in the boxes I’d put out for her and in the seats of reading chairs, on the bed, even on the floor.  The other cats were scandalized, sitting where they could see but not touch anything and growling fiercely.  In one long interval, Finnegan — probably both her father and her inseminator — let her lean against him.

The first two kittens died right away.  The third also died in a little while.  The fourth is alive and crying at the moment, though safe on a bed in the clothes closet.  Duckie has been packing it around the house from one “safe” place to another.  She has begun to nurse and lick it.  She responds if it cries and it finally began to root and suck after hours of barely moving.  A single kitten is not happy because it is meant to share a nest.  People who talk about how wonderful childbirth is and invite their children to observe are simply out of touch with reality.

The temp outside is up to forty.  This means that by noon one will need waders and pontoons to go anywhere.  The high is expected to hit fifty and stay above freezing for the next few days, even at night.  This means floods.

Back to the Russian hacker.  The story has seemed to disappear from the media.  So far I’ve seen no comments.  Instead there are a lot of other stories on the morning news, which is always sensational, unreliable, and being told by glamorous young women and dodgy older men.  They’re off after the latest shiny object:  KellyAnne suggesting espionage by microwave ovens.  She’s the same problem as Trump, making us wonder whether she’s incredibly stupid or pretending to be a moron as a defense-by-distraction.  

The hacker story turned up on my automatic feed.  I can’t go back to look again now because I’ve hit the paywall on both the NY Times and the Washington Post.  Even the Economist.  “Paywalls” are devilish little systems for wringing subscriptions out of reluctant but curious people.  They backfire with me — try to force me or entice me for the sake of making a profit and I’m gone.

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The NYTimes teaser said:

Russian Espionage Piggybacks on a Cybercriminal's Hacking

By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ and JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN

It appears that the Russian authorities, leaning on the work of a hacker, grafted an intelligence operation onto a far-reaching cybercriminal scheme.

Twitter provided this:

Michael SchwirtzVerified account
 @mschwirtz
If I achieve nothing else in my career, at least I'll be able to say I got this cat photo [left above]  on the front page of the Times

 

Michael SchwirtzVerified account
 @mschwirtz 5h5 hours ago

The FBI's most wanted cyber criminal--a lover of luxury cars, possible Russian spy. And check out his fancy cat.

Some great reporting here by @mschwirtz & Goldstein:   Russian Espionage Piggybacks on a Cybercriminal’s Hacking

"Mr. Bogachev’s exploits may have created an irresistible opportunity for espionage."

Confluence of state and criminal cyber actors makes attribution harder & threats greater @mschwirtz @JoeKGoldstein

Michael SchwirtzVerified account
 @mschwirtz
The FBI's most wanted cyber criminal--a lover of fancy cars and leopard-print pajamas--also might be a Russian spy https://nyti.ms/2ncRjpY

1st article I've seen to start to get at how they do it: "Russian Espionage Piggybacks on a Cybercriminal’s Hacking"

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By now I’ve found a place to download the story, which is very detailed but doesn’t specifically tie to Repubs or Trumpians.  I suspect that it DOES link in reality.

As for what ties Duckie the Delinquent Mother together with the continuing international scandal, the theme is how bad it has to get before something happens.  Every day there is more damning evidence about this election and yet nothing happens.  Maybe they’re waiting for divine intervention.  

http://religiondispatches.org/new-poll-shows-white-evangelicals-are-still-dancing-with-the-one-that-brung-em/?utm_source=Religion+Dispatches+Newsletter&utm_campaign=2c7129c3ea-RD_Daily_Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_742d86f519-2c7129c3ea-42405913

NEW POLL SHOWS: WHITE EVANGELICALS ARE STILL DANCING WITH THE ONE THAT BRUNG ‘EM

BY ANITA LITTLE

An astonishing 88 percent of those who originally backed Trump during his campaign approve of his current job performance and 91 percent of his original supporters still have a favorable view of him. 

