GOTTA HAVE A DRIVER'S LICENSE

Pondera County Courthouse

This is what it means to live in a small town in a sparsely populated county.  First of all, you’ve got to have wheels, as surely as if you lived in LA.  People who can afford them drive big heavy vehicles that are road-worthy in winter.  On a subzero morning one hears the diesel engines warming up all over town.  A lot of people drive old beat-up mini-pickups like my Ranger S.  But the roads are straight and there’s not much traffic, so we get along -- going around each other as needed.  

My driver’s license was about to expire.  The more I explored how to renew, the more confused I got.  The people who make and publish the rules always have a context previous to what they tell us, so I couldn’t reconcile the idea of making an appointment with the idea of  just walking in, until someone explained that the appointment deal was just for big cities.  Then when I called to try to sort things out, I confounded them by asking about emission tests and safety checks on the vehicle, which are required in some places where I’ve lived.  I know people who couldn’t pass a driver’s test because their vehicle was substandard.  Mysterious requirements come and go according to some legislative wild hare.

I wore earrings to show I was a serious person.  But I couldn’t wear my “Chinese intellectual” glasses because they’re set for the computer and I wouldn’t have passed the eye test.  (There was an eye test.  They said there was a hearing test, but there wasn’t.)  The little waiting room was full.  A big handsome responsible-looking man explained I should take a number and fill out a form.

Bill O'Leary, interim CEO of the Pondera County Hospital

Making conversation idly, I asked what was happening in Conrad.  He made a strong pitch for the health fair.  I resist them.  In the first place, I don’t want to know.  In the second place, I don’t think they tell you much anyhow.   In the third place I just flat don’t have enough money to pay for even cut rate tests. 

The man was so personable and friendly I thought I might know him, so I introduced myself with the tag that I was married to Bob Scriver in the Sixties.  That’s was connects me to locals.  He said, “Was that the Bob Scriver who had the bronze foundry in Browning?”  Revolving red light goes on in my head.   Not the art -- not the Museum of Montana Wildlife -- the foundry.  His name was O’Leary. (See above.)  I joked about whether he had a cow, which meant I remembered his name.  I tried to talk about ebola, but that went nowhere.  Then his number was called and he went on into the office to do business.

Pondera County Medical Center

Five minutes on Google when I got home and I knew O’Leary was the interim CEO of the struggling Pondera County hospital and had lived in Kalispell, where the pirate foundries have always lurked.  A few minutes more and I was reading about eMax and Image Movement of Montana, an organization of 30 medical institutions in Montana that formed to seek more efficient ways of sharing medical imaging data by using “the Cloud”.  O’Leary is a high level administrator with them.  The pitch is that it’s a "grassroots" system.  Metaphors.

In the coming election Pondera Hospital is asking for a county levy.  They are struggling to hire staff, keep up with equipment needs and so on.  The chair of the board is Brent Gaylord, who hired me in 1999 when I moved here.  In fact, if he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have moved so soon.  But the catch was that he knew he was going to sell his newspaper and that it would leave town.  Six months and I was on the street.  Another member of the Pondera hospital board is a man who has no reason to be fond of me, since I was on a jury that decided against an insurance payout for his daughter.  I have no business being on juries around here.  The only reason I was on this one was that the opposing lawyer saw that I had been clergy and as a good Catholic, he had quite a different idea about what that might mean.  These guys are all big-time “diesel”operators.

Pondera County

Luckily, the license examiner and I hit it off pretty well.  We compared job histories and he told me he’d been an elementary school principal, then a Children’s Services worker, and now did this job with a certain amount of relish and enthusiasm.  We discussed whether it would be better to smile for the photo on the license, which studies are supposed to show will make a better impression on a highway patrolman.  I said it would probably be more help to be pretty and he said he wouldn’t know since he wasn’t pretty.  I assured him that short men with nice beards are “cute” which was just as good.  That pleased him.  There’s a helluva lot of subtext in this paragraph.

