WHAT'S UNDER YOUR PYRAMID?

Once years ago I was taking a workshop around the Unitarian circuit that was about “place” and the importance of knowing the place where you lived.  A man pondered this and objected, “But there’s NOTHING under my house!  I live in a housing development and there is nothing there!”  This produced an image of his house floating in the air.  But -- just like every other place -- there was plenty of history and geology under his house -- he just didn’t have a consciousness raised enough to get past the bulldozers.

Indigenous and autochthonous and First Nations and aboriginal are all about the place where the people found a way to survive that melded them together into a tribe.  The values, the “ethical space,” of those conditions is what has made them what they are.

I don’t know how I failed to meet Candace Savage when I was in Saskatoon and visited Eastend.  http://www.candacesavage.ca  A woman who kisses giraffes is fairly memorable!  It appears that I just missed her, coming after she left for a few years and leaving before she returned.  She is ten years younger than I am, which means nothing, really, except that time is always a part of place.  Stan Rowe, a soil scientist and also a Saskatoon person, talked about “slabs of space-time.”  Our slabs didn't coincide but they echo. 

Here’s a quote from Candace’s generously illustrated photo book, “Prairie: A Natural History.” It’s the epigraph to the preface in the second edition:  “There is no way to hold back the future.  But we can shape the course of events by engaging -- fully, deeply, and passionately -- with the present. . .  This approach is sometimes referred to as a strategy of “no regrets,” because the work is worth doing now, no matter what happens next.”  The accompanying photo shows a huge moon hanging over prairie where faraway cows graze in what is called “wolf light,” when the sky is dark purple and the land is shadowed.  It is liminal time, but especially on the prairie where there is nothing to block the horizon.

This book makes an excellent “bible” for those who are autochthonous to this place in the rainshadow of the Rockies and a little farther east.  It includes the point of view expressed by a scientist when we stood in a group near Eastend at a site where a dino skeleton had been found.  He said,  “You must understand that at that time here was not here.”  He meant that the continents had shifted radically so that this point on the planet had moved far away from where it had been at the time, and the skeleton came along for the ride.  So ancient a land is revealed by the constant erosion that exposes new bones from the past around Drumheller and the Tyrrell Museum which some people exclaim is a temple to evolution.  www.tyrrellmuseum.com/ “Features ten signature galleries devoted to paleontology, with 40 dinosaur skeletons with more than 110000 fossil specimens.”

One of the great grasslands of the world, though seemingly inexhaustible to the First Peoples, has suffered from constant resource exporting, the limits of water use, and inexorable climate change that have certainly altered and are exhausting the great resources left by the glaciers who ground across the land ten thousand years ago and then melted, leaving a huge underground aquifer.  The wind blows away and storms run off topsoil, so that carcinogenic chemicals must be added in order to achieve ag goals.  Now the land is criss-crossed by railroads, pipelines, highways, high tension electrical wires, drainage canals, and wind farms with their red night lights that drown the stars in blood.  The profits do not stay on the rez and, in fact, do not even stay in the United States or Canada, since the investors may be in Japan or Europe.

Eastend, Saskatchewan, where Wallace Stegner’s early years were spent (for the specifics, see his memoir, “Wolf Willow”) is now a writer’s retreat, thanks largely to the efforts of Sharon and Pete Butala.  The ranch that Sharon writes about so eloquently in "The Perfection of the Morning" is now a refuge where the original grasses are grazed by today's buffalo.  Stegner has been an object of love/hate for some people because they feel he ought to have given more attention to the indigenous peoples.  The truth is that in the years Stegner was there, the Indians had been extirpated: removed to reservations.  He never knew any -- but he knew the land in much the same way they did, and came to about the same conclusions.  In a way, his love/hate relationship with his wildass father is something like the struggle of the indigenous against the empire builders.  Stegner’s desire to be a proper academic, more in the frame of his mother’s world view, took him to universities and New England which separated him from indigenous tribes even more.

Those who remain are divided between lovers and opportunists.  I will say that opportunists' pyramids are somewhat shorter than those of lovers.  They will not reach as far up as transcendence, nor do they touch the ground.  The same division exists on reservations among the enrolled tribal peoples.  All those people who thought the key to life was getting a degree from a fancy university were not wrong, but it’s not enough.  If they want to be Real People, Nitzitahpi, they will need to return and walk all day through the grass like Narcisse Blood and Ryan Heavy Head, just as the ancestors did.  You could take your dog along.

When all those children, sent away at great cost in both dollars and emotion, come back to the high east slope -- which they have been doing for years now -- they have a lot of questions and a lot of new ideas.  They will not be backpacking mountain climbers who try to get higher than everyone else, but rather prowlers of the sliding shale where one can find the old dream beds.  They might even try lying down in them for a while.  The songs up there are not from meadowlarks, those operatic carolers, but rather the harsh and incisive “grawk” of ravens that may remember the old timers who came to fast and hallucinate.  (Well, maybe YOU think it’s hallucinating -- but maybe it’s something else entirely.)  Consult a raven.

In sci-fi vids and movies we often see floating islands of cities and even jungle and that can give us the illusion that our lives can separate from the planet, escaping from all the pitfalls of history and the bedrocks of geology.  But it can’t be done.  Shouldn’t be done.   Instead my advice is to deepen and intensify your own “sensorium” so that no matter where you are, you really hear the rustlings, smell the dust, taste the wind, feel some big boulder erratic pressing against your back when you lean there to rest, and possibly stoop to pick up a buffalo stone from the grass, somehow hearing its small seductive chirps left over from when it was part of a sea creature long before here was even here.  Then you’ll have something to dream about.

Quoting Stan Rowe:  "The reality of the world is not people and separate 'other things'. . . it is -- beyond all understanding -- an integrated ecosphere of marvelous creativity."

AUGUST IS THE IRONIC MONTH

On the August prairie the narcotic incense of distant forest fires arouses my nose to tumescence, oozing, an uncomfortable eroticism.  Every distant thing is behind a veil, coy and twilight in the daytime.  Light is blushing, gold in midday but at the ends and beginnings of the day turning lipstick red.  The borrow pits used to be full of asters at this time of year, but now they only grow purple-tipped alfalfa and a sketchy bit of sweet clover.  However, if I want to pick a bouquet of wheat for my stoneware pitcher I bought at the Browning Mercantile fifty years ago, I’d better do it now because the combines are beginning their repetitious march over the swelling hills.  The custom cutters are just arriving and the race is on to beat the hail before it beats the wheat.  

Or if I want a handful of cattails for the tall stoneware jug I bought from Terry McMasters’ pottery store, The Brown House, in East Glacier only thirty years ago, this would be a good time because before we know it the heads will be begin to tear apart to down and leave on the wind.  They’ll look more like blown-up thistles.  The first snowfall is usually in two weeks.

Those who only know the West from research and movies cannot have this erotic connection with the actual place.  They are describing lovemaking without ever having explored the body of the lover, which is land and light -- sound and smell.  At the moment the Western History Association is having an argument about a call for papers. 

Specifically, they are struggling with the title “Post-Ironic History of the North American West.”  Does this have something to do with “modern” (never really satisfactorily defined for anyone) or “post-modern” (never mind -- plunge ahead) or Annales, as referred to in this quote:   “By 1980 postmodern sensibilities undercut confidence in overarching metanarratives. As Jacques Revel notes, the success of the Annales School, especially its use of social structures as explanatory forces contained the seeds of its own downfall, for there is "no longer any implicit consensus on which to base the unity of the social, identified with the real."   I never heard of Annales, but I guess they mean the People’s history and that these days there are just too many different kinds of peoples to keep track of.

After 9/11 it was said there could be no more irony, by which I guess they meant that it was just too serious to make jokes or mention cruel fate.  But then a look at the list of dead showed Islamic countrymen of the terrorists who perished in the catastrophe because they were pushing sandwich carts down the halls.  Irony was only beginning.

Autumn is the ironic season, a time of deconstruction, piling up the compost.  For instance, the funeral of Joyce Clarke Turvey, fourth generation direct descendent of Malcolm Clarke whose life was so significant in Montana history.  Joyce was a Keeper of the Flame for her father, John Clarke, the deaf/mute woodcarver so much celebrated and valued, but her death has gone without even mention in the obits of the nearest big city newspaper.   When I tried to interest either the Great Falls Tribune or the IR in Helena in  finding a reporter to do a story about the death, they couldn’t understand what I was talking about.  WHO did I say?  They are young, they just moved here, they’re thinking about Friday night.  What is more ironic than a newspaper that rejects news?

