THE SEASONS FLIP IN FLAMES

Myself, 1945-'46

This time of year I’m always a little panicky.  It doesn’t help that the weather shifts now, so around here we are due for a cold spell and even some snow, but in the meantime fires are filling the air with smoke so that the nose-brain is signalling “fire,fire,fire. . . “  

But the real reason is the beginning of school.  From the very first day of kindergarten, which was my own personal first day because my mother had to fight to get me in late, because she said that I was overloading her ability to care for the three of us (me and “the boys” who at that point were like one person).  My b-day is late in October, so I was technically too young, but she made her plea stick.

The result was that I walked into a classroom where everyone had already formed their social patterns and there was no place for me.  Lesson learned.  Maybe OVER-learned.  I wouldn’t have known this had happened if my mother hadn’t told me.  Her position about me all my life was that I was unwilling to take the bullet for her and the boys, for the family.  (My father had a traveling job.  He was irrelevant but he was also the reason my mother felt so overwhelmed.)  She never mentioned a precipitating incident, but there must have been one.

A candle-making demonstration about 1953

She felt that my role as a daughter was to support hers as a mother.  She hoped I would be a do-over for every disappointment she’d had.  That meant she finished college while I was in high school as she could not at the proper age (the Depression), and then sent me through college.  But she was enraged that in middle age I went to Divinity School on scholarship.  Twice in life I really screwed up and got into the crosshairs of failure so that I had to ask to come back “home.”  The first time she assumed I was admitting she was right — now I would get a proper hairdo and learn how to play bridge.  The second time she almost didn’t let me return.  

So now at 77 I make my own place.  Ironically, it was my third of my mother’s estate that bought me this ramshackle house.  I’ve been on my own ever since and have managed the necessities — barely.  But the crucial nub of my real, if secret, life has since 1999 has been aflame with ideas and fulfillment.  Only one person really knows and that person was a gift beyond measurement.  

They say that in a sort of foreshadowing of coitus that bacterial one-celled creatures will sidle up next to each other and both will open a sort of port-hole in their cell walls.  Then they exchange some genetic information.  it’s a vivid image.  For me it brings to mind ranchers out on some rural road, traveling in opposite directions so that they can park with adjacent windows and talk for long enough to shut off the engines.  They used to smoke.  What they learn from each other can be vital.  So this writer and I pulled up our computers next to each other and the result was life-saving.

So many people are trying to resolve their life-issues by writing, that there is a parallel industry now that coaches and gives pep talks.  One of the best is steve@stevenpressfield.com.  Best because he really does know nuts and bolts and has sold books.  All these guys operate off pretty much the same assumption: that “writing” is linear, follows the same pattern of a compelling problem that causes rising action through increasingly tougher problems until finally there is a crisis/climax and then a resolution, hopefully one that leads to a higher plane of life.  

This is narrative fiction, but most of the non-fiction also follows this pattern.  The college educated pre-readers, editors, and agents look for it and endorse it.  If presented with a mass of print, they try to find the “narrative line” and develop it, prune it, espalier it onto the familiar wall.  Many times the most inspired but nonconforming writers are murdered by this.  Sometimes they reframe themselves as poets, which means they’re free but they’ll never make a living.

So what are the new patterns, the alternatives?  One has grown out of blogging, on-going sequences of individually composed writing — possibly chronological like a journal, but maybe only related by the writer having written them, like beads on a string.  Way down at the origin of at least one of my strands is kindergarten, and the dread of starting school again but being driven to take the bullet for the family.  A lot of other strands added since 1945, which is the origin of that bullet metaphor.

The formal philosophical underpinning of the three-part syllogism comes out of Greek drama and was both the origin and the exemplar for the Western world clear up through the Enlightenment.  Science and the scientific method is another version of it: define a problem, take evidence, form a hypothesis, make a triumphant discovery.  There were alternatives, but they were ignored.

Most recently I found “rhizome theory” which is the pattern of how sweetgrass grows: in clumps, then in long runners with a new clump forming at the end.  This is how blogs are.  This is how I think and write.  This how the world seems to be for a moment.  It’s a “Silk Roads” theory.  A town, a trail, another town.

Here on the high prairie the temp and the air quality are balancing, still late summer but predicted to flip over into a crisp fall in the night.  It’s hard to sleep and dreams are worrisome.  A repeated dream is that I’m at a conference in a strange town, not all that interested in the agenda and not knowing any of the other attendees.  I walk through the city and only half-realize they are cities from television, mixed and overlain with the cities I’ve known.  Rarely am I stepping over railroad tracks in a rotted industrial zone; usually I’m passing shop windows.  Often it’s all so real and familiar that I wonder whether I’m channeling someone.  There’s no Freudian symbolism nor even any Jungian tale.  I’m just new to kindergarten and wondering what the key might be.

Alan Deale and I at the tea after ML awarded him an honorary doctorate.

A few nights ago I had a telephone call from my original — and beloved — Unitarian minister, Alan Deale, because of writing about clergy misconduct misconstrued and suppressed, then dragged out of the past in vengeance.  We talked about his intern student ministers from the Seventies, who are involved.  I told him about driving by the church at 2AM after an event of some sort and seeing all the lights on, so I stopped out curiosity and the vague thought that help might be needed.  It was an intern in tears over not being able to write a sermon.  My efforts to help didn’t work.

When I went on, I had to cross what they call the “Pearl District” which used to be warehouses and therefore has railroad tracks in the streets.  Now it’s trendy boutiques and galleries, gentrified but with no residences.  I came to a car on fire — totally engulfed in high flames, just like television.  A man with a camera on a tripod was taking photos.  I stopped again.  

“Is there anyone in the car?”  Knowing if there was, they were dead.

“Yes.  In the back.”  He didn’t stop.  I heard sirens.

I left.  There was never anything in the news nor did I hear anything through the sheriff’s gossip.  Sometimes I wonder whether it was a dream.  What is reality?  When can we intervene?  When is it right to call on others for help?  Are we ever entitled to guard our own interests?

FEINTS AT SPRING

This time of year I’m always a little confused. Like the weather. Like the long skeins of geese that have been sculling the skies, looking for open water. Today it’s here, tomorrow it’s there. It may be only folk legend, but it seems as though many old timers slide away about now, so that the obituaries are listing ranchers more than a hundred years old, which means they were born before World War I.

This year the farmers are checking their winter wheat without a lot of hope since there has been so little moisture, so little snow to cover it with insulation. Last year was so wet and now this year is so dry. The great scythe of weather swings back and forth, changing everything and confounding any sense of whether the global weather is warming or cooling or simply chaotic. We watch the sky for signs of the jet stream.

I have a cardboard box of sweetgrass I cut from the bed I grow in my back yard. Originally I brought it into the house to dry, putting it up high where the heat collects, but then I forgot it except for occasionally noticing the sachet effect. Then last week I had occasion to give a handful to a friend and send another handful to my cousin. I meant to make conventional braids, the way one buys sweetgrass in a shop, but I never got around to it so I just bound the clutch with yarn. There were a lot of things I never quite got around to this winter. I’m not domestic in the best of times and when distracted, I let things slide. Squibbie, the tortoiseshell cat, has taken to sleeping in the box of sweetgrass, maybe dreaming of summer. Crackers, the yellow cat, likes to chew what sticks out over the flaps. I pick up the strands the cats leave on the carpet and throw them onto the stove burners to make smudge when I boil water for coffee.