And here’s more: he was one of 9 sibs, 6 of them female, and all the brothers were taller.  But his wife was one of fourteen children.  Mormon?  No, Catholic.  Metis? No, his ancestors were from Poland but had Americanized their name.  But his wife was a MacKay.  (A Scots Catholic?  Some history there.)  I told him about Strachan (“Strath au Cairn” -- river of rocks) and about Scriver, which is not from the root of “scribbling” but rather from “shriving,” an antique word that means to cover and protect, as to cover with mercy and forgiveness in a metaphorical use of the original meaning which was about mantles, like capes.  Scrivers were mantle makers. This is why things go slowly in the licensing office.  (Should we be shriven?)

Metaphor or sub-text?

The waiting room had several Valierians besides me, and when I went on to the grocery store, more passed by, joking, “This must be Valier day in Conrad!”  I don’t know whether they came for the Health Clinic.  Most of us go to the little Valier clinic that’s run by the hospital in Shelby, which is under examination for their practices because of a high handed physician.  (I was ward clerk there for five months.) Those who have the money and big cars go to Kalispell.  Great Falls tries to dominate the whole region, but the rumors about them are not good.  Money hunger.  We liked it better when the nuns ran things.  The Blackfeet way of describing them would be that they were “too proud of themselves.”

At the drugstore I bought a clever little “berry drainer” (a plastic colander); a kit for fixing eyeglasses that have detached bows due to lost screws; and a red 3-ring binder because my papers are color-coded.  Red binders for Indian material and the ones I have are full.  In the grocery store there was bacon cream cheese (nononono) and deep chocolate cream cheese (YESYESYES) -- but 9 grams of sugar??  Ordinary whipped cream cheese is more like 2!  Still, it’s only to spread on toast because butter on hot toast melts and runs up your wrist.  How many grams of cream cheese does one spread on toast? 

Pondera County

The shelter woodlots around the ranch houses are only partly turned to gold.  Twice, racing cats darted across the road in front of me -- were they just coming home after observing the eclipse in the night or were they gripped by mating?  Normally I’m more likely to see pheasant or even a deer.  The grain fields that were snowed flat in an early storm just lie there in rumples and mats.  It’s not cold but there are clouds.  Clouds.  Hmm. Mixed messages about them.  If the Internet uses up all the metaphors, what will we use in novels? But why worry about writing a novel when you can just live one?

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Pondera County with cloud

http://www.healthcare-informatics.com/article/taking-it-clouds

SALVATION BY BOOKS

Among my father’s many books was a set of fewer than a dozen precious-seeming editions of famous works, including Shakespeare and Boccaccio. Those were the only two I tried to read at about age ten. So far as I know, no one else ever tried to read them. When my father died, my mother gave those books to my brother as the oldest male in the family, acting on her belief that they were valuable family heirlooms. I don’t know what he did with them. They were really not easily readable (flimsy paper, small print) and a close reading of Boccaccio is titillating, but not useful for much more short of an academic specialty. My father’s master’s degree was in agriculture. His thesis was about the prices of potatoes. But everyone in the family thought of him as an educated man. He had a LOT of books and everyone was impressed by that. No one asked what kind of books.

It was a jumble. Biographies. Fiction that was popular when my father was a boy. A bit of history. One of my fav sets (he liked sets) was “one-minute” stories that each took one minute to read: history, mythology, science. He liked science a lot and I even struggled through a very simple book explaining atomic energy when I was maybe ten. He had almost the whole set of the Modern Library but no one read them. He had the kind of poetry that Palgrave liked, the kind that’s good to memorize in a one-room schoolhouse. We kids had our own books. My mother read library books. In later years my father bought self-improvement books by the box, but never read them so far as I could tell.

I have a lot of books. They are more or less in groups: natural history and nature writing, Montana fiction and essays, Western art and bronzes, Native American literature, how-to-write and writer’s reference books, religion and theology (not the same thing), myth and fairy tales, anthropology, several kinds of psychology (object relations, archetypal, brain theory), interior decoration and gardening, the Transcendentalists and the James Boys (Henry and William plus their sister). These are working books. I have to buy them because I write in the margins and highlight things. The Valier library doesn’t have this kind of books. Most of the people in Valier don’t realize there are subjects like this.

