Tuesday, June 30, 2015

HEAT, FIRE, BEARS

No formal post today.  Too much keyboard time yesterday and one leg is swole up like a snakebit pup.  Today my feet are up high.  Here's some gossip.

Fire north of Browning in hay meadows, that probably means along Willow Creek drainage.  Last I heard there were hundreds of acres involved, but they were almost halfway contained.  Lots of fuel this year.  Could involve Bob Scriver's Flatiron Ranch, which used to belong to Corky Evans and before that Oscar Doane.  Now it's a Nature Conservancy/tribal consortium.  Might not be there.





In Valier, post office sign says bears sighted near Valier.  They follow watercourses, including along Lake Francis and irrigation ditches.  Folks in town advised to keep pets indoors and make sure there are no attractions outside.  They're likely to be young bears with no manners.

I've watched a PBS movie about Williston and the influx of men, hoping for work on the Bakken oil patch.  A minister is trying to help, but. . .

 http://catapultfilmfund.org/project/the-overnighters/
http://video.pbs.org/video/2365519171/

There's a sharp swerve at the end.  And then the credit roll gives you faces and origins -- these men come from the whole planet.  We were anxious to have them here in town, thought we'd make lots of money renting out our back yard.  Then thought about it  again and changed our minds.   The boom is calming now anyway.

Among other books, I'm reading "All Our Stories Are Here."  It's an anthology of literary criticism edited by Brady Harrison.  Professors must publish to get tenure.  Many have figured out they can do that by getting their friends to each write a chapter.  Harrison's friends are mostly on the U of Montana faculty in Missoula.  Not that that is a bad thing, but it means that friendship circles among writers are the key to publishing.  They always have been.  But they badly distort the full spectrum of who's writing about what.


I'm going to put this on the air twenty minutes early and go to bed.  It's just dusk.

No comments: