"LIFE ON THE TRAIL", a chapter in "WHOOP-UP COUNTRY"

Living in the North American “flyover country” as it is patronizing called by the bi-coastals who think there is nothing on the prairies, is an exercise in ambiguity.  Neither here-nor-there, it has been seen that way since the first Easterners arrived on the steamboats and it persists today.  It was said, in the joking style that helped people tolerate both the limits and the tragedies of the settling by a people not suited or accustomed, that the water in the Missouri was too thick to drink and too thin to walk on.  One of the clergy, an eloquent sort of person who was in one of the circuit-riding occupations along with drummers, theatrical performers and gamblers, advised that a person arriving from more civilized climes, would be well-advised to have a good set of teeth, not for biting but for straining out foreign objects.

I have especially tender feelings for the chapter of “Whoop-Up Country” called “Life on the Trail”, since for three years I lived in a F-150 Ford cargo van and circulated among four congregations: Great Falls, Missoula, Bozeman, and Helena.   Circuit-riding.  It was a classic thing to do though the leaders in Boston never understood why I would want to.  For them all spaces “between” were empty.

Bull Train

Four-horse coaches, 18-mule teams (as opposed to 18-wheel modern trucks) and bull trains capable of moving enormous loads very slowly, were reinforced by railroads.  Not the trans-continental federally-subsidized railroads, but short stretches between thicker populations or valuable commodities, like the spur line that serves the grain elevator in Valier.  (Currently, these short stretches are being torn up as not commercially viable.  The movement that has accompanied this is the creation of fashionable long walking parks, trails of a sort.)  Since clergy and missionaries circulated among towns, they spent a lot of time on railroads eating cinders and withstanding the grinding of steel on steel and the banshee wails of the warning steam whistle.  One could not be confident of access to meals so the journal-keeping religious people noted that they carried “dates” in their “wallets.”  (This practice served nomad bedouin rather well.  I always carried breakfast bars in my circulating parsonage.)

Concord Coach

The Concord coach was considered a major advance, since the passengers were jostled around without being directly exposed to the weather until they had to get out to walk uphill or even push.  They were treacherous, tippy vehicles that required special skills, experience and reckless attitudes to get the mail through -- maybe not on time.  Coaches were identified with particular drivers, who sat up high in the dust or snow -- whatever.  In winter they really needed the buffalo hide coats and Scotch caps.  In summer it was Stetson, bandanna and vest that counted.  

Their tongues were their whips.  This is also a persisting skill.  When I was an animal control officer, early on when I was the only woman, a stock truck full of horses went over the bank between the Portland Airport and the Columbia River.  In the pre-dawn dark it was a horrible scene of massacre with the horses trapped inside because the truck fell on the door.  The Really Big Wrecker arrived and the driver set to work attaching chains and so on.  He spewed a steady stream of mule-skinner oaths until he realized I was female.  Then he was rendered mute, but that meant he couldn’t work, so I tactfully left to get coffee.  Whisky and coffee are necessities on any trail, in any trial.

A Democrat 

The “Whoop-Up Trail” was international since it was between Fort Benton, Montana, and Fort Macleod, Alberta.  Some of the the travelers were English adventurers, like two young men who assumed the whole world was like the one they knew at home.  They left in a “Democrat.”  They let their horses escape in the night, but after they had been advised to picket them, nearly strangled the pair by tethering them close enough together to entangle the ropes.  They couldn’t start a fire because they didn’t know about kindling.  They were forced to admit that an Oxford education had limited relevance.  But other sophisticated travelers felt that the trail-life folks were surprisingly sophisticated about politics and so on.  They were Civil War survivors who had been displaced from small town life and did not care to go back.

Same place from the Alberta Side

That's Chief Mountain.

On the Canadian side, newcomers were advised that British standards of behavior were necessary.  However, the first version of Fort Macleod was a “house built on sand.”  Not only that, it was on the river floodplain and regularly flooded.  After ten years of this it was moved to safer ground.  Macleod House, run by Harry “Kamoose” Taylor (1824 - 1901), was a prominent feature, much like the Kipp boarding house in Blackfoot (the town) on the Blackfeet reservation.  Various “house rules” supposedly posted by “Kamoose” included things like removing spurs and spiked boots when going to bed, sleeping double if the management said so, and forbidding assaults on the cook.   More clever, and evoking English tavern signs, there was posted out front a large silhouette of the back of a man’s head with the words:  “No Jawbone.”  It meant no credit, just cash. 

