REVIEWING THE REVIEWS

Now that so many people are doing Print On Demand books and some folks have noticed how good a few of them are, the new “demand” is for someone to point readers at the good stuff. One of the people responding to that is Pod Critic, who read my own book, “Twelve Blackfeet Stories,” and gave a good review, by which I mean one that told clearly what he looks for, how the book didn’t scratch his itch, and what he liked about it even if it might not be his cup of tea.

Back a while I wrote a review of a movie about rodeo bull-riders, praising it, and got back comments from other people who loved the movie and were disappointed by the responses of the critics and the public. They didn’t know rodeo, didn’t understand the “juice” of bull-riding, and couldn’t respond to the old killer bull turned out in the end to live peacefully. Just didn’t compute.

So when I heard Rick Newby on a recorded panel from the Montana Festival of the Book, saying that he would like his online magazine, Drumlummon, to emphasize reviews and criticism, it got me to thinking. The arts in this state are so layered and checkered, that it would be of the utmost importance to lay out the terms of each review. Our college towns and maybe our California imports take for granted kinds of art, theatre, cinema, music and so on that others in the state just don’t “get.” On the other hand, I sure don’t get most athletic performances (what makes a “good” basketball game? I dunno.) I could tell you a bit about rodeo, but not the real, gritty heartcore stuff. I can critique a story or novel that purports to be historical, narrative, and maybe magical-realistic, but I’m no good at interpreting poetry. A dead loss at bluegrass or honkytonk. But I can take a run at ballet. You see what I mean?

I suspect that much of the resistance to “regional” literature is really an inability of the person resisting to understand what’s important to the region, what the iconography signifies, what the rhetoric implies. They don’t claim their own failure to connect but push it off onto the subject. The defense of regionalism that “the Bible is regional” assumes that it’s universal, and doesn’t recognize that many people are not equipped to talk about the world of the Bible. I don’t mean they’re not believers -- I mean they can’t imagine that world of fishermen and shepherds, small seas and foot traffic.

We need to step back a whole other level, earlier than disciplines, maybe earlier than cultures, to a kind of meta-theoretical way of sorting out ideas about standards in writing. I’ve been reading EMT blogs with great relish, but got into a discussion with a friend (who put me onto them in the first place) about which was “better” -- EMT #1 who has a great wiseacre facade which sweeps back to reveal human tragedy or EMT #2 who takes on the grand novelistic sweep of dramatic descriptions and portentuous stuff that he can’t always spell or punctuate. He voted for grammar, I voted it was a side-issue, that the story was what counted. (So does Pod Critic.)

So now I’m going to turn the tables on Pod Critic and critique his criticism. He says himself that he reads for what Whiskey Prajer called perceptively “bulletproof narrative.” This is why his lead is as follows: “The tales in Twelve Blackfeet Stories are only interesting up to a point, and when reading them, one will find oneself straddling the fence of boredom and excitement. This conclusion isn’t based on the subject matter, because I have read books on Native Americans and have found myself completely engrossed—riveted, if you will—by the events that unfolded concerning early tribes. It is the way the author delivers these tales that is at issue here, as she sometimes uses an irregular narrative form that leaves a reader scrambling to find cohesiveness. Additionally, the stories, while loosely associated, are hardly linear.”

Pod Critic is quite accurate: the stories are not linear except chronologically and for some readers they will not be cohesive BECAUSE they are not unfolding events among early tribes, which is what a contemporary average white urban reader expects. I should admit to the more-or-less accidental nature of the links between stories, which didn’t occur to me until late. My model was a book I didn’t read and only knew from reviews (Ironically!) It was called “Generations,” was nonfiction, and tried to describe the essence of each American generation, giving each a tag description. I got to thinking what a sequence like that would be like for Blackfeet and since I have a time-line for Blackfeet, I got it out, divvied it into 20 year sections, and tried to decide what was characteristic of each one. It was obvious that the first major change was the coming of the horse. Others have speculated about how some young man first understood the use of a horse and what a major euphoria it was, so I was writing a counter-story, about an old woman who resisted horses.

There are moments of inspiration, however. The first story, Dogwoman, written in a smooth and inviting style—for the most part—touches on important and ancient themes, such as the interrelation between man and beast and earth, and the delicate balance that exists between them. But the story itself—which isn’t entirely concerned with that theme, but rather with a dog-loving woman’s hatred of imported horses—lacks a few ingredients that would have made for a more compelling stew.

In other words, where’s that warrior on horseback that I can identify with?

The second story bears a similar tint, giving us a rare and inspired moment between a father and daughter before charging headlong into an intermittent back-story that almost loses us—to say nothing of the main narrative.

Actually I sort of stole that scene from Beverly Hungry-Wolf’s “The Ways of my Grandmothers” in which she tells about her sister getting her face painted by her father every morning. It was again meant as a counter-story to the young man admired by his mother. But also, I was at my most polemical in this story, trying to describe what a “Bundle” really is and how it contains memories, moral force, strangeness and reassurance. The long trip to the SW is part of this (made possible by horses), the relationship with his best friend’s wife, his resistance to being a “holy man,” are all part of an attempt to get away from the idea that Indian religion is just some kind of primitive and blind “magic” and that all “chiefs” craved power and status. Then it occurred to me that this grown man could be the small boy of the first story, so that was the first “link.”

But while she paints scenes like a master artist, sans an actual canvas, her stories aren’t necessarily captivating—they are interesting at times, though, and they provide incredible insight into the lives of the Amskapi Pikuni people.

Actually, this gives me too much credit: there is no way I can give incredible insight into these lives from earlier and other times. They’re only a guess and guesses that might be much resisted by the living Piegans.

A great sense of importance emanates from the pages of the book, as though Scriver were attempting to capture the moments of these individuals and hold them in a literary time capsule for future generations to enjoy. I get that. I also get her attempt to immortalize these souls by delivering something offbeat; something that would stick in a reader’s mind, and leave them transfixed for its sheer uniqueness. The work does achieve some of these goals, as its experimental nature is something to admire, but the delivery is jerky, at best.

This is the best paragraph in the review, because Pod Critic is doing for me what I tried to do for the characters: see through their eyes. He’s trying to imagine what I was trying to do, though he doesn’t quite understand my urge to break up Indian stereotypes for the sake of the living people. Not that I’m not trying to be a good and memorable writer, but that I wasn’t watching the writing that closely.

I understand that a writer is somewhat balancing on the points of pins and needles when it comes to preserving a heritage through their work—which is equivalent to writing not only what you know, but what you love—while at the same time writing for the pleasure of their readers. Twelve Blackfeet Stories, unless you’re heavily into Native American culture, satisfies two out of three of these aims. The casual reader, therefore, may not find this collection of short stories to be quite so accessible.

Pod Critic, in the phrase “preserving a heritage,” gives away again his underlying assumption than I’m writing like George Bird Grinnell or James Willard Schultz, a kind of anthropological endeavor dealing with a lost people. But I’m trying to upset assumptions, challenge the “received wisdom” even among the Piegan themselves so they won’t just replicate the past. The difficulty in this was immediately proven when the first comment in response assumed the stories were myths and legends. To Pod Critic’s credit, he straightened her out quickly.

It never occurs to either of them that I’m writing TO the Indians themselves, much less that a few of these characters were based on people I know. The Two-Spirit man, for instance, exists. I didn’t know that a Jesuit resembling the priest in the story also exists as an historical person. I learned recently from his biography that if he was supposed to be Jesuit, I got his cassock wrong: the Jesuits didn’t usually wear buttoned cassocks, but rather a wrapped kimono sort of garment with a cincture. But a button was a plot gimmick, so I guess he wasn’t Jesuit.

If you love literature, but are not as concerned with story as with language, then Blackfeet has beautiful language to spare; the book is practically brimming with it. Additionally, the book does smooth out a bit when it crosses over into stories that feature the latter generations of the Amskapi Pikuni people, as these prove to be much more conventional in theme.

But, all in all, the book is as close to a worthy read as it will come, in my view at least.

To me the later stories are not so much “smoother” as “flatter” because I began to compromise and write happy endings so that younger Indian readers wouldn’t despair. The transition is at the point of magic-realism when the two women in the Starvation Winter find that a huge boulder (a buffalo rock) is really a door to the paradise where the buffalo are hidden. So it seems to me that my obligation as a writer is also to explain more what I’m doing, where I’m coming from, so that people like Pod Critic -- alert and sensitive as he is -- will understand that this is not an adventure story but a series of didactic reflections. So what I see as the next step in this sequence of stories -- which I’m not quite ready to abandon yet -- is not development on Pod Critic’s terms but more clarity and discussion about its didactic use. I should write explanations, interpretations, anthropological and historical grounding and put them in as an appendix for the teacher. I’m sort of inventing a new genre.

So I’d give Pod Critic a grade of 3 stars out of four, because for an “outsider” he saw pretty accurately. If he’d been a Blackfeet Indian, he would have written something else, and I’d have given him 4 stars. Fair and honest? Luckily, the book is printed by Lulu.com and I can easily create a new edition.

GREAT FALLS FESTIVAL OF THE BOOK

The Great Falls Festival of the Book was May 3, 4, and 5. The first two events were evening readings and I don’t drive at night anymore, so I only attended Saturday and didn’t get up early enough to be there for the Student Authors, who I’m told were EXCELLENT, so I’m regretful.

The afternoon featured three groups of authors, the first being a group of two: Doug and Andrea Peacock, who talked, read from “The Essential Grizzly -- The Mingled Fates of Men and Bears,” and showed old footage of real grizzes Doug knew well enough to name. (I don’t know how he got away with the politically incorrect “MEN” in the title of the book.) Doug is irresistible in his passionate advocacy of grizzes and his footage, esp. the long sequences of Happy Bear sitting in half-frozen ponds and playing with broken ice or the riveting spots where bears came right up to him and he kept filming only so “my survivors would know which bear finally ate me.” But things don’t look good for the whole world and he says that he’s stopped telling high school audiences the truth about human and bear prospects. Too scary and they’re too young for despair. Andrea said that to keep peace in the home she and Doug divvied up the writing thus: he gets the bears and she gets the “men.” With a background in journalism (she was once the editor of the Missoula Independent), she’s a skillful researcher and interviewer. It works out very well.



Then came three authors from “Montana Women Writers -- A Geography of the Heart”. Caroline Patterson is an editor at Farcountry Press in Helena, a former Stegner Fellow, and has many other notches in her belt. She is the editor of this anthology.

Ruth McLaughlin recently completed her memoir “Bound Like Grass” and read from a chapter about her sister who was challenged in some way not mental and rather baffling (maybe Asperger’s?) that provoked cruelty from others. Ruth was only beginning this book when I first heard her read and the change in her now is amazing. She seems bold, confident and much younger!

Third was Deirdre McNamer, who has also changed since the first time I heard her read in Kalispell from “Rima in the Weeds” in 1991. I went with my mother’s cousin and her daughter and the reading was a bit risque. (My mother’s cousin was the least shocked -- she said that when she was a beautician in a small town, she did the hair of all the prostitutes and had already heard everything.) Deirdre has been on the New York scene a while and is now quite cosmopolitan, confident, but a little stooped. A new novel, her fourth, “Red Rover,” is on the way. Montanans might have seen an early excerpt in the online magazine “Drumlummon.”

The last set of readings (at no point were there panel discussions or other interaction -- few questions from the audience) was focussed on historical writing. Sam Phillips had gotten interested in hunters who died in the field by misadventure, murder, suicide and pure stupidity. There was so much material that he compiled it all into a book, “Dying to Hunt,” reflecting on the statistics as he is trained to do. You’ll be happy to know that there are far fewer deaths these days and most of them are due to heart attacks or drowning. Stupidity (liking pulling your gun out of the vehicle with the barrel pointed at your gut) is yielding somewhat to hunter safety courses. His new book is “Hanging Around Montana,” about the 240 plus documented instances which include seventy-some legal hangings and a lot of lynchings. His method is clearly dispassionate reflection on the macabre.

Sam Phillips read to us a mosaic from his case study of a very bad man who made trouble and headlines repeatedly until he finally hung himself in his prison cell to avoid an officially imposed demise. "Lone Wolf in the Promised Land." In the end we were left with a panorama of a time when only the scramblers survived -- though probably the ones who did it legally had more long-lasting success.

Lee Rostad, a Fullbright Scholar, a rancher, Chair Emeritus of the Board for the Montana Historical Society, was the final author to read and told us the story of her recovery of Grace Stone Coates from retirement oblivion as well as, along the way, Margaret Bell’s horrifying memoir. "An Alien Land." Through careful tracking and caring conversation with Coates herself, she quietly made discovery after discovery, opening a door into lost history.

As the readers came and went, so also did the audience. When Doug was reading, big hearty outdoor types leaned forward in their chairs. When we got to the women readers, they fled. But a new set of men, older and maybe bookish, filtered in for the hangings and robberies. A core of women remained throughout -- not young, not old, clearly dedicated readers -- the kind who show up at their book clubs having actually read the book. At one point several handsome thirtyish men arrived during the afternoon break -- including Pete Fromm who lives in Great Falls -- and stood around for a short while, then left. Maybe they went of have a beer together and make some REAL talk.

At one point I saw that one of these young men was frankly eavesdropping on my account of the vicissitudes of producing Bob’s biography and I ought to have invited him into the conversation, but didn’t. I was talking to Penny Briant-Hughes, a professor at the University of Great Falls who once evaluated my classes at Heart Butte and netted me an award from the National Council of Teachers of English -- though that didn’t save my job. Also in the conversation was Paul Stephens, a cranky leftist who knows me from my Unitarian circuit-riding days. A faithful non-conformist, Paul is so sharp-minded and independent that the insecure flee from him. Yet he never resorts to the kind of shameful tactics of our state representatives this year and his facts are always in order. Don Marble, another Unitaran sympathizer, was there, but we didn’t have a chance to talk. He came for the bears. (He’s the man who kept the old stone Unitarian church in Helena from becoming a nightclub and vigilantly guards the Sweetgrass Hills, a sacred locus of a different sort.)

It’s always a puzzle to me how these energetic, funny, contrarian people can be gathered for the Great Falls Festival and somehow be muted, grayed out. Partly it’s a matter of critical mass, since numbers are usually low. This year there were no refreshments which always help talk and loosening up. But there’s more somehow. The atmosphere is always one of politeness. I wonder if it’s because of the military presence, but no military people seem to attend. Maybe it’s High-Line north-European conformity, the feeling that nothing should get out of hand. (Garrison Keillor Lutherans.) If the same folks were in Missoula or esp. Bozeman, a ruckus would be almost guaranteed to break out.

The basement room, esp. on a bright warm day like this Saturday, has a kind of dampening effect, but the same forces seemed to be at work when a roughly similar set of people spoke once in the auditorium of the Historical Museum where big doors were thrown open to the outside and a summer breeze wandered through.

I have a hunch that it relates to the idea of “culture” as being walled-off, put under glass, “protected” from people smudging it up with their wet noses and dirty hands. I notice the effect at the Russell Auction among the Montanans, but not the carpetbaggers who come in from Texas and Virginia expecting booze and women in evening gowns. They aren’t afraid to be funky, aren’t worried about class or status or whether they’re spending too much money. My worry is that writing will become so much of a tea party occupation that it will just dwindle off and die. (Well, that’s when I look at the audience: the authors are quite a different story.)

But how is it that the handsome young men, who undoubtedly had their novels in their back pockets, were allowed to stand there alone with their fine profiles? Where were the nosy old ladies who asked them who they were and towed them over to meet a publisher? Where was the Darrell Kipp who always takes a moment to note the big shots in the room (however defined) and thank them for coming? Where were the intense, inky women who write incredible poems into their journals? We were all too damned polite. What are we scared of? “Shhhhh! This is a library?”

I did pick up a bit of library gossip. The librarian of a certain tribal college is going around bad-mouthing Adolf Hungry-Wolf’s “Blackfoot Papers.” He will be featured by the Great Falls library on the evening of May 17. (They have his title wrong on the flier, using the plural, which shows they haven’t even read the introduction to the four massive volumes which amount to “a museum in a box.”) But speaking of Indians, none were spoken of at this meeting and none were present either. Too bad.

"CREATING LIFE ON STAGE" by MARSHALL W. MASON

This was the end-of-season cast-and-crew photo at Eaglesmere Summer Repertory Theatre. The fellow peeking through the trellis at the left is Jerry Zeismer, who became a notable assistant director in Hollywood. Standing at the end in front of him is Russell Lunday, who was from Billings, MT. To the right is Dave Pressman and David (Tony) Roberts, who have both had stellar careers on stage and screen. In front of them is Sarajane Levy, the first of us to die (cancer). Down low next to her is Rod Nash and then Marshall Mason, holding a cigarette. AK is in the middle of the back and I’m leaning my elbow on the other trellis. Directly below me in a white shirt, also holding a cigarette, is Laird Williamson who has stayed in touch with me through an outstanding career as actor and director, especially in Ashland, Oregon, at the Shakespearean Festival.

Sue, in Calgary, one of my most faithful readers and responders (Her husband Clyde McConnell has scanned and upgraded all the photos for my bio of Bob Scriver -- he’s a professor of photography at the University of Calgary) suggests that I’m very fond of synchronicity -- not that she objects to that. One might also call it “harmonic convergence.” It does seem as though once in a while there are hints from the universe, arrows pointing at something just as the means arrive to deal with it. I generally take this seriously.