The librarian explains to me why people like to ice fish. She says you can see the fish down there. The little perch like to rest on the bottom on their fins but then you see a boil-up cloud of dust (underwater?) and they’re all gone. In a second the menacing shadow head of a really big fish (I don’t know the kind) comes along like a shark. This is the kind you catch by using a mouse for bait. The man who was once in Special Forces and who was writing a book this winter just for fun has stopped writing because, he says, he must get ready for fishing season. (He doesn’t fish for ice. Jokes.)

My friends are watching this season’s “Downton Abbey” but I don’t have television. When it’s on DVD, I’ll catch up. In the meantime, I forward them the many peripheral articles because they don’t subscribe to culture compendiums. A recent one of these said that in the huge house where they film, old things constantly turn up in drawers or at the backs of cupboards. They just now found an entire staircase. I suppose it had been walled up or the access door had been locked. This is supposed to be a classic woman’s dream: a hidden space revealed, especially the one the girl ascends to find the old woman spinning. The girl becomes the sleeping beauty. George Macdonald, writer of fairy tales, added the catacombs of ancient mines in the mountain under the castle. Down there the trolls jostle Curdy, the miner, who knows he can defeat trolls by stamping on their tender toes.

When I have this dream, I’m in a grist mill where flour is ground and the stairs are open, going up among the timbers, all laden with chaff. The sound of the mill is so vivid that I wake up. It is a diesel truck idling across the street, warming up for a day of hauling. It has snowed a few inches that will be gone by noon. One cat behind my knees, the other on my left arm. One snores, the other purrs.

The dregs of February. Do we leap this year? No Marching yet. The calves and lambs are coming. It’s a little past shearing season. In Portland, where I grew up, it’s spring with pussywillows and forsythia. In Chicago, where I was educated, the red cardinals have changed to their pairing-off songs. Here in Montana the ground squirrels are pregnant but rolled up sleeping in their burrows. The bear cubs have been nursing but maybe their eyes are still closed. Their mother shifts a little now and then.

I have a friend to educate. “What is a rhizome?” he asks. “What is a minotaur?” “How do you find sweetgrass?” He’s Rip Van Winkle, newly retired, his eyes wide.

Those are not the questions I’m asking. I’m wondering, “How does a person manage desire? How much of it is history?” “Why are people comforted by denial?” “Why do people in dire straits want to be alone?” (I would.) “What is gender really?” “When is spring? Not just the angle of the axis of the earth, but as a subjective experience, that realization of having made it through the winter?” My questions are complex and always lead to new questions.

I should do some housekeeping. Vacuum. Pay some bills. Wash the dishes. Straighten the pictures on the wall. Reshelve books. Wash the cat dishes. Sort and file the toppling stacks of paper.

This morning the sky was blue and the sun was bright gold. Now it’s back to gray and the mountains are shrouded again. Mardi Gras followed by Ash Wednesday. I did not want to wake from winter dreams, oblivion streaming desire and and elaboration. I grasp at the dreams to keep them but they are resentful, clinging to the knowledge that I still want them but nevertheless trying to cut the connections. Their knives are dull. I’m only bruised, though I sting with awakening. I just won’t open my eyes yet.

THE PRAIRIE HOLDS ITS BREATH

The prairie is holding its breath before beginning to blow again. The leaves have been torn down, so only the water-drawing structure of the trees remains, a vertical river emptied for the cold. Long dead grass is sheltering small green plants at its feet. Without leaves my poplars look as though someone tied knots in the lesser branches. They are growths from some kind of disease. When I ask, people shrug. My cottonwood and one of the blue spruces are showing signs of stress -- not enough water in the late summer, too much in the early summer. The newspaper today advises a good soak before winter sets in. In some places there is not enough ground moisture to give the winter wheat a proper start. They need to have roots so their vitality will winter over and spring up green.

Summer building, fall planting, are just trailing off now. The Halloween snow has come and gone -- night skiffs will persist with maybe some single-digit blankets until Thanksgiving when the first big snowstorm hits. The bowl of water I keep outside over summer is frozen solid in the mornings. If I leave it and the sun hits it, there will be a little water on top by afternoon, but I’ll dump it out now. Skies are bluer with summer dust settled and water vapor wrung out by cold. The yards are cleared of furniture except for the barbecues. In a meat-eating town some people don’t know how to cook on an indoor stove. The only spots of color are children’s plastic toys abandoned on the lawns.

I’m looking at house skirting, driving around town in mid-afternoon through the empty streets. Many houses have them, mostly trailer skirting, some of it meant to look like stone though it doesn’t. If I put skirting on my old house, it would be warmer. The real old-timers used to bank dirt or snow against the bottoms of their houses, but they were less worried about bugs and small rodents. It’s pure speculation on my part. I can’t even afford a paint job. The present paint is peeling: thinly sprayed-on cheap latex paint. The actual siding is asbestos, which always breaks along the bottom, so that the effect is like bad teeth.

One intersection near the new watertower is completely dug up. No idea why but maybe something to do with attaching the new well. I didn’t get out of the pickup to look. I might be curious enough to go back tomorrow when workers will be there, so I can ask questions. We are all getting very curious about our infrastructure. We’ve just paid some consultants $20,000 to find out why we often fail our sewer effluent treatment tests with the state, which has advised us we need to upgrade. Partly we are maxed out, but there is also a theory that the providing company for the treatment machinery sold us a system that doesn’t work at forty below. Another theory is that the spring was so wet that there was too much water for the “bugs” (bacteria) to do their job.

The people who built the processing megaloads for the Athabascan tar sands have bought land near Bynum where they plan to build future loads, adding 140 new residents to a place that has dwindled to near nonexistence. They say because the place is already on the route approved to haul them. Why aren’t they building in Valier? We’re on the route and past some very risky terrain on 89 between here and Bynum. Sharp curves, steep drop-offs, thirty miles closer to foothill ice storms. A decision by someone back east who has never been here. Everyone was anxious to know who sold the land: Hutterites.

Most people have done their hunting now. There’s been wind for keeping geese down low and snow for tracking elk. The weather was great for pheasant but the bird population is down. The snow geese are on Freezeout in their huge African-style rippling banks and clamouring clouds of moving wings. The managers plant barley to bait them. They’ll be around until the next storm, then roar off to the south. The ornamental waterfowl in Gibson Park in Great Falls have been herded away to their winter confines. I don’t know what the city did to get rid of the slacker geese along Tenth Avenue South. Probably the same thing as Valier did to eliminate the rock pigeons around the grain bin farms in town. I ask about those bins, but haven’t found the right person for answers yet. Taking out the rock pigeons left a niche for the hyperactive noisy doves. I advise the cats to get to work on them. They don’t. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Don’t catch them.

This part of fall -- late, bare -- is always in tension between the stress and abandon of summer and the expected tests of winter. This particular summer for me was braced, paranoid, ambiguous. It never did get really hot. My cherry tomato plant mostly just sat there. My computer died and was restored with the help of friends and relatives, which was an immensely heartening experience that I had not expected and still feel a little guilty about. My intention in this part of my life was to be absolutely self-reliant and on my own, but that turns out to be a silly idea. My other intention, to write with as much risk and passion as I dare, has been pretty much fulfilled but because it was private, only a few people know about it. At my utmost, I was not quite enough. But what I can see in the future might be even more demanding.

