HOW YOU DOIN' ?

“Mental health treatment needs to re-engage with the language of persons. This means suspending the detached, third-person stance toward patients, and attending to their actual experience and circumstances.”

Dr. Davis would replace psychoanalysis with “understanding that can bring unusual and challenging mental states into conversation with a person’s relation to the world.

Recovering this interpretive conversation means sharply circumscribing if not dropping biogenetic talk. It means seeking understanding, which is what people dealing with emotional suffering, like those we interviewed, yearn for. An understanding as persons, embodied and situated in a life-world. An understanding that is the enemy of fear and requires no othering.”

(Joseph E Davis is research professor of sociology and chair of the Picturing the Human Colloquy at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.)

https://psyche.co/ideas/lets-avoid-talk-of-chemical-imbalance-its-people-in-distress?utm_source=Psyche+Magazine&utm_campaign=57c550ad7b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_07_13_05_10&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_76a303a90a-57c550ad7b-71346600

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In theory, this was the breakthrough of the humanist psychologies of the Seventies when Maslow said, “Why are we studying the people who are malfunctioning instead of the people who are thriving?”  Of course, Ruth Benedict got him to come visit the Alberta Blackfoot tribes and the climate, the people, the poverty — but it was all too tough for him.  He only stayed weeks. That "pyramid" of needs that takes a person to peak experiences is for college-educated folks who live in the city.  So maybe he couldn’t recognize strong mental health in terms of survival strategy.

Yesterday I made myself stop writing long enough to go weed whack my parking strip.  This year’s weather has somehow made plants jump into growth of such vigor that grass is like bushes and bushes are becoming trees.  I’ve never known such growth, and since it coincided with the thriving of microorganisms, both the famous one that is changing the human world and the subtly, not quite invisibly, ones that give us everyday fevers and achey muscles, my house is overwhelmed by green stuff.

An ATV went by and turned back.  Happens all the time.  But they never stop.  This time it was a townsman whose wife has also taught at Heart Butte.  I haven’t known them, but knew “of” them.  He didn’t mind my filthy and cracked plastic yard chairs so we sat to swap stories.  I haven’t done this for a long time.  It took the whole rest of the morning that I should have been using at the keyboard, but we were checking out each other’s memories of the past here as well as theorizing about what the bloody hell is going on in the world and explaining each other’s past.  

This was a man of intelligence who paid attention — recently retired, prosperous, competent, clued in about the world of irrigation — that historic force that goes back to the invention of cuneiform writing and arises everywhere there are mountains that scrape snow out of the sky so it runs down into canals and rivers in spring.  Dams and canals, combined with long stretches of fertile soil, are one of the foundations of American prosperity,  

In a sense, melt water is as important as buffalo in terms of feeding people.  Valier was founded to capitalize on this and is part of the history of Europeans coming in to combine with industrialization — major ag machinery, railroads. and ocean shipping — that underlie the miles of wheat that’s just now heading up but still green and the huge consumption of fossil fuels.  Solar powered combines are not invented.

This man loves Westerns, the good ones like C.J. Box’s or the ones that on TV we know as “Longmire.”  I love them, too, but have put them aside for now except that they come out of the dynamics that I try to understand, not just the cultures of Euros on the prairie but all culture as it arises among humans, defining sanity and success.  So besides the big macro politics we checked out things like the story of the family next door, which has suddenly taken their noisy dogs and left.  We don’t know why or for how long.  In prairie towns the townspeople meet in coffee shops before they open work for daily business so they can swap information and theories about what’s happening.  Is there danger?  Are there funny stories?  What about mysteries?  Do you remember anything like this?

Some of the talk has no doubt been about the state of my yard and what it is that an old lady does in there all by herself every day.  Is there some kind of intervention the town should make to preserve the state of Valier by maintaining short green lawns?  In winter we talk potholes but in summer it’s all about demonstrating propriety and sanity by keeping your grass cut. 

https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2015/11/18/letting-go-of-green-lawns/ideas/nexus/

Great tangles of grass and the rogue weeds of salsify (very bad), alfalfa, thistle, and flax (very pretty blue) are thought to reflect the mental health of the persons living there.  This is an import.  North of Birch Creek, the boundary of the Blackfeet Rez, people are not so different but not so intent on yards.  Although Darrell Robes Kipp one summer declared he was going to reveal the golf course underneath Browning by taking a power lawnmower to the empty lots.  Nevertheless, Browning’s economy is about grazing, animals rather than machines.

