HACKING THE ECOLOGY OF SMALL TOWN CULTURE

Fort Mac Fire smoke

The weather is glorious — if you don’t mind the burnishment of the FORT MAC smoke plume turning everything a little brassy.  Their evacuation is continuing.  The fire is almost to Saskatchewan.  Two babies have been born in the midst of the confusion.  They’re safe.  The pilot of a just-landing fire retardant plane had a medical incident, lost control which was seized by the copilot, but not before the plane went off the runway.

Instead of working on my yard, I’m here at the keyboard thinking about — oh, you know, small towns, world overpopulation, the Trump atrocity, and the two beautiful but sad movies I watched in the last few days: “Amour” and “The Keeping Room”. (Reviews later maybe.)  I’m trying to think of an overarching concept.  The main thing is an ecological approach to everything — that is, how the different entities and processes fit together, affect each other, die out, and leave spaces for something new — mutation and evolution being part of all that.

What is the homeostasis of my subjects?  For instance, small towns like Valier-- since the monthly town council meeting is tomorrow night.  How much stability on the one hand and disruption on the other can we tolerate without collapsing?  The mayor has been inquiring into the global venture capital practise of buying properties auctioned for failure to pay taxes, bundling them as toxic assets.  49 properties in Valier (out of something like 200) are vulnerably delinquent.  I don’t know how many have reverted to county ownership nor how many have gone to satisfy liens on estates of penniless elderly people who died in nursing homes.  Probably a few are just abandoned with no clue to the location of their owners.

Across the street from the town hall

 

Such information is technically public, rarely reported, but it represents a considerable shift in wealth in a little town whose supporting infrastructure is aging out.  Property ownership is boom-and-bust as much as anything else.  How do you handle a sewage lagoon or a water supply in response to that?

The holocaust in Fort Mac is only beginning to be felt in long terms.  The downturn in high-pay oil field work has already plunged roughneck workers into unemployment and closed down oil companies.  Will the rebuild of tar sands losses—which will undoubtedly begin as it cools — pull back former employees or create a new set with different skills?  Or will the companies find that it pays to leave the tar sands black and blank for a while until oil prices go back up?

Big, strong, not-necessarily-educated men are having a knock-on effect in small Western towns.  Bars provide an interface between tired lonesome guys away from any previous family, causing new alliances of unstable but fertile relationships.  To quote the movies, “there will be blood” but also there will be babies.  We make a fuss about marijuana being an “entry drug” to cocaine or meth, but say nothing about alcohol as an entry drug, far more violent and pervasive than pot.  

At first we thought in terms of veterans returning from combat and struggling with PTSD, but now we’re thinking about common drunken bullies fueled by a pervasive culture of extreme superheroes and “religious” systems of dark and evil far more magnetic than the anemic mainstream churches.  There are certain men in neighborhoods whom we avoid.  When he’s out shouting bare-chested in his yard, we go indoors.  We can’t control him so we control ourselves.  We never really know what's happening indoors.

Such men are catnip to women susceptible to the idea that a man will finance and protect a family and to the emotional extravaganzas a man can stage after a siege of abuse.  The women are local but defiant of family, maybe shunned.  

Since the Internet is so handy, I spent some time looking for what to do about families with abuse and violence.  There are a lot of hotlines and websites.  The bottom line is that such families fall between laws to protect families and keep the peace, and another set of laws meant to protect private life from invasion by authorities.  Basically, everyone is stumped.  It’s a gap in the ecosystem being filled by floaters attracted by big salaries for uneducated hard labor.  In small towns we are more exposed to them when they show up.

Businesses that had been run in stable and growth-supporting ways, originally built on a strong work ethic and willingness to accept hard conditions, have been sold to people who are climbing the learning curve and expecting profits to support luxuries.  Families who have resources have essentially bought the town.  Offend them or be offended by them and it will be necessary to drive thirty miles to get groceries.  

Sources of pride are high school sports teams, ancestor worship of 1900’s immigration, and a nice yard.  Someone in another town said to me, “Don’t you think Valier is a pretty town?”  She was entirely unconscious of the blocks of metal grain storage or side-street properties collapsing and unoccupied.