A little while ago in my futzing around, I knocked out this computer. Dead. Nada. It took much more pondering -- accompanied by paranoia -- than it should have to figure out the problem. The power cord had come unplugged and I think of power cords as BIG. This one was small. Maybe that’s a good clue. Maybe it’s not so much the events as the way we take them. Emotion can be good, but it can also interfere.

Anyway, there will be more wind. And it will remove many leaves from my yard. Then I can rake and bag what’s left in the corners. Even so do the seasons, our lives, and our feelings weave in and out of each other, encoding as they go.

SONGS WITH WINGS

There are two “sound shifts” that herald spring in Valier.  One is the soft surf of newly emerged leaves, which is still weeks in the future.  The other is the much earlier birdsongs.  This year the first bird song (if you can call it that) I was aware of was on a fog-bound morning walking to the post office when I heard a forlorn single honk from a Canada goose, flying so low that it was a good thing most of the houses here are only one story tall.  I figured it was just a scout on reconnoitre from Great Falls where some geese winter over.  

But then my correspondent Paul said that on his country property in Idaho there were definitely geese -- the only trouble was that the water was still frozen so they were out there jumping up and down in unison to break the ice open.  (For you city folks, that’s a joke.)  A few days later pairs and family groups were flying through Valier.  And a little later than that, the high skeins were traveling through with their high eerie bugling.  Funny how comical honking is when it’s up close but how musical when it’s coming down from far away.

I have doves living in one of my blue spruces.  They are a busy and amorous bunch, careless of their eggs and defiant of the town owl, and I’m unclear whether they are there over winter or not.  Their incessant coo-roo is meant to be romantic, I’m sure, but it can get wearing.  Maybe that’s because I rarely actually SEE them, unless one comes out onto the bare cottonwood branches to take a little break from the boudoir or is on the ground to load its gizzard with gravel.   They clearly don’t eat the same grain as the rock pigeons around the grain bins.  The latter have simply disappeared.  I suspect they’ve been poisoned -- Valier likes poison and has the high cancer rates to show for it.   The gulls are much fewer than usual as well, though this year the water is high enough that their nests on the island in Lake Francis are protected from ATV assault.  I never see magpies in town, but also fewer in the countryside.  It’s worrying.

I’m appreciative of the brisk rattle of the little woodpeckers who work on that cottonwood tree all winter, probing the crevices of the rough bark.  It’s a silver cottonwood which I dearly love and I’m happy to have it tended, so I was UNhappy when Squibbie, my fat tortoiseshell cat, managed to catch one and bring it into the kitchen through the cat flap.  I heard it hit the glass of the picture window, knocking itself “cuckoo” (technical ornithological term) enough that it was still so I could take it in two hands and carry it back out to the tree, where it seemed to recover and proceed with its work.  

Cats may be the reason there are far fewer birds this spring.  Concern about the number of stray cats is increasing and the deputy and I have consulted about measures to take, like securing old warehouses and other refuges and buying a few live-traps for the town to use regularly.  I would be pretty upset if my own cats were killed or removed, so I don’t like the idea of poison, and a town is no place to be shooting, but there are plenty of people here who despise cats as vermin.  Oddly, they feel the same way about chickens.  Valier has been echoing Great Falls’ chicken wars in which high income people want to keep a few hens for pets and low income people regard them as the first steps towards the total degradation of the one civilized place they have ever lived.  “I fed chickens on the farm, I know chickens, I HATE chickens!” is the cry.

Early in the spring a small eager woman at the post office told me about her hardy apple tree, which hangs onto its fruit over the winter.  Attracted by an unfamiliar sound, she looked out the window to see her tree swarming with robins gobbling up the shriveled apples.  I didn’t see it myself, but the mental image had me wishing I were an artist.  I’m hearing media stories about robins being much fewer this year and singing at night because around cities the noise level is too high for them to communicate with possible helpmates for nest building and (ahem) the small ceremonies that produce eggs.  

When the fields finally begin to clear and it’s warm enough to drive around a bit with my elbow out the pickup window, I listen for the first meadowlark which, to my heart, has a bird song approaching the sacramental, though the house finch is a close second.  Meadowlark song is near being pronounced words and they say different things in different places.  The first ones I deciphered said,  “Would you like to go up in my swing?”  A story I read claimed they said, “I love fresh fruit!”  This year they are quiet, but that may be because that the empty space in the middle of town where they normally live is currently the scene of construction for our second water tank.

Normally there is a house finch family that lives in the trees in front of the Baptist church next door, but I haven’t heard them this year.  I’ve heard other house finches in town and dearly love their twisting shining arias which are the same here as they were in Portland when I was growing up and they lived in the walnut trees across the street.  I’m  not even hearing the alarm sounds from them and the robins, which is beeping like a big piece of equipment backing up.  Robin warnings are similar.

The most mysterious and rare song in Valier is one I was used to in the forests of Oregon: the hermit thrush.  Sound is different among big mossy trees but I still recognize the notes.  The most typical summer song on the prairie, at least near any small stream or barrow pit puddle is the “breeeeee” of red-winged blackbirds.

It occurred to me that there must be many bird songs online and I began to listen to them, but had to stop because Squibbie woke up from her morning nap and began trying to get inside my computer.  A few owl hoots put her back on her tail.  As a kitten she was nearly carried off by that town owl.  I came out just in time.  She hasn't forgotten.

ONE GOOSE AT A TIME

FROM PAUL:

Won’t be long now, the geese will arrive, thought I heard some yesterday, but it was only exuberant chickens. Even before there’s any open water on the creek, they’ll be entertaining and serenading me as they crash land, slide and tumble on the ice, to scout out and lay claim to the choicest nesting area. I have to think these are the same geese or offspring that have been raised here over the years. What other reason would geese in their right mind wend their way through the mountains, looking for a beaver dammed creek in a country with huge lakes and two big, designated waterfowl refuges? I’ve always meant to compile statistics...when they first arrive every year and how many pairs start out nesting and how many are successful at raising a brood. I suspect they’re swallow-like and show up every year on or about the same day. 

Even when I’m expecting them, the first wild honks come as a surprise, like they snuck in overnight. Trying to count them is problematic too. If I go out there, it seems they all rise up at once to circle and eye me warily, but that’s deceptive because if they’re sitting eggs, there are still a bunch of geese in the grass and reeds, waiting until you almost step on them before bursting into flight, or come chasing after you with wings outspread and neck crooked forward, offering to take a piece of your hide.

Coyotes and other predators must take a lot of them but it never seems to much reduce the population, nor dampen their enthusiasm. My camera records sound, I ought to see if it’ll pick them up well and figure out how to send you a sound file. I’d like to get another one of the spring peepers and overlay them for a sound track I could use for a spring tonic in mid winter.

Paul is on the plush west side of the Rockies, surrounded by trees, where spring comes early and actually involves things we don’t see until early summer, but here’s something he could listen to if he doesn’t get to that recording project.

http://www.myspace.com/frankielainemusic/music   NO, not “Mule Train!”  “The Cry of the Wild Goose.”  That was my father’s theme song.  In fact, Paul is getting ready for a spring wanderjahr.

Not me.  After the wind blew everything into a tumble, it has snowed again.  Not a lot, so the cats don’t mind trotting out the cat path to inspect the back garage.  