Maybe it is a family that denies its own history.  The present generation rejects the connection to the early half-breed Clarkes, nationally famous and influential but never wealthy and still half-breeds, on grounds that Joyce was adopted (though she looked much like John).  They want to claim Joyce’s distinction as an Avon manager with a pink convertible and her accomplishments in visiting exotic places.  The irony of selling Western art but raising one’s children in suburban California, where they know nothing about it, is a little painful.

History that is quant instead of quaint acts as though no people were involved.  One prof asked for “an older, more direct approach.  Maybe “Body and Soul: Western Missionaries Eaten by Cannibals.  1820-1860.”   Okay.  Is there an algorithm for that?  I think most of the cannibals ate their friends and relatives, so what does that imply?  A metaphor for historians?

More useful definitions are “irony as unintended consequences,” which as Elliot West suggests, just about sums up the history of the West.  Or maybe the reference is to “the historian’s stance as outside and above the events s/he is writing about . . . implying a superiority and a distance from engagement.”  [emphasis added.] A professor’s stance -- understandable enough if one doesn’t know anything else.  So clean, so PC -- so nice in a dustless well-lit room cooled by AC.

This DOES sharply relate to an abyss between early and late historians, between those aficionados who loved the West they thought was real, the one where you shoot black powder guns in a reconstructed frontier town, ride in a real cattle drive, and other “juvenile” stuff, come to meetings in boots and Stetsons, and could throw yourself into DVD’s of “Hell on Wheels,” instead of sitting on your leather sofa with a martini, sneering at “Deadwood,” that campy example of displaced urban rot.  “But that’s what the West was really like!” the ironists declare.  “We know and you don’t.”

On the drive to buy bottled water (the latest well in Valier has loaded the water with iron) two fat whitetail deer cross the highway in front of me, slipping on the asphalt, tails waving.  I counted three squashed skunk carcasses.  There are never any dead gophers anymore -- all poisoned out.  Never any hawks because there are no gophers.  In Valier there have been no mosquitoes all summer, so there are no bats.  The old farm ladies are dead set against any chickens in town, so the coyotes will have to eat cats -- plenty of those -- except the coyotes get shot.  Sometimes the cats, too.  The irony of unintended consequences.

Gray chemical fallow fields stretch out for miles, nothing to hold the tainted dust from blowing.  The mayor worries about downwind radioactivity from Hanford.  The new West glows in the dark, and that’s not counting the red lights and strobes on top of the hundreds of high wind turbines to warn the airplanes away.   But no one under thirty remembers anything different.

When I came to Browning in 1961 (I should get someone to set this to music. . .) there were still survivors of the cavalry massacre mounted in retaliation for the murder of Malcolm Clarke. Through that decade Bob and I sat at the lunch counter with John Clarke, telling gesture stories and laughing.  When I came back in the Eighties, it was AIM and some of the most abusive drunks had become shamans.  Then in the Nineties the Indian kids began to succeed in college and a school was started to teach the little ones to speak their own language.  Now they are the only ones left who can.

THE PRAIRIE HOLDS ITS BREATH

The prairie is holding its breath before beginning to blow again. The leaves have been torn down, so only the water-drawing structure of the trees remains, a vertical river emptied for the cold. Long dead grass is sheltering small green plants at its feet. Without leaves my poplars look as though someone tied knots in the lesser branches. They are growths from some kind of disease. When I ask, people shrug. My cottonwood and one of the blue spruces are showing signs of stress -- not enough water in the late summer, too much in the early summer. The newspaper today advises a good soak before winter sets in. In some places there is not enough ground moisture to give the winter wheat a proper start. They need to have roots so their vitality will winter over and spring up green.

Summer building, fall planting, are just trailing off now. The Halloween snow has come and gone -- night skiffs will persist with maybe some single-digit blankets until Thanksgiving when the first big snowstorm hits. The bowl of water I keep outside over summer is frozen solid in the mornings. If I leave it and the sun hits it, there will be a little water on top by afternoon, but I’ll dump it out now. Skies are bluer with summer dust settled and water vapor wrung out by cold. The yards are cleared of furniture except for the barbecues. In a meat-eating town some people don’t know how to cook on an indoor stove. The only spots of color are children’s plastic toys abandoned on the lawns.

I’m looking at house skirting, driving around town in mid-afternoon through the empty streets. Many houses have them, mostly trailer skirting, some of it meant to look like stone though it doesn’t. If I put skirting on my old house, it would be warmer. The real old-timers used to bank dirt or snow against the bottoms of their houses, but they were less worried about bugs and small rodents. It’s pure speculation on my part. I can’t even afford a paint job. The present paint is peeling: thinly sprayed-on cheap latex paint. The actual siding is asbestos, which always breaks along the bottom, so that the effect is like bad teeth.

