AN AMERICAN STORY

It’s a common enough American story, one that has happened again and again in place after place, but people are not aware of that.  Each thinks their story is unique in both good and bad ways.  The current craze for genealogy should be turning out the secrets and bitternesses, but I’m not hearing about that.  I guess they're shoving stuff back into the closet.  

Greg Hirst says that among the families of the Blackfeet the main topic of conversation when the old women get together is all the family material: who was adopted, who couldn’t seem to stay married, who made a lot of money by accident, and so on.  He says that very late when all the children have gone to bed, they told the stories no one should properly know: the murders, the affairs, the major betrayals, who died in prison.

Often the stories across the continent began on frontiers and when they became cleared of the original inhabitants by disease or military force.  The best agricultural land was along the rivers because they flooded and renewed the fertility as has happened since Egypt grew up along the Nile.  The first transportation was by river and then roads developed, pretty much parallel.  Land became surveyed and then developed into fields owned by families.  When they did well, they built big houses for their extended families, and possibly big barns for hay and cattle or horses.

Farms were along both sides of the road and they struggled along through wars, depressions, and prosperity.  Their children married each other, which sometimes turned out very well and sometimes produced disasters: violence and runaways, alcoholism and child abuse — maybe sexual.

Then came the industrial revolution so that a train ran nearby and an industry developed within commuting distance.  Maybe Ford or Boeing or Amana or General Electric.  Now it was possible to keep the family farm going by working on assembly lines.  In order to market what was produced, from automobiles to sewing machines to refrigerators, the parallel industry of advertising sprang up.  People saw more things to want.

Farms are hard work but if there were unmarried uncles and male children, it was a dependable way to eat, especially if there were still access to unclaimed land or government land where there was hunting and fishing.  But if things were going very well, it became a point of pride to send children to college.  This set up a whole new class of problematics — literally involving class in the sense of status, and now also the gender gap when girls were limited to nursing and teaching, while for boys the sky was the limit.  Jealousy arrived, and arrogance over the stupid ones left behind.  It was easier to deny and force secrecy than to get to root causes.  Religion could be used to suppress.

Of course, there were always the scramblers who left for the big city and made a lot of money for a while, but then got busted back to the farm, making their wives — who might not have grown up along the riverside road, but had seen the world and loved the glamour, so that now they were bitter and blamed their menfolks for not staying rich, since that was the purpose of men — to make money.  War messed everything up even more with men killed, crippled, frozen by trauma.  The more sentimentality tried to compensate by talking about patriotism and loyalty and how love conquers all, the more tempers flared.  God became a tyrant, just like dad.  A punisher.

Denial was the best choice, because it put everything off to the future.  Sometimes the family, rather unconsciously, settled on one person who would save the family fortune by being brilliant in some middle-class way, like inventing something or becoming a very important person with some company that sold plastics, which were the future.  Maybe they would write a book.  But maybe that family member was unsuited or just didn’t want the burden.  Maybe drugs came along.

The bicoastal culture phenomenon also came along then, mostly driven by the formation of cities and then megacities, ports for international trade.  They included foreigners, black people, whole sections of gays, and networks of crime, including white collar swindlers in the casinos of stock markets.  Since so many jobs were deadly dull, entertainment mushroomed into huge sports empires and picture show chains which almost forced television into existence.  Back on the farm there had only been radio.

Now there was an appetite for stories, but if a person from those little river farms used their families as material, all that yearning and frustration, all those hidden atrocities and humiliations, that storyteller would be cursed and ostracized.  At the same time, there would be some who felt they had been overlooked and wanted their story told.  Murder and muck-raking always sell, so the industry that grew up between authors and audiences to find and promote the stories were eager to hear the worst, the most shocking, esp. about the families that had become famous.  Tell us about presidents who run down the hallways of the White House, nude, chasing fancy women who were also gangster molls.

When that grew boring, people wanted to hear about the shockingly miserable, the zombies in shooting galleries, the crazies who kept girls captive and forced them to have babies, the cannibals, and then on to the supernatural, the werewolves and the vampires.  The terrorists.  By the time the farmers on both sides of the river road had computers and at least one person in the family could get on the internet, or maybe the famiiy had cable with sensational faked news, everything was exposed.  The world was an evil place and there was no place to hide.