But my winter wool socks are looking very hairy.  I decided early that knots in socks were not a good thing, so I just let the ends of the wool trail.  They don’t show when I have my shoes on in public.  For the same reason, I use up any bits of wool I have around.  I like sock darning.  It’s a pleasant way to keep my hands busy while I listen to the news.

Yesterday on the way back from the post office I picked up some good firewood and there’s lots in my own yard.  The wind is quiet enough to sit by my wood stove and burn sticks this afternoon.  Another pleasant thing to do, though there’s no radio out there.  No matter.  I like hearing the fire.

The other event on the way back from the post office was a Canada goose flying over, yelping, not much higher than the housetops!  Here I was scoffing at Paul.  But the calves and lambs are coming fast now.  And then there was a whole V of geese -- not a long, high one.  I think they were local geese, hatched here, who wintered over in Great Falls where the river is fast enough to stay open.  The real migrators fly way up high, only their voices falling down like rain.

One theory is that these big birds, remnants of dinosaurs, learned to migrate partly in response to seasons and partly because of the continents, borne on deep tectonic plates and driven apart by volcanic upwelling at the bottoms of oceans, kept trying to do what they had always done, even though the terrain changed and so now they are birds.

If you want to get all scared (and put off doing your homework) here’s something to worry about:

“The world can see total havoc if the solar flares continue to bombard the earth. According to some scientists and geologists, the Sun may be experiencing a 100,000 years cycle and bombarding the earth with massive solar wind. While the magnetosphere and earths internal dynamo is holding strong, a serious problem is being observed in the thermal and seismological readings of the earth’s tectonic plates.

“For the first time the tectonic plates of the earth are becoming vulnerable to these abnormal electromagnetic radiation from the Sun.

“There is some risk of the tectonic plates disintegrating by 2012. That will be catastrophic and the human civilization can disappear in a day or two.

“According to some tectonic plate observers, Indo-Australian plate is about to break apart near Sumatra. That will automatically produce ripple effects and many other plates will start cracking.

“The electromagnetic radiation from the Sun and the cosmic radiation jointly are causing major stresses in all fault areas of the tectonic plates. It is similar to making the plates in those weak spots brittle – a little shock of any kind will break them.”

(FROM A BLOG CALLED YEAR-2012)

Paul won’t be surprised:  he’s a “doomer,” raised in the shadow of nuclear holocaust.  Actually, total and instant destruction is not a problem because there’s nothing you can do about it anyway.  But disruption of what one expects and depends upon as daily infrastructure can be a heavy weight, a strong wind, an earthquake.  The realistic problem might be interference with our internet/satellite system or even our electrical grid.

So I keep my socks mended and trek to the post office every day to get my bills and second-hand books.  The windfall of sticks is welcome and if I can’t blog, well, I have a big stack of yellow legal pads.  Not to worry about publishing what I write -- publishing has already cratered.  Apocalypse comes in small increments.  It teaches us to fly.

ELK SEASON

It’s cold and overcast today. The summer crops are cut or dug, the winter wheat has mostly sprouted, as it is supposed to. It will die back during winter and then be up early in the spring. Everyone says the signs point to an exceptionally cold and snowy winter, but we’re supposed to get a little more slack in a few days. I’m thinking about putting some straw bales around my foundation. It is hunting season and so far two teenagers have been shot by accident. One out with a group of kids and found dead in a field. The other shot by his sister back at the car at the end of the day -- she was unloading her gun and by accident got him in the face from five feet away.

We know about these hazards in Montana and teach classes that effectively diminish the numbers. Also, on the reservations there are classes to reduce the number of suicides. Classes never totally succeed, but they help. I’m not part of that scene now.

Nor do I go hunting anymore, so I turn to my friend Paul for seasonal stories. The reality of hunting is that a lot of it is just plain hard work.


Paul:

I have another horse tale that ties in with saws. When in college one of my professors heard I had a little packing experience and had a friend up at his cabin near . . . Trego? Anyway the friend had downed a big elk way the heck out there in the mountains, and the prof had a horse, but couldn't get out of his obligations and the horse had no packing experience, nor did he have a pack saddle. The deal was, if we packed it out, I'd not only get paid, but get half the meat! Tell that to a hungry kid who'd been boiling up cheap tongue for lunch meat.

Grabbed a willing friend and we made it up to the cabin the next morning, introduced ourselves to the horse and the hunter, put a western saddle and a bunch of rope and a saw on the horse and headed in. The hunter was careful to mark his way out but had a heck of a time retracing his trail and we had to do a lot of backtracking.

When we got to the elk we had to re-gut it because the inexperienced hunter had done such a poor job. Then I looked for the saw to cut it in half. When I couldn't find it, I remembered an odd sound somewhere in our travels that sounded just like the twang a saw might make hitting the ground, but I chalked up to the sound of a saw brushing up against a tree.

Didn't think we'd ever find it again, so the only thing left was to use the little chainsaw I'd brought along to clear trail. What a MESS! I'm sure I looked like Freddie Kruger by the time I was done.

Went back to the horse to bring him up and he wasn't about to let me get near him, much less follow me into what he must have thought was oblivion. I ended up having to put my jacket over his head to get him close enough to snub up to a tree while we tried to load and truss a half elk to that saddle and the horse.

All the way back down the mountain that elk half would slide to one side or the other or to the belly of that poor horse. The solution to the problem escaped me until we were close to the cabin and I cut a hole in the hide and ribs for the pommel to fit in. The second half was much easier since we knew where it was and how to pack it.

When we got back and hung the meat, all we could do was drool until we cut what was left of the mangled back straps out and headed back to town for a real feast. Came back on the weekend and cut the whole thing up and split it up. Ate good for a long time and the prof even loaned us freezer space for the winter.


How long have folks been bugling elk? Never been much of an elk hunter but I did take a brief interest in bugling. I must have bought mine at the pawn/gun shop next to the tavern because I took it into the tavern to try and figure out. It had two pieces, the "flapper" that you were supposed to put in the roof of your mouth and the bugling tube. The flapper gagged me for some reason, so it took a few beers to relax my gag reflexes enough to give it a proper try. My first attempt must have been pretty good, because within minutes the place cleared out. Just for a few minutes though, because everyone went out to their trucks to get their own bugles and we had an impromptu bugling jam session.

Bugling was hot in those days, which is why I was thinking it was a relatively new tool. I'd be out cruising timber and hear "elk" bugling all around me. Which of course was probably the real motivator for my purchase. I like messing with folks!

Nope, never did find that handsaw, even though we looked for it on subsequent trips. I knew right where it fell off, too, because it was in one of the few rocky areas. It's probably still lying there or part of someone else's "what the heck is this doing here" collection.

The bugling craze has died down pretty much here. I think the F&G changed the season to a later opening specifically to get away from rutting season, because bull elk are plumb stupid then and too easy to bring in. Now you can only effectively bugle during archery season.

Yeah, I never did much like my in-the-mouth bugle, but damn, it sounded like the real thing. I could probably pull off a feeble attempt with a piece of grass and some inventive grunting, but the bugle did all that for you and was much more believable. Those inserts were the worst though. There were several tones as I recall and you could buy different colored inserts. I think I was always afraid of sucking the dang thing down my lungs.

