THE EDWARDIAN COUNTRY HOUSE: A Review

Oh, “Gosford Park,” I thought when I ordered “Manor House.” This won’t be a tough one like the "Forties House." No war, everyone in that elegant house Manderston, and everyone knowing their place. Ha! Nor was there any more information about drains or heat either, except the maniacal French chef’s obsession about his massive cookstove which had to be hot at all times, consuming whole roomsful of coal and kindling! The man whirled around his kitchen so fast he was almost a blur and no one, NO ONE, helped fast enough or the right way to suit him.

This chef, Monsieur Dubiard, who clearly lived to cook; Miss Morrison, the Lady’s maid and confidant; and Tristan, the groom who ordinarily does about the same work driving a carriage, were about the only people in this idyllic setting who didn’t end up in tears or near to it, including Sir John, the master who sat at the top of the pile! (Real names for these people -- they were not actors.) This is a surprise to the viewer but seems to have been even more of a surprise to the participants who were thinking in terms of a lark, not sixteen hour days of either slave labor or total boredom. In fact, the comments on IMDB.com seem to divide between those who thought the whole thing was scripted and phony, and those who thought the reality was palpable. I vote with the latter.

We so romanticize the Edwardian period, overlooking the hierarchies, double-standards, hardships and injustices of that short and slightly unbuttoned period between the death of Queen Victoria and the beginning of WWI. We are quite unaware that the obsession with food (quite as intense as now) was hardly health-based -- in fact, Sir John and his wife (a physician) became rather concerned over the high fat, low nutrition, and total absence of roughage, which meant constipation. They admired their chef’s ice sculpture swan but not the pig’s head that glared at them so reproachfully from the sideboard that the family returned their plates untouched -- those surviving downstairs had no such scruples and enjoyed nicking bits off it. Even the chef said to it, as he closed the oven door on the head, “See you later.”

Sir John was so reproachful about the pig head with the butler, Mister Edgar, that the seemingly impervious Edgar was nearly weeping. He had so valued his intimate relationship with Sir John -- tenderly shaving him while talking things over, man-to-man. The pig head might have been planted, but his emotion seemed quite real. Poor Edgar took the heat from both sides as the gentry became more restive -- the sister, Miss Anson, became so bored that she sank into depression and had to be shipped off for a “rest cure” -- while the downstairs staff became even more rebellious.

As always and as Edwardian children knew, downstairs was a whole lot more fun, partly because this staff, at least, was young and partly because there was just so much “doing.” The first kitchen maid (think “Ruby”) quit after two days. The second one lasted only slightly longer. The third one was a country girl, who knew the realities enough to not mind picking game birds and scrubbing pots with homemade soap. The trouble was that she was “country” enough to fall madly in love with the “hall boy” who was at the bottom of the ladder in every way except his own mind. The two footmen were quite splendid rosy-cheeked youths, whose worth was determined by their height. Charlie was vigorous and modern enough to take over the endless pot-scrubbing for a day so the servants’ cook could catch up enough to prepare a decent meal for once. But the brainstorms he was so proud of didn’t always work and poor Mister Edgar was torn between admiration and exasperation.

Not enough housemaids had been hired to maintain a mansion with such elegances as a sterling silver handrail on the main staircase, and it was clear that a bit of extra flesh plus an assertive personality could save such a servant. The thin, idealistic one was laid low and wished desperately to go home, which is when a third maid was added.

If the footmen had too much to do, the young man of the house, “Jontie” was not only prevented from doing anything but also prevented from SAYING anything, which nearly drove him round the bend. The younger brother did quite well with his tutor, Mr. Singh, who had hardly any plot line, presumably because he really WAS tutoring. He is normally a teacher. Nevertheless, he was a reminder of the British Raj, a product of this era, and kept alive the connection between the treatment of servants and the treatment of colony natives. He was the silent conscience.

Clearly, these people put up with their lives because the alternative was possibly prostitution for the women and death by exposure and malnutrition for the hallboy, who was probably much younger in actuality. The economic realities of the time pressed their personalities into deformations and compromises that most people in the US no longer need to make. MOST of the time. Except on reservations and in urban ghettos.

Towards the end of the show there is a “fair” on the grounds. (See “The Buccaneers,” another of my favorite Edwardian movies.) It is visited by Socialists, who might have been ordered off in the true times, but were probably invited by the directors who were well aware of how the rebellions and hardships of the servants made them greatly welcome such a movement. The war, as we’ve seen in “Upstairs, Downstairs,” pretty much ended the system.

It wasn’t until I watched the “footnote” video journals (the participants had the chance to slip away and speak privately to the camera) that I learned this production was slashed across like a sword during filming when 9/11 happened. It was a hard jolt. Miss Morrison and her daughter had actually visited the World Trade Center and stood at the top of one of the towers just the previous year. No one escapes the hands of fate, the wars and economic crises and climate changes of the whole globe, and even Edward the Seventh, who gave his name to the age, must have known that.

The participants thought of just stopping what suddenly seemed like trivial pursuits. But then, like true English, they picked up their roles again and finished. What lingers in my mind most vividly is the still shots of the landscape, a beloved breast of land that has survived so much.