The writer wanted to tell true things, but also to sell; wanted to protect the family but knew only the dark would sell; and then the big house burned but anyway the extended family had shrunk to only a few, maybe one stubborn old hermit who moved into the bunkhouse.  Everyone else had worked themselves to death or just couldn’t find anyone along the road who would marry them or didn’t have the emotional energy to marry anyway.  Some just left.  Some straggled back beaten or infected or addicted.  The successful ones felt guilty, esp. when the remnants asked for help.  The one who was ingenious enough to run a crop-dusting business either crashed or became demented from the herbicides and pesticides.

All the whole time the screens in the house showed laughing beautiful young people doing wonderful things in Tibet or New Zealand or Manhattan, like an alien race that cried out, “Buy, buy, buy!  Make money so you can buy!”  When the twin towers were destroyed, the president said, “Don’t panic!  Go shopping.”  At least the later president didn’t say, “Buy my daughter’s line of clothes.”  He hired little people to say that.  And to keep the secrets safe.

"THEEB" MEANS WOLF

Theeb, tracing cracks in the mud

When I dream adventures at night, I’m almost always an eight year old boy.  This is an archetypal figure, I think probably in every culture, because a child like that is only considering the culture, still uncommitted.  The film called “Theeb” for a boy with that name is about exactly that child.  Thinking, not quite ready for manhood or gender assignment, but in prototypical primordial ways able to act in the world, able to survive, the hero of this film depends greatly on the nature of the actor.  The director tells us that the boy was unimpressive just standing there, but with the camera turned on him, he became magical.  

“Theeb is a 2014 drama thriller Jordanian Arabic-language film written and directed by Naji Abu Nowar.”  This is factual but tells you nothing.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3170902/   Trailer.

The boy who acted Theeb, Jacir Eid Al-Hwietat, like the others, was local, not a professional actor, and only needed to be taught to swim for the sequence when he is dumped down a cistern of water accumulated in a cave, a crucial well.  Others were chosen for the cast by improvisations, acting out little scenes, which no one in that village had ever done before, but which was well-understood and produced remarkable actors.

This terrain, a stone labyrinth in a sand desert, is full of contradictions.  The people, all male because females all declined to be so public as acting, were really related and entirely familiar with this setting.  It is the dawning of British industrialism that is coming upon them like a dragon locomotive, destroying their way of life, shattering a herding pastoral people into predators and prey.  The only trained actor plays the Englishman desperate to rejoin his fellow soldiers.  

These are not the bedouins of “Lawrence of Arabia” or “The Sheltering Sky.”  No one is blue.  Everyone but the villain wears gowns of what looks like unbleached cotton and eats unleavened bread baked by throwing it into a campfire.  The most remarkably complex and expressive entities are the camels.  When men arrive on horseback, the horses look strange.  

Don’t take your eight-year-old to this movie unless they can read, since there are subtitles, though they could probably figure out what’s happening just by watching.  Gender is irrelevant because there’s no sex in this movie.  Life is simply male — same old default.  Other versions of a story about a vulnerable boy, esp. in this so-called modern civilization, would have to include sex and drugs.  Probably Arya in Game of Thrones is a good example of a female person this age getting caught up in something as sweeping as the Ottoman Empire.

The link below is one of the better review essays, but there is a lot of interesting stuff to read.  The director, Naji Abu Nowar, claims he was trying to make one of those stark, tragic, Italian spaghetti Westerns.  He over-achieved.  This film crosses many boundaries.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/aug/13/theeb-bedouin-western-jordan-naji-abu-nowar

This one is an interview with the director:

http://www.npr.org/2016/02/05/465736996/theeb-looks-at-middle-east-history-through-the-eyes-of-a-bedouin-boy

Aspects of this film’s creation interact to create a powerful spell.  Using a child protagonist to shine an unflattering light on the crazy and agonizing activities of adults is not new but remains effective, esp. if the child actor is capable of unwavering "gaze" (now a political term, esp. in queer studies).  

Brothers, as in this story line, who are devoted to each other though separated by age, is a kind of love that is totally proscribed in American discussions because of hysteria over pedophilia and especially the man/boy version.  American arts can barely get away with depicting father/son love and protection.  We're suspicious.  Maybe it’s because in the USA grown men rarely teach boys in this personal way we see the older brother teach about his rifle, giving the boy both access and cautions, the boy leaning his cheek against his big brother's shoulder.