One intersection near the new watertower is completely dug up. No idea why but maybe something to do with attaching the new well. I didn’t get out of the pickup to look. I might be curious enough to go back tomorrow when workers will be there, so I can ask questions. We are all getting very curious about our infrastructure. We’ve just paid some consultants $20,000 to find out why we often fail our sewer effluent treatment tests with the state, which has advised us we need to upgrade. Partly we are maxed out, but there is also a theory that the providing company for the treatment machinery sold us a system that doesn’t work at forty below. Another theory is that the spring was so wet that there was too much water for the “bugs” (bacteria) to do their job.

The people who built the processing megaloads for the Athabascan tar sands have bought land near Bynum where they plan to build future loads, adding 140 new residents to a place that has dwindled to near nonexistence. They say because the place is already on the route approved to haul them. Why aren’t they building in Valier? We’re on the route and past some very risky terrain on 89 between here and Bynum. Sharp curves, steep drop-offs, thirty miles closer to foothill ice storms. A decision by someone back east who has never been here. Everyone was anxious to know who sold the land: Hutterites.

Most people have done their hunting now. There’s been wind for keeping geese down low and snow for tracking elk. The weather was great for pheasant but the bird population is down. The snow geese are on Freezeout in their huge African-style rippling banks and clamouring clouds of moving wings. The managers plant barley to bait them. They’ll be around until the next storm, then roar off to the south. The ornamental waterfowl in Gibson Park in Great Falls have been herded away to their winter confines. I don’t know what the city did to get rid of the slacker geese along Tenth Avenue South. Probably the same thing as Valier did to eliminate the rock pigeons around the grain bin farms in town. I ask about those bins, but haven’t found the right person for answers yet. Taking out the rock pigeons left a niche for the hyperactive noisy doves. I advise the cats to get to work on them. They don’t. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Don’t catch them.

This part of fall -- late, bare -- is always in tension between the stress and abandon of summer and the expected tests of winter. This particular summer for me was braced, paranoid, ambiguous. It never did get really hot. My cherry tomato plant mostly just sat there. My computer died and was restored with the help of friends and relatives, which was an immensely heartening experience that I had not expected and still feel a little guilty about. My intention in this part of my life was to be absolutely self-reliant and on my own, but that turns out to be a silly idea. My other intention, to write with as much risk and passion as I dare, has been pretty much fulfilled but because it was private, only a few people know about it. At my utmost, I was not quite enough. But what I can see in the future might be even more demanding.

A little while ago in my futzing around, I knocked out this computer. Dead. Nada. It took much more pondering -- accompanied by paranoia -- than it should have to figure out the problem. The power cord had come unplugged and I think of power cords as BIG. This one was small. Maybe that’s a good clue. Maybe it’s not so much the events as the way we take them. Emotion can be good, but it can also interfere.

Anyway, there will be more wind. And it will remove many leaves from my yard. Then I can rake and bag what’s left in the corners. Even so do the seasons, our lives, and our feelings weave in and out of each other, encoding as they go.

PRAIRIE COLORS (or colours)

It’s a still gray day, not even the skritching of dead leaves killed by cold before they could change colors and drop from the tree. If you were to paint the landscapes I saw when I drove to Cut Bank (thirty miles north), you would only need a few tubes of paint: Payne’s Gray, Yellow Ochre, and maybe a little Cadmium Yellow for highway centerlines and traffic signs. Some black for cows. But the colors are all muted, not exactly pastel, but a little grayed out. Thin colors in values that are close together, not very light and not very dark. Shapes are long and reclining, except that the edges of mountains and what we call “reefs” or buttes, make a kind of handwriting along the horizon, way far out there.

In the town the colors were Crayola, primary and color wheel stuff, meant to suggest enamel, plastic, flags, toys. . . commerce. I grew up in Oregon where the only crayons you needed were green. Did you know there are twenty kinds of green in the Crayola full set? Not counting the specialty crayons: Changeables (like Tangee lipstick, they go on one color and become another), Magic Scent (they had to stop using food smells like “berry” because the kids ate the crayons), Gem Tones and Silver Swirls. I’ve neither seen nor tasted any “specialty crayons.”