“Kamoose” means “wife-stealer” according to Sharp and others, but I’ve had no occasion to learn the word, so I’m not sure he’s right.  The story is that he fell in love with a tribal woman, offered to buy her, was refused, and simply ran off with her.  More certainly, “Kamouse” had been clergy but turned to whiskey trading, rather like the contemporary Montana priest, John Bauer, who owned “Miss Kitty’s” X-rated book store named for his cat.  It’s more a coffee shop now, but still offers the same kind of books.  John is gone so it is owned by his female former manager and quite accepted by the town.  People find their comforts where they can and only the foolish turn them away.

Fort Macleod

This is also the time period when Jerry Potts earned his reputation as a guide for travel and John Healy was feuding with anyone who differed with him or interfered with his shipping.  But the legends had not grown yet and visitors from more civilized places were unimpressed.  One Brit said Fort Macleod was “a wide, muddy lane, with a row of dirty, half-finished, wooden shanties flanking each side.”  This sort of scene is archetypal now, immortalized in a thousand movies.  

An ecologist told a story about a newcomer to the West who was enchanted by the purple mist of blooming spotted knapweed, a notoriously invasive weed that even goats think twice before eating.  The ecologist’s comment was that the first sight of a place will forever afterward be the marker for “normal” and seem like the way it “ought” to be.  The West has always and will always have a steady stream of newcomers who divide their opinions between their homelands and this broad landscape that seems more eternal than it is.  The result is often stupid and transient construction, or a sudden impulse to build without thinking about maintenance or adapting to the future.  There’s no choice but to live in the “now,” but to deny the past and ignore the future is to build a ghost town.

Mounties with Empire standards

At least in “flyover country” we’re not likely to drown when the oceans rise, but what are we going to do with all the displaced coastal citizens on the road?  That’s also a rising tide.  My laundromat locks its customer bathroom to keep out “road people” who wash their children and hair in the small sink.  But maybe “Kamoose” would build a proper wash house along the highway to accommodate all the people living in their cars on the trail.  It would be a comfort.

"SLAMMING POWER"

“Slamming” is a drug term.  Look it up.  You’ll have to work at it, since Google is suddenly prudish and hides sexual information that used to be right up front.  The sexual/gay/meth version of slamming is easily relevant when dealing [sic] with power.  It's also a communication system term.  This story is infested with cell phone exchanges.  Sometimes the messages appear on your own monitor screen!  There’s not much sex, not much violence -- it’s like snakes -- quiet danger.  High brow danger that expects the viewer to understand abstract potentials.

Slamming also means switching communication companies without the knowledge of the subscriber.  (The Helena IR just subscribed me to their email feed without my invitation or permission, but that's "spamming," right?)  "Slamming" is also -- says Google who doesn’t think that excretion is sexual --  a big painful bowel movement.  Sounds like a great title for a novel to me, but this is just a little blog post.

So I slammed “House of Cards III”  this weekend and I’m not going to have any mercy about “spoilers” because it’s silly to expect this movie’s pull to be suspense, not knowing what will happen.  All you have to do is check the news right now.  The fascination is knowing what will happen in the end and watching to see what the steps of developments will be.  One of the main strategies of this plot is to set up the expected and then step to one side of it, so that your head is playing the two situations side-by-side -- then the surprise is in there between them.  The point is speculating about which truth seems most authentic -- so far.  Even after watching the whole series, the questions persist.  Cling inside one’s mind.  Make a person laugh.  (How many people will be making “little pickle” jokes for a few weeks, partly because the phrase itself is fun to say?)  So the spoilers that are truly surprises are not that spoiled.

When the moral center, the only person who seems to have both understanding and compassion (some understandings only trigger contempt), is a former addict hustler who writes best sellers (or maybe steals some of them -- he tells it both ways). It’s clear that only a non-judgmental listener like him is going to be able to “get” this tale from either of the principals, both of them deeply hidden even from themselves.  It is the business of the compassionate whore to get to the center of a person and then use it. Then keep the secret.  This is also the task of the honest biographer.  If you ask me, it works.