The creators of this film went to people who really WERE the people in the storyline and lived with them for a year.  They did not go back to Malibu at martini time.  The personal lives of artists used to be seamless as this, but are now very often insanely divided between their subject matter and their “other” culture which has got to inflict something like consciousness schism if not actual brain damage.  I wonder what their dreams were like after they finished the film and went home.  I had powerful image-dreams just from the movie.

Using a child meant that the protagonist was hard to demonize.  Even the pouting, posturing Trump would have a hard time convincing us that Theeb wants our lives.  But inside the movie context, the “bad guy” was not unsympathetic.  He gathered up Theeb and took him along to the English, who were literally asleep or absorbed in their little ceremonies of Britishness, like shaving.  Death and loot are converted to a few coins.  The box of gold turned out to be a dynamite detonator: destruction.  Theeb’s final decision was totally understood even by the victim because it fit the context.

Queen Noor, consort of King Hussein

So the story was whole, convincing, coherent.  It was filmed in Jordan, which has an ambivalent past with the Western World, rather like Switzerland in making itself valuable as a refuge where it safe to make a movie.  Its history is so old that the first settlers were Homo Erectus, 200,000 years ago.  It is on the Silk Road, which means the mentality is one of traders rather than warriors, esp. since the place is a continental crossroads: Asia, Africa and Europe.  King Hussein chose Queen Noor as consort, a beautiful American of Arab descent whose philanthropic efforts made her a model for people like Princess Diana, and created many contacts between political and artistic worlds.

Then comes the next remarkable game changer, leaping over the industrial paradigm shift that the land itself resisted, into the impalpable electronic world, effortlessly planetary, in sci-fi fashion making everything real but fantastic, a Star Wars world.  The storyline is the industrial revolution.  The revolution that makes this movie possible is the electronic revolution. The impact on movies like “Theeb” is double:  first the sudden ability to make high quality images without even film, much less huge industrial camera crews; and second, the ability of anyone to see “filmed” narrative on hand-held devices.  Though I would say that one needs a rather wide screen to appreciate the fractal nature of stone labyrinths in the sand imitating drought-cracked mud.

The problem with this sudden wealth of creation rather than wealth in the crass sense of funds, is discoverability.  How do we know about films like “Theeb”?  How do we change ourselves from passive sofa-sitters watching whatever television pushes at us, into the seeking Silk Road consumers who can get past even web-crawlers where an outfit like Google operates like the Ottoman Empire?  We’d better talk to some boys.

OUR METHODS DEMAND BASICS

U of Chicago Div School

“What’s your method?” was always the first question at U of C Div School.  The idea was to establish a stream of precedents that were already known, so as to impose limits and a sort of spine, a line of thought.  In the best of worlds, that strategy would yield an essay that was coherent and intelligible.  Of course, if you chose a method no one liked or understood, you were doomed.

This morning on Aeon.com I ran into a new question:  “Then what?”  In Div School terms, this is teleology.  It depends on what your goal might be.  

https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-reboot-a-modern-civilisation-without-fossil-fuels?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=feca0f6557-Daily_newsletter_weekend_edition_16th_January_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-feca0f6557-68600437  

Lewis Dartnell

What happens after the accepted methods of our civilization — like exploiting fossil fuel and centering everything on profit — are exhausted, no longer apply?  What methods will save us?  When one is on territory unknown (terra incognita) the question becomes even sharper but the methods benefit from being fuzzy, wandering, and mixed.  This Aeon piece was derived from a blog based on “The Knowledge”, a book or series of books or nested blogs that seem to have their source in a man named Lewis Dartnell.  He’s handsome, young, and smart enough to star in a BBC series and my only question is “why isn’t he?”  The title, of course, is from the knowledge of London streets a taxi driver must have to pass a certifying test; it’s a “where are we going” question.