"THE FORTIES HOUSE" A Review

At least I've found the perfect cure for whining about the economy and my diabetes diet. I'm watching the "house" series from the BBC and tonight was the 1940's house. I had thought this would be a sort of aesthetic diversion from life in my village, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Nevertheless, it was bracing.

Mostly this was not about the house itself, interesting as it was. Each room had a vividly tiled little heating unit though they never told us what fuel was intended. I think this is the kind that is sometimes set to operate only when money is inserted, like a parking meter. The hot water unit worked on what appeared to be coke, compressed coal dust, which can be rather dangerous in terms of carbon monoxide and hard to re-light. Woodwork was painted in wild colors, mostly mustard, with thick enamel. Even the furniture and objects d’art were period-specific, partly through set decorators (oh, how the Brits love their wartime series!) and partly through history buffs. A panel of historians and other experts on the period acted as a kind of “government” which controlled what happened to the house through the nine weeks of the program.

Many families applied to be the time-travelers portrayed, but the one that was “cast” was a family consisting of a middle-aged man and wife, their divorced daughter and the daughter’s two sons, one about twelve and the other maybe six. The engine that pulled this little train was the father, a devoted WWII buff who was especially enamored of a particular kind of backyard bomb shelter, a sort of culvert erected over a hole sunk four feet into the ground with the excavated dirt piled back over the top.

As it turned out this was one of the first and most severe tests, as it was for the original WWII people. At the most desperate point of near-despair with everyone digging, all of them clearly unsuited for the task, two male neighbors (just as during the real war) came over to lend their backs to the project. Miserable as the little hole could be -- especially when the sounds of air raids were piped in or when their own personal “air raid sirens” forced them to interrupt meals, tasks and sleep -- they grew rather fond of the sort of clubhouse feel. Dad in particular went out to play his saxophone there and to smoke his cigars, for which he invented a little tar-paper blackout safety device that made a roof over the glowing end. “I could’ve made a fortune back then,” he exclaimed, ever the engineer.

Blackout was the next major challenge, harder than it might seem. Some rooms acquired big darkening drapes and other windows were blocked by dark paper or a kind of framed canvas as used for paintings, except that it was painted black. Even so, the family was fined heavily because early in the bomb shelter routine the mother was so intent on getting her children (who were deeply asleep) out to the shelter that she left the kitchen door standing open behind her while the kitchen lights were on. Something I hadn’t realized was that thousands died due to blackout conditions: auto accidents, falls, and other blunders. In fact, only a few blocks from this actual house a young mother hurrying to her crying child fell on the steps in the dark. She died of a broken neck. We don't know how many gleams of light were targets for bombers.

These two boys tried to be brave but now and then the younger one broke down: too much confusion, too little food, too much cold, too few toys and too much to do. The older boy was assigned the task of monitoring their energy use, painting a black line around the bathtub to show how high bathwater could be. (They were only allowed to draw a bath once a week and had no soap after the first few “years.”) He became a master of the warning sign stuck to light switches and got a lot of arithmetic practice from figuring out actual energy usage compared to goal. Often he managed to keep everyone below the goal with some to spare -- is that relevant or what?

Then the Machiavellian “government” began the real hard-core stuff: the father left for his actual job back in the north country. The women went for each other’s throats, as they had warned they would, esp. after the cigarettes were cut off! They could hardly be blamed: the food shortages came down hardest on them because they fed the two boys first. And they did all the cleaning, as well as having to learn to cook. Neither of them had ever baked a cake.

The committee put them through all the wartime stuff -- pretend explosions that broke up belongings (but mercifully not the mascot statue of a fox terrier which participated in everything), cutting off their gas and water, lack of darn near everything. The "granny" who was only fifty or so and normally dyed her hair bright red was the most transformed. For one thing she lost weight -- they didn't say so, but it was obvious. As time went on she ran out of makeup, only got four hours of sleep a night, and then had to quit smoking, which tipped her into rebellion. The government had to relent and let her do "volunteer work" with some local senior citizens at a center where they served lovely cakes, and from then on she got her feet under her. It wasn’t just the calories: she had not understood how rewarding it was to help others even more needy than herself, even if what they really needed was a friendly ear to listen to THEIR wartime sacrifices. The two little boys remarked that before this experience (nine weeks) their granny was a kind of spendthrift free spirit, but now she'd gone "all nanny-like." The daughter went to a workshop where old planes were restored. She had never worked with men before and found it an eye-opener.

What is worse than war? What made this pale imitation of an actual and intense effort so absorbing? What were they fighting FOR, actually? Would it have been so awful if Hitler had won? Well, how about gray, grinding, oppressive, constant deprivation under a dictatorship? And what's worse than that? Belsen. The show pulled no punches. Through an authentic account of the liberation of Belsen concentration camp “broadcast” over the massive wooden-cabinet radio, it was made clear just how bad life -- if you could call it that -- really could get. The family felt their hardships dissolve into rather pleasant memories.