At a town council meeting a few years ago, also several council versions ago, a man came who asked to give a testimonial.  He was leaving town for a new job he couldn’t resist, but he was broken-hearted about leaving friends in town and his feeling of belonging.  I don’t know who he was or where he went or what happened, but I’m very curious.  Was he just lucky, or was there something in his personality?  Was it the timing?

Bill Houff

The Reverend Bill Houff of the Spokane UU church, used to tell a story about a guy wanting to move to a community that was peaceful and prosperous.  He figured rural and small was the way to go, so he drove out along country roads until he came to a field where an old-timer was working and hailed him for conversation.  “Is this a good town to live in?” the guy asked.

The old-timer looked him up and down.  “What was the last town like where you lived before?”  City guy explained what made him want to move.

Old-timer, before turning back to his tractor and field, opined, “Towns you move to are always pretty much like the town you left.”  In short, it’s a self-fulfilling expectation.

Entering Valier

It’s one of those survival conundrums:  what is good for the individual may not be good for the community and vice versa.  How does one achieve balance and mutual contentment?  Are those qualities to strive for anyway?  Doesn’t every context need threat, defiance, discomfort, in order to realize something toxic that had been unconscious?  Isn't mutation in the interest of evolution always scary?

In short, how can one hack small town culture problems that paralyze the normal routes, like elections, churches, or the sheriff?  Few want to be on a council forced to react to intractable problems.  But now there are new planetary dynamics shifting the terms of settlements on every continent:  global weather change, disease pandemics, visible and invisible famine, and the exhaustion of resources, including soil fertility, exotic metals, and mountain water-making.  

Australian firefighter gives a koala a drink.

Oh, yeah.  And this is the kind of continental conflagration fires that Australia has lived with for centuries.  Don’t go planting fire-loving eucalyptus trees.  There are no koala bears in Canada.   Alberta is importing firefighters from Jalisco, Mexico, with whom they have had a training relationship for years. But what about their tribal firefighters? Are they as professional as the ones in Montana? We’re all in this together.

DREAMS OF BLOOD AND THUNDER

A fetal scan projected on the White Cliffs of Dover

Two chapters in the anthology “The Blood Runs Like a River Through my Dreams”  by Tim Barrus (published under the nom de plume of "Nasdijj")  are mirror versions of each other and yet they are not, each coming from a different point of view.  The story that gives the book its title (and was the original version in Esquire magazine) weaves together the Navajo setting, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (which was just coming to consciousness at the time), and a father’s love of his son, who dies.  The point of view is the father’s, despairing over his own limitations and inability to save the very young boy.  The second, “Dreams Come Down Like Thunder,” is from the son’s point of view, now adult, looking at his all-powerful but deeply flawed father and wondering how much is inherited by himself.

Consider these two paragraphs, one from the first story and one from the next.  

1.  “Fishing with my son was like surrendering myself to the talons of some wondrous beast.  Death is always the uncharted logic of its wars, the punished boy child who has been terribly burned, disfigured, standing like an Aztec priest under his father’s infinity.”

2.  “I have a recurring vision, a nightly dream where my cowboy fisherman father, the white man whom I look like and take after, returns to me mounted on a horse.  Life itself seems suspended.  His despair can fill the sky like starving buzzards.  Riding dragons.  Him struggling against some unseen force, a monumental void, a fissure in the earth deep below, and the stars fall in the echoes of the woods. . . ride with him through the dream I must.” . . .  later:  “I wish there was something other than my father to hang on to.  But there is nothing.”

I will say -- provocatively -- that these are deeply Euro-Christian visions in spite of the invocation of Aztecs, who cut out the hearts of their living sacrifices -- who were not necessarily their sons.  It was Abraham who was about to cut out the heart of Isaac before the ultimate Father relented.  The New Testament version is, of course, Jesus broken and splayed naked by authorities for all to see, unable to escape except through transcendence eventually provided by his Father/God.  No one saw it -- it happened in the darkness of the cave/tomb.  Did Jesus dream his resurrection?