But here’s where I’m really hooked.  It’s a subject I met in seminary: the wilderness in the city.  Most of my classmates thought of it in terms of people: savage mental pygmies, I guess.  But like many others I’ve always been easily seduced by what some call “ruin porn.”  That is, abandoned industries and housing that are being reclaimed by the “natural” world.  http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/ruin-photography/  This link should take you to examples of how transient anthro-construction can be.  We’re used to seeing Aztec pyramids and Asian mega-statues overwhelmed by jungle, but now we’ve added catastrophic evacuations (Chernobyl) and resource-exhausted communities (abandoned mining towns in the West).  It's not hard to imagine the U of C quads as ruins.

In fact, strictly speaking, my own buildings qualify, since two of them were temporary knock-ups used during the rebuild of Swift Dam, one a shop and the other the caretaker’s shack.  Nature and time are dismantling them, as well as this modest house built in the Thirties with an add-on bathroom and garage.  But my earliest and most vivid images are from the trail in Macleay Park in Portland where my family went to hike in the Forties and Fifties.  It was a WPA project with a lot of stonework, including a little bathroom which became a sin center and then was burned and buried, though the stone walls and arched entrances remain.  Our teenaged babysitter hanged himself nearby, in an earlier wave of alienation among young men.  Our movie horizons are full of post-apocalypse landscapes. 

Macleay Park

A periodical related to this complex, called “Ernest Journal” ,(http://www.ernestjournal.co.uk) guides this line of thought with optimism:  how would we rebuild?  Actual practical information.  How to make glass.  How to make breakfast.  How to survive an asteroid strike.  I have a friend who’s a bit of a survivalist — he just survived major cancer surgery and is restored to his health of years earlier — which means being a bit of a pack rat.  The secret here is knowing which rat to pack, and that means a grasp on basic technologies like electricity wiring, water piping, and gardening.  

Here in Montana where the grid is thin and weather gets cold (it’s generally already very windy at any temperature) one learns quite a bit about dust physics, insulation, smoke management, cooking over fires (the coals, not the flames) and other dynamics.  The traces of earlier civilizations — drag marks of travois, bits of metal or glass beads on the hill tops where bodies were left for the sun to take back, pictographs on stone — are either durable or gone.  They are not likely to be smothered by vines but the boulders are embroidered by vivid lichens, plant extremophiles.

In England which is wet and sitting on what once seemed an inexhaustible mountain of coal, the industrial revolution got a good headstart on a lot of forces that have ended now: colonies, factories, railroads. ships — all of which led to a demographic shift, an influx of people not accustomed to industrial life, a demographic apocalypse that will be the irresistible force that changes immovable Britain.

As it happens, I know quite a lot about molten metal and even a bit about ceramic kilns   In Oregon there were always glass-casters nearby.  They liked to build their studios near the beach for the sake of the cool breezes, the same as we used to prefer casting bronze in the winter, during weather just like this: snow on the ground and zero temps.  With the big fans going, the furnace and the protective gear were bearable.  Technology at this primitive level does not depend upon instruments, except maybe a pyrometer until you learn to tell temp by the color of the molten metal.  It’s a matter of human senses and internalized knowledge that comes from experience.  Less dramatic is woodwork or pouring concrete, or maybe animal husbandry which adds the dimensions of empathy and persuasion.  These are “methods.”

Sci-fi loves this sort of thing, and so do the paleoarcheologists who try to imagine the steps between the last hominid and the first modern human.  Of course, there is no “step”, no “break”, but a series of small developments that folded back on each other, became culturally contagious, used the environment instead of just surviving it.  Some of those uses were glass, stone and metal.  These survive even humans and the pre-ag aeons are named for them.  (Aren’t we the Glass Age, if you count silicon and sky scrapers?  I’ve never forgotten photos of an experimental house built only from scavenged car windshields.)  And now we turn to gravity energy in the tides, solar energy on the roof, volcanic energy in Iceland, and microbial energy in our sewage lagoon.  Clearly, energy is where you find it.

The biological energy we have not mastered — maybe I should say supported — is human beings.  What a waste for people to be drowning in the Mediterranean, starving in Syria, dying of exposure in the streets of American metropolises.  Why can’t we figure out how to address this gradual apocalypse?  This erosion of life?  What if our goal was not to restore the world as we know it, but to find a new way to be in the world.  This is not the first time the question has been asked. It’s teleological. 

Darnell embracing a Martian friend

Here’s Dartnell speaking:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbbvf-GkJcA

"WHO BY FIRE" by Fred Stenson

Fred Stenson and the 18 books he's written so far.