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How bad does this cat situation need to get before I pay $50 per cat to euthanize them?  That’s $400.  (There are no humane society shelters nearby.)  The cats and I have had respiratory infections for a few weeks.  Runny noses, crusty eyes, general aching and need to sleep.  It’s not just me and eight cats.  Both the city employees have been too sick to plow the streets.  The mayor had to find someone who could keep the state-required  water and sewer functions operating.  It’s far more technical and complex than people realize.  The clerk and the mayor also got sick, so the Town Office was closed.  

This is the first time I’ve been really sick since I moved here in 1999.  It was bad enough that I began considering whether I ought to call the ambulance.  As cold as it was just then, as snow-and-ice-and-wind-ridden the roads were, driving the thirty miles to an hospital emergency room was preposterous.  I decided to die in my own bed.

I thought of the pre-Christmas week at Heart Butte in 1990.  Kids kept getting sick and throwing up.  The janitor faithfully circulated all day with his pail and mop.  But then he started throwing up.  At that point the superintendent declared an early start to the vacation and sent everyone home.  No one objected.

I came to the rez to teach in 1961.  JFK had just been elected.  Two years later he was assassinated and we all left Camelot, but I stayed in Browning.  By 1968 when MLK Jr. was assassinated, I had quit teaching and was married to Bob Scriver.  In 1969 the astronauts walked on the moon and a lot of people refused to believe it.  I suspect they were the grandparents of the people who still believe in Trump.  The same people who refuse to believe in global warming.  Of course, it will be easier to accept now that the temp is forty rising to fifty.  How bad does it have to get before we grasp the necessity of changing our categories?  What keeps us from acting?

[Duckie's fourth kitten went silent.  It's missing.  No doubt dead.  Maybe it's for the best.  Duckie is not her usual exuberant self, but she was a lousy mother.]

ONE DAMN THING AFTER ANOTHER

I’m back.  I did not watch the inauguration because I spent the morning on the phone with Tier 3 Apple Support people trying to remove spyware that was not detected by my Malware program.  It was messing with my contacts, even trying to invade bank accounts, blocking people even when they were white listed, and other mischief.  I have to say that all the Apple people were patient, cheerful, and a pleasure to work with.  They were also all female.  

This is a long-standing problem and since I depend on my email to make contacts for writing, it’s a problem that can cost me money and make enemies because people think I’m ignoring them.  We may have gotten the problem licked.  It was installed through 3rivers.net who claimed they knew nothing about it.  Techies there are hired through some agency elsewhere.  I suspect they were bluffed by a rogue.  Maybe they should be bonded, but bank tellers are and that’s who stole my credit card number.

The next prob on the list is fleas.  We’ve still got them.  The systemic flea med that you put between the shoulder blades of the cat made Bunny allergic and now she’s looking pretty moth-eaten plus spending a lot of time chasing itches.  There are 8 cats that come into the house and four of them can’t be caught except with a trap.  A second kind of flea med “Flea Bully” turns out to be laundry soda.  It says,  “Lather the cat thoroughly and rinse well.”  Right.  The third kind is for carpets:  “Sprinkle on, leave four hours, vacuum thoroughly.”  Seems to work.  The other basic recourse is laundry of bedding and clothing — not the cats.  I don’t have a washing machine and the nearest laundromat is thirty miles away.

The one I visited this time was so degenerated that only four tubs worked — I usually use five.  One failed to drain and, alas, it was the one with the heaviest flannel sheets — which I could hardly lift when saturated, much less wring with arthritic hands.  Luckily the profoundly cold weather has broken so the temp was in the low Fifties because a Chinook wind is blowing.  I slung the sopping stuff onto the clothesline where it at least dried out enough to be draped on the furniture for the last stage, merely damp.  Fleas would have drowned.

