A TOWN MEETING IN DEADWOOD -- er, VALIER.

The mini-Bakken boom around here has changed the dynamics of Valier, adding itinerant oilfield labor to the demographics.  Once Swift Dam and the canal construction that is the heart of the town's economy had been completed in 1910, the previous boom dynamic of male gypsy labor moved on to other territory.  Cut Bank became the saloon town and petit professionals like school teachers did their relaxing in more upscale emporiums in Valier, places more like restaurants.  Froggies, which had been closed down, reopened as a pizza parlor with beer.  Since then, it has become more of a dive, though the parking lot fistfights have been kept to a minimum.

In fact, Froggies, its growing clientele, and the general weakness of the town council as they struggle with the fraying of infrastructure built a century ago and a constant stream of imposed requirements from the state, has meant that the malcontents and the mutineers have solidified into a kind of alternative political hub, though they have no background or information that is current.  Froggies is their headquarters.

This came to a head last night in a council meeting during which the Froggies crowd expressed huge outrage at the lack of respect for their fireworks event on the Fourth.  On the one hand the owner actually wept over the grievous insult of a town council member, gentle and quiet Dave Widhalm, coming into the bar and asking whether they had remembered to get insurance for the fireworks in a year so dry that in many places fireworks were flatly forbidden.  The indignation focused on Dave asking these questions in front of his clientele.  Also, this man felt that the posting of the Valier regulations for fireworks was an assault on his dignity.  He had a handful of notes detailing these failures of respect.  After a half-hour of being harangued, Dave humbly apologized.  I didn’t see why, though it was a generous thing to do.

In addition, the Froggie owner spoke out about the constant fury from people who want to do things that are blocked by city rules.  This news must be conveyed by city employees who are personally blamed.  

Then there was a diatribe over the failure to properly respect and support the older man who has volunteered to run the campground, so full on the Fourth this year that four spaces were double-camped.  He and his friends prepared the camp before the fireworks and then cleaned up afterwards -- all for no pay.  Among the other indignities, he has to go around to the camps to collect the fees because the town has not provided registration boxes the way the national parks do it.  

Valier fish cleaning station

One wonders at the enormous popularity of the campground this year.  This is the first year there has been a full-time resident camp tender.   One of the more peculiar complaints about the campground was that the very bright lights by the fish-cleaning station and the wash house should be turned off at night.  They were installed to deter persistent vandalism.

The campground (and the lake) is owned by the Pondera Canal Company and the head of THEIR board gave permission for the fireworks.  Again, rather strangely, no one seems to have consulted the fire department, though it’s only volunteer.  The Pondera Canal Company is a sort of “third government” of the town, but very quiet in most circumstances.  It is the whole reason for the town’s economic existence -- NOT tourists, nor fishing nor even ranches.  Froggie claims that the fireworks display was not advertising for his bar but rather a benefit event for the library (the most vibrant and irreproachable institution in town) and the VADC which springs into being whenever the ladies of the town want to undertake some improvements of a cosmetic nature. 

In fact, two ladies were there to propose more grant applications to improve the looks of the town, because surely money would follow if only the weeds were gone.  Of course, they propose to write the grants, as they have done before.  (The town can barely get the old ones paid off since they are usually partial funding.)  Many of the complaints by the Froggie crowd are demands for repairs to streets and so on that simply can’t be afforded without going into even more serious town debt which must be repaid by property taxes.  Maybe a third of the town is “owned” by Pondera County (the county -- not the Canal Company) because of unpaid taxes.  The county does not pay itself taxes.

Valier grain elevator

This is a collapsing town.  The grain elevator is old-fashioned and there is talk of abandoning it, esp. since the railroad spur may be closed down.  One grocery store is left and a proposition to sell it to someone younger has broken down.  The cafe has been sold to people who don’t have the vision of the previous owners.  The engine rebuilder of great talent is seriously ill.  The bank provides less and less service.  The owner of the Medicine River Trading Post is too ill to open.  One large and prosperous family, reaching critical mass, has bought the only service station (the other one closed) and the motel.  The car dealer is gone.  The other major business in town, a construction company, has an adjunct office in Kalispell and the company wives would rather live over there where there are many amenities.

Valier is less than a hundred miles from the Canadian border, next to the Blackfeet reservation, and on dealing terms with a half-dozen Hutterite colonies.  Our population is divvied up into compartments.  The whole situation is ideal for people who like to evade the law without attracting attention.

Lethbridge, pop 83,000, was originally Fort Whoop-Up, based on the whiskey trade (the Whoop-Up trail went past here), and after that a coal mining town.  It has always been a sin city with a veneer of upper class culture: universities, art galleries, and so on.  It is 131 miles from Valier.   Apart from the many 18-wheel haulers,  traffic up I-15 is fast, sporty cars with Canadian plates.  Great Falls’ population is not quite 60,000 with the same bourgeois cultural features (museums, universities, orchestra) but also Malmstrom Air Force Base.  It is 86 miles away.