And the “government,” not being stupid, made sure to provide joyful liberation experiences like picnics in grassy and flowered meadows (this well-off family had never experienced a picnic!) and a jitterbug dance evening with a group that wears authentic uniforms and “frocks” while playing the music of the period. The contribution of the Yanks was recognized as being food (notably chocolate, oranges and SPAM), a huge infusion of energy (some of it in the form of sex, for which they had prepared with condoms), silk stockings, cigarettes and music, oh, the MUSIC! How they loved the music!

There was a vintage airshow where the nearly overwhelmed father sat in a Spitfire, his idea of the most ideal machine ever invented. (He was an engineer working at Precision Parts.) His wife and daughter watched with wet eyes, knowing what this meant to “their man.” Maybe the best byproduct was what amounted to the liberation of those two women, a huge jump in confidence in their own abilities and a strong new relationship between them. And the boys? For a long time afterwards they played a board game they had invented with spinners and little markers in which the Doodlebug bombs tried to get through the Spitfires.

And I've shut up about my own limitations for a while.

COWBOY ART: IS IT ALL OVER BUT THE SHOUTIN'?

Cultural phenomena go in huge arcs, decades long, so that students get out-of-phase with their teachers, performances get out-of-phase with their audiences, and art gets out-of-phase with public taste. There are two “long arcs” that I’m not sorry to see go on the down curve, one is the abstract movement of the first part of the last century, all those intellectual exercises in cubism and targets and Campbell’s soup cans -- though I have some favorites among them -- and the other is the outrageous career of Damien Hirst and his pickled animals, which no one dared to criticize until recently an Aussie critic (they’re still “cowboys,” unlike the metrofication of Americans) said they were “tacky.”

The new arc seems to be lifting up representational art, some of which had been reduced to the level of wallpaper in many institutions throughout the country. Not only can you tell what it is, the subject matter is often uplifting, even celebratory of the nation. Coinciding with this is a sudden realization that since real estate and the stock market have become shaky investments, art is looking pretty good. In fact, some paintings by newly admired artists have become so potentially valuable that the owning institutions have been unable to resist the temptation to sell them.

So what impact has this had on cowboy art? The Western art mags have gotten a little thinner and have included more art that is still certainly “Western” but about landscape, still-life or iconic works as well as the man on a horse with a rope. Some major corporations have sold off their collections, for instance, the 7-11 photos of the West. It’s nice to see familiar CAA artist’s names listed in the catalogues of Sotheby’s rather than the ghettoized but enormously successful annual Western auctions, and the value of the big names is holding if not increasing: Russell, Moran and so on.

At the shows in the institutions the art is increasingly skillful. One surprising factor has been immigrating Chinese artists, classically trained and seeing the terrain with new eyes. Another has been the influx to the field of cartoonists, most often the people who invented and replicated the backgrounds now drawn by computers. They are also skilled and have a kind of romantic aesthetic that goes well with Western subject matter. I hadn’t realized how many there were until I read the bios in the latest Cowboy Artists of America catalogue. I sometimes wonder whether the action isn’t with the teachers of wannabe artists, rather like the teachers of wannabe writers.

The CAA, which now often drops the second A, has had its troubles with the “arc” because of aging membership. The original group was knitted together both through friendship and from loyalty to their career-changing impact on the fortunes of cowboy artists. By joining with Dean Krakel and the Cowboy Hall of Fame, they achieved “critical mass” as a movement and respectability for pictures that appealed to a lot of rough-hewn shirt-sleeve millionaire buyers who needed to show they had “culture.” Now the founders are much outnumbered by a second and third generation of artists -- some of them literally the sons (no daughters) of the founders -- and far more competitive with each other. (Dean Krakel has been gone a while and the Cowboy Hall of Fame has changed its name again.)

Experts used to argue that Remington’s art was a better investment than stocks and bonds and had a little graph to show why. But that was before the SE Asian artisans discovered that they could eyeball any statuary and create cheap equivalents that the ordinary citizen could never distinguish from the originals. A new technology uses lasers to create a replica of any three-dimensional object, including a person, so now we’re back to the kind of accusations Rodin encountered when he created “The Age of Bronze” and was accused of simply casting his model from molds applied to his body. The tiny plastic injection toy farm animals I see at Big R are often as cunningly done as many bronzes. “Cold cast” miniatures are popular. The dime stores feature clever and fairly accurate painted animals and vignettes. And a giclee print with a few judicious paint-strokes added is for most people indistinguishable from easel art.

But probably the real key to Western art is -- as it was for most of the CAA artists -- life experience. These works appeal to people who can relate, so the success of the art is linked to people who hunt, who ride, who rope, who attend rodeos and eat beef. Thus, to some degree, the prosperity of Western art is linked to the fortunes of the Republican party. Every time I say this in front of a dealer they can hardly keep from putting a hand over my mouth. The excessive moral outrage of huggers -- whether of trees, buffalo or owls -- amounts to a form of terrorism. (Not that I disagree with the real problems -- just their methods.) At events about Western art the audience is often white-haired.