I went to Dick Blick’s website for art supplies to kick up some action in my brain and was pleased. It appears that in this context there are not only new colors but new “media” beyond pastels, oil paints, watercolor, or even craypas, which are a personal favorite -- though I never know quite how to use them -- because of their brilliant colors, highly “saturated” in the lingo. One Easter I wrote and drew on hard-boiled eggs with craypas, then dipped them in black ink. Looked great.

There are things called “color sticks” described as instantly drying oil paint. I’ve never seen one. It makes me think of animal markers (http://www.livestockmarkers.com), which are (yes) for writing numbers or symbols on cows, horses, pigs, sheep. Here’s something I never knew about before: “SHEEP MARKING CRAYON - Designed for marking sheep in varying climates. 4”x 2” (10cm x 5cm) The Ram Crayon is to be used in conjunction with a Ram marking harness. The harness is to be placed upon the Ram. The crayon (which should be on the animal's chest) is fastened to the harness with a split pin. When the ram mounts the ewe the crayon will leave a mark that sticks well. The color of the mark on the back of the ewe allows the breeder to track the correct Ram. Consists of top grade waxes, and pigments which mark in intermittent weather conditions which sticks well to animals.” It makes me think of a naughty story about a woman who was intimately entered without her permission just after a doctor had painted her entrance with purple gentian to treat a fungal infection. The culprit, in his private part, had clearly “voted” for her, though it was not his finger that was inky. It strikes me that putting a crayon harness on a ram might be a little like belling a cat.

More properly, there was a Montana artist (I think a woman in Bozeman) who drew big gorgeous prairie scenes of runaway grass fires and flaming sunsets, using animal markers for their broad strokes and vivid colors. I’m told that over the years the colors, like the auto paints used by Jackson Pollock, lost their punch. I hope that’s not true.

The descriptions and instructions for this animal crayon website are in French. French animals? Cat Urbikit at http://www.stephenbodio.blogspot.com, who ranches sheep in Wyoming, uses Nepalese ranch hands. Her guard dogs are big Eurasian breeds, but the dogs who work with the herders are more likely to be Australian heelers or black-and-white border collies. When they mark the sheep, what language do they use? Is there an international language of sheep marking symbols?

But I’m getting off the point again, which is colors. I discovered that the computer codes for colors are called “hex” colors because they are coded in 16 bits or pixels or whatever. They started to call the system “sexameter” instead of “hexameter” but the designers got all embarrassed. Clearly not French. I suppose the people who are really into it don’t say “blue” or “green” anymore, but rather refer to the sixteen number code. Talk about a foreign language. Usually the choices are presented as a table that automatically translates into “hex.”

I guess we can’t talk about color without talking about language. On the prairie, when speaking of color, it is also necessary to talk about the season. The green hazes of spring, the yellow and blue flowers that follow, the sheets of lupine lavender, then the tawny burn-off of late summer and the red-orange of Indian paintbrush in the mountains. When the day is winter and clear, it shimmers with the Monet iridescence of gold wheat stubble among snow reflecting sky blue.

When the land is wet in winter, which doesn’t happen for very many days, the colors are saturated, the russets and siennas and burnt ochres of old masters’ oil paintings of interiors. I’m always interested that some mud is greenish and other mud is reddish, depending on whether the sea life pulverized into it aeons ago accumulated copper or iron.

I tried to Google around to find out about what makes DayGlo colors so bright, but no luck. One gets lost in phosphorescence, flourescence, until the nuances are too hard to figure out. No one seems to really know.

Some people do not like the taupe, dun, beige, ecru, sorts of colors and their reaction to the color scheme of the late fall Montana prairie is that there is nothing to look at. But to my eye, that’s when things get interesting. There is only one color I really hate to see: the gray of a chemical fallow field, which has been sprayed to kill everything, creating vegetable ash. In theory, the killer chemical will be gone by the time a new crop is planted. In actuality? I don’t think so.

SOLITARY BUT IN COMMUNITY

On my father’s side I am saturated with the idea of cooperatives, an ideology he acquired as a component of what was his religious position: prairie progressive humanism. Devised as a way of surviving poverty and the strangulation of corporate railroads and elevators, rural co-ops made life possible, though it was a lot of work to attend the necessary meetings in grange halls to work through all the issues of goals and strategies. In fact, it is probably this difficulty -- plus today’s prosperity mostly supported by government subsidies -- that eventually withered most ag co-ops away. The last one in Valier sold out a year or so ago. Of course, the town itself is more or less a cooperative, though some people want to sell the water system to a corporation.