When Darrell and I continued our intermittent conversation of decades, talking about issues of culture, we were both trying to find out why things have gone wrong that there are so many people twisted and destroyed by poverty.  What has happened to Blackfeet families and bands, how do we relate to modern institutions, and why was Maslow such a sissy that he couldn’t live in the West?  It’s a time of questions that keep coming back.  Maslow’s “discipline” was psychological.  Some called it “the talking cure” and it was meant to be like the idea at the beginning of this post, knowing each other as human beings.  Older than irrigation.  

A MESSAGE FROM THE SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS IN VALIER, MT

In Montana there is no school on the 17th or 18th because of the Teachers' Convention. I don't know how that will affect the conversations about this incident, but I hope there will be many among teachers, students, and others.  To be out-of-town offers some opportunities in a different place.  (I should say that I've taught in Heart Butte and subbed in Valier.) 

I put this story from the Valierian on my blog so it reaches around the planet to those who read this daily essay.  It's an excellent example of how kids pick up on adult foibles and adults use kid stuff in a damaging way, how a powerful strategy like color symbolism can go crazy, how modern technology is always more powerful than we think, and how 17 kids put so many people on their back feet. In the past around here, school or not, controversy has tended to be suppressed.  Getting this out in the open shows how ridiculous incidents can be and what adult leadership looks like.

(I added emphasis.)

http://www.valier.k12.mt.us/Home

Ms. Julie Gaffney, Superintendent of Schools, released this statement to the Valierian, the town weekly newspaper. 

On behalf of Valier Public Schools, I am releasing the following statement to address the unwarranted, inaccurate, and unfair statements made about Valier Schools students, staff, and community regarding a student video created for Homecoming week. 

The video was not a mockery of Native Americans or the tragedies revealed through the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s (MMIW) movement. Unfortunately, only approximately 2 1/2 minutes of a 6 minute video was released to social media without the school’s permission and interpreted as racially motivated. That video segment was misinterpreted by the person who released it and those following her posts as intentionally created to make a mockery of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

It has been implied that the MMIW and the red skirt symbol was well known to everyone so advisors should have known to tell students to remove it from the video. Although the MMIW movement is very well known in Canada and there is increasing awareness in the U.S., the symbols related to the MMIW movement are not well known. 

It has been said by some people that it doesn’t matter what the intent of the video was. I don’t agree. Nothing in the video had anything to do with the MMIW or symbols related to it. The skirt was a pink poodle skirt, worn all day because it was Retro day, and nothing more than student clothing.  The skirt was later described via social media as a red skirt which symbolized the MMIW movement, which was not true.  American History portrays Red Coats and Blue coats as symbols of the Revolutionary War. 

As part of Homecoming week, as is tradition in Valier, high school students create videos based on a theme selected the week before.  The theme for the freshmen class was the 4th of July.  Students watched a video, School House Rock, “America! “Shot Heard Around the World” which became the idea for their video.  The British (Heart Butte) and the Colonists (Valier) were going to engage in a battle.

   

Students found costumes representing each side. Some students found red FCCLA jackets, and blue shop coats, jackets and sweatshirts. Other students found fringed vests, headbands, wigs and mustaches in the drama room to wear as Warriors.  There are 17 students in the freshmen class, 7 who identify as Native American or mixed heritage. They all took part in the video, one way or another. 

The students recorded their video, with each scene being shown to the advisors. It was stated on social media that an indigenous woman wearing a red skirt was murdered. That is not true. The student is dressed as a male warrior who is clearly wearing a mustache.  The character is hit in the head with a football and falls down.  There is a “Bang” sign, which is then related to the “shot heard around the world.” 