Ten thousand years ago human beings turned from hunting/gathering to agriculture.  They quickly became powerful enough to invade North America and destroy the hunters and gatherers there, though some of those were also farmers.  With metal, horses, special seeds and smallpox, the Euros quickly settled across the high prairie and began to raise their families.  But 200 years ago some of the same people discovered fossil fuel and invented the Industrial Revolution.

In the beginning the high prairie saw only railroads and welcomed them as marketing tools for their bonanza of small grains (in a lucky year).  But fossil fuels were pooled beneath the farmland and soon began to change the terms of ownership.  Since then we’ve gone on to build mighty dams, to mine radioactive ore, and to industrialize the wind, all to assure power for machines, but taking a toll on the land.  

“Who by Fire” by Fred Stenson is a clear, vivid account of two generations of a high prairie rural family whose lives were controlled and sometimes snuffed by high sulphur oil wells that released not just fuel but also a form of hydrogen that was poisonous, corrosive, and explosive.  It turned lungs to wood, ate the iron out of barbed wire and farm machinery, destroyed the stainless steel tubes that were supposed to contain it, and, when uncontained, exploded like a bomb.  You can find all this online or in old newspapers.

The story happened around here and north of here.  Fred Stenson grew up in Southern Alberta so part of the story was lived through by his own family and neighbors.  Still today when I go to Cut Bank or Shelby shopping, I get whiffs of sulphur.  The Great Falls refinery was infamous for its “skunkworks.”  The worst damage was early before people really understood what was going on.  The “industrial” enterprises are so technical that only trained engineers can understand what’s really going on, and that’s the level the core story follows: a physically suffering boy who becomes an emotionally suffering engineer because he doesn’t understand that as much as his body was nearly destroyed, the trauma of ordinary farm folks trying to understand the destructive changes in their existence have also tied his psyche into knots.  Engineers aren’t good at emotional dynamics.

Because this story covers two generations -- one nearly smashed and one slowly crawling back -- it’s not a simple muck-raking novel, though as the characters work their way through the facts we also learn a lot.  It’s doesn’t plunge us into the abyss of despair but leads us along the faithfulness and constant effort of ordinary people to some kind of new balance.  Eventually the machinery that is supposed to remove the stench and danger begins to work better, maybe even well enough to live with, though it’s clear that major corporations have bought out politicians, regulators, even newspapers so citizens are forced into constant vigilance and monitoring.  Thank goodness for the Internet and for the gathering strength of the Indigenous Peoples.

Maybe the Montana High-Line and the foothills/prairie south of Calgary have reached some kind of balance, partly because of inevitable depletion of the resources and partly because of major changes in the world market due to frakking and Middle Eastern chaos.  But up north are the Tar Sands and in the NE corner of Montana is the Bakken formation.  They begin as though they were gold strikes, soon become grinding miserable places that push out the previous quiet lives, and then start to suck up money to control murder, “accidental” deaths, illness, and a growing under-culture with global connections.

“Billy,” whose love of pure physics is made into poetry by a short inter-chapter in which his father shows the little boy how to put a thread on a rod so it creates a bolt that will take a nut, becomes a compulsive gambler and a drunk -- like a lot of other people.  It’s plain that no matter how clever the strategies of ordinary people, when they are up against international corporations, they are basically pulling the lever on a one-armed bandit.  But the universe marches on and the CEO gamblers also sometimes lose.  Given enough time, they cannot win because all natural commodities are finite and the values of the larger culture grow and change.  We didn’t know about the greenhouse effect then.

Fred doesn’t touch the depletion of the next commodity: grain itself.  The prairie topsoil revealed by metal-prowed plows in the first Euro generation has grown now into an industry as powerful and unrelenting as oil-cracking plants with machines to match.  The biological substrate of roots and other biota is thinning as much as the small animal and insect life that once inhabited it.  Educating city slickers about what happens when there is no grain won’t be as easy away from the Ukrainian farmers on the prairie who lost ancestors to Stalin’s economically imposed grain famine. 

A reading in Pincher Creek, Alberta

Billy’s parents fight hard to save their marriage and family and though they take a lot of damage, they manage to hang on.  In fact, Billy and his two sisters remain attached enough to that imperiled old homestead to return to it at retirement age, scarred but feisty.  I particularly enjoyed the chapter in which one of Bill’s “big sisters” decides to wake him up.  She has a smart mouth and clear understanding of what goes on.