I’ve always said that when I really got my writing skills in hand, I would tackle the Northwestern University School of Speech years (1957 - 1961). It was a fertile time to be in college: Ivan Doig (who graduated from Valier High School) and Paul Winter were both there the same years though I didn’t know them because they were in different “Schools.” Marshall W. Mason was someone I DID know. His book about what he has learned in the theatre, has just been published by Heinnemann. His author photo on the back shows a person I hardly recognize, though I know that he’d only have to say one sentence for me to know who he was, even if he’s lost his Texas accent by now.

Marshall and I both had attachments to two groups: a competitive circle of theatre people devoted to Alvina Krause and a small intellectual trio of men: Marshall, Dwayne Thorpe and Bill Shaw -- I think they were roommates or something. They were brilliant, knew it, but couldn’t quite understand how to shape themselves yet. I was intensely connected to Bill, who was originally my biology lab partner. We spent many happpy hours auditing AK's advanced acting classes in the little Swift Theatre. (He became a distinguished professor of education law but died young of a brain tumor.) Dwayne was on the editorial board of the Northwestern Tri-Quarterly, which accepted one of my short stories for publication, but I don’t know whether he was in favor or against -- I was not particularly close to him.

Marshall, after a brilliant career directing off-off-Broadway as founding artistic director for the Circle Repertory Company. He is considered “one of the most innovative and influential directors of the twentieth century.” He points to Alvina Krause as his key inspiration. His book, “Creating Life on Stage: A Director’s Appoach to Working with Actors” just arrived in my post office box today. So far I’ve read the Foreword by William Hurt, the Introduction, the Table of Contents, and the Index and have looked at all the photos. I’m not in any of them, so I supply the photo at the top which is from Eagles Mere, PA, the summer of 1960, I think.

AK, as we called Alvina Krause, began her adult life teaching Speech and English in Seaside, Oregon, where her siblings lived. That would have been before I was born, but it accounted for some of her affection for me in spite of my blunders and inadequacies. That summer at Eaglesmere, a resort town high in the mountains where the acting company lived in a big decrepit boarding house, I was useful ballast. Technically I was the costumer. I didn’t drink or smoke, I was sort of pre-sexual, my inner emotional turmoil was muted while I watched the others “act out” theirs. I helped Lucy McCammon stir the compost, I tried to back up the rather strange cooks, and if someone passed out on the floor, I put a blanket over them. Some objected on grounds that they wanted to suffer and they didn’t welcome interference, especially if it suggested mothering.

Not changing the subject, which is the roots of artistic achievement, after I watched “The Raj Quartet” on DVD recently, I ordered the book(s), and also a biography of Paul Scott by Hilary Spurling. Scott was wrestling with the same demons (or Daemon, the dark knot of destruction and anguish that some feel powers real artistic depth and forces its expression) as we were. The revelation of the Scott biography is that after a near lifetime of something wrong that couldn’t be diagnosed and was only eased slightly by huge amounts of gin, he turned out to have amebiasis (infected by amoebas living in the intestinal lining), a tropical disease with effects rather like AIDS. It was when a specialist used drastic measures to cure Scott that he had the clarity and energy to write “The Raj Quartet.”

The Netflix DVD that came in the same mail as Marshall’s book is “Angels in America,” an amazing production combining AIDS with fear of the Millennium of 2000, a spectacular combining of religious and health issues -- in societies as much as in individuals. It’s far more extravagant and challenging than “The Raj Quartet,” but no less an exploration of class, sensibility, and environment -- if you can accept the gay world of New York City as a kind of India. It’s the kind of writing that Adrian Louis, Louis Owens and James Welch brought to bear on their reservations. I don’t know whether Marshall ever directed a production of “Angels in America” on the stage, but it was part of his world. I suspect it was coming to terms with a culture that forces everyone into stereotypes that freed him to direct with real depth.

I don’t quite have the skills yet to begin a novel about those years at NU and EaglesMere, but I’m on the way, writing about the rez. Diagnosing diabetes was rather like discovering amebiasis, releasing me from gray lassitude. Retirement gives me a certain economic floor so I don’t have to fight so hard to earn a living.

Marshall is retired, too. He’s in Mexico with his longtime partner, Danny. (I choose solitude.) All this is prelude as I begin to explore this book. It is the base of my writing as much as it is his directing. AK taught a cross-humanities, moral, life-preserving sort of mimesis. Scott’s “Sister Ludmilla” in the first book of “The Raj Quartet” had some of the same qualities. The arts can be a devotion. That’s disabling in a way, which I’ll address later.

Right now the synchronicity of the Universe is saying, “Keep going. You’re on the right track.” Sometimes that means more than anything friends can say.

COUNTRY FOLK

This is the way women my age were supposed to look just after WWII. In fact, the woman on the left is my Grandma Strachan, who is very much like me. I know she made her dress and probably took the collar and cuffs off some previous dress. The woman in the middle is Georgia Coleman, my grandmother’s best friend back in South Dakota homesteading days and the mother of "almost relatives". The woman on the right I don’t recognize, but I think it is clearly her visit that has prompted a clan gathering. She appears to be more urban and maybe a little younger. As a former costumer, I notice the difference in (ahem) foundation garments. I think that Georgia has just dispensed with them. I wonder now whether she had some Indian blood. The photo is at her house in Silverton, about this time of year judging from the blooming bush. Nowadays, these women might be in embroidered sweatpant sets.



This woman is Noma McClure, a beloved daughter of Georgia Coleman, and a one-room schoolhouse teacher. Stewart McClure, her husband, is providing the labor while Noma does stability. Noma was a lively, black-eyed person, interested in everything and everyone. Stewart was much older and quite deaf, but gentle and benevolent. Their marriage was very much a demonstration of what “labor” and “stability” can do for lives and many others benefited from their hard work and constant support. Silverton, where they lived, is a small town with a monastery where the specialty is fine music. It’s also a place famous for its iris farms and the McClure garden stood up to that standard. We loved going there. It was an ideal model of what “country” ought to be and is part of the reason I’m in Valier. Silverton itself is far too commercial and gentrified now.


This is the companion photo for the female old friends at the beginning, probably taken the same day. With the exception of Stewart McClure, these men were from the prairie and never stopped marveling at the Pacific Northwest stumps. This one is not even particularly big as doug fir stumps go! Back row is my Uncle Glenn, Ted Coleman (son of Georgia), my Uncle Seth. Front row is my Uncle Doc (husband of Beulah’s daughter, my aunt May), my Grandfather Strachan and Stewart McClure. The idea of all of them getting on the stump was inspired, but what I love about this photo is the body language: look at the difference between the cocky Doc and the composed Stewart. In the middle Sam Strachan grips his lapels in a characteristic pose. He had employed all these young guys at one time or another, so he knows he’s the head of the company.


This photo always makes me smile. Agnes Wilcox and her baby daughter Norma Jean are on the back porch of their big square farm house in Sutherlin, Oregon, far down the valley from Silverton. At this point (maybe 1937) this house had a handpump for water (like the one behind Stewart and Noma in the ice cream making photo) and an outhouse. Agnes was a home ec major at Oregon State University where she met her husband, George, and she kept house with such zeal and competence that my mother was a little intimidated. I’ve never used an outhouse so totally sanitized and roomy. It was approached along a little board walk. Norma Jean was a couple of years older than me and had red hair like mine. I always treasured her handmedowns, which had mostly been sewed by Agnes. (NJ’s only sib was male.) George was a big, cheerful, quiet man of great competence who grew up on this farm. His father lived out his life with them. George’s son, John, had quite a different life.



This is another of my favorite “country” photos. The man is my Grandfather Pinkerton’s brother, James, but of an entirely different temperament. (John, my mother’s father, was fiery and proud. Jim was gentle and god-fearing.) Jim was one of twins and lost his brother in early adulthood to typhoid fever in the marshy lands of Washington where the family contracted to build the big dairy barns going up at the time. The family moved to Roseburg, a timber town at the southern end of the Willamette Valley, and was never prosperous again but much healthier. Jim’s mother, whom I never knew, mourned endlessly for her lost son until one day in church she plainly saw him walk up the aisle to her and take her hand. “I’m all right, Mother,” he said. “Don’t grieve anymore.” Nadine, Jim’s daughter (here behind him), said she saw the apparition as well. She said the sun coming through the stained glass windows shone on him.

“Aunt Florence,” who was actually my great-aunt, was a bit older than Uncle Jim, which caused trouble when they married. (Few of the Pinkerton weddiings went uncriticized!) Called “Aunt Candy,” because she always brought treats, she was famous for sitting down at the breakfast table with her second cup of coffee and saying with enormous relish, “Now let’s make plans for the day!” Even in old age she could walk the feet off her nieces and she had a lot of flair, a sense of airs and graces.