There are direct parallels between the School House Rock video and the student created video.  They both begin with, “The British are Coming! The British are Coming!” and the student video adds, “Wait! Aren’t they the Warriors?” to set the stage for the upcoming game between the Warriors and the Panthers.  Another direct parallel is the students’ use of a spinning globe and comments about the shot that was heard around the world.  The question, “Did you hear that? Did you hear that?” is expressed by people in different parts of the world.  In the full length video, the students engage in a snowball fight between the red coats (British/Warriors) and the blue coats (Colonists/Panthers) where the Panthers win.  Each side runs out of ammunition, meet in the middle of the “battle field,” and decide to engage in a snowball fight instead, all in good fun.

These scenes are why laughter can be heard from the audience. The video also shows the blue coats crossing “the Delaware” in a boat with the Panther mascot at its helm. At the end, the red coats (Warriors) are seen surrendering by waving a flag, and the last scene shows the class, dressed in red, white, blue glasses, waving the American flags, saying, “God Bless America; Let Freedom Ring.” 

I regret that we were not given the opportunity to answer questions prior to the clip being released.  Valier Schools has a strong commitment to the Native American culture as demonstrated through the work of the Impact Aid Committee, joint student activities with Browning and Heart Butte, and a welcoming open enrollment policy. Activities such as the Valier student council working cooperatively to help plan the Blackfeet Area Schools Youth Leadership Initiative and attend the conference, visit the museum, play cultural games, and listen to Native American speakers are among some of the ways Valier students have reached out in the last couple years to understand and work with surrounding communities in an authentic way. 

Last year’s freshman class participated jointly in the Blackfeet Research Project at the Montana Historical Society to catalogue and properly name artifacts.  School staff have been learning about Native American learning styles to help inform their instruction to reach all students.

Valier Schools will continue to foster authentic activities, relationships, and learning opportunities with all of our neighbors.  We will continue to reach out to experts to enrich our curriculum and learning opportunities.  And, we will continue to embrace the many traditions and activities that for many, make Valier Schools their school of choice. We will institute a procedure to review student-created content so that hopefully, misunderstandings like this one won’t happen again.

   

Many people have contacted the school to offer their expertise in communicating effectively, raising awareness of Native American issues, and sharing ideas to bring our communities closer together.  We will continue to encourage ideas and suggestions to enrich student learning and activities while we recognize the diversity among our students.

One only needs to come into Valier Schools, watch our kids work together on the court, field, and classrooms, go to dances, and watch the kids walk the halls arm in arm, to see that our school is anything but racist. The school community did not deserve to be represented the way that it was.

I hope that in the future, adults will take pause before going viral with something they may not understand, and give kids the benefit of the doubt.  

THE TEN-MINUTE MAYOR

It seemed as though it were almost unprecedented that Trump has quickly become revealed as a TV illusion who was essentially quite loco.  But in fact, here in Valier, we had an incident a few years ago that was clearly a precursor.  A man named Tom Hoover moved up from Conrad, the county seat.  He let it be known that he had made a fortune selling automatic lawn sprinklers and he built himself a very nice little house with a SW-style veranda, a big landscaped yard, and a fountain in this village of modest homes.  He befriended many boys in the community.

This town has an aging population, so a dwindling number of people volunteer for the fire department, Emergency Response Team, and so on.  No one really wants to be the Mayor or even on the council, but it's always been possible to find someone.  McKenzie Graye was a progressive retired woman who moved to the village from a city in the NW.  She raised hackles over the heron nesting trees on an island in the irrigation lake called Francis, which she wished to protect.  And she was a WOMAN, but nothing like Velda Loche, a previous mayor.  It was easy to oppose Graye in an election.

Hoover first raised an alarm over the new water tower, which he claimed was so poorly built that it would fall over.  This turned out to be untrue.  He was also intent on presenting visual explanations of why the town's budget and water management was badly flawed.  At one meeting he was so emotional that he was ejected.

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Cut Bank Pioneer Press:

Less than 10 days after taking his oath as Mayor of Valier, Tom Hoover has resigned. Hoover, whose unexpected resignation came at the conclusion of his first town council meeting on Jan. 15, soundly defeated incumbent mayor McKenzie Graye in last November’s municipal election.According to the draft minutes of the meeting, during the “special announcements” portion of the meeting, “Mayor Hoover stated that if the community is concerned with small issues like where his office is located, he does not want to deal with this and he announced his resignation as Mayor and left the building. The meeting ended abruptly at 9:27 p.m.”