The next problem (aside from the temps of twenty below zero F) was that the main town water supply, which goes past my house, broke in the usual place, the corner between my block and the Lutheran church.  This happened in the night and drained the contents of our spiffy new watertower for the second time, this time into the streets.  In order to find and mend the break, it is necessary to dig, but the ground must be thawed first, which means blasting it overnight with propane.  In this case, the break was not where they expected it, but upstream and sending water through the ground next to the pipe.  More thawing, more digging, more days.  Water was rerouted around my block, so only my block had to make dry camp.  The mayor opened city hall so people could get water jugs filled there, but I knew nothing about that.  As soon as Corky had water, he filled my two big jugs.  I bought a couple of packs of drinking water, which is always in the stores because some people think Valier water tastes funny.  This is good training for a major disaster, like maybe a huge earthquake triggered by frakking.

As soon as I realized there was no water, I whipped over to the Mom and Pop store to buy water.  But I should not have driven through the standing water in the street.  My pickup went crazy.  Then it seemed okay but went nuts again when I tried to go out to the trash roll-off.  Peter, a kind Hutterite young man, pulled me out of the drifts and into town.  After drying overnight the pickup worked.  The diagnosis is a wet distributor.  The answer is to take the cap of it off, spray everything with WD40, which drives out water, or even use a cloth to dry things.  Yesterday the pickup was running and I took a load of trash out to the roll-off.

In the meantime I was using up stuff from the back of the fridge and dumped a half-cup of old poppyseeds into a bowl of biscuit mix.  Seemed like a success until a poppyseed got stuck under a gum and raised a huge abscess that lasted through all the rest of this stuff but has finally subsided, I think because the seed finally festered out.

Running parallel was war with pharmacies.  The Shelby one in the ShopKO store has a new pharmacist but still has their old policies (controlled by corporation rules and insurance regulations) that one cannot renew a prescription until four days before the old one runs out and the pharmacy cannot keep on hand enough meds to be sure of renewing a prescription completely.  Over and over, they would give me a half-dozen pills to keep me from dying but promised to send the rest by mail.

I got indignant and moved to the Cut Bank Albertson’s pharmacy.  They turned out to be really OSCO and no different except that they never remembered to send the remainder of the pills.  Anyway, there was a three-day weekend and the weather kept me from driving.

So twice in this month I’ve gone for nearly a week without my prescription.  I hadn’t thought about the implications of corporate pharmacies.  There are three county seats about thirty miles from me.  Great Falls, which is a very small city, is the closest major shopping hub on this side of the 49th parallel.  Lethbridge, Alberta, is a little bigger but in Canada.  My passport has expired and I can’t afford renewal.  To get that done I would need to go to Conrad on certain days.

This time I switched my pharmacy account to Conrad.  It is a locally owned business and when one gets prescriptions filled there, a special niche is established in which they keep your meds in amounts that will cover you for the next period out.  They don’t run short, and they WILL mail meds.  They are in “my” county (Pondera Co. — Pend d’Oreille, earring in French).  Since I went to get my meds, that’s the reason I used that wretched laundry.

So yesterday, just as I settled into my re-boot after lunch nap, I got a phone call that seemed to be from some Montana state oversight person checking up on pharmacies.  She wanted to know if my pills were working, if I were taking them regularly, chatchatchat, until I began to smell a rat and asked bluntly who she was working for:  Osco/Albertsons in Cut Bank.  What she really wanted to know was why I left Osco and her intent was to persuade me back.  I gave her an earful and told her I would NEVER use that pharmacy again because I do NOT want deceptive nanny-ladies calling up to quiz me in a way only my doctor should.  I was yelling.

The Apple Support people were in Las Vegas.  All this stuff — indeed, life itself — is pretty much a gamble.  Three cats are sneezing and snoozing, now that the weather is warm enough to release god-knows-what.  I thought Finnegan had died in the night, but he finally roused for breakfast.  Tuxie is throwing up.  Momo, formerly Mimi, can’t be touched but accepted bits of my frozen waffle.  I never had human children.  Good decision.  But there’s really no escape.