My gramps used to make me willow whistles too. I've tried a time or two, but they never work. I have better luck with Elderberry stems, hollow, kinda like Cow Parsnip, but less poisonous and won't make your lips fall off.

Thanks, Paul!

THE LONG FALL INTO AUTUMN

Around here this fall the business to be in is grain storage bins. There was a LOT of wheat and barley because the early summer was so wet, but a LOT of it will be somewhat compromised because the late summer was so wet. Grain that is slightly compromised but still not degraded to the level of feedlots -- just a little less protein and the other stuff that makes it good for baking -- that stuff takes a long time to sell. The best sells first. The rest takes negotiation and a little searching around for buyers, maybe looking for bargains or for uses other than the usual. So the new storage bins are going up around town and in the country, even though the shuttle railroad spur has been busy hooting in the night.

The population near Valier is only a few generations away from Belgium so they tend to revert to the old European pattern of living in town and driving out to their farmlands in the daytime. In winter the grain farmers don’t even have to do that and the beef ranchers have grown used to shipping their cattle south for the winter, maybe contracting with someone to feed them down there if necessary. The Homestead Act forced settlement on lands as a condition of “proving up” for ownership (curious since the government that handed out the ownership had just driven off the people who had lived there for millenia). But the dispersed people were often lonesome, like the widow lady out on prairie proving up all by herself. Thinking she might need some meat, a cowboy brought her a live chicken (no refrigeration for dead ones, so you just hung the poor disheveled fowl upside down from your saddle). Months later he stopped back through to see how she was doing and was surprised to see the chicken walking around. She hadn’t killed it because it was such good company.

The oldest grain storage around here is little wooden “houses” with peaked roofs and often the framing on the outside of the board walls. In fact, more than a few ranch houses are several of these grain bins clustered and enclosed with one roof, proper siding. On a wet day they can smell a little mousy. The newer grain bins are corrugated metal, the ripples going sideways, with a conical roof and a little door towards the bottom like the door on a coal furnace where you take the ashes out. Grain acts like a liquid: you pour it in the top through a long pipe with a screw inside it -- its fins all the same size all the way up -- that works with a PTO. That’s a power take-off. It was an acronym that long precedes texting. Used in classified ads when buying or selling tractors. What the grain farmers do all winter is watch the commodities market on their computers. Maybe from a warmer place than Valier.

The optimists are building onto their houses right now, taking advantage of the same long sweet weeks of Indian summer that have saved the water main replacement project. (The meters that were required by the government as a condition of subsidy will be installed later, at least the ones that go under the houses. Some will be in vaults at the curb.) Now that the little shack behind my neighbor’s house that she called “Pinky’s dog house” (his man-cave in contempo-talk) has joined Pinky in oblivion, I can see out my window a house that just added a protected porch in front (otherwise when you open the door the winter comes sweeping in with a whirlwind of snow) and more rooms in back. When I was delivering papers, an old woman lived there but then one morning she came to the door at 4AM, incoherently telling me her dreams. Soon after, younger people moved in. Relatives, I think. Houses transfer here partly through purchase and partly through inheritance. That’s the way the politics work as well.

I should rake leaves today since all the poplars have thrown theirs down. I cut a lot of withy growth from the green ash stump that refuses to die, so now I have to decide whether to strip and save them for some mysterious future use or just cram them into the pickup and cart them to the rolloff. If the photo feature of blogspot is working (it hasn’t been for a while), I’ll put up a photo of the roll-off, mighty dumpsters in a cage so that the wind won’t drive the trash across the fields. A little like the cage around the home plate on a softball field. When the wind is up, it howls and moans more than a humpback whale.

Lately someone reminded me of the writing of Gaston Bachelard, a French philosopher who kept trying to get at the basics of human experience and how we organize them in our minds. So much of it has to do with dwellings. The NYTimes had an article today about trying to build satisfying places for poor people -- not just poor people but people like the Haitians who have nothing, not even a flat place in the mud. The newer idea is to provide a concrete and steel framework and let the people fill up the spaces to suit themselves, maybe with provided materials, the way they do anyway with the immense fragile complex mazes of slum in megacities around the planet. There is a lot more use of glass, like the architect who built a house of old used auto windshields, or recycling, like that well-known house made of bermed used tires.

But Valier rejects all that. They don’t like innovation. I have to say that the most innovative and “green” new building -- on the next block -- is built of styrofoam units piled up and filled with cement. Not many windows -- another neighbor used to resent that as though she lived there. There is no lawn, just gravel. One drives right up to the door, French style. The strange thing is that this man’s friend is the one who built a house with a glass front looking out at an elaborate garden. Both are compulsive maintainers, chasing weeds. Newcomers.

Me, I’m mixed media. Withy stumps and alfalfa clumps and fallen leaves. Yesterday the cats were sitting in the leaves among the aisles of laundry on the clothesline and gazing around in satisfaction. Today there is wind and I may not have to rake leaves after all. They might be outta town by sundown.

OCTOBER IN LOW DENSITY COUNTRY

This morning I woke up to the double-boom of double-barreled shotguns. Boom-pause-boom. It’s duck season. Some flew over my house, discussing indignantly where they should hide out. I think there are at least three shooters. I will not go to see, even though I have a pretty clear idea they are shooting along the lakeside close enough to the Lighthouse for access to “fortification.” The Lighthouse is a very hospitable place.

October begins. Our postmaster retired yesterday. My fav metis UPS man retired. His time will be almost totally occupied by the necessity of defending his mother’s land against public condemnation for the purpose of building a high tension electrical transmission line up to Canada, so all these local wind farms can make a profit. (They’re owned by an Irish conglomerate.)

The cats, who are aging (they are eight now, past the average lifespan of a cat at large but surely middle-aged for fat cats overindulged) go to sleep early and rise late, skipping the early AM prowl though I, who am past middle-age, get up to pee at the usual time -- 3AM or so. They open one eye. When I come back to bed, they make barely enough room for me and only because I’m body temperature. I’m stubborn about the windows so they are open. The main bugs are gone but there is a fruit fly or gnat who wants to fly up my nose while I type. I try to smash him in mid-air, but the wind of my hand pushes him to safety. I need a double-barreled something. So far I’ve brought my fleece shirts back inside because I use them for jackets at the beginnings and ends of the day. But I’m still wearing jeans instead of sweatpants. Socks.

The water main replacement has about finished the first phase and they are collecting the yellow by-pass pipes that kept us in water while they changed the original masonry conduits into pretty sky-blue plastic pipes. Now they are replacing the mains that go out to the south edge of town where one of the four wells is located. It’s easy for them because it goes down the alley and there are no houses along most of the way. Either that’s the part of town where one man bought up lots as an investment and then left an estate too complicated to unravel or it’s the part where no septic tanks or hookups can be installed. Anyway, they are working “ten fours” so they can take Fridays off to return to their permanent homes, which means three days with no dawn clanking and grinding. The good weather is a blessing in many ways, not least of which is allowing enough time to get this project finished. In Conrad a few years ago the weather caught them too soon and the by-pass pipes laid out all winter, making all sorts of trouble.

I’m in the middle of the block, but on the corner is the bright blue porta-potty. Yesterday I noticed a couple of parents lingering self-consciously while their small offspring tested it out. It’s not locked but no one has stolen the TP. I looked. It doesn’t smell half-bad, but then it’s pumped out daily. The honey truck’s pump makes a ghastly grinding noise, which by now I recognize, so I’m familiar with their schedule.