More and more, the kind of promotions that institutions like the CM Russell Museum use to build their base are programs for children, or with an interest in wildlife, or are linked with a particular lifestyle exemplified in magazines like the Big Sky Journal, based mostly on massive log, stone, plate glass, and Corten mansions in the middle of nowhere -- but a nowhere with a fine view and possibly a tennis court or ski trail. (How long this trend will continue as these people age is open to question.) Miniature art and “quick draw” events where the art is sold wet off the easel are also popular. So far I see few classes on how to tell “good art” from “bad.” Maybe it would have to be taught by some bold Aussie who isn’t afraid to bring down the wrath of artists on his or her head.

The dealers tell me that more than anything else, it is the thinning of the American middle class that affects sales. The very rich feel no constraints. The poor never bought anything but dimestore art anyway, though they might be loyal admirers of people like Charlie Russell.

In the end I think Damien Hirst’s pickled sharks are doomed -- the art reporters are saying a warehouse sale is planned. The best of the Manhattan-based abstract work will never lose its value in our lifetime because there are too many people who have taken the trouble to understand what it is about and to grow fond of it. If they pass that on to the next generation (if the experimental materials like Pollock’s housepaint and car enamel don’t just deteriorate out of existence).

I don’t think “cowboy art” -- the man on the horse with a rope -- per se will disappear. Rather it will become one figure among a whole panorama of American art. Quality will become increasingly important. The education and experience of the audience will matter. I’m very curious to see what happens to this amazing auction culture, rather like rodeo culture. Will there be on-the-spot bronze pours like rough stock events? Can’t you just imagine the searchlights sweeping over the gallery, the smoke and fireworks, the Western artists swaggering across the floor (covered in sawdust for the occasion) in chaps and Stetsons? Might work. But only for a season or so. Then back to the mantra: quality.

JOSEPH EPES BROWN & BLACK ELK

Why do people love Black Elk? What’s not to like? He was a sweet, peaceful, spiritual man who tried always to do the right thing and welcomed Christianity without giving up his Sioux convictions and practices. He was archetypically Plains Indian: Sioux, present at both the Battle of the Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee I, as well as participating in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show as it toured Europe. I suppose part of my resistance comes from auditing a class taught by Joseph Epes Brown, who followed John Neihardt as an explicator of Black Elk.

Brown was teaching in Missoula and he was strangely resistant to me sitting in on the class. I couldn’t understand why until afterwards when I realized that he was starting a lecture on tricksters by “tricking” his students with a phony baloney story about coming-of-age ceremonies for women that involved them being painted red in recognition of cow buffaloes getting bloody noses and snuffling warm blood froth all over their calves as a kind of red flannel underwear to keep them cozy. He suspected that I would raise my hand and say, “What nonsense! What a great way to attract wolves!” But I didn’t. On the other hand, I thought, “Oh, another cheesy anthropologist inventing stories.”

Brown was wearing a pale blue silk knit turtleneck under a tweed jacket with the obligatory suede elbow patches, turquoise and silver jewelry, a pearl gray Stetson and well-polished cowboy boots. Right there, already, I was suspicious and I suppose I’ve carried those feelings over to Black Elk, whose sartorial elegance ran more to a black silk scarf around his neck and a blanket around his waist. No feathers or jewelry. In his most famous photo he looks quite a bit like Chewing Black Bone, an irreproachable and holy old man of the Blackfeet.

But I’m entirely unjust to Brown. Both he and Black Elk were gentlemen participants in an approach to religion that William E. Paden (see “Interpreting the Sacred: Ways of Viewing Religion”) calls “universalism:” “It is the view that all religions essentially point toward the same reality but use different names for it. As water is the same everywhere, but is called by different names, so too with divinity or the spirit that is the same everywhere.” (p. 95) Produced by new and open-minded exposure to Asian religious ideas, such as Taoist, Hindu and Islamic concepts, universalism in this sense is the key (with variations) to the “perennial philosophy” as well as Unitarian Transcendentalism. Beyond scholarly inquiry, this attitude can easily become a framework for believers working towards peace and harmony on both a personal and international level. Plato had suggested something like it early on. Brown, like Neihardt, found it in Plains Indian systems. To Black Elk it was not a matter of rationality so much as emotional recognition. A survivor of massacres does not turn away from peace and transcendence.

Since that time and especially during the Aquarian Revolution of the Seventies, many have welcomed this thinking. I notice that Brown refers several times, approvingly, to a thinker named René Guénon, a French metaphysics thinker, rather like Eliade but less famous. Guénon ended up converting to Islam and living in Egypt, which suggests that he might be a pretty rewarding figure for a contemporary study. His attraction to the occult, which he ends in rejecting because of its corruption by persons seeking power over others, introduces the issue of using religion as “magic,” trying to turn the dogma of the ideal into a rationale for controlling others. (Fundamentalism.) Or hinting that one has supernatural powers amounting to miracles.

So there is a spectrum here from a reaching out for peace and harmony to a grasping at something like sorcery to try to dictate events. I see both trends here on the Blackfeet Reservation with the balance point a little too far over on the control end. Is anyone who understands the effect of poverty and oppression on people, let alone the destruction of their belief systems, very surprised by this? Today it’s strong in American politics. It’s tragically powerful throughout the planet.