My most favorite co-op is the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Hyde Park where you might have run into Obama once. Not now. I still maintain my membership which I began in 1978 so I’m now officially a thirty year member. I get 10% off purchases, which just about covers the shipping. What I need is an equivalent for used and remaindered books, which are mostly what I buy, but I can find them at Powell's which used to be in Hyde Park. These bookstores work because they are run by wonky geeky idealists. I love ‘em: I mean both bookstores and idealists.

The deepest I got into communal stuff was the Portland Scribe where I was the theatre critic for a year, attending the weekly meetings where a volunteer editor presided over an unruly circle of people sitting on the floor in an old church. Of course, I was the Animal Control Officer for SE Portland, which was where many of the hippies lived in old houses in the San Francisco manner, though the houses weren’t nearly so elegant. All day long I knocked on doors, earnestly trying to get rebellious counter-culturists to do the right thing about their dogs. They’d say, “Dogs are supposed to be FREE, man!”

But the most nearly I came to really joining the counterculture was when a highly intellectual young man in steel-rimmed spectacles worked for us at Scriver Studio a few days in the Sixties and seriously suggested that I just go with him to Stanford. The attraction was mutual and instant. I turned him down. Might’ve been the wrong move, but I wasn’t finished with Browning by a long shot. Still am not.

What works against the hippie/commune/counterculture magnet is from my mother’s side of the family, esp. her fiery Irish-Prot father who demanded respect with that imprudent, raging attitude of someone who knows he isn’t getting any respect. He longed for sons, then adopted the defensive attitude (he had a LOT of attitudes) that his four girls could do anything sons could do. Their reaction was to pose in bib-overalls, boots and old hats -- their long curls cascading over their shoulders. In the end, after watching her mother die slowly of cancer, my mother fixed on respectability in a more low-key dependable way as an elementary school teacher and then librarian. (Barrus’ mother also was a librarian. Neither of our mothers was the kind who had a degree in library science. They lugged books around.) My mother wanted security and though she was brave in some ways, she never got up the courage to move out of her original bridal house.

Except that at one point she thought the two of us should buy a duplex and each live on her own side. I didn’t even want to stay in Portland, much less where my mother could monitor me. She was very angry when I left for seminary in Chicago and stayed disapproving even after I appeared to be doing fine as a minister. “Why can’t you just marry a nice Presbyterian minister?” she asked.

So, caught between prudence and risk, being co-opted and being co-operative, I’ve ended up solitary, which is not the same as lonely because I’m so busy and so connected to virtual community through the Internet. Not Face Book or You Tube or even Twitter, but just on-going relationship with various communities, the most unlikely of them entirely guys, many of them young, and one of them only ten years younger than me, a survivor of full-frontal, deep-dish, all-the-way communalism. I’m there, but I’m not there, which suits both sides of the arrangement. None of us has much to lose. Of course I mean Cinematheque.

I take Barrus to be a combination of his mother and father, the same as myself. What choice do we have? His father’s ability to use tools, to work hard, to be a good foreman -- his mother’s gifts as master gardener and librarian -- all survives in their son. Even the rage -- though verbal and aimed mostly at exasperating people in publishing or cyberpredators. Taking three “puppies” with suicidal tendencies on a sudden pilgrimage to Bolivia to stabilize Barrus’ daughter and her family in the midst of street demonstrations was his father Maynard’s kind of thing to do, defying danger while protecting from it. “You kids feel like dying? I’ll show you what dying is really like! If you’re going to die, do it FOR something!” The only way to tell whether it was a good thing to do is to keep those pups alive until they are thirty, then ask them. Works for me. In the meantime Barrus’ daughter and her family stayed safe, didn’t run.

All this is so romantic, so unlike the lives of most Americans, that there is a contingent who insist Barrus making it all up. Maybe. I read the articles of William Langewische in Vanity Fair, which are just as out on the edge, but no one says he’s making it up. Of course, he’s a journalist and making it up would be breaking the rules. But Barrus is beholden to no one. Even if they were BOTH making it up, they explore ways to live that aren’t just a matter of trying to make enough money to keep your house.

Incidentally, maybe the solution to the big empty foreclosed McMansions is to make them into hippie communes for artists. No government processing or interference -- just let it happen. Might happen anyway. An ecological niche always gets filled one way or another.