When questioned about his resignation, Hoover offered no official comment. Approximately 15-20 people attended the meeting.

Hoover’s statement at the Jan. 15 meeting appears to be in response to a comment by Keith Stark during the public comment portion of the meeting.  The draft minutes state, “Keith Stark is a member of the local American Legion Post and one of their responsibilities is to sponsor the Boy Scouts. The Legion is upset with Mayor Hoover for creating his office in the Scout room without consent from the Legion. He would like to come up with a happy solution between the Legion and Mayor. If no solution can be found the Legion may purse formal legal action.

 * * * * * *

At this meeting it turned out that he didn't know how to call the meeting to order, had a very weak grasp of Robert's Rules of Order, and didn't know the words to the Pledge of Allegiance which started every meeting.  He kept asking the poor clerk what to do.  (This is a very diligent and motherly clerk who tried to be helpful but was exasperated by the extra burden.)  His whole idea of being the mayor was a fantasy.  He had an exaggerated idea of what a mayor really is and presumed he had a lot of power.  People who had known him in his earlier life in Conrad were not surprised.

After this haywire temporary success, Hoover moved away.  Eventually his house sold and the garden is maintained.  We were all surprised again when an adventure recently killed him.

* * * * * * * 

Great Falls, MT obituary:

Valier, MT - Thomas Lee Hoover, age 71, of Valier, MT passed away at St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula on September 1, 2019, after injuries received from a motorcycle accident he was involved in on August 15, near Butte.

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Putin/Russia had nothing to do with any of this.  Neither of the two political parties was involved.  But there was a high level of gossip and guessing. Probably always will be.

What is it that possesses old white men with ideas of grandiosity that are so unreal and self-destructive?  It seems to be a need for attention and for importance in a life that is too ordinary to suit them.  Do they get it from media?  From an over-indulgent mother?  Is it the mild beginnings of dementia?  They create a lot of confusion and loss because people are so easily fooled and eager for someone to do the work.

VALIER, A COMPLEX REALITY

When I began working on the history of Valier, Montana, a town based on irrigation, the consensus of the town dwellers was quite different.  One idea was that the economic base was the recreation offered by Lake Francis, which is a dam-created impoundment, part of the irrigation system.  Fish are there because they are stocked, planted, but no one in town sells a fishing license.  The kind of fish is quite unlike stream fly-fishing for trout.  Some of the lake use is machines that go fast on water.  It’s not a good place to swim because of mud.  

An island was a roosting spot, a refuge, for herons, but also for seagulls which are considered negatively and nest on the ground.  When a vandal got access because water was low, partly because a construction company had graveled the route as a favor to politicians, and smashed the nests and eggs in a gleeful ATV spree, bird defenders tried to bring in national organizations.  The rookery, trees that had grown there before the dam and had died after that, was cut down to eliminate controversy.  Or maybe the dead trees just fell down.  Things calmed down.

There are no seagulls around this year.  I don’t know why.  No herons either.  The campground next to the lake becomes more and more controlled, with an onsite manager to collect fees for the piped water and electricity.  People mostly come on the weekend in RVs.  We’re all nervous about open fires.

At one point when the Conrad brothers owned the land, it was an open range ranch with many cowboys.  This is often featured in the histories written by women hoping to promote a romantic image based on movies and tv.  The just previous period of raising sheep is quickly skipped over, and the introduction of barbed wire, which ended the “open” part, likewise is only noted.

Another rather idealistic story is that Valier was founded by Belgians whose sense of propriety was offended by the raucous boom culture of oil discovery, particularly since it was associated with the Blackfeet reservation, but also avoidance of Cut Bank, which was still wild and woolly when I came in the Sixties.  The bars are more civilized now, but still thrive.