Lethbridge, Alberta

When the cultured ladies who want to propose grant applications think about small towns, they do not think of the larger context or the opportunities for evading the law.  They do not think about the world wheat economy or the international corporations who own it.  They do not dream that a new water agreement with the Blackfeet tribe might very well cause ranches to fail, if the lack of snow pack in winter doesn’t end irrigation first.  They haven’t penciled on the back of napkin how many major construction projects on the northern prairie remain on the federal agenda, which have been what sustained the company.  Nor are they aware of how federal funds are steadily dwindling.

Their thinking is all on nice domestic terms, which is how they don’t notice the drug scene.  They drive up government costs simply by bustling around imposing surveys on people who never fill them out.  It’s not a glass wall that seals them off from the handsome, wolfish, money-making men or makes them the tools of the steak-eating, red-faced, heart-attack bait who hold office and run businesses.  It is a mirror.  But this has always been America’s problem.

I think that I will honor my grandmother, a staunch Women's Christian Temperance Union member in her prairie homestead years, by putting a referendum on the ballot this fall to make Valier a "dry" town.  Let the soreheads drink in Cut Bank.

"THE OVERNIGHTERS" Oh, my God.

Pastor Reinke

IMDB:  Broken, desperate men chase their dreams and run from their demons in the North Dakota oil fields. A local Pastor risks everything to help them.

ROTTEN TOMATOES:  Hard-hitting, absorbing, and painfully relevant, The Overnighters offers an urgent and compassionate picture of life in 21st century America.

GOOGLE:  A pastor sparks a controversy in his North Dakota town by opening his church doors to homeless workers who are seeking jobs at nearby oil fields.

INDIEWIRE:  One of the most remarkable examples of layered non-fiction storytelling to come along in some time.

Okay.  That’s the official position, the liberal gloss on small towns with conservative churches caught in a culture vice created by exploitative power-hungry corporations.  That’s true, but there’s more to it.

One of the early scenes is the jolly pastor singing hymns as he rousts men for the day.  He’s very much in the mode of good old Brother Van, the Methodist bachelor preacher who supplied song and good cheer across early Montana. The sleeping men are indoor street people in bedrolls along the halls and rooms of the religious education wing of a Lutheran church, clearly built back in the day when big two-parent families wanted to provide their children with a reliable map of how to live with God.  The pastor is intense and intimate, putting his arms around the men, but the filmmaker is also allowed a lot of intimacy -- his head is in the huddle, too.  

The Bakken boom has reverberated even here in Valier. An earlier version of social shift that displaced small family farms with rural industrial agriculture (vast small-grain fields farmed by huge machines).  Now this shift is to the oil patch and frakking, a destructive bonanza made necessary by the fuel and fertilizer managed by those huge diesel tractors.  (Plus, of course, transportation and energy that supports the Internet and other city doin’s.)  This is “flyover country”.  Sometimes you can see the little smudge of dumped surplus fuel when the big planes prepare the long descent down to Minneapolis.

Often one can tell more from the negative space around a problem than the obvious problem itself.  What we here call “the High-line” because that was the name of the Great Northern tracks just south of the Canadian border, pushed that earlier boom/bust a century ago.  The railroad promoted ag-based homesteading so they would have traffic, but the combination of drought and bank collapse (these booms always are capital-based both on ascendancy and on decline) ended in foreclosures and dispersal, the same trajectory as these contemporary men looking for a way to make a new grubstake.  But they didn’t come to make homes.

Locals at first were thrilled.  These things are always promoted as a surefire way to “grow” and therefore get the old days back.  Plus needed tax money.   In Great Falls there has been a boom in telephone answering services: they contract to answer questions as “support” for appliances, insurance, and other businesses that are not there.  No one can see them, so they tend to be people who can’t easily get other jobs, stigmatized by their appearance but not handicapped by being dumb.  The company always comes in asking for grants from the city and pledging to stay and become part of the community.  After a few years of sweet deals, they pull out.  The building is back to being semi-abandoned and a few hundred people are looking for job.

Working in the Bakken boom is tough.  It’s hard repetitious labor with a certain amount of risk and a climate like Antarctica, which makes it barely possible to live in a car or “rough.”   Man-camps go up, trucked-in dorms, usually owned by the corporations.  There are always a few men who are over-optimistic, grifters, alcoholic, and other misfits.  The ones who haven’t gotten into the job system yet -- or who are automatically filtered out -- can be dangerously antisocial.  One category that desperately needs to be anonymous is the men labeled sex-offenders and forbidden to live here, there, or anywhere.  There are a LOT of them and they are supposed to be monitored as criminals.  The nature of their sex offenses ranges over a broad spectrum, from murderers to teen lovers.  