Paul Sparks as Thomas Yates

In this version one character after another develops cracks if not total destruction, like the Jesus corpus that pitches off his cross behind the altar.  This narrative is never beyond the cheap laugh:  the prez picks up a fragment off the floor and says, “At last I have God’s ear.”  And he does.  Corny, but his cool at a theology symbol makes a catastrophe funny. And somehow more ominous than if the falling statue had put him in the hospital.

Mermaid under a crystal shower

Pay close attention to the production values.  These sets are like aquariums, aquamarine silvery colors with spare set dressing.   Not much furniture, mostly sharp-edged leather.  The opposite of Victorian excess.  The women are light-washed into perfection until they get a bit rucked up by the plot and then their freckles emerge, their eyes clench into wrinkles except for the strange phenomenon of older women with subtly Chinese eyes because of the skin being pulled back by face lifts.  On the younger ones, when the lighting goes harsh, we suddenly see their little I-am-not-fertile mustaches from the Pill.  As the president loses power, his exquisite dark suits become gray hoodies -- like the ones worn by kids who are street shooters, but high-end.  In the end, it is the wife rowing in the boat.

Fly-over country, until there's a election.

Watch the set-dressing paintings hanging on the walls in the “White House”.  In Episode Three, they are all landscapes, very few with human figures, not conventionally pretty -- ochre grass, dark trees.  Like the prairie landscapes at the end of the series.  I’ll not tell you about it -- you deserve one surprise.  But it’s clear that this movie is about America and never clearer than when the Russian is there.  The Russian is quite Danish, tall and blonde with a heavily boned face -- Putin will love it!   But never mind.  The faux Putin makes it plain that he is a macho match and just as “ethical” as the US President.  And he sees that the same is true of the president’s wife.

Annie Parisse as an Iowan modern mommie dearest

At the end of the season, when we look back in our godlike way, what we have seen in this series was the book that  “Thomas Yates”  (Paul Sparks) wrote.  Or would have written.   Still might.  A couple as tightly knit as the Starks, but without the beheadings.  Instead there are de-soulings.  The prom queen finally meets today’s young mother: cynical, narcissistic, considering the murder of her baby on one hand but insisting on breast feeding.  People begin to see and walk away from this power couple, even Freddie the rib king.  The couple itself goes out of balance.  The amorphous but vicious power-hungry man begins to attack and confine the wife who got him to where he is -- “she put me in the White House” -- and it is enough to set her free.  He broke the deal.  NOW who will fuck him back to sanity when he ends crumpled on the floor?

The argument in the end is about the Third Estate, which I also looked up.  (I’m not informed enough to just know this stuff, but I know to look things up.)  The Third Estate is a term indicating the ordinary citizens, not the law school graduate power-mongers in Washington DC.  The Iowa Caucus and the New Hampshire primaries represent this third element of power.  But the writers also nearly do homage to journalism, which is represented as always after the truth on behalf of the Third Estate.  

I was amused that one reviewer insulted the biographer supposedly hired by the president with full confidence that he would skate the shiny surface and never be a scorpion.  The reviewer clearly wanted the biographer to be a more god-like truth detector instead of just a good listener.  The “tell” is that he doesn’t think the bold woman journalist would ever go to bed with a geek like this guy with a shady past.  Which sounds more like the reviewer's regret than the character's.  So characteristic of critics to be more willing to criticize sexual mojo than writing mojo.

All these complex tales of the city start with aerial shots of the city concerned, but "House of Cards” has the best montage ever.  Maybe I just like it because of the familiar graceful monuments -- I love the lions -- or maybe it’s because of the gorgeous progression through days, nights and seasons.  I sit quietly and watch the titles, unlike my tendency to multi-task during the obvious parts.  The sound track is equally gorgeous and heart-breaking: the distant echoing trumpet, the sorrowing aria.

Phallic or finger?

This vid is the credits titles plus GPS instead of sub-titles, in case you go there.  I'm not being funny -- people from the rez are forever going to Washington, D.C.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/entertainment/house-of-cards/

The online discussion will go on for years, but this was an interesting one.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/02/house-of-cards-creator-beau-willimon-dishes-on-season-3-s-scandals-and-surprises.html

People around here can comfortably disavow these characters or maybe claim parts.  I would not be surprised if our mayor rapped his ring on the folding table to bring our council meeting to order and ask us to pledge allegiance to the “best country in the world.”  But the real power in the room is always female.  It's just that we don't much go in for dressing up.