The boom years of Valier came from the construction of Swift Dam and the ensuing irrigation channels and basins.  The former sheriff from that time, now deceased, told me that weekends were so riotous in Valier that one had to walk down the streets on a layer of beer cans.  I have not researched any of this but only have talked to people, seen the publicity, and observed the land itself.  The exception is the story of how the Catholics, the Belgians, and the railroad developed a scheme for bringing in a community of farmers.  I’ll pursue that story, which I did research a bit, in another post, but it has been a strong force in terms of self-image. 

The dwindling of Valier, which is in process today, is much the same as that of the entire High Line of Montana and small towns across the prairie.  It is dynamic, continuing, and cannot escape forces that have nothing to do with the town.  Maybe most wrenching is the aging of the population, the thinning out of families, the confused transfer of wealth and practises across the generations.  Many people have big powerful vehicles and shop a hundred miles from home, but those with undependable cars and those who have no way to drive — either no car or no ability — are limited, as I discovered when a severe ear infection made me too dizzy to drive.  This is no longer a good place for poor people with health problems.

A counter force, not necessarily helpful, is that of the people from other places who see this village is a refuge, a holdover from long ago when families lent stability and charm.  There are two categories: one is young families hoping to keep their children safe and unaware that drug dealers have discovered that small towns are a good place to cook meth and dispense pot, that an aging (and hurting) population is vulnerable to pharmaceutical pill racketing.  The other is single men who have not formed into families or who have left earlier families.  A theoretically non-alcoholic community is not a problem when one drinks privately, a practise that is not exactly community building.

Another factor is the return of military people, since the area encourages enlistment of the young as a guard against poverty.  These people are educated and energetic, still young in retirement, and accustomed to a rather different ethos than that of the current nation where extreme negatives are seen as funny and powerful.  Something similar happens on the rez where the people who were moved to the cities by Eisenhower — who thought it was a way to disperse the rez — come back home.  Some are used to prosperity and impatient that things are old-fashioned, old buildings are falling down, and so on.

One expectation is that small towns like Valier will be cheaper places to live, cost less for food, taxes, infrastructure and so on.  But the idea also means less quality, less fresh food, more potholes, water problems, and standards imposed by people in the “cities” of Montana, though none of them break the 100,000 population mark.  Professional refugees from competitive cities, much bigger and usually coastal, have little idea of how to live in a rural place.  They don't participate, expecting service.

This close to Canada (a little more than an hour’s drive to the border) we have compensated by interweaving our enterprises, but the federal government’s appetite for national isolation and tariffs is interfering.  Consequences are felt in medical care, academics, and the international pressure from refugees.

One other factor should be mentioned, which is the risk of monoculture.  The beef ranches and hog farms are not so susceptible — or so we think — as the vast stretches of wheat, esp. where irrigation can encourage it.  These fields are vulnerable to the shrinking supply of water (or so it seemed until this violently wet year) and also to tinkering with seeds, both by cross-breeding and by fiddling the genomes.  Today there are people allergic to wheat, people dependent on the beer from barley, undetermined numbers diseased from chemical fertilizers and weed control.  It’s easy to play “sim city” with a small town like this one.  As long as a bad move doesn’t eliminate all the players.

WRITING A BOOK ABOUT VALIER

I sometimes frankly say that I’m writing a book about Valier, but I think what that conjures up in minds, esp. the ones here, is quite different than the outline I’ve been developing and will continue to research until it amounts to a book.  Many people here think in terms of stings and tattles, because so many pop books are based on sensationalism in order to sell. 

My plan and goal is to trace out the relationship between the land and the people over millennia from the glaciation intervals over thousands of years and the eruption of the Rockies.  Then after that last withdrawal appear the rain shadow that created grasslands and Chinook winds and the formation of the Old North Trail.   I will NOT be discussing dinosaurs!  Just their bones and the last of the mega-mammals and the people who preyed on them.

Next chapter is the bison-hunters and the beginning of white contact.

Rockies and wheat = irrigation

The real meat of the book will be the effect of industrialization, the beginning of the Anthropocene.  Dams, railroads, sea shipping, the formation of nations, the addressing of population explosions through raising grain to prevent famine, the impact of world wars, the infiltration of the land with manmade molecules (pesticides, herbicides, meds), alfalfa, species extinction, coal mines, oil wells, wind turbines, boom towns, and so on.  Getting order and continuity out of this will take research and time.  I don't know how many chapters that will require.