These are my role models, though they would never have been able to even imagine where my life has taken me. Their small plain houses, their quiet simple lives, are what I try to achieve now. The only person from these photos who is alive would be Norma Jean, the baby, and we’ve been out of contact for many years. Nevertheless, the voices and faces of these people live on in my mind. Their ghosts don’t have to walk up the church aisle to tell me not to grieve because I don’t. Instead I find them a source of joy and strength every time I look at these photos. And there are people here very much like these "country folks."

FATHER PHILIP RAPPAGLIOSI

“Letters from the Rocky Mountain Indian Missions”, edited by Robert Bigart.


The Salish/Flathead, who had no “f” consonant in their language, called him “Pilip.” (So how could they say “Flathead?” Clue: they didn’t call themselves that. They didn’t even flatten heads.) The Blackfeet, who had no “l” consonant, called him “Pinip.” His family affectionately called him “Pippo.” By any name he was the most sincere and tender Jesuit ever sent to northern Montana.

There are only two photos of “Father Pinip,” the one on the front of this book and another inside, both taken in Montana in the 1870’s by professional photographers. No one knows which one is earlier, so we don’t know whether his problematic health is getting better or worse, but we do know his health was a problem even at home in Italy. Nevertheless, he constantly protested that he was fine.

The early Jesuit missions were functioning in very exciting times. Consider this summary of events:
1841: Father Pierre DeSmet, S.J. establishes St. Mary’s Mission in the Bitterroot Valley. (This was the homeland of the Salish Flatheads, who were rapidly being pushed out.) He and his helpers hoped to form a religious utopia. The mission closed in 1850.
1854: St. Ignatius Mission founded in 1854. (It had originally been near Pend d’Oreille River and Lake in Washington.) It was quite a large and busy community in 1875.
1855: The major Blackfeet treaty is signed. Also the Hellgate Treaty with the Salish Flatheads.
1859: St. Peter’s Mission is established to serve Blackfeet and has to move several times as the reservation shrinks. Closed in 1866. Re-established in 1874 at Bird Tail Rock, fifteen miles south of Simms, Mt.
1860’s: In Canada, "Fenians," a group of Irish radicals, a.k.a. the American branch of the Fenian Brotherhood in the 1860s, made several attempts (1866, 1870, etc.) to invade some parts of southern Canada from the US. The ultimate goal of the Fenian raids was to hold Canada hostage and therefore be in a position to ask the United Kingdom to give Ireland its independence. Because these Irish were Catholic, to some minds, all Catholic Irish were suspect. Some thought they were involved in the death of Governor Meagher, an Irishman.
1861: the uniting of Italy’s city-states into one country.
1861 to 1865: American Civil War. It maims, hardens, displaces people all across the continent, many of them into the West.
1866: St. Mary’s Mission was re-established.
1869 -1870: The Riel Rebellion. Refugees escape to Montana.
1870: Missoula had 66 buildings and 300 white residents. This is the year of the “Baker Massacre” of Blackfeet.
(from Wikipedia) In 1821, the North West Company of Montreal and the Hudson's Bay Company merged, with a combined territory that was further extended by a license to the watershed of the Arctic Ocean on the north and the Pacific Ocean on the west. In 1870 the trade monopoly was abolished and the company sold Rupert's Land and the North-Western Territory to the Dominion of Canada. Both territories were then combined as the Northwest Territories. This left a vacuum exploited by whiskey traders until the founding of the RCMP in 1873.
1871: The end of treaty making with the Senate only. Now all tribes will enter into “agreements” with both houses.
1872: The Salish Flathead divided, one small part going with Chief Arlee to the Jocko Reservation, and the majority staying with Charlo in the Bitterroot.
1874: Father Rappagliosi, thirty-two years old, arrives in January at St. Mary’s Mission. The Oblates of Mary Immaculate, a French order, came to Cranbrook to serve Canadian Kootenai.
1875: For the first half of the year, Father P. is assigned to St. Ignatius Mission. For the second half he is assigned to St. Peter’s Mission, the Blackfeet.
1876: Battle of the Greasy Grass (Custer’s Last Stand).
1877: The Nez Perce, led by Chief Joseph, make their escape and are partly captured at the Bear’s Paw Mountains. Sitting Bull is in Canada and accepts those who escaped.
1878: Father “Pinip” dies while visiting the Metis on Milk River in Canada.
1880: Charlie Russell arrives in Montana.
1883-84: The buffalo are scarce, then gone. Holy Family Mission is established on Two Medicine River.
1890: Wounded Knee
1891: The last of the Salish moved to the Flathead.

This beautifully organized slender little book supplies an historical framework, footnotes, photographs, and commentary that fortify the wonderfully warm and detailed letters of Father “Pippo” to his supportive and conscientious family back in Italy. They are staunch in their belief, careful in their actions, and wracked with tragedy as two of Father Philip’s actual brothers die suddenly in the year before Father himself fails.

It’s worth looking into the Jesuit Order, founded by a Basque knight and dedicated to three things: schools, conversions, and opposition to Protestants. They are a highly rigorous group: individuals commit themselves to self-examination each night and at least once during the day to see whether they are living up to their ideals and goals. They oppose corruption, no matter where they see it, and therefore have gone through periods of disfavor and official disbanding when they dared to oppose high authority.

The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate is a much more recent French order, originally established to help recovery from the French Revolution. They took as their mission charge the Northwest Territories. Father Genin, reputed to be Father Philip’s nemesis, had been assigned as an Oblate, but was expelled from the order for something. They said violating his vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. He denied that, but was reduced to being simply a priest. Since he soon became involved in wrangles with the diocesan authorities who presumably governed him, it appears that his chief failing was that of disobedience.

Father P. had previously visited this group of Metis and Blackfeet, and evidently while he was gone, Genin stirred up criticism of him. When Father P. returned, he was struck in the face with resistance and maybe even hatred, which he could little tolerate. Some think that killed him. But Father Genin is known to have brought him a drink of something a few days before he died. He was a close friend of Sitting Bull, had been adopted by him, and as a Catholic might have been thought to have Fenian ties. Military and officials trusted him not at all. Or maybe he just had a nice little racket going in the last of the buffalo hides. He was sending money home.

It’s all wonderful material that has yet to be explored and explained, with a world in political chaos while a faithful person like Father Pinip goes about his business of teaching and consoling people, celebrating mass, mending his own pants (not too good at this), sleeping on the ground while rolled up in a buffalo robe, traveling the prairie in winter by sled -- so wrapped up in furs that he said he looked like “two bears.”

We should all be so devoted and sure of our calling in the midst of confusion. This little book is an inspiration.

A REVIEW OF "TWELVE BLACKFEET STORIES"

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GEORGE & PHYLLIS JOHANSON

“Black Cat--Mountain is characteristic of the work of George Johanson in its capacity to engross us in its range of imagery and implication, of questions asked but not entirely answered. The human form, the animals, the vista of reimagined Portland, and the image of fire and volcano are all “familiar” and yet mysterious and in flux; the world is transformed and transforming. It is a world of shadows and fitful light. It is a world of perilous still life-- the arrangement of things that will fall, break, or start burning in a moment or two. The egg balanced on the yardstick extending off the edge of the table is such a still life -- tiny, precarious. Johanson’s work, one could say, is combustible. Tensions build to the breaking point and sometimes are released: cats launch, volcanoes erupt, eggs will surely topple and break.

“Johanson is the painter of inside and outside; of rooms and porches overlooking the city and its natural environs. His perspective, in the various meanings of the term, is urban. His home and studio are near the Vista Bridge in the West Hills of Portland, and many of his views are more or less from there, down over the Rose City and out toward the Cascades. In numerous paintings, certainly in Black Cat-- Mountain, Johanson refers to the Renaissance convention of the window -- the surface of the painting as a window opening onto a room as well as the rendering of a window within the painting in order to separate foreground domesticity (with women and men, cats, tables, cigarettes, fruit) from the world at large (with cities, mountains, catastrophes). Johanson’s work is magical (at times related specifically to American Magic Realist painting), Surreal (in the manner of European Surrealism), “neo-regional” though not regionalist in the traditional sense. Drawing on many sources, most importantly his own imaginative interior, Johanson fuses image and idea in ways that are ambiguous, “edgy” (a word Johanson often uses in talking about his work), provocative, frequently thrilling.”
-- “George Johanson, Image and Idea” by Roger Hull. Published by the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University and distributed by the University of Washington Press. 2006.