Waking from his dream, the author comes down from the sleeping loft of his cabin and escapes on his father’s horse, “which has a saddle now.  Through the woods again, and the dreams come down like thunder in the rain.  My despair can fill the sky like starving buzzards.  Riding dragons.  Struggling against some unseen force, a monumental void, a fissure in the earth, deep below, and the stars fall in the echoes of the woods.  My compass is a savage thing.  My own vehicle waits for me in a clearing.  Go. Go.  Your life is in your teeth.”

He is as much seized as his father.  He sees the abyss that terrified his father.  We know from the previous story that his vehicle is Old Big Wanda, the F150 Ford pickup that he immobilized so that his little son could pretend to drive it.  But at the end we see that HE is the horse, with life as the bit in his teeth.  A horse who takes the bit in his teeth is uncontrollable.  

The rules of some kinds of literary criticism say that the author’s personal life cannot be drawn into the discussion and others, probably less adept at the literary elements, can ONLY discuss writing in terms of the author’s life.  I’ll pick my way through here by revealing only a few things from the author’s life.  One is a Methodist upbringing spiked by counterculture indignation (if God is God, He is not good.); one is that Old Big Wanda is a real truck I have seen in photos; and one is the observation that has been made by others:  that writers spin out their stories from their own volcanic hearts, pounding them into slightly new shapes on the old themes.  Virtual worlds come from the details of actual worlds.

The father/son relationship, particularly in terms of power differential and obligation, is the crux here as in all of the three Nasdijj books.  Tim’s life has been a consuming effort to help sons, boys, esp. the ones at risk, including himself, and to empower them to save themselves -- both practically and politically.  There is no need to summon up Tim’s genetic family, but the shadow of abuse is palpable.  

Stick to the tropes.  The horse: Pegasus, the winged horse, is the embodiment of poetry.  Woods: not forest but second growth where the smaller animals find food and shelter, where dryads and nymphs pursued by rapists can escape by becoming daphne, laurel, willow.  Buzzards: death on wings.  Dragons: power on wings.  Stars: more sky stuff.  This is“Star Wars.”   Fishing: the hidden lives in water teased out by skill and proper equipment.  The source of sustenance, the substance of transmitted skills, shared joy. 

Phaeton

What is more powerful than the father, even the father in the sky?  What is the meaning of the recurrent word “light”?  Ultimately is it the sun that curbs the hubris of Icarus, who flew too high, and Phaeton, who attempted to drive his father's Sun chariot but lost control and set the earth on fire.  Or is it being able to see?  Enlightenment.

What does the dog stand for?  “She went back and forth between the two of us like a gentle conduit between his demons and my determination to tame them.”  Sounds like the ideal mother or wife, an aspect of a human wife.  But NOT the real mother because the ultimate source of the damage was the drunken mother.  “I am still trying to find ways to forgive her.”  The man wants to do the mothering.  He has a hard time sharing it except with the dog.  In the wilderness the wife and the hospital are pushed aside.

As for many others, water is the transcendence, that old baptism, “where the sun glitters golden on the gravel of the riverbed, and life with all its prowess, its struggle, its tenacity, and its yielding exists in a turbulent crescendo all around you as it rushes downstream, uncomplicated by the complicated likes of man.”  This is where the boy dies.  Then there is nothing.  “Just the soft sound of the river, with its unruly grandeur and its fluid savvy.” 

The Abyss by nac-nud

In the second story -- near the beginning of it -- the man says, “I was a major disappointment to him in his life.”  But nearer the end the father says, “I’m the one who was a disappointment to you. . . I couldn’t MAKE you grounded.”  Now the father’s mother is present and tries to intervene, but the father demands that the author back up the pickup with an empty stock trailer attached.  It’s too much.  The father/boy is again helpless on his father’s anvil, pounded, seized and unseeing.  He senses the abyss under them, not the sky and the light.  It is night.  

Go back and reread:  “My despair can fill the sky like starving buzzards.  Riding dragons.  Struggling against some unseen force, a monumental void, a fissure in the earth, deep below, and the stars fall in the echoes of the woods.  My compass is a savage thing.  My own vehicle waits for me in a clearing.  Go. Go.  Your life is in your teeth.”

Dreams are projections on an unyielding world.  Indians know.