Getting back to the specific issue of “The Sacred Pipe,” it is a follow-up to the earlier “Black Elk Speaks.” Brown recorded Black Elk in 1947 when the scars and deprivations of WWII were still everywhere. Meeting with the old man (1863 to 1950) in the walled tent where he lived as a migrant worker and then the log cabin in Manderson, S.D. where the family wintered, Brown taped what are described as Seven Sacred Rites of the Sioux. These are edited and annotated in footnotes to emphasize their universality. Brown says, “We are still very far from being aware of the dimensions and ramifications of our ethnocentric illusions. Nevertheless, by the very nature of things, we are now forced to undergo a process of self-examination and to engage in a serious reevaluation of the premises and orientations our society.” Thus, “we are looking to the kinds of models represented by the American Indians.”

The Seven Rites are:
INIPI: The Rite of Purification
HANBLECHEYAPI: Crying for a Vision
WIWANJAG WACHIPI: The Sun Dance
HUNKAPI: The Making of Relatives
ISHNA TA AWI CHA LOWAN: Preparing a Girl for Womanhood
TAPA WANKA YAP: The Throwing of the Ball

The very fact that each is titled formally, including the Sioux name, helps Christians see them in terms of the Roman Catholic seven sacraments with Latin names: baptism, confirmation, eucharist, penance and reconciliation (confession), anointing of the sick (last rites), holy orders, and matrimony. In fact, Black Elk formally converted to Catholicism, while keeping the Sioux understanding of the world.

If one were to look at Blackfeet liturgies, one might not divide the territory quite the same way that the Sioux did, but there’s no question that all Plains tribes (especially after the advent of the horse and calamities like epidemics and cavalry attacks) learned from each other in the same way that the early Christian communities learned from each other, an innovation or interpretation in one place traveling to the next.

The universalist understanding of what religion is all about, with or without the “magical” element, has as much appeal for us today as it did in the days immediately after the holocaust and the atomic bomb. The Dalai Lama does a good job of embodying in a personhood the same elements as Black Elk. There have been numbers of such figures in history and they are with us now. But there still aren’t enough of them. If there were ever a time to “cry out for a vision,” this is it.

PRIONS. WHAT THE...?

When I get tired of worrying about money (which appears to be one of those endless loops anyway, mostly because my basic assumptions may be wrong), I worry about the burgeoning problem of bodily disorders based on the assumption that the world is a continuous sheet of code in time, place and substance. (I also think about theology based on this assumption, but it doesn’t worry me -- in fact, it’s a source of reassurance, a kind of repeated assurance that what is now will always exist and has always existed in some form.)

To come back down to earth (my ex-husband and my best former boss both used to say, “Get your feet on the ground!”), Petunia my neighbor came over to see whether I could find out anything on the computer about what is killing her close friend. At first they said she had a blood clot in her brain and inserted a stent to hold open an artery. Now they are saying she has a disease that starts with a “P.” Petunia, who has macular degeneration so can’t write things down, had learned to spell the word which is short anyway. Prion disease.

Petunia’s husband read her the long and rather technical download I gave her from Wikipedia. They tried to puzzle through it as best they could but she still had questions, which I was pretty hard pressed to address. Anyway, at this point no one could answer them for her. The first time I Googled “prion,” I was still back in Portland in the Nineties and there was almost nothing known about them. This was when the first publicity about “mad cow disease” began to hit.

To put it short and crude, prion disease seems to be a mysterious mis-folding of proteins into something that has stopped being a viable part of the constantly transforming feedback loops of a biological being because it is stuck. It is “polymerazed” into something so stable that burning, radioactivity, standard chemicals, just don’t faze it. In terms of my little wood-burning stove in the garage, it makes “klinkers,” stuff that’s left over after the burning has happened. (I guess actually it’s a coal-burner’s term. In childhood I woke every morning to the sound of our coal furnace having its grate shaken to knock the klinkers down out of the way of a new fire.) Hard ash.

And it’s a hardass kind of problem: mad cow, scrapie in sheep, maybe Alzheimer’s, chronic wasting disease in deer and elk, and other mysterious conditions that show no infectious agent, no organ failure, just a stuck brain. Kuru, the cannibals’ disease from eating human brains, is one of the more colorful versions and challenges the idea that it’s a “modern” disease that comes from our changed environment -- since those tribes were talked out of cannibalism and given can openers.

As it turns out, Petunia’s friend and her family had prided themselves on eating lots of venison and elk, partly because they liked hunting, partly because it helps with the money, and partly because they believed it was healthier. People don’t eat the meat, have symptoms right away, and then fall over like the victims of poison mushrooms or death camas. Rather the malfunctions of little cells accumulate until the whole system hits critical mass and everyone notices that something is very wrong. A healthy immune system cannot get rid of prions. Cooking, very high temperatures, bleach -- all the standard household sanitizing measures -- do not work. It’s even hard to test for the stuff.