The above material is from a book meant to accompany a major retrospective exhibit of George’s work. I admire Roger Hull’s very high quality writing in this book since I’m interested in writing about art, though not this kind of art. Part of my intense pleasure in reading about George and his wife Phyllis, is that they embody the kind of life I once thought I could live: stable, focused, embedded in a community, contributing service, constantly delighted and engrossed in work of value. I never really found my way to that community, but it was through my short animal control career that I became friends with Phyllis and was drawn into the borders of their life. By that time the Western art world had become a hunting ground.

The painting above is on the cover of the book and the subjects are known to me. Mt. St. Helens blew up the year I was in seminary and Bob’s granddaughter died in a car accident. They seem related somehow, so I understand that George is finding equivalences and relationships among the things in the painting: ecological disaster, the city along the river, his own house porch as both a refuge and a vantage point, “woman” (Phyllis, possibly) as a dependable guardian and anchor, the many cats she rescues -- always passing through.

Phyllis was so earnest and diligent about “responsible pet ownership” that we (a small community of dedicated common-sense people) really made a difference in Portland. She invited me to dinner at that house just up the arroyo from the Vista Bridge, and the events were always like the kind of artists’ gatherings one reads about in books: brainy talk, hairy jokes, much wine and food, friendships that stretched back to the Mexican Quaker work camp where George and Phyllis first met and recognized each other as kindred spirits, marrying in a matter of weeks. When the table had cleared at the end, they brought out a container of odd-shaped wooden blocks and we took turns adding them to a tower on the tablecloth with the only goal being height and the eventual excitement of collapse. When it was dark, a family of raccoons came, looking for leftovers.

Sometimes I was a lone guest, eating “Diet for a Small Planet” style, which is the sort of eating to which I’ve returned. There were so many small ways that I think about now, not the least being Phyllis’ early morning habit of walking up into the West Hills along a trail. The cats-in-residence always formed a line behind her -- I remember as many as a dozen of them -- all trotting along in single file with tails high as banners. I’ve never known anyone else who had an entourage like that except a mother cat.

George, I might have known, is Swedish and Finn, which gives him a kind of practical openness to experience that is often disconcerting to others. For instance, one morning early the phone rang while they were still abed. Phyllis answered. It was a dirty phone call. The fellow breathed, “I’m going to tell you exactly what your husband ought to do to you...” All Phyllis heard was “husband.” “It’s for you, George,” she said and handed him the receiver.

George listened carefully and asked, “Does that really work? Have you had success with it?” Click.

For the past decades the two of them have been rising early and going down to the Willamette River to scull. Frosty-headed and rosy-cheeked, there they are down at the docks in the mist with the gulls shrieking at them. They claim to be doing it for their good health, but I think they do it because it is beautiful and an adventure, and because they love being where they are, doing what they can to keep it all alive.

Their son Aaron lives just a bit along the hill with his wife Van Le and small daughter Sonja, who has her own easel next to George’s. The family life is so vital, so mutual, so related to other lives and places while being rooted in one place, that it cannot help but produce fine work, deep value, and joyful rewards. This CAN be done. It needs demonstrating, since we see so many opposite examples, so much art as an excuse for chaos and opportunism. This is not something George and Phyllis deny. They simply create an alternative. I'm hoisting my tail and following up the path.

NEWLY WED PARENTS

My friend Jim Stebbings has been recovering memories of working in the East St. Louis stockyards when he was a kid. He’s not much older than me, but he got me thinking about earlier times. Here are my mother -- except she wasn’t even married yet -- and my father’s cherished youngest brother, Seth, who was clearly “born to fly.” He began with the earliest fabric and bamboo little moths on the prairie and -- parallel with flying -- became a unicycle operator with a thirty foot tall unicycle! (Well, maybe only ten.)

My father, Bruce, and Seth were a lot alike physically but not at all beyond that. I’m not sure exactly how they differed or why except that my father carried an enormous burden of responsibility, partly because he was the oldest -- save for another little boy who died days after birth. Seth was the youngest.


Because Bruce was the oldest and this was a Scots prairie family, it was taken for granted that Bruce would go to college. He was kind of bookish anyway -- in fact, the family thought he was brilliant. Unsaid was the idea that, once graduated, he would pull the family along into enough prosperity for the others to go to school. In fact, they all earned post-secondary certificates paid for by their parents, but only Bruce got a Master’s degree -- in agriculture at Oregon State University. The Depression changed everyone's plans. His thesis was on the price of potatoes -- what patterns the prices followed and which hopefully would be predictive. He was motivated from experience -- the family went broke growing potatoes up in Manitoba.

But an MS in Ag, which is what he earned, didn’t mean a desk job. He worked for the Oregon Wool Growers as a buyer and was grateful since he was getting the only paycheck in the family for a while. In these two photos, he’s sorting wool. It got him exempted from WWII. By then he was married with kids and a little too old.

When he was courting my mother, he was cruising eastern Oregon to look at wool and sheep. She was working in Roseburg and he -- the self-declared atheist -- went to church so he could gaze at her while she sang in the choir. (So he claimed.) Early in the marriage my mother went along on the trips, taking her needlework in the car. I have a quilt on my couch this very moment that she started as individual blocks with iris appliqued onto them in 1937 and never put together into a quilt until very late in life. (1982)


Bruce is the farthest to the right.

Now Bruce is the farthest in the rear.

When I was very small, I went with him to the warehouse. I announced that I needed to “go”, but there were no women’s bathrooms in the building -- indeed, no women! One of the men said he would guard the door, I suspect, while my father took me into the only bathroom, but I was so distracted by several big white shiny installations that I’d never seen before that I almost forgot why I was there. I asked what they were, but got nothing but doubletalk and changed subjects. This, of course, alerted me that they of great and mysterious importance to adults. It was many years before I realized they must have been urinals. Until then I think I had the idea that they were sheep monuments of some kind.

Jim remarks on how decent and mannerly men were in those days. They showed up for work on time, didn’t loaf, and checked out a little AFTER quitting time. No cussing except a little mild stuff if no women were around. Older men here, both red and white, are still like that. They tip their hats and hold doors and say, “Ma’am.” The kids don’t. They just growl and prowl. Unless there are none of their peers around -- then they are quite capable of being decent human beings.

Late in life my father worked with Future Farmers of America a bit. For instance, he composed and judged competitions. One of his favorite questions was “if you see a flock of sheep spread out through a fenced pasture, would you expect the wool to be higher or lower quality?” Of course, it would be likely better wool because sheep that are fenced have been bred for wool quality, but sheep in a flock favor the survival of those who stay in the bunch, which might not mean the best wool. One could say better wool is evolution guided by profit but tighter flocks are evolution guided by survival.

I suppose this is true of people, too. So what is it that shapes our young people into growling prowlers, I wonder?

SPRING SAFARI

It was Shopping Safari Day but I didn’t get up early and I forgot my list. In spite of that, it was an auspicious adventure in Great Falls. First on my list was stovepipe from Big R ranch supplies, which has moved into an abandoned K-Mart. A big sign on the front door asks customers to please check their firearms at the front desk before shopping. I asked several clerks how many times a week that happened. “Oh, couple dozen in the summer.” Around here a gun is a sort of ranching implement. Coyotes, gophers.

The store has acres of everything except the little fly traps I wanted. They are simplicity itself: a plastic bag with a plastic baffle at the top where flies go in and never come out. The bait is an old horse turd soaked with something so repulsive that one cannot use the trap indoors or even in the garage. They said, “It’s not fly season yet.” But I’ve had flies for a week. “Huh,” I scoffed. “You haven’t caught up with global warming!”

But what I really wanted was stovepipe so I could hook up my little cast iron bunkhouse stove and sit by it in the morning while I drink my coffee. We found the pipe, which is remarkable since I’ve discovered that none of the little farm supply places can carry it because they don’t order in big enough quantity and the people who make the pipe consider them a nuisance. Then we found three kinds: “blue,” black (the standard) and galvanized -- but nothing had prices so the clerk did battle with the computer until we found out that the galvanized was so cheap that I could have bought it last winter if I had known!

I had an interesting conversation with another clerk who was wearing a cowboy hat, which made me mistake him for a customer. He’d been a saddlemaker over in Eastern Montana (he didn’t want to tell me where) until he’d gotten bucked off a horse and stove up enough that the only pitiful excuse for an indoor job he could find was clerking for Big R. He was embarrassed. But actually morale seems to be high at Big R.

Then I went over to the CMRussell Museum to look at the Scriver bronzes they’ve just been gifted, but I’ll tell about that on my other blog: scriverart.blogspot.com.