Two letters are key to the plot.  One is a sort of gesture towards an impossible love that could be a potential lever to win a major lawsuit.  The other letter, by the same person, becomes the key that unlocks frozen Bill enough for him to accept help.  All through, there are people who wish him well and try to help him in spite of his resistance and the “stink” on him that he can’t seem to crack.  This book will not leave you despairing.

But it will make you wary and it ought to.  It’s meant to.  The writing is clear and apt enough to be understood and appreciated by the people who live in this country, leaning against a hard, cold wind, walking with their dogs, talking in their heads to people who are no longer living.  This is not a book for city dwellers, no matter what Western phenomena they wish to hug.  It’s meant to help locals dig in heels and fight.

Stenson is not alone.  His friend Andrew Nikiforuk, a journalist, is a bit more fiery and political, taking on “The Tar Sands” in his book by that name.  In his newest work, “The Energy of Slaves”, he tries to see beyond our practice of exploitation -- whether it is African people, fossil fuel deposits, or factory farming animals.  Now that the Internet crosses international lines, Canadian books can be ordered online at www.amazon.ca.  “Who by Fire” is on Kindle there.  Same for Nikiforuk’s books.  Even for me, but none of mine are on Kindle.

I met Nikiforuk, Richard Manning (a Montana version of this sort of enviro), and Pamela Banting (a poet and professor) who is married to Stenson, at a watershed conference in Waterton Park more than ten years ago.  They were working as hard then as they are now.  They all have focus, endurance.  The Canadians are living in or near Calgary, a three/four hour drive from here.  From Valier I can see Chief Mountain at the edge of Glacier National Park and the contiguous Waterton Park which is on the Canadian side.   We are a community of place and some of us have eloquent voices indeed.  I hope I never have to hug a buffalo but I could hug Fred Stenson. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQTRX23EMNk   Leonard Cohen's song of the title.

PRAIRIE HYDRAULICS

The “legs” for the water tower “bubble” tank are going up.  The pieces of the bottom half of the tank are on the ground.  Our elevator with its attendant railroad spur is at the horizon to the right.  

Two industrial revolution contributions to the prairie landscape --  more engineering than architecture -- are the grain elevator and the water tower.  In fact, they both operate on the same principle -- to exploit gravity to move a substance easily.  Inside the grain elevator a conveyor belt of little shovels lifts the grains to pour into internal vertical sections that can be unloaded from the bottom.  Grain pours just like water.  Inside the water tower a pump fills a tank so that it will flow down through the underground pipes of the town.  

In many of the small towns around here (Heart Butte, Cut Bank, Shelby, Conrad) there is a hill close enough to town for a big tank on the ground instead of the familiar long legs.  (Once someone discovered how to unscrew the giant nuts that held one Heart Butte tank onto its concrete pad, but luckily it was discovered before it tipped over and rolled down the hill onto houses.)   Valier is adding a second watertower on legs.  Not so much because the population has gone up as because stronger state standards for water systems have come into play.

Wikipedia shows many versions of water towers from all over the planet, some of them jokes (a giant peach, a giant corn on the cob) and some where attempts have been made to disguise them by using elegant architecture designs, like the famous “castle” in downtown Chicago that gives its name to a glitzy shopping complex.  Watertowers are important navigation aids for small planes used by ranchers who navigate by landmarks instead of GPS devices to tell where they are.  Most towns paint the name of the town on their tank.   Valier wants to paint purple paw prints on theirs because purple is the school color and the panther is their emblem.  This will cost thousands of dollars, an amount that they plan to raise by subscription.  

Maybe they should save their money.  They say that Montana has not been hit so hard by the recession but you wouldn’t know it from the newspapers.  Brady, a small town about the same distance south of Conrad as Valier is north of Conrad (the distance a farmer could get a horse-drawn wagon to market and back in one day), has just been denied a state grant they had asked for to upgrade their water system.  This wouldn’t be so necessary if the state hadn’t also just required them to upgrade because of water quality issues.  Valier is caught in somewhat the same pincers.  