In the laboratory there are measures that can finally destabilize the interlocked molecules of the protein and disassemble it. But no one so far can figure out how it works. It doesn’t seem to be “alive” in the way that creatures we know use their nucleus information to manage what a cell does -- a tiny entity that’s much more active than we ever imagined until we developed instruments that could watch it block entrance of some things, open gates to other things, change docking ports on its surface, rearrange structures of storage, metabolism and transformation in internal sub-cell structures.

At the same time as I’m looking up “prion,” I’m getting material via a sort of chain-letter network from people who monitor protected high-tech medical journals and newsletters and translate results for the rest of us. Most recently posts have suggested that bisphenol-A interacts with leptin, causing the metabolic dysfunction that we call Diabetes II. (This stuff is in the linings of cans, so watch out, you folks with can openers.) Another suggests something similar pertaining to the chemicals used in children’s nightclothes to make them flame resistant. There is a host of manmade chemicals associated with polymeres and carbons (which is the base of organic life on this planet) as well as many “tweaked” hormones used as pesticides, herbicides, growth promoters and the like. That is, we have produced many molecules by now that are distributed everywhere in our environment -- like in the breast milk and livers of polar bears -- and that we cannot avoid ingesting. They are just a little bit off, not quite normal.

Many of these are prohibited in other countries, but not here because our political system protects big spenders. (Am I paranoid? Well, I watched “The Constant Gardener” last week, and that would make anyone paranoid. And it didn’t even involve the USA.) Anyway, it’s a fool’s assumption that national borders mean much to chemicals which travel on the wind, in the water, in products -- everywhere. So it’s not ridiculous to assume that Petunia’s friend is dying at the hands of some politician tolerating a desk jockey pushing bench chemists to produce new products while not funding extensive testing or government supervision so as not to interfere with CEO income. And there’s no way to simply abstain.

In China or Russia or other manufacturing-intensive economies, life expectancy is dwindling but incomes are growing. I seem to have this near-unconscious and not particularly rational conviction that to be rich is to be “sick” or otherwise doomed in some way, that it undermines judgment and morality. When the prions finally get to reproductive success (and you know the stories about frogs with weird anomalies as well as I do) then the problem will be solved because there won’t be any more people making new skewed substances. Anything that evolves a way to get rid of prions in their systems will survive and repopulate the planet.

Of course, we can jump the evolution queue by inventing things that un-do prions, breaking up the klinkers. But what it it turns out to dissolve proteins in general? Or some unsuspected keystone protein that brings the whole biological carbon-based unit to dissolution? Maybe I’ll go back to worrying about money. But, you know, it seems to be connected.

DA VINCI REVISITED

I’ve already written a post about the “DaVinci Inquest” long-running Canadian series but maybe there’s a little more to say. I’ve probably watched more episodes of this than any other cop series, (through the magic of DVD which is different from watching weekly on television), mostly because there are more episodes available. This is a very popular show and stayed alive for a long time by transforming itself (first Da Vinci is a cop, then a coroner, then the mayor) while remaining rooted in a real life person. So far I don’t have access to the mayor version on DVD, at least through Netflix.

Many a cop show has played out before my eyes -- I can even remember back to Dragnet, though I wasn’t a big fan until Hill Street Blues came along. That really grabbed me because by then I’d been an animal control officer knocking on doors and responding to emergencies. It was the Seventies, the Patty Hearst years, and we were all a little crazy. After that I followed Bochco along through all his permutations, even the ill-advised one that was a musical -- whatever the heck it was called. But Bochco was tame compared to something like the English “Wire in the Blood,” based on the truly vicious novels of a lesbian interested in torture. Without Robson Green, those shows wouldn’t even be tolerable.

Incidentally, both Bochco and Jack Webb thought about creating a show about animal control officers, but there were two problems. One was that animal actors are difficult and the other was that the American public (and probably all the English-speaking countries) simply will not tolerate any understanding of pets except the most Valentine card portrayals. I haven’t seen the Animal Planet shows -- which from descriptions seem to be only about cruelty and emergency calls -- but they appear to be the only way the public will tolerate law enforcement shows about pets.

Getting back to da Vinci, one of the most obvious qualities of this show is its “Canadian-ness.” And B.C. Canada at that. Among these the most salient is the character of the center-pole leading man, Nicholas Campbell, who is not exactly Shakespearean but not a loose cannon in quite the way Cracker is. (Cracker is a prototype of the genius wildman.) He drinks too much, but who can blame him? He likes women but is too obsessed with his job to sustain a relationship. Occasionally he loses his temper, but it is always justified. He doesn’t think in terms of solving the crime, but solving the problem: what are the solutions for murdered prostitutes, street kids, drug trade, abusive nursing homes? He’s almost like a public health official. In short, he lives at the intersection of Idealism and Romanticism.

The acting is universally excellent from Donnelly Rhodes, who represents the old Dragnet model, to Ian Tracy, more along the lines of Brad Pitt. That their partnership really works means that the writers understand both types. Old cops either get fried and hardened into ineffective cynics or they develop a sense of humanity based on “seeing everything.” The Ian Tracy character is both smart and compassionate. In fact, it is the compassion straight through that tips this towards NW Canada -- a place where the rain falls gently on us all.