That corner, which is by the very neat and well-kept cement block Lutheran church, has been dug up over and over and over since I’ve been here. I have no idea what makes it so problematic except that it is a major T in the system. (T stands for trouble!!) There’s a hydrant that often leaks, which means a puddle in summer and a sheet of ice in winter. I wonder why there isn’t some invention so they can just roll back a lid, but the backhoes are so efficient that the dirt comes up and goes back easily. The street isn't paved anyway. It’s the place where they thought they had nicked a gas main, but now they’re saying that the “sniffer” was mistaken. I’m not sure I believe them. We have a big credibility problem in this town.

I was reading something yesterday that suggested that the main difference between a low-density population (small rural town) and a high-density population is that the latter can work as a political system with parties and interacting forces that are relatively impersonal though individuals may “front” them. In a low density population things work in the old-fashioned way: family knots and tribal histories. This is surely true here. Now that the Internet has us crossing from one context to another, there’s often a dissonance that has to be solved by the UPS and USPO. Solutions originating in high-density places -- corporate headquarters, Washington DC -- have no meaning in low-density places. UPS says deliver only to people with street addresses. USPO says deliver only to people with PO boxes. (We don’t have home delivery.) Christmas catalogs are arriving. Smart people put both street address and PO box on their orders.

I often think of decades ago when I was conducting a survey of animal control practices. From Portland I called Harney County, sagebrush country in SE Oregon. “What do you do with loose dogs?” “If they’re good dogs, we take ’em home. If they’re bad dogs, we shoot ‘em.” “How do you know which is which?” “Hell, lady, I know every dog in this county!” An essayist in New West emag was trying to describe places like Harney County and said it took a hundred acres to support a Holstein. A Holstein cow is a dairy animal that couldn’t live on sagebrush -- the mental image set me laughing.

Sorta like the philosophy professor who wants to genetically alter tigers and lions so they’ll graze like ungulates. Too much grass floating around already, maybe, in the high density populations of campuses. The genetic alteration altercation that really counts right now is the one that caused farmers to switch to Roundup-Ready seeds so they could spray with Roundup instead of harrowing out weeds. Now the herbicide is suspected of being toxic to humans so the law is forbidding the use of the stuff, but there are no “normal” seeds available. And the farmers sold their harrows. At the same time “Roundup-Ready” corn has helpfully sent pollen over to the neighbors who were previously certified as organic and authentic -- there are dueling lawsuits underway: those whose crops are contaminated versus those who sell the patented seeds and accuse the neighbors of stealing.

It’s possible that here in low density country we get along a little better because there are fewer lawyers and more cows (Angus, Charolais). Or maybe it’s because families run things to suit themselves. Or maybe it has something to do with those double-barreled shotguns. Opinions differ.

LIGHT IN AUGUST

Tarnished light in a tipping world now. The major wildfires we feared never happened -- at least so far -- but there are small blazes somewhere making smoke. Caspar, the big white cat with gray cap and tail from across the street, stalks through the yard, stopping at the mixing bowl of water I keep outside in summer. Cats like their water with a little algae on the bottom. They don’t mind bugs struggling on the surface. Crackers, the fat woolly part-cocker-spaniel cat, creeps along behind Caspar -- keeping a distance since Caspar has ripped her up in the past, but curious to smell all the little squirts and scrapes this belligerent cat leaves behind.

There are grizzlies in the wheat fields again, cubs who brought their mom this time. (Check for photos in the Great Falls Tribune website.) Ranch wives go out with cameras and capture their images standing up in the wheat fields. Why do bears look so silly when they stand up to look? Maybe it’s their round ears like stuffed toys. Maybe it’s the limp way they hold their paws in front, bent down at the wrist. They look so human I would not be surprised to see them put their paws on their hips like a Gary Larson cartoon. What are they about to say? Maybe “why do these people plant all one thing for miles and miles? Where are the roots and grubs?”

I was waiting for the hot days to dry out my door frames so the doors would close and make it practical to put up the rest of siding, patch the roof holes. Halfway through August, there have been almost no hot days. Instead the thunderstorms keep coming, drenching us all over again. The temp is staying temperate. I cut half the sweetgrass and brought it indoors in my new flat basket from Ramona’s family. It’s slowly perfuming the room. But in truth, the whole house is saturated with the smell of a custom-mixed oil that came in a little blue bottle from a fellow employee in Portland when I left ten years ago. She wore it for perfume and wanted me to have it so I’d remember her and keep in touch. I haven’t kept in touch. Don’t even remember her name but I do remember her, a free spirit with a Japanese lover, both of them thin and smart. I’ve dumped the last of the oil onto cotton in a little green globe with the world continents etched on it.

Squibbie, the velvet lizard, is slow to rouse in the morning after a night of hunting. In the last few days she contributed to the deaths of little brown bats all across America, which has reached pandemic proportions, not because of one tortoiseshell cat but because of a white fungus that seizes bats by the nose. Danger comes in many forms. Last night Squibbie killed a young dove, whose wings I harvested to attach to my little figure of a boy, wings exactly the color of the wings on the Caravaggio boy in the famous painting.

Time is changing everything. Tim has taken a dying boy (AIDS dementia) to a far-off place where he can be cradled in enmeshed love. The followers (many poets now) are baited off in speculation, imagining this beach of pot sherds and frost, this cottage of quilts and whiskey, giving some quiet and privacy to the loft in Paris where boys healing from operations have been removed from hospital because of unknown “visitors” appearing suddenly. Nurses are not used to protection on this level and the cops are too slow to come. The priests who act as chaplains have been afflicters in the past and cannot be trusted now.

Too many deaths this summer. Tomorrow I’ll attend Carl Cree Medicine’s funeral. So many times in the early Sixties it was only Bob, myself and Carl who poured bronze. We hurried in the fall, because Carl was a binge drinker and disappeared over Christmas, usually just after we all went out in the pickup to cut Christmas trees in the snow. But sober he was the best of help: willing, competent, busy, and in the end it was his son David who was Bob’s foreman, taking better care of the old sculptor than his own family did.

The most dangerous danger is caring, getting enmeshed, having to help someone else without any return -- although a writer always gets a return. Just not in money. Tim or I don’t write for others, for each other, for our mothers or any other motherf . . . Okay, calm down. Don’t think I haven’t considered whiskey but I’d want single-malt Glenfiddich Scotch. (Which I’m probably misspelling and couldn’t afford -- there might not be any in Valier anyway. They drink Black Velvet here and offer their women Peppermint Schnapps.) I only reason I know about Scotch is because it’s in the story I’m listening to on earphones from a little beetle-green wafer with a tiny red light. Would it be dangerous for me to drink whiskey alone while I listen? I’m too “scotchy” (as they say around here) to spend the money to find out.

It’s fall and things are winding down, but they never really wound up this summer. Paul has been anxiously awaiting the northern lights we were promised as a byproduct of the sunstorms that are also bringing a bumper berry crop. No curtain of lights. (He’ll say, “I see I made your blog again.” Well, that’s what happens when you know a writer.)

I’m reading about rhetorical grammar. Why didn’t anyone write this book long ago? It’s so practical, so integrative, so common-sense. So many things are all around us and through us all the time (enmeshed?), but unseen until they are named. Some things are better not named.