Valier’s assortment of four wells seemed to need a new one, so the drill rig set up on the west side of town, but twice only drew water with too much iron or sulphur to be potable.  The third attempt was a block away from me.  That one didn’t work either.  When one says “well,” do not imagine a hand-dug shaft with a stone wall around it -- only a pipe.  At 200 ft and deeper there was not enough good water.  A special meeting was called to decide whether to try a fourth time.  This time the mayor decided to hire a dowser, a water witch.  The strategy was to identify an area according to the hydrogeologist and then get the dowser to suggest the specific spot to drill and drive in pipe.  They are out there now, only a couple of blocks from the new water tower, near to the best of the old wells, which shows signs of exhaustion.  It is not clear whether there is really enough money to pay for this fourth try, so there was considerable reflection and doubt.  The community is not participating in any of this.  They interpret the town as something that is done to them, not something they do, though they will scream if taxes and water bills go up.  On the other hand, there are local historians and hobby geologists who say there is a ledge of rock underground that directs water in a certain way.  They were not consulted.

It is ironic to struggle with this water issue when Lake Francis is in plain view along the edge of town, just south of the airport which has itself become an object of controversy because some people want to subdivide the land and build “luxury homes.”  (Our sanitary lagoon is beyond maxed out, so that would mean building a second one.)  It is a small grass runway, not much more than a field, with an open shed for a hangar.  Just south of it, between the town and the lake, is what is called “the recreation area” which is RV parking as close together as any trailer park.  There can be no permanent construction for a margin around the lake in order to protect the quality of the water, which is the property of the Pondera Canal Company and the source of water for Conrad, an arrangement that dates back to the founding Brothers Conrad who once ranched on this land.  Anyway, there is talk of raising the level of the lake enough to drown both campground and airport.  In the meantime, drought often creates a wide baked-mud “beach” around the water.  The water level is not controlled by global warming but by the Pondera Canal Company.  At present the nesting island that was such a controversy is at least half submerged since this is a high water year.

The sections of the "bubble" part of the tower 

and the central water pipe that will be enclosed by the structure.

The supporting "legs" are up now and the top dome of the tank is assembled on the ground.

Getting back to the water tower, the sections for it were brought to town in huge shards and laid out on the ground for assembly.  The workmen are specialists with heliarc welders run by a bank of generators on a truck.  When I walked into the area to take photos, one of the welders, startled, ambled over to advise me to leave since I had no hard hat.  In a soft down-south voice he advised urgently,  “You’ve got to go, Ma’am, or it will make really big trouble with OSHA.  It’ll be hard on us.”  I went.  He reminded me of the young Scott Glenn in the movies.  Handsome but -- you wouldn’t want to argue with him.  There was a row of rings in his ear.  When I remarked about his accent, people told me the crew indeed came from the South and were specialists, traveling the country.   

The real “hydraulics” we are struggling with is population hydraulics as people move around in response to opportunity and disaster.  Darrell Kipp used to speak of “the hydraulics of the plains tribes” as they pushed back and forth against each other.  Nothing has changed except for the paper trails. 

GUNS

The American West was won by the industrial revolution: steamships bringing European refugees, steamboats inserting people and removing commodities from the heart of the continent, railroads uniting the continent, and guns.  Guns were handheld-small, but they wiped out the buffalo so that the starving original population could be subdued, confined and mostly eliminated.  Of course, one can shoot people as well as bison, and that’s been the crux of the argument ever since.

The remedy for shooting people has been the removal of all guns.  But the argument for keeping them, in Montana at least, has been hunting and protection.  We draw a distinction between handguns and long guns, but our long guns are not normally war guns.  Rather we tend to have big game rifles and waterfowl shotguns.  

The industrial revolution extended the powers of ordinary humans in both war and peace.  The hand-carried device that can eject a high-speed pellet, a gun, has become loaded with juju, the way a small piece of paper imprinted to be money becomes a symbol of power and control.  Those who wish to have the extra impact of being gun-carriers have a motto:  “guns don’t kill people -- people kill people.”   Quite so.  But they don’t follow through with that idea.

I don’t own a gun.  I had a little single-shot .22 once that I used to kill gophers (actually ground squirrels) to feed our pets (eagle and fox), but I left it behind somewhere because I was going to the city.  Nevertheless, when I was an animal control officer (specialized sheriff’s deputy), I was expected to qualify on a rifle range and did pretty well.  