Next stop was the new Pacific Antiques Mall: one of those places where there are stalls rented to individuals as well as the main guy’s merchandise. I was blown away. It’s a huge place and absolutely crammed with stuff -- not necessarily what you might expect as “antiques” back east or on the coast because a lot of it is cowboy gear: hair chaps, rawhide ropes, bridle bits, big hats, leather cuffs. In the individual booths were everything from black golliwog dolls and homemade rough tool boxes to elaborately carved cabinets costing plenty. There were some Scriver bronzes. Lots of glassware and figurines. A tender Royal Copenhagen female nude with a cat. A jaguar’s head as a bowl. I’d have bought both if I’d had the bucks and/or any space for them.

But what almost made me weep, given what I’ve been reading, was a frail wicker rocking chair from St. Peter’s Mission near Fort Shaw, one of the early Jesuit Missions. I daresay it had been sat in by Father Philip Rappagliossi himself, about whom I will tell you more later. (I’m reading his letters home, in which he assures them that his health is improving, though we know he died in the end.) It wasn’t even expensive. I hovered and dithered over whether to buy it. I’d have to borrow money... But where would I put it?

I’m not entirely sure the man running this vast operation (the building is so huge that he could have indoor parking in the winter if he wanted to) really understands what that chair is. He’s from North Dakota. Leased his ranch to his son and came over here to see what he could do with this idea. He said he’d wear his cowboy boots except that the concrete floors were already too hard on his feet. He says there’s tons of all this stuff in the country around and he’s selling most of it to Canucks.

Then along came another big tall older fellow who looked vaguely familiar and turned out to be someone I’ve seen around art premises over the years. They began talking freely in front of me about evaluating a Leonard Lopp painting someone wanted to sell. Leonard Lopp! He was a big name in the Sixties among people who like scenery that has a lot of pretty colors in it and who think a BIG oil on canvas is what a painting really ought to be like. We began naming others from that period: Les Peters who did lovely subtle paintings of wildlife, Leo Beaulaurier who did Indian portraits on black velvet which sounds awful but were actually rather sublime when lit properly. They’re both in big demand according to these guys. And so on. Ghosts in the room. (If you can call a space roughly the size of an airplane hanger a room!)

Then the most surprising event of the day! This guy offered me a job! He wants to install a high-end gallery in one corner and needs someone to take weekends. I was so startled I almost accepted! But then I had to say, Oh no! I’m just too pure! It would spoil my moral stance to be buying and selling. Anyway, I don’t know the prices of anything these days. I just knew the artists half-a-century ago! But my head echoed with what Alan Deale said when I quit the ministry: “Who are you going to be, Ginger Renner?” (She’s a big expert on Russell in case you didn’t know. Lives very well.)

This guy was relieved, I think. After all, he knew nothing about me, although his friend recognized me. I WAS dressed-up, since I put my preaching togs back on because they were hanging at the front of the closet.

Barnes&Noble and the grocery store were normal and uneventful. I scored some Jack Daniels Mustard and bought much-too-expensive cat food because that’s all that’s on the shelves now. (Melamine is showing up in the food pigs, because the cat food makers sold all their contaminated cat food to the hog farmers. Maybe those cultures who stigmatize pork have a good idea.) Meadowlarks are singing now and it was warm enough to open the pickup window and stick my elbow out. Sunday it’s supposed to hit eighty.

SATURDAY NIGHT TRAGEDY

Since I was scheduled to preach on Sunday, I was spending my Saturday evening in an effort to work myself into a suitably benevolent and nurturing mood. As an aid and prompter, I’d been reading emergency med tech and ambulance driver blogs and trying to picture the insertion of breathing tubes down throats and IV lines into veins. Then, just after dark, the village siren began to blow.

The siren blows every Tuesday at 7PM to remind the firemen (so far as I know we have no firewomen) to come to the monthly meeting where they all study how to save people and do a bit of bonding. If pizza and beer seems natural afterwards, well, that’s good for business. But this was Saturday. It was great weather -- had been good weather for the entire day, which is a little unusual since our weather tends to pass through at a high speed and you have to catch it on the fly, so to speak.

By now the robins are back and I even heard a meadowlark today, but the poplars haven’t gotten past those little purple twiddly things full of pollen and the prairie looks green only where it is overgrazed enough that there is no dry grass to hide it. Very often in this season someone gets carried away with the Spring ambiance and the human equivalent of little purple twiddlers by overindulging in beer when they should have stuck to pizza.

Then the lights went out. Stuttered back on, went out and stayed out. The last time this happened a house burned up. Though I had been in my nightgown and a jacket, I went out in front of my house to see if I could spot the fire, which was pretty easy since the whole town is only a few blocks wide and the fire was on the main highway two blocks away. Loretta, my neighbor, was out in her yard as well, also in night attire.

“Wanna go check it out in the pickup?” I asked her. She did. So we two matrons of heft and girth climbed into the pickup, drove over and sat in our nighties at a respectful distance to watch what was a vigorous conflagration that had engulfed the attached garage. “At least it’s only the garage,” I said. We knew the old lady who had lived there alone had died the week before, so we assumed that the house was empty, but still...

Loretta looked sad. She always knows the inside story. “The family went over to sort through furniture and valuables yesterday,” she said. “They put all the good stuff in the garage where it would be easy to load up after they emptied the trash out of their farm truck.” The farm truck was parked far enough down the driveway that it wasn’t even singed. All the trash was in good shape.

This Saturday I was also in my nightgown but judiciously put my jeans back on to go look for the fire. I could hear sirens in the distance. I’m just a block from the fire truck garage but the door was down. Then a couple of law enforcement vehicles came swirling around the corner with lights flashing, parked with a screech and went on-the-double into the garage. In a minute the fire door shot up and the truck was rolling. It stopped for another few minutes while pickups drew up quickly on both sides of the street, doused their lights and ran for the truck. Their equipment was hanging ready for them to struggle into as the truck took off.

With the door open, I could see that the ambulance had already left earlier. I wondered whether the driver had been electrocuted when he (must be “he,” right?) hit the power pole. I followed the truck at a respectful and -- I hoped -- legal distance. When I got to the livestock corrals, I was about a half-mile from the scene of the accident where the truck had stopped in the middle of the highway. I couldn’t see any flames or smoke. Maybe they needed the truck for the Jaws of Life.

I watched a while and went on home to get to bed so I could get up at 5AM. The lights were back on and with them the electric alarm clock which has a battery backup in case of power failure, but I never have bothered to put a battery in. How often do I have to get up these days? I reset the clock, took an aspirin and went to sleep. At 1AM my carbon monoxide monitor shrieked. It’s on the house circuit and if there’s a power failure (or restoration) it shrieks. The power was off again. When I took a peek outside, there were a million stars and a completely black village.

So I found my flashlight first and then rooted around in drawers until I finally located my travel alarm, which winds up. I bought it when I used to sleep in the pickup while on the road. I got it set and wound. At 2AM the power came back on and the monitor shrieked to let me know. I got the electric alarm set up again.

At 5AM both alarms went off, but I was already awake. Both cats had been walking up and down on me to let me know this would be an excellent time to go out and look for mice or, failing that, for me to open up a can of cat food, hopefully not poisonous. Then the paper came. Nothing in it about the accident, but it was too soon. I got out the door at 7AM, on schedule for the hour and a half drive to Babb. At both services we were careful to pray for the driver of the car and any passengers that might have been involved.

When I came back, I drove up the highway to see if I could tell where the vehicle hit the power pole, but I couldn’t see any signs of charring or splinters. I was really too tired to care very much, so I came home and took a long nap until 5PM when the cats started their routine again.

The next morning the paper didn’t mention the accident but when I went to the post office, I knew I’d find out what had happened.

“Oh, some goose ran into a power line and brought it down. Shorted out the whole town.” Just as I suspected. “What was the guy’s name?” A silence while the postmaster thought and then smiled.

“It was a goose.”

Then I had to “shift my paradigm,” so to speak. “A goose?”

“Yup, a Canada goose. Wings just wide enough to touch two lines at the same time. Electrocuted itself. Started a little fire but the guys put it out almost instantly.”

No EMT necessary, I guess. “The goose?”

“Too cooked to eat. Totally charred.”

There are a dozen stories every weekend in this little village. You’ve just heard one of them.

AN EARTH DAY LIST

This morning I went to preach in Babb and Browning. Along the way today I saw (in order).

1. In the first daylight a silver boat out on Lake Francis, which was like blue silk with a little tint of pink. (The early worm catches the fish.)

2. Lots of calves bucking and cranking their tails over their rears. A few stilt-walking colts right close to their mothers in case of needing warm milk.

3. The Rockies white with fresh snowfall so that they shone against a background of dark cloud lurking just the other side, waiting to come over and rain on us in the morning (we hope).

4. A band of mustangs in designer colors like taupe, mauve, claybank, mouse, buckskin -- all with long tails and trailing bangs that hung over their eyes so they looked through like shy girls.