Tracy gets a bit of the “sex” stuff since he’s romancing Suleka Ramen, the dishy pathologist who works alongside the coroner’s ex-wife, but it is the most tender and quiet sort of intimacy. When he is working to understand a Guatemalan torturer who has just been lethally poisoned by either his victims, his bosses, or his cohort, he’s on the bed with Suleka who is reading a book about a victimized Guatemalan woman. She moves down close to him, leaning over him, and he merely strokes her face gently with the backs of two fingers. It is intense. Likewise, when the coroner’s daughter misses her piano teacher, a lovely woman who insists on giving him the lesson since it was paid for, she takes his hand to teach him to play scales. Innocent but... In an American show, he would be bending her over backwards and trying to undo her clothes.

I’m impressed by how many of the actors, like Suleka and the female detective Venus Terzo, are “people of color.” There are Asians, Aboriginals, Blacks, various blends and versions, everywhere. And they are accurately portrayed. Evan Adams, who plays “Thomas Builds the Fire” in Sherman Alexie movies, has appeared both as a street scruff and again as an Alderman. I could swear that one character, a defense attorney, was played by Sherman himself in his early years, but I couldn’t find any record. This inclusiveness is partly because Canada, as a part of the British Commonwealth, is open to former colonies of England and is seen as a desirable place to start over or take refuge. (There are few-to-no Aussies, who prefer Hollywood.)

But I think even more than being a realistic version of Vancouver, which is a port city after all, this originated with Chris Haddock, who invented the show in the first place. His signature screen shows a jazz bass player from overhead, twirling his instrument. I suspect it’s someone famous (I’m too out-of-it to know) and I’m often aware of both the jazz understanding of race (“It don’t matter if you can play!”) and the jazz sense of structure (themes, riffs, solos, inventions). Once in a while the romantic "soul" understanding of the underworld takes over, for instance in the story about the addicts taking refuge in a “shooting gallery” after one strung-out doctor’s son literally shoots a shopkeeper. Old-cop-think is to call the Swat Team and blast ‘em outta there. But the hero talks his way in by using a hit of drugs as bait, finds only two unarmed kids, and gets them safely out. It’s clear that the reason they have no drug money is that they’ve spent a small fortune on candles, which makes the dank interior of an abandoned warehouse look like a Jean Cocteau fairytale.

One of the other characteristic elements is that of the normal and level-headed onlooker, in this case usually played by Sarah Strange who is sometimes described as the coroner’s secretary or -- by him -- as his “associate.” She does the legwork, the phone calls, the little trivia that would clog up the plot, but also she simply looks, widens her eyes, tilts her head, or otherwise comments. She’s no Greek chorus, but she does put that outside comment on what could otherwise be pretty extravagant.

There are few special effects except for the quite wonderful local scenery. One doesn’t see people screwing or beating each other up or burning up, but one does see the bodies afterwards. VERY realistic bodies. That’s the dark note that balances the romance.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON PRAYER

At seminary one of our on-going arguments was about whether one could “call the Holy Spirit,” how a person would do that, and whether the Spirit actually would come, remembering that the “Wind,” which is a metaphor for the Spirit, bloweth where it listeth. That is, does whatever it wants to as an independent and supernatural agency. But none of us had any trouble recognizing the phenomenon of feeling that the Spirit was with them. Whether it was awe and trembling, the recognition of the sublime, a feeling of presence, the “oceanic feeling” in which one felt connected to or dissolved in the universe, or any of the other descriptions, we all accepted Eliade’s idea that the sacred feels quite different from the profane, even in the subtlest forms embodied in architecture or near-accidental confrontation with nature. At least if no one felt this, they didn’t admit it. Why would they be at seminary?

In those days -- 1978 to 1982 -- there was not yet any “neurophilosophy” or “neurotheology” or “spiritual neuroscience,” because the fMRI and PET hadn’t been involved yet. But even then we knew that meditation could produce effects measurable by certain devices, like maybe electroencephalograms. In fact, there was considerable resistance to the idea that religious experience could be measured in the brain because believers worried that they might be told the whole thing was “in their heads,” possibly even pathological. We know that some ailments and tumors and brain deficits are accompanied by religious experience and no one wanted Joan of Arc’s bells reduced to tinnitis or Saint Theresa’s ecstasies identified as epilepsy.

And yet, as we become more and more able to find small structures in that blob of Jello that we call “the brain,” we become irrepressibly curious about what they can do and what difference they make if missing. A few days ago I Googled “brain”+ “religious experience” and got over 8,000 hits. Granted, some of them are redundant, but the essence of scientific investigation is repeatability and reflection. It appears that in order to keep order in my own brain-Jello, I’m going to have to learn a map of the brain.

So far, these are the suggested associations:
Posterior superior parietal lobule, or PSPL. (Part of the difficulty is learning the name of the structure, which is descriptive and then the acronym used by those “in the trade.”) Located “several centimeters to the side of crown of the head.” (Is this why monks shaved this area? Is this why men naturally go bald there? Is this why observant Jews wear yarmulkes? Should we call this the tonsure spot, the maturity spot or the observant spot?) It shuts down during meditation and prayer. This area seems to be involved in spatial cognition and differentiating “self” from “non-self.” Sort of oceanic, eh?