When I was little, there was an automatic pistol in the house meant for protection.  It was WWII and guns were everywhere, on everyone’s minds, and that’s part of the reason that Westerns (gunslingers) were big when television arrived.  I handled that gun, didn’t shoot it, and was taught that all guns were loaded.  But as an adult my Marine veteran brother shot himself in the forearm with an “unloaded” gun.  

I recognize the beauty and history of guns.  Bob Scriver had an extensive collection of historic weapons, so I can recognize a Hawken, a big heavy buffalo shooting instrument so well balanced and designed that even I can hold it steady, or “Yellow Boy,” the Winchester .66.  I rubbed down the Colt Navy pistol kept on the bookshelf and the hand-made tiger-maple and brass Kentucky rifle a couple of locals created, inventing a small forge from a barbecue grill and a hair-dryer in order to cast the butt-plate and trigger guard.  In fact, I got impatient with the miniature “lodgepoles” of long guns precariously leaning in every corner, gathering dust unless there were aficionadoes who wanted to handle them.   

One of the intinerant traders who came through Browning all the time in those days showed us a special handgun he had acquired.  I’ve forgotten what it was exactly.  We were fond of this good-hearted man who was not at all violent and rejoiced to have produced a son late in life.  (Suppress jokes about being a “shooter.”)  When he got home with that handgun, he put it down briefly on his coffee table while he turned to his wife.  The toddler son saw the gun, picked it up, shot our friend in the chest.  He died.  Even a small child can be deadly with a loaded gun.

A gun is only an extension of human abilities and only effective as a mechanism if it is properly maintained.  Modern war movies show the soldiers “breaking down” their guns, cleaning and inspecting them, then reassembling them -- over and over until they know them intimately and have integrated them into their brains and reflexes.  We have seen sharp-shooters with their high-tech electronically augmented shooting machines that are kept in carefully foam-cushioned cases.  Therefore, we have to know that it takes a LOT of practice, the physiology of “Brad Pitt,” and a specific kind of temperament.  Those who are not just sharp-shooters but also assassins must be willing to accept orders and able to assimilate the morality of killing.  Probably family is not a good idea.  Maybe not any intimate relationships.

“If you fight with violence,”  Gene Sharp says, “you are fighting with your enemy’s best weapon, and you may be a brave but dead hero.”  Or crook.  Mr. Sharp is the thinker about non-violence who is said to be the guru of the Egyptian regime change.  There are those in our society who have discovered that “death by cop” is an exciting way to commit suicide, though the price for failure is pretty high.

But the reason I don’t own a gun is pure laziness.  I have no reason to get up early to shoot gophers, so I don’t need a long gun.  Beyond that, even a handgun means taking the time and making the effort to sight it in, clean it,  and practice enough to stay accurate.  

There are no children in this household and I don’t let visiting children out of my sight, though I can’t always control them.  It’s best to put a gun in a lockbox of some sort, better to separate it from ammunition.  If I were keeping a gun for self-defense, it would have to be quickly accessible, meaning where I could get at it fast, though to keep it from being stolen I probably ought to put it in a hidden spot.  Problematic when I can’t even remember where I put the book I was just reading.  That applies to the key of the lockbox as well.

In the end the bumper sticker is true but incomplete.  Even allowing for accidents, which inevitably happen, a gun is a mechanism that extends the power of human beings without either making them worse or better.  The worse the person the more evil (I locate evil in persons, not the devil.) is empowered.  We would want to prevent bad people from having guns, but bad people -- who are often evil because of their craving for control and power -- are exactly the ones who want to own guns.  Good people have better things to do, unless they are hunters.  I don’t object to responsible hunting though I've been accidentally shot at twice.

So in the end gun control is a matter of people-control, and we aren’t even close to understanding how to do that responsibly.  Clearly institutional religion is not the answer.  Training and other education is not the answer, though they help.  I think the answer is in a true understanding of what a human being is and can be.  How we achieve that is what’s up for discussion world-wide.  We’re in the midst of a tech revolution that moves power away from violence, though the management of money can kill far more people than guns or even bombs.  (By ignoring famine, disease.)  Tech revolutions don’t improve humans, but they are a means towards that end.  Then maybe we can tell what our devices are extending.