Gradually, we realize that this church is a shell.  It’s Lutheran, which means that the denomination is helping, probably mostly with the pastor’s salary.  He has a wife, hard-working and devoted, and three kids who seem pretty successful.  We never see the pastor preach.  The building, probably all paid off in the past, is clean, well-built, with a big parking lot, now filled with men living in cars and campers.  The neighbors want a clean, safe, respectable location, like the old days.  The board is middle-class businessmen, aging, a little baffled but used to being in charge and preserving appearances while dealing quietly with bad things.  This is not the sort of church in the sort of place that a successful Man of God is looking for if he’s thinking about anything but charity.

Something is going on.

Now the spoiler:  the pastor turns out to be gay, but not in a healthy way.  His family doesn’t know.  The gay grifters have figured it out and take advantage.  He is terrified of publicity.  With good reason, because the small town resisters know that if they pull in some hip big city news hounds, the reporters are capable of smashing this charity project that has turned their big otherwise empty buildings into a Salvation Army dormitory.  (On the other hand, they DO fill the pews on Sunday.  But would you want to sit with them?)  SEX, SEX, SEX!   What sexual revolution?  So Jesse Moss comes in and puts a new liberal spin on the story, finally getting down to the level of confession.

There’s a pile-on of the more shifty men, happy to accuse the pastor’s character, creating enough squid ink to make their escape.  Looking back, one wonders which ones were having sex with the pastor.  The film shifts to the land, not the drilling but the fields where family homes stand ruined and deserted.  This had been their forever place.  They are probably swelling the cities and suburbs to the south or west.  The pastor tells his wife ON-CAMERA in public and she is devastated.  Then he wanders off alone in his car, now an over-nighter himself.

The wife and kids will be okay as soon as they have a little time and counseling.  They are hard-working and attractive.  The house belongs to the church so what happens with it depends on whether a new pastor comes who needs to live there.  I think the community will rally to the family, but that they will move on.  The kids are nearly college age and the wife may want a re-tread credential for a career.  This is the way life happens in the US today.

But let’s be real.  The Metropolitan Community Church (website:  http://mccchurch.org) welcomes gays and other alternative “lifestyles.”  All their pastors that I know of are gay men, though there are women and cis men in the congregations.  I’ve done pulpit supply once, because Unitarian Universalists also try to be open.  (UU's are a little more upscale and straight.)  I was instructed that at some point I was to receive the men in couples, to put my arms around them and assure them that they are fine, conscientious people who love each other.  I did that.  It was exactly what Rienke, the pastor in the movie was doing.  These were young, idealistic, devoted men and I saw no reason not to support that.  Some of them wept.

How come Rienke or at least the filmmakers, who were presumably broadly aware, didn’t note this alternative he had?  It’s as though he had been earning redemption with martyrdom so long that he didn’t know how to be ordinary, didn’t WANT to be ordinary, somehow NEEDED a secret life.  I can’t blame him.  When I was in the ministry, I needed a secret life, too, but it was not sex-based, more book-based and, well, cloistered.  Was this pastor’s advisors -- come on, every pastor in a mainstream denomination has a cloud of supervisors, guides, colleagues, therapists -- so out-of-it that they didn’t know about the Metropolitan Community Church or was the pastor himself defining gay as so scurrilous that he wouldn’t accept his own desires and make them legitimate?   Why couldn’t he join with the people trying to reform the Lutherans to recognize gay pastors? 

In the end any population-based institution has to deal with numbers, demographics, and how many bottoms are sitting on their checkbooks in those pews.  But when the people are gone, there is no graceful strategy for the use of a building that has the luxury of standing empty for 6 days out of 7.  Probably the best bet would be a retirement home for aging people who need a little support.  Emotion has to respond to economics.  In fact, it is world economics of the price of oil that has since changed the whole dynamic of the boom.  Valier was a bit relieved, to be honest.

But what about a centuries-old, education-based (Lutheran seminaries have VERY high standards), once-mainstream denomination, sort of semi-Catholic religious institution.  What obligation to do they have to drifters and grifters?  What do they owe to the respectable, worried, struggling “Saving Remnant”?  And why didn’t they give that pastor a rap upside the head?  I know he must have done a Clinical Pastoral Education internship, probably in a hospital, where such deep dilemmas are supposed to be turned out and surrendered to God.  

It must work for somebody somewhere or why do conscientious people keep counting on it?  There are perfectly practical things to do when the will to do it is there.  To me the bottom line corruption is that the city folks are willing to destroy the prairie in order to live on the profits: cheap oil and cheap bread.  They worship money, not God and not the planet.  Lately even city people have been wondering if they aren’t just an answering service for small appliances and travel agents.  

I liked the article about the origin of the film at http://www.buzzfeed.com/kateaurthur/10-things-to-know-about-the-overnighters#.awkJ9gYX