Valier cherishes its "Belgian" roots, but Belgium is a composite country divided by language and history.  This calls for more research -- WHICH part of Belgium did Valier come from and what impact did the bloody European Thirty Years War have on the people.

The last chapter will be an attempt to project what a sustainable future might be.  What comes AFTER reservations?  What would governance in general look like -- would it go to ecosystems instead of today’s states and counties?  What would the landscape look like?  Should we restore the original animals?

I will NOT be looking for a publisher.  Today’s publisher-based book producing system is a phenomenon of profiteering.  There are consortiums and organizations but even they by now have developed elites that control the others or have let the mass stifle the inspired individual.  Books in libraries are controlled by practical demands and increasingly becoming access points through computers rather than storing information in books.  This is not meant to be criticism.

The bottom line is change and how to survive in the midst of tumultuous new forces.  Part of that is being able to predict at least a few years ahead.  The great institutional stabilizers of schools (including universities), churches, economic systems, and transportation/communication/energy regulation are already rocking and shattering.  We in this small town are already seeing the imbalances from in-coming people who imagine the town other than it is, maybe hoping for a return to an earlier century, or possibly nefarious wayfarers not responsive to local standards.  Health and welfare issues are no longer supported by extended families.

Valier is particularly interesting because some of these newcomers, including the very early written-down historical population, arrived as a group.  An entire Belgian village was imported to tend the new irrigation-based grain growing made possible by the building of Swift Dam.  This is the real spine of the story I’m after, the industrial web of canals/fields/grain elevators/railroads/ocean-going ships/international politics and today’s international ag corporations that control whole countries.

Hutterites

In addition, Hutterites arrived as groups related to a network across countries and time, trying to preserve a different culture supported by religion.  Compare to the Blackfeet, forced to coalesce into a captive nation, but now demanding sovereignty and participation.  They present themselves as issues of culture, even religion, which gives them some protection, but -- in fact -- they are economic phenomena.

Economics is always ecological, meaning many small forces of survival that amount to general prosperity in the luckiest of times.  Human life is short.  The Anthropocene is only a little more than a century old and already we approach the tipping point of climate change, more extreme, warmer, moving insect vectors and vegetal patterns that carry coded diseases already epidemic.  The right to carry guns will do nothing to defend against malaria.

Militarized police

But guns and near-military force and surveillance may become part of the social dynamics as things become more unstable.  I hope to be gone by then, but some predict big trouble will start within five years and others laughingly point out that we’ve got plenty of instability right now, with the US Congress teetering at the edge of chaos after years of gridlock.  

But I don’t think of equality as a good thing.  Too often it is an assumption of uniformity and that every person should have the same sort of desires and sources when it is plain that successful ecologies are those based on interacting variety.  Even the most extreme outliers, surviving on crime or oppression, suffering from stigma, can have their use in terms of the whole.  They may be explorers, they may be secretly providing something the culture denies, they may be necessary counter-actions in the face of crushing forces from inside or outside.  They might be artists.

Ivan Doig

One of the strong forces in Valier is the constant demand for uniformity, “respectability,” even as admiration is awarded to ostentatious wealth.  Another troublesome tendency is to do what every other town does rather than seeking out the uniqueness of this set of circumstances. I talk about high school rules and one-celled cultures, that don’t want to hear about anything except their own way of doing things.  Maybe these demands for what seems like safety are best addressed in fiction.  But the novels of Ivan Doig, which DO address some of these things, is resented in Valier even though it’s about them.

Our awareness is now forced way out to the near unimaginability of the sedimentary shell of space debris around the planet, molecular saturation of the world’s seas with plastic particles, growing piles of nuclear waste, and the culture of sensational mass communication replacing what was once fitted to an extended family, a local institution, and an embracing ecology.  Some of us will find niches for survival or be able to adapt, many will not survive, and a few may be the beginning of a new species.  I often say that we can’t even find the factors that would allow sorting, and that’s a good thing because we would try to skew it to suit our prejudices, our OWN elements for survival.