Three escaped murderers are headed this way. This Sunday one attended church and mowed the lawn for forty bucks and a jacket. One of the parishioners recognized him and turned him in. Was that the Christian thing to do? The other two are supposed to be near here. Is that a knock on my screen door? I keep it hooked.

JUST AFTER THANKSGIVING

The snow that always follows Thanksgiving came last night. One moment I looked out the window to see the moon floating among a few clouds in the east. A little later I looked out again and snow was flying.

The first sign that it’s on the way is often a wave of warm air, still and peaceful, quite deceptive. Then you look at the Rockies and a storm shelf is building up on the west side, a piling-up of clouds like a second mountain range -- sometimes as dark and much higher than the actual mountains. Over the mountain range stands a Chinook arch, which means that the clouds are blown back so they form a big curve in the sky, blue in the middle but outlined by cloud with a sharp edge towards the wind. They will be very high clouds, so sometimes there are other smaller, lower clouds wandering through the blue arc. The wind moves down lower. It is part of the great jet stream that the airliners ride across the continent as though they were ships in the great currents of the ocean. Now the wind is along the ground and beating hard against the house.

Pretty soon the wind stops. The silence makes you stop and listen. Then there is whispering as snow travels across the windowpane. The light changes outside because it is reflecting on white ground. In a few hours it changes again because the main storm has passed, the clouds have thinned, and the moon is just behind them. Everything outdoors is “steel blue,” the cold color of the stage gel for tinting light that’s supposed to be moonlight.

In fact, this broad landscape is often best interpreted in the colors of stage gels. This morning it’s clear and the thin white cover of snow is striped with “bastard amber” sunlight (they still call it that) vibrating with “double blue” stripes of shadow, while literally “straw” colored stubble sticks up in the long swaths of strip fallow. (http://stagespot.com/colorchoice.html for a nice essay about stage lighting.) It’s cold and predicted to go colder.

While outside is so bright, my inside decor is turning towards deep color: shiny Roman stripes of coffee, cranberry, and evergreen, cranberry corduroy on the wicker chair, purple-and-gold quilt made for me by the Hagmann women on the sofa, gilt and sienna ruffled pillows, and in the window my two strands of tinsel. Depending from my chandelier are small satin and gilt Swedish Christmas ornaments, birds and lambs with a white dove flying in the middle. This year I think I will stick my big snowflakes to the windows. When I put them up, generally others will appear around town but they tend to be square, since it is evidently hard to figure out how to fold typing paper in thirds. (The secret is to fold it in half, cut off the excess so you have a square, start to fold that into fourths but only pinch it in the middle for a guide for making a three-fold . Fold that in half and cut. If you use a sheet of tissue paper, you can cut through many more layers. I try to mix angle cuts and circles.)

That’s all I’m going to do. I hope people don’t send me stuff because I mostly re-gift it. I’m careful not to let on that I have much fun alone because then people want to come join me and I don’t want that either, though I like to hear from people -- friends or not. Even enemies so long as they don’t show up on the doorstep.

In a strange recent phenomenon, blogs are disappearing as though they were leaves. The only two other blogs in Valier, one photos and one short poetic writing, have both stopped. Across Montana one accomplished novelist in the East and one admired poet in the West have both stopped. Internationally, Jake at Old Scrote has suddenly begun speaking in French and very rarely. Fretmarks is always sporadic and is again in a long quiet interval. 2blowhards is down to only one now, Donald who lives in Kirkland, WA, where I was the interim for a lively UU congregation. I have no idea what this means, but it has sent me on a bit of a search for new blogs to monitor. Luckily, there is no shortage! Querencia remains a major favorite, esp. since Cat Urbigit joined them with her fabulous ranch photos.

Next Sunday I will be reading at 3PM at Hastings. I’ll read from “Sweetgrass and Cottonwood Smoke” which is an exploration of theology drawn from the prairie, as though the land were a “bible.” I have copies to sell. Then I’ll add readings from “Bronze Inside and Out,” the parts that describe our participation in Blackfeet ceremonies, including a visit to Starr School in the days when the Christmas dance was still in the Round House, heated by a roaring fire in a stove made from an oil drum. Maybe I’ll add some from “Heartbreak Butte,” though it is unpublished: a midnight candlelight service in the old St. Anne’s church with the emerald green doors on a night so slick with ice that one of my former students, Angie Howe, pushed me up the path by putting her hands on my rump! When we came back out, the men of the congregation made a line and handed us along until we got down to our cars.

The forecast for Sunday is too far in the future to be real, but it appears that it will be cold enough to need to restart our cars now and then to keep them warm. When I was teaching, one faculty member -- usually the shop teacher -- would go out and start all the teacher cars every few hours so they would start at the end of the work day. Now the kids have as many cars as the teachers do. When I was teaching in Heart Butte, the faculty always left for Thanksgiving vacation on dry ground but returned in that first major snow storm, often pushing snow up to their hood ornaments. This year they only got four inches up there. I can see it from here. One of the kids said, “Why don’t you go home for Thanksgiving?” I explained, “I’m already home.”

MERCILESS AUTUMN

When I got up in the night at 3AM, as I often do, only not exactly at the same hour every night, the floors were strewn with squares and trapezoids of silverplate. The moon was full, as big as if seen through a telephoto lens. In the Sixties an artist used to submit to auctions and shows a sort of genre he invented: an old country homestead with clothesline and outbuildings, situated on the horizon and silhouetted by a huge full moon. It was so definitive of the West, so born of experience, that I’ve never forgotten those paintings and wonder where they’ve gotten to now. Where’s the artist fifty years later? I never met him, so don’t know whether he was young or old.

By the time I went back to bed, the wind had come up and the air was warming, which is always the way new fronts come in. There’s an arctic mass on the way. The forecast is snow all week with a night-time low of 8 degrees on Friday. Today is the last day warm enough to work outside. Sometimes the long sweet autumn ends like falling off a cliff. The Farmer’s Almanac says a long hard cold winter. Around here we take that seriously.

The reason I get up in the night is partly that I love seeing the moon splash whitewash everywhere and make patterns through the still-not-quite-turned leaves. A clear night in the fall or winter always means the temps will drop fast because of heat radiating out into space. The moon yearns for our body heat. The moon wants to come into that little homestead through the windows and sit on the hearth to warm up. The moon has no mercy, but it gets none from us either.

Another reason I get up in the night (there are quite a few reasons) is that the Internet has less traffic then so it works better. We have been struggling with our small town infrastructure for a few weeks. Somehow, even though we’re within a few miles of the futuristic wind farm where hundreds of unbelievably tall and thick masts support whirling blades that could cut a car in half, we’ve been having blackouts of several hours. Usually when this happens it’s a one-time event related to someone’s machinery severing a cable or someone’s accident knocking over a power pole. Once in a while they are scheduled swap-out/upgrade events. This time the reason is unknown.

My microwave shut down. My television refused to play. (I only use it to play DVD’s.) My radio went off. The streetlights dimmed. The only way to stay online was to keep rebooting both the software and the DSL box. The monitoring electronic parts for the local Bed and Breakfast heating boiler were blown and had to be replaced. Telephone calls to techies went nowhere until the calls were finally booted upstairs to someone able to do more than placate. Those smug fat newcomers who assumed living here would solve all their problems were upset that they were losing their Fox News feed.