5. Boyd and Lila's new batch of buffaloes, young 'uns all clean and fleecy, propped on their elbows in the green grass looking like buffalo always do on the prairie.

6. (Back in Browning) Two sets of tall Blackfeet teens on two tall brown horses, riding double. On one horse the girl was "steering" and on the other the boy had the reins. Just as I came along, they broke into a run but no one lost their seat. They say that in the old days young couples would ride double like that, circling around and around the camp lodges while they sang love song duets.

Must be spring. Earth day, too!

My prayer tagline was “We thank God for allowing us to walk in grandeur merely by stepping out the front door. People here really do feel like that.

Well, when the wind isn’t blowing, it’s not fifty below nor a hundred and ten above, and we’re not up to our Alice B. Toklas in snow.

CHO/LIVIU LIBRESCU

I’ve been missing some blogging, partly because I’m trying to figure out some technical stuff (I finally managed to get a cover on my “Reservation Blackfeet” reference book on Lulu.com/prairiem.) and partly because I’m having too many thoughts too quickly to get them organized and posted.

They say that faculty are talking about Cho and the Virginia Tech shooting all over the country. The conversation I’ve been monitoring has been on the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, which includes nature writers but also a great many people enamored of theory, especially the victim-is-blameless post-crit sort of ideas. The comments there have ranged from the out-of-it (“How dare Nikki Giovanni say Cho is evil?” versus “How dare you criticize Nikki Giovanni who is a woman of color, sensitive and insightful?”) to the highly sophisticated.

EXAMPLE:
As a poet who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, who worked for civil rights, who militantly opposed white racism, and who continues to excoriate the oppressions of racism still pervasive in our society, she has an undeniable perspective on evil: its machinations, its embodiments, its transmission. Consider one of her best known poems, "For Saundra" (1968):

i wanted to write
a poem
that rhymes
but revolution doesn't lend
itself to be-bopping

then my neighbor
who thinks i hate
asked--do you ever write
tree poems--i like trees
so i thought
i'll write a beautiful green tree poem
peeked from my window
to check the image
noticed the school yard was covered
with asphalt
no green--no trees grow
in manhattan

then, well, i thought the sky
i'll do a big blue sky poem
but all the clouds have winged
low since no-Dick was elected

so i thought again
and it occurred to me
maybe i shouldn't write
at all
but clean my gun
and check my kerosene supply
perhaps these are not poetic
times
at all.

SECOND EXAMPLE:

The roots of this narrative go deep, much deeper than American culture. Should anyone wonder about Cho's use of the name Ishmael, be sure to look up Genesis 16:12: "And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man and every man's hand against him." This is why Abraham's maid Haggar gave her child that name. And it fits Cho all too well. This is an ancient narrative indeed.

This murderer, an English major, was no dope. Melville used the name for the same reason. It signifies the loner, the outsider, suicidal and homocidal, the one who is in Melville's term, "wolfish" and against the world. Melville's Ishmael is redeemed by Queequeg, that noble savage and type of the natural romantic man. Too bad Cho never met a Queequeg on his campus. I doubt any of these mental health professionals could have done as well. I suspect he would have run screaming from their psychobabble, even more angry than before.

Some commentators have noted the similarity between Cho's taped statement and those of many Palestinian suicide bombers. THe narrative circle draws tighter. For Ishmael was the son of Abraham cast off into the desert while his brother Isaac got his inheritance. And Ishmael is said to have been the father of the Arabs. So today's Arabs see themselves still as the children of "Ismael." In the Koran, it is Ishmael, not Isaac, whom God tells Abraham to sacrifice. And today in Palestine, the children of Ishmael still battle with the children of Isaac over who is the true son of Abraham, beloved of the Lord, and the rightful inheritor of the land.

Cho too seems to have felt disinherited. He rants against the rich and powerful, clearly himself feeling outside and powerless and propertyless, an Ishmael, like the Arabs, like Abraham's son, like the narrator of MOBY DICK.

He is, unfortunately, not unique, but a type we have had always with us. Solomon was right: THere is nothing new under the sun. The narrative here is our human inheritance; the alienation, our original sin.

Cho is that wolf within us that is indeed evil.

-Preacher Dave

Personally, I think that the cracks in Cho’s psyche happened to line up with the anniversary of Columbine, impending graduation, and a considerable number of our cultural fault lines: love of violence, transgression as retribution, the entitlement of rectitude, gun access, and a lot of other things so that they coincided just right. The experts in the field of mass shooting say to expect several more in the coming weeks, copycats. They say they have averted 12,000 similar incidents through security measures.

I was interested in the counter-Cho, Liviu Librescu, the heroic engineering professor born in 1930 in Romania. He was Jewish and therefore in 1941 he was banished with his family to the equivalent of an Indian Reservation called “Transnistria” where thousands suffered, starved and died. (He was not much older than Cho when Cho's family immigrated.) He survived and his life is posted on Wikipedia. He was rational and math-savvy, knew well the odds when he held the door shut to let his students escape, but he had a strong cultural dedication to resisting danger. He died on the Day of Holocaust Remembrance.

People often think of the reservation here as a place where there might be violence, mass shootings. There are bomb threats every spring, which the administration takes so seriously that they move the students out to sit in school buses while the school is swept. (I always think that a serious bomber would put the bomb under the buses.) We’ve had a series of fatal stabbings, usually in a context of parties, drinking and drugging, sexual competition, class jealousy. High school students of mine have written about beating up, raping, and killing people. (Some of them have actually done it.) Some were startled when they were instantly marched to the counselor. (As was the counselor!) I always got into trouble with the administration for reporting the incidents.

But the most chilling memory comes from the small white high school where I quit after a few months. One boy was fixated on the possibility of an explosion or gunman. He was definitely an oddball who got no respect. The other students said that the administration was always calling him in as a suspect, but in fact he was always innocent. He was brilliant and I tried to assure him that many of his problems would fall away when he got to college.

I had a class that had become notorious for being out of control. They were star athletes, they would tell you, and could do what they wanted. In fact the only reason I was hired was that no one else would take the job. I talked to them, I reviewed all their files, I separated them from the rest of the class and kept them after school, etc. etc. One day I was having lunch with other teachers and asked what they thought I ought to do.

“Kill them,” they said. “Murder the bastards.” One of these teachers was an aggressive Christian. Another was a recovering alcoholic. I wouldn’t be very much surprised if they became shooters.

PRINT ON DEMAND MEETS TEXTBOOKS

Someone told me that there is a person in town who is proofing textbooks as a job. So far, I don’t know who that person is or what kind of textbooks are meant or even what “proofing” means in this context, but I’d like to find out for several reasons.

Textbooks as an issue -- as compared with POD as an issue -- have preoccupied me for quite a while, so now that it occurs to me to think of the two issues at the same time, the lightbulbs pop. For one thing, I just Googled <“print-on-demand”+textbooks> and got a fascinating list of citations, including the website entry below:

http://www.fonerbooks.com/2005/09/college-textbook-sales-and-internet.html
Some quotes:

"According to the NACS 2004 College Store Industry Financial Report, college bookstore sales of new textbooks reached $4.956 Billion. Used textbooks added another $1.751 Billion. By contrast, the combined North American sales of Amazon, Barnes&Noble (stores and website) and Borders for 2004, including music and DVD sales, was $10.83 Billion. Deduct something for those non-book items and allow for the fact that Amazon et al also sell some number of college textbooks, and you see that college bookstores with their captive audiences make up a good third of the U.S. bookstore market.

"The textbook situation is one of those problems that could easily be solved by a combination of internet publication and print-on-demand. Just imagine, professors could write their own textbooks without selling their souls to the editors at the NY trades who insist on the inclusion of needless color illustrations and bizarre formatting just to run up the price. The cream would rise to the top, when students wanted (or were required) to purchase the texts, they could be printed on demand, as a whole text or in sections, and students would see their textbook costs drop to under $20 per course. Thanks to the print on demand publishing model, an Internet textbook co-op could pay for its overhead and still pay professors royalties on par with what they would have earned on a $150 paperweight."


If one goes to the website itself, http://www.fonerbooks.com, one finds charming and essential sources for material on how to fix one’s computer and how to build oneself a timber frame house! If I were younger than forty, I’d begin both projects immediately! But since I’m “coming on for seventy” as the English say, I reckon I’ll stick to self-publishing.

Here’s my issue with textbooks. When I first began to teach in 1961, there was generally a key text that everyone used in some fields. For instance, all the high school speech & drama teachers used “The Stage and the School” and “Rehearsal.” This meant that publishers could do mass printing and keep prices low. The books were teacher-written, illustrated with photos from their work (I’m in some editions of “S&S” as a student.), and not flashily bound. In fact, “Rehearsal” was an early example of plastic comb-binding and not entirely satisfactory. Then came the big post-canonical explosion of approaches and materials in all fields.