When I wrote the book about Bob Scriver, some people objected. They said he wasn’t important enough -- only really important people have books written about them because it’s an honor, an homage. But then others were VERY impressed that I’d written a book and gotten it published, though they had only the most vague idea of what it meant. They didn’t know about the differences among commercial publishing, academic publishing, literary publishing. It was just a vague idea that it was sort of like getting a Ph.D. or something except that one acquires a LOT of money.

Most of the people who see me around with my baggy jeans, my shirttail out and my baseball cap assume that I got my book printed at a newspaper locally. When they hear that I’m an ordained minister, they assume I’m Christian. There are so many assumptions and unknown distinctions about things in the world. Even I thought that if I just got a book published, my life would be transformed and I’d have enough money to pay off my loan. I was wrong. Now I know of many excellent writers who have had acclaimed books published, prize-winning books, authors who are well-known -- who are as impoverished as I am. (I’m not starving, but there’s barely enough.) So what does all that book reading, writing and publishing get you?

This evening I received a little barrage of emails about N. Scott Momaday, one of the best-known and beloved of the early Native American writers. "A big bear of a man," born in 1934, he spoke in Eugene maybe fifteen years ago. Now THAT was a role model! My mother loved “The Way to Rainy Mountain” and thought that if I could write a book like that one, I would have fulfilled my life.

But there is no safety. I’m just going to reprint the emails, though I might get in trouble -- it might be indiscreet or mistaken. On the other hand, if it makes you want universal health care, it would be worthwhile. I don’t know which tribe enrolls him (he’s from mixed tribes) or what goes on with Medicare and the IHS, both of which have many trapdoors a person can fall through, sometimes personal and sometimes in terms of program funding. The LEAST you can do is go read his books.

Suffering from the debilitating affects of diabetes, Mr. Momaday requires 24/7 home health care and that has drained his personal finances as well as those of the care-giver organization that has
been subsidizing those services. It will be some time before Mr.
Momaday is fully recovered and able to resume his work and that is why I'm writing to ask you to consider making a personal contribution
to the care-giver service COMING HOME CONNECTION, a nonprofit Santa Fe based home health care service provider. COMING HOME CONNECTION is a 501(c) (3) charitable organization and so your contribution to help offset the costs of Mr. Momaday's home health care is tax-deductible to the extent allowable by the Internal Revenue Service. (Although I'm sure that is less important to you than is the opportunity to support one who has inspired generations of native scholars and enriched all of our lives through his remarkable talent.)

I'd ask three things of you to support this effort. Firstly, send your good thoughts and prayers for Mr. Momaday's recovery. Secondly, SPREAD THE WORD and distribute this appeal or write your own to native list serves of which you're a member, circulate among native professional associations, and share with all who might be able to contribute. Thirdly, write your personal check to COMING HOME CONNECTION, designating it for the N.Scott Momaday fund; and mail it to : Coming Home Connection, 418 Cerillos Road, Santa Fe, NM87501.

Sincerely,
Holly YoungBear-Tibbetts

(Dr. Holly Youngbear-Tibbetts received her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Holly is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Council on Institutional Cooperation, the Bush Foundation, and The John T. and Katherine D. MacArthur Foundation Grants for Peace and International Cooperation. Joy Harjo is part of this effort to help Momaday. She is one of the most respected NA poets and a hot sax player.)

From: Karen [mailto:kstrom@hanksville.org]

Received this morning. I have checked it out and spoken to people at the home health service in Santa Fe. It is legitimate. I understand that
Scott is recovering from surgery and is in a wheelchair. He needs to learn to walk again as he has no feeling in the soles of his feet. It is
better than I thought when I first received the message, but apparently still a long recovery ahead. I inferred that his wife's battle with cancer probably depleted most of their funds.

Karen Strom
(http://www.hanksville.org/)