Anyway, there is no way to stop the present coming out of the past and zooming on into the future, sort of whacking us in passing as a side effect.  How do we withstand that?  With beauty and pleasure!  Participation, appreciation.  It’s the old Zen story of the monk falling over a cliff and on the way down plucking a raspberry growing in a niche so he knows one last sweet taste.  Much better than balking until one can't hold on any longer.

So much to find out!  So much to do!  Such stories to tell!  Do you  know about Robaire, the town too wicked to survive in spite of the priests living there?  Do you know about the Original Kipp who may have been even more powerful than the Conrad brothers?  Do you know about the decade during which Valier was technically not a town because someone didn’t turn in a document on time?  Do you know why our houses constantly writhe in and out of their original rectangles?  I'll tell you that one.

It's because of the volcanoes in the Cascades.  Sensational after all.   

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.

EAST SIDE, WEST SIDE, ALL AROUND THE TOWN

Winter in East Glacier

This time of year in East Glacier things used to get a little, um, exciting.  I’m talking about the post WWII years.  You could read some of the stories in “Dream Chasers of the West” by B.L. Wettstein, (2006, Riverbend Publishing), although the author is writing about the WWI years.  It was so primitive in those days that Clara Augusta Miller Smiley, who had already homesteaded in Minnesota, was repeating the feat in a cabin that could only be reached by jumping off the train when it slowed down to go uphill around a curve.  Not from a boxcar, but from the coach, because there was no depot and no dependable road.  Even when Clara came home from the hospital with her new baby, the only way to get it home in winter with the road drifted shut was to throw the infant off the train into the arms of a dependable man.  The bright side was that if he missed, the snowdrifts would cushion the baby’s fall.  Today you can see that place from the Marias Pass Highway #2 just before you get to Summit. The buildings are gone, I guess.  In old age she moved into East Glacier and her buildings became the Brown House, a pottery shop and bed and breakfast.

http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g45152-d615664-Reviews-The_Brown_House-East_Glacier_Park_Montana.html

East Glacier is not the same as West Glacier, but they are both born of the enterprises of James J. Hill, Jr, and therefore children of the railroad. The sibs are nothing alike.  East Glacier can be one helluva bleak place in winter, even now, though the Browning teachers often live up there these days.  I rented a house there in the spring of 1971, a two-story yellow house built in the Thirties that I dearly loved, not least because I had just survived a divorce and a winter in our little ranch house on Two Medicine River which I also dearly loved.  But then I’m a nester -- luckily, a serial nester.

The viaduct underpass

East Glacier is bisected by the railroad.  The train only stops there in the summer because it is the feeder for the Big Hotel which is only open in the summer.  There is only one way to cross from the mountain side of town to the highway side and in a really fierce winter (and the one in 1972-73 was worse than this one -- ask the weather stat people) the crossing viaduct under the train tracks can be problematic.  That year, the sewer, which runs under the road, froze, broke, and filled the road with steaming water that instantly froze onto the undercarriage of any vehicle that ventured across it.

Brownie's

In the Fifties when everyone was already dislocated and forced out of their familiar conventional patterns, one side of town would get into a sort of enmeshed quarrel with the other side.  They stole each other’s wives, ran up too-high bills, neglected their children, and -- well, drank too much.  That’s when the two sides are rumored to attempt to burn each other out, though it might be that things just got over-heated in several senses.  Thus there had to be two grocery stores:  “Brownies” in the bottom of an old log dormitory built to shelter the railroad construction workers and “Krska’s” or the “Glacier Park Trading Company.”   They survive today, though “Brownies” is now a youth hostel upstairs and a very rewarding bakery downstairs.  In the old days no Brownie’s customer would trade at Krska’s unless he gotten into a fight on the mountain side of the tracks, nor would any of Krska’s people trade at Brownies unless his wife had run off with someone on his own side.

Krska's

In the Seventies when I was divorced, there was financial trouble and population shrinkage all along the High Line.  Major changes were underway in Browning, the capital of the Blackfeet Reservation.  One was subsidized housing projects which caused the little old houses, like the ones I had lived in, to be demolished.  Moccasin Flats was partly demolished and partly sort of overbuilt so the little log cabins were crowded among newer buildings.  This meant that the white teachers had to find housing in East Glacier.  Until then, the Board would fire them unless they lived in town or on a family ranch.