Much of that was a reaction to poorly prepared teachers who simply started on page one and taught their way through the English books, hoping to get to the halfway point of the book at the same time as the halfway point of the course. Usually what happened was that students dropped off the map along the way, doing more and more poorly if the material was cumulative, or the teacher slowed down to reteach until they caught up, which meant that the better students muttered and sighed -- and the back end of the book rarely got taught at all. Maybe the last week the teacher would crash-teach gerunds and participles for the college-bound.

More of it came from “streaming” or “tracking” or sorting kids into what our Fifties chorus teacher in elementary grades and reading teachers in primary grades used to call “song thrushes,” “canaries” and “crows.” (One chorus teacher had a category she called “listeners.”) The idea was to group the kids according to ability, achievement and style of learning so that one teacher could use multiple methods. The fact was often that the stigmas of race, poverty, and disability nudged out other criteria. Over the years this has been abolished and then crept back in (usually with a new name) repeatedly. On a reservation this has enormous political implications. The inability to find a good solution means constantly vacillating between grouping and not-grouping, enormously expensive and hard on morale.

At its best I once had a reading comprehension series in paperback that had four tracks, but all of them focused on one paragraph. The “lowest” track concentrated on what happened and vocabulary. The “highest” track addressed symbols and cultural context. The examples that worked the best were Steinbeck. I myself learned a great deal from preparing to teach from these materials, but they disintegrated easily and were hard to manage in terms of handing out, checking in, and all that dumb stuff.

Nevertheless, one could put one’s hand on Warriner’s and know what was there. The last time I tried to teach (Cut Bank) there were simply no textbooks for English except an idiosyncratic collection of ragged paperbacks in insufficient number for the class sizes or anthologies that suited the prejudices of the one dominant English teacher. The principal (who had been an English teacher) said she would buy English texts “next year.”

Part of the reason she was putting off the acquisition was that the books have become incredibly expensive, due to the slick, bright covers and illustrations, even as the contents have deteriorated into error, politically skewed facts and omissions, and lousy editing. Since they were a horror to teach from (and had the opposite difficulties from my little paperback series -- e.g. they were huge, heavy, slippery, and the loss of one meant a $50 or more hit to the inventory), everyone went to duplicated materials. This meant that the poor copying machine fairly smoked in the morning and “monitors” were sent to make extra copies all day. At the end of the day sheets of papers strewed the floor -- impossible to re-use. Teachers had elaborate filing systems and new teachers were handicapped by the need to spend their evenings inventing these materials. (Death to trees!)

California and Texas are huge school constituencies, so most commercial textbooks are aimed at them. Since they either have or are believed to have high proportions of “Creationists” and other ante-diluvians, that’s what goes into the texts. They are not friendly to people who are not “mainstream” Americans (meaning mostly Germanic and white) and tend to skip history that’s not flattering.

A few years ago the state of Montana passed a law (pushed hard by Native Americans) requiring the teaching of “Indian history” in the state. Most people interpreted this to be anthropological discussion of artifacts plus -- if a person were bold -- a bit of material about how white people pushed the Indians aside. I don’t know of any textbook that discusses in any detail the creation and development of reservations. So -- heigh-ho! Here I am a’doin’ it!

This morning I’ll proof a book I’m calling “Reservation Blackfeet” so that Google and Amazon will pick it up from my blog. It’s not original writing by myself except for some transitions, explanations and definitions. Instead I’m including a few documents specific to the Blackfeet that are otherwise inaccessible because they are unpublished, or too academic for high school kids and teachers.

This NOT what some Native American people wanted. They had fancied a counter-equivalent to white mainstream triumphalism by the inclusion of romantic ideas about greater entitlement and the natural nobility of their bloodlines. They didn’t want to have to wrestle with such immediate and painful issues as water rights. To my mind, this is what makes a POD project valuable: for an outside party -- though sympathetic -- to attempt to provide objective materials. But I didn’t try to include water rights in this first attempt.

For now, I think my old eyes would be better off not “proofing” textbooks, but that my old mind and library might be valuable in terms of thinking about textbooks and providing materials. Fonerbooks may be a little over-optimistic about cream rising to the top, but optimism is a valuable commodity. Anyway, this attempt to provide materials should be available in a week or two from Lulu.com/prairiem.

SORROW

This is a world seeded with sorrow today, even as the tractors are out in the fields seeding something better. It’s not just the shooting in Virginia. A few weeks ago I was in the grocery store when the manager asked the clerk who was checking me out to leave the counter and go do something else. She protested that it was not her job, that she didn’t know how to do it, and that it would make her late leaving for home. The manager insisted.

She was plainly exhausted and her eyes brimmed. It tipped over into anger. “If I have to do that, I’ll walk out of this store.”

“If you walk out of this store, don’t come back.” She is a woman with kids. She went to do what the manager said.

More recently I was in Great Falls in the grocery store behind a woman whose husband just got back from Iraq. He’s clearly suffering from trauma -- has to sleep in a separate room, is on temporary leave. Drinking. There is no counselor available. The marriage is in danger. The clerk was a young man who knew this woman and somehow was part of the Malmstrom Air Force Base family -- maybe he was moonlighting, maybe he was a veteran, maybe he was married to a soldier. He was counseling her gently: “Take care of yourself. Confide in others. Go to his commanding officer.” I was in no hurry and wouldn’t have wanted to hurry this exchange anyway. His best piece of advice was “Believe in the future.”

I preached Sunday in Babb and Browning, always a pleasure to see people and to drive up to the mountains. But I was very conscious of how much the people had aged since I was their minister for a year in 1988-89. Smitty turned 89 on Sunday and we sang “Happy Birthday,” which made his hearing aid squeal. He grinned but was impatient because he wanted to go ice fishing after church. (He’s been fishing almost every day that I’ve known him, but the ice is about gone for the season.) Clara, his wife, is on oxygen now and carries a portable unit. She moves slowly but still valiantly does her job making coffee and folding orders of service.

That was in Babb. In Browning were the grandparents of one of a recent sequence of boys who have been knifed to death at parties. These were not bad boys, not drunks. The uninsured auto parts and repair business that the family has run for many decades burned to the ground not long ago. Their grown daughter plays the incredibly clever and complex digital organ for services. On the first day of school that she was in my English class long ago, she looked me up and down and said, “Oh, I WOULD get a recycled Lucille Ball for an English teacher!” I liked her from that moment. Now she runs the Succeed in School program.

Both congregations are even smaller than they were before.

Yesterday was sixty degrees, no wind, comfortably overcast, and I went out to work in the yard. Not much debris blows around in Valier, but in my flowerbed I found a piece of paper with what appeared to be answers to catechism questions, carefully printed in pencil. I don’t know what the last question was, but it may have been “what do you pray for?” The answer was “Give us something to look forward to!”

Then I came in the house, checked the email, and got the news that they think they’ve discovered what has killed all the bees: cell phones. The cell phone messages destroy the bees’ ability to tell where they are and get back home again. If we give this country a choice between bees and cell phones, what do YOU think they’ll choose? It’s an easy choice for me. BEES.

Not that I’m surprised. I’m still grieving over the fungus that’s killing all the frogs. It’s a little early for frogs here, but soon it will be warm enough for them to begin to sing. Will I dare drive around the lake, trying to hear them before they are gone?

There’s a missile silo only a mile away, but I don’t worry about it much. Others are worrying that it will be decommissioned, because that will mean fewer customers for the stores and cafes, fewer jobs, fewer taxes. No one obsesses over annihilation in a mushroom cloud the way we used to when I was the age of that South Korean shooter in Virginia today. All we worry about is money and drugs -- some worry that they’re around and some worry when they’re NOT around.

Last night I almost overdosed on Helen MIrren, which I thought was impossible. It was “Elizabeth I.” 211 minutes of scenery chewing. Some drawing and quartering -- quite vivid and detailed. So tonight I turned to Sigourney Weaver: “Imaginary Heroes,” a slow stupid tour of the faults of suburbias with Sigourney looking and acting pretty ugly. (It only cost $4. I might just throw it away. That’s what I did with the last Val Whatsis murder mystery, which was just a little too horrible.)

My last attempt to keep from sinking was the blog called “A Day in the Life of an Ambulance Driver” If anyone can say something about a campus shooting, he can. But why? Instead, he told about delivering a premature baby in the back of the ambu while it struggled through an ice storm. (The vehicle, not the infant.) Heroism on the parts of all involved, including the baby. He couldn’t talk her into naming the baby for him. She said “Ambulance Driver” was too generic.

Now I’m okay. “Believe in the future.” “Give us something to look forward to.” Babies and all that. The daffies in the front yard are up about five inches.