The hard cold comes again. Locals knew it would. Some of us sort of forgot. In the cold war of my youth, the enemy was supposed to be Russia, at least the USSR. We equated being progressive with being open to science, calling on our own government to protect us, freedom to speak our minds and move around. This cold war requires passports, ID cards, registration, and camera surveillance. Progressive as a political option is so confused as to be meaningless.

But I’m mixing weather with politics. Still, the environmental listservs to which I subscribe would say that weather IS politics. Weather is the economy here -- looks like the winter wheat crop is exceptionally good this year, which COULD mean that prices will be down. Every farm I pass has a couple of new steel bins which means that there is also a DSL connection in that house where someone is trying to decipher the futures market so as to know when to sell. In the towns the merchants are trying to second-guess the farmers so as to know how and when to stock their shelves. This translates to international trade.

The right wingers believe that keeping guns will prevent the government from invading them. Today there was another scare story in the paper about the US Fish & Wildlife invading the home of a retired couple who had a business buying and selling rare orchids and who had let their paperwork get out of order. Their house was ransacked, strewn, by a SWAT team. The man went to prison for two years. Some people are surprised that Fish & Wildlife did this, because their mental map is waaaay out of date. They haven’t lived near a border where cars are regularly searched and eagle feathers are not just Native American materials, but the equivalent of drugs in giving authority figures the power to fine, imprison and -- at the very least -- impound. The irony is that it was the political struggle of NA’s to own their own heritage that has given the feds this much power, made it defensible in the name of a “noble end” not unlike the demonization of marijuana that has put 30% of the population in jail. I don’t cross the Canadian border anymore, even though my book was published in Canada and I have many ties there.

Now the wind is blowing the sky back to blue. I’ve got a couple of aerosol cans of insulation to fill cracks that leak cold air. The stepladder is already out front, ready to reinstall the gutter-gap strips under the edge of the shingles. The wind blows them out all the time. This time I’ll try nailing.

My homestead infrastructure always needs a bit of maintenance. I don’t pay anyone to do it for me. The proportion of thinking to doing is about 80-to-20 and these days I have to write down that 80% of thinking or I’ll forget. But I can do that in the middle of the night and have the reward of the huge moon printing my floors with her luminous patterns. This latter is the “end,” the purpose, the meaning of being human and alive. All the rest is “means,” requiring attention but not the goal. Maybe if I sorted and filed more of my boxed archives, I might find that artist’s name. I hope so.

EARLY NOT-QUITE SPRING

First day of March. Snow on the ground, but from several days ago. Gray sky, unmoving, no wind. Icicles hanging off the pickiup but they’ll be gone by evening. The normal high now is supposed to be forty. The forecasted high today is near fifty and tomorrow a little bit higher with sun, which is good because I’m supposed to go up to Browning to judge a spelling bee at the Junior High. On the internet, the Montana weather map for highways is showing yellow-dashed (intermittent snow and ice) from Valier west and green-solid (dry) from Valier east, which is often the way it is. We’re at a balance point. No wind, no fog. Tomorrow it will be dry to Browning, easy driving.

I’ve begun to hang my spring curtains: bunches of violets on aqua background (a sheet, actually) in the bedroom replaces the shirt-material quilt. In the front room, pink and cream stripes. Already big red and white stripes on the sofa, red and white ticking on the wicker chair and blue and white ticking on my reading chair. I enjoy fussing around with this stuff, esp. when it’s still too early to do anything outside. I might even mop and vacuum, though that’s not much fun.

Caspar, the big fluffy white cat with gray ears and tail, is over at the Baptist church where she’s “reading” with her nose the information off the cars parked during services. Yesterday she was in my backyard, more or less confronting a spotted cat and a young springer spaniel who’s been cruising the neighborhoods at high speed. He’s too wary for me to nab, which is lucky for our deputy sheriff because I always kid him that I’m going to put any dogs I catch into his patrol car. (He’s a K-9 officer.) Anyway, I charged out yelling, sending animals in all directions and rousing my two big fat cats from their slumber. They spent some time in the old snow decoding what had happened. Then Squibbie carefully dug a hole in the snow, made a deposit, and vigorously buried it, sending snow flying. She seemed perfectly confident that this would work as well as kitty litter. As long as it stays freezing, she’s right.

When I’m outside, I can hear the owl’s soft questioning and a flicker’s shriek and rat-tat-tat, plus the small chatter of little brown birds. When the sun comes out, a song sparrow lets loose a barrage of arpeggios. The geese are quiet now, incubating eggs. When they hatch, they will be just in time for the owl to snatch them, answering the question about “who-who will I feed to MY babies?”

It’s tournament time and small towns whose teams did well have hit the road. Since face-painting has become so popular (Why is that? Rock bands? Indigenization?) it’s easier than usual to tell who went where. There are always jokes about turning out the lights and putting on extra patrols because it would be such a good time for burglars. My theory is that much of this is bravado to pump up courage for being on the road in unstable weather.

The CM Russell Auction is a little late this year, the weekend of March 20-21, and it is usually quite warm by then. In 1992 on this date, it was 68 degrees. In 1996 it was minus eighteen. So you can expect anything in between. I bought this house ten years ago when I came from Portland to attend the auction. I’m a little surprised that it’s stuck together this long.

Towards the end of the week we’re supposed to get more moisture. We’re at a little less than the norm. Are we officially in a drought still? When are we NOT in a drought? Valier is technically using more than its share of water for the town, according to the state algorhythms, but the problem is that the conservation measures that would bring it back in line (water meters, new water lines, new wells or well-rebuilding) would take more money than we have. This is not a unique problem. But newcomers have to be educated about it all over again, every time they come. It’s tempting to consider that closing out newcomers might be a good conservation measure.

When it was so cold, some people let all their faucets run (not trickle -- RUN) to keep them from freezing (their houses are not really insulated for prolonged sub-zero weather) so the sewers were carrying a lot of water to the sewage lagoon which upset the balance of treatment ratios and put us out of compliance with the state laws. Truly draconian fines are possible, but the state generally recognizes reality and, if there is a letter of explanation, doesn’t impose them. Still, it makes us nervous.

I listen to the falling value of housing stock and wonder what that says about my own homestead. (It is a legal “homestead” which means that the first $60,000 of value is protected from being seized for debt.) This house is assessed at $30,000 from an eyeball survey on the street. They don’t know about the asbestos-contaminated insulation from some previous boondoggle for seniors or about the two floods underneath that caved some of the foundation. If they came in, they would see a new sink in the kitchen and a new sink in the bathroom: that would impress them. Because in our culture we value appearance more than function. Even in personal relationships.

In early March, not yet spring, we’re in an era that talks about debt-deserted neighborhoods and failed states, where Mexican drug dealers wage war on BOTH sides of the border, but with the guns from the American side where their ownership and dealership is defended on grounds that no Mexican drug dealers will invade YOUR house, if you’re armed. But if you have a .45 that you don’t keep clean and never shoot, and “they” have an Uzi they fire daily, who wins?

The owl waits for your babies to feed its babies.

Oh, sure, maybe April is the cruelest month if you have high expectations that are dashed by spring storms. But March is often the deadliest month, just before green-up while the calves are on the ground. In the old days the food used to run out about now. Often, even now, it’s a time when old people leave the planet.