The other dynamic that stretched along Highway #2 to the east was businesses that had been founded in the boom after WWII when veterans returned to start small businesses and marry Indian ranch women who were enrolled and nicely situated.  These were big handsome white guys with real world experience.  Their mixed-blood children have become major leaders in the half-century since then.  But in the Seventies the parent generation was aging, wanting to retire, selling out, or -- the saddest aspect -- running their businesses to failure because no one would buy them.  That is, they stopped maintaining buildings and inventories, let their tax bills run up, discovered that their children would not stay, and -- well, began drinking too much.  When I came to Browning to teach in 1961, Joe Lewis’ cafe was one of the nicest in town.  Now it is Ick’s, a source of abusable substances and street quarrels.  The image of Napi that Al Racine painted on the wall of the building is still there, but he ain’t eatin‘ no short stack no more. 

Great Northern Railroad, paralleling Highway #2

Things are a little better in Valier, so some rez folks are moving here.  It’s just off the rez so teachers can live here and still teach in Heart Butte.  There is no equivalent to Ick’s, at least where anyone can detect it.  In fact, this time the running to failure is more like consolidating the wealth.  The prosperous ranchers don’t live in town, but own town businesses, often collecting the better ones into the strongest families.  The rich get richer and the poor just hang on.  The churches can’t support a local minister, but protect their buildings.  Ministers and priests travel among three or four congregations, which is what I did in the Eighties.  The bars ran to failure.  Gone.  A few other businesses begin to struggle.

Bob divorced me in the fall of 1970 but I just ignored him for a while.  I was too confused to make decisions, though I’d asked him to get the divorce because he was terrified that I would divorce him and be able to take all his money.  He had bought a little ranch on Two Medicine, a couple of miles from the highway, so I went out there for the winter to let my head clear.  It was a thistle-and-gravel ranch since the flood of 1964 removed all the topsoil, but our horses were fine with that.  Their biggest problem was boredom  -- excluding hay, of course -- which they resolved by watching me move around in the house.  When I went from kitchen to front room, there were thundering hooves outside while they raced around to the window on that side.  Reality TV.   In spring I went back to teaching and moved to East Glacier.

Three developments happened without me really noticing.  One was that the alcoholic woman who took a run at Bob after his second divorce but didn't get anywhere, did better this time.  He was aging.  She moved right in with him and ended up being the fourth wife by common law, the widow.  The second was that the big rodeo series, which I had helped develop and cast, sold as a complete series to the Calgary Stampede or its collateral investors.  It was a LOT of money, enough to buy the Flatiron Ranch.  The third was that the divorce law changed in Montana and was far more generous to wives as well as including common-law wives.  But I just ignored all that.  I wanted a graduate degree and went back to Portland.  People around here were baffled -- one’s CHILDREN went to college and what the hell was a grad school anyway?  Was it worth money?

Flatiron Ranch

Since then Browning has gained a tribal community college.  Valier has a booming library, looking at expansion.  More and more people not only own computers but can operate them, which means that a lot of what happens is invisible, underground, unmonitored except by the internet megamedia.  The sheriff has proceeded upwards to being a county commissioner, our best deputy has left his job, and I don’t know about the other law officers (border patrol, homeland security) who live in town.  We’re not as secure as we were for a while.  The expected boom in housing that was supposed to follow frakking has gone out with the tide, the wind farm somehow doesn’t seem to be connected to us, and the water rights that sustain wheat farming are threatened by the activation of sovereign rights the rez had all along, but never developed.

People are scared.  They act badly.  They fort up and cocoon.  East Glacier still does that, too, but -- maybe because of the tourist summers -- they tend to lean to the left instead of the right and that’s all the difference.  What both communities have in common is that they know sex is fun but money means a lot more.  In the half-century since I came, that has seemed to be about right.  Not so many drink too much, but some have turned to drugs of one kind or another.  Or are hooked on bodice-ripper romance.