Then the parts of the temporal lobe which, when stimulated by “transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) may give a person mystical visions. Some experimenters can make it happen and others can’t. The idea comes from people who have epileptic (electrical) storms there and report visions. Given “lie detector” tests that record reactions, people with this form of epilepsy react more strongly to religious words.

What’s especially interesting to me is that though the actual stimulation was the same, what the experimental subjects reported was in terms of their own culture, so that though they might all feel that there was a presence in the room with them or that they were experiencing cosmic bliss, the person said it was God, Jesus, Buddha, or simply the wonder of the universe. When I did my chaplaincy on the neurology ward of Rockford Hospital, there was a man with a tumor in his brain who claimed confidently that every night God came to him in a ball of light and promised him healing and heaven. His brain surgeon was a former Jesuit and I think he half-believed it himself.

A drop in activity in the parietal lobe (the upper back of the brain which “aids in navigation and spatial orientation”) and an increase in the right prefrontal cortex (behind the forehead and involved in attention and planning among other things) is characteristic of the peak in meditation. (This also sounds like being “deeply under” during hypnotism.) One reaches it by concentrating on a thought or object. (Om!) Adepts describe it as “effortless concentration.” The same pattern was in Franciscan nuns as they prayed, reporting “closeness and mingling with God.” A decrease in activity in the frontal lobes, the whole front section of the brain, showed up in five women while they “spoke in tongues.” (Glossolalia.) The area, which is what is severed in a lobotomy, is about self-control and judgment.

Though it turns out that the nun subjects could not summon up the Holy Spirit while in that hammering donut hole of the fMRI, their strong memory of such an event affected six areas: the caudate nucleus (“a small central brain region to which scientists have ascribed a role in learning, memory and falling in love”); the insula (“a prune-size chunk of tissue tucked within the brain’s outermost layers that monitors body sensations and governs social emotions”); the inferior parietal lobe (spatial awaareness, which contradicts other findings); the medial orbitofrontal cortex (“which may weigh the pleasantness of the experience”); and the middle of the temporal lobe.

Multiple involvement of brain parts is in line with the observation that brain functions are produced by several gizmos in different places interacting -- not just a global Jello response nor a cell-by-cell computer-type code. (Reference reading: is this why book=religion to some?) If one gizmo, the equivalent of a distributor or magneto, weren’t working right, the brain would perceive something different from ordinary daily operations. We know that we’re only aware of ten percent of all the stuff that goes on in there and that part of what it does is to provide awareness, so any impairment -- being drunk or high or hypoglycemic -- might make you think you were doing just swell while in fact stumbling, weaving and seeing double. But religious experiences, such as produced by meditation, seem to make people more clear-headed, even-tempered, patient and focused. No wonder people pursue the state!

Incidentally, IMHO, what’s at stake in naming this field of endeavor is cultural categories. Neurophilosophy privileges the “neuro” or scientific part over the “philosophy” or love of knowledge part which is more a humanities angle. Neurotheology insists on the “theos” or God, the big preoccupation of the Abramic religions that dominate the Western world. “Spiritual neuroscience” uses the polite but fuzzy “spiritual” to escape formal religions, which often seems like a good idea but loses precision.

I acknowledge my debt to a Scientific American article on October 3, 2007, called “Searching for God in the Brain.” (Abramic title writers!) Now I’m going to go looking for more and more recent stuff, plus a current map of the brain.

NOM DE PLUME/NOM DE GUERRE/NOM D'AMOUR

Pinning down the exact identity and location of a person and/or creature and/or property seems to be as much a preoccupation of our age as taxonomy was in the 19th century, and maybe it’s related. What is your REAL name, they demand, and wizards who know the REAL names of things can control them.

But these seem preoccupations of Euro whites with Middle Eastern theist roots. Maybe it begins with God disguising himself as a burning bush (His first nom de plume being Jehovah when he wrote the Ten Commandments on stone tablets.) Or maybe it traces to the Graeco-Roman tricky gods, esp. Zeus who liked to present himself to the ladies as a bull, a swan, a shower of gold (I’m sure that was about money, not the other.) to tell them, “But of course I’ll respect you in the morning. Trust me!” At least humanity seems to have gotten a lot of good out of the mongrel crosses that resulted, all those heroes and constellations. Strangely, as much fooling around as Napi did, he seems never to have had children. Was he shooting blanks? Or were the People simply not so patriarch-focused, more concerned with Mom?

Plains Indians were “cool” about taking a new name whenever they felt changed, whether by an event or by moving to a new level of society membership, or maybe just in a new context. This drove to distraction all those missionaries and agents and sergeants trying to keep track of people and their origins so as to hand out commodities “fairly”, which is why I laughed out loud when it was announced that the Blackfeet tribe would be manufacturing the new “smart ID cards” that would have embedded electronic tricks to make sure no one pretended to be other than the official version. Blackfeet had the advantage as a tribe of ending up on both sides of the 49th parallel, so they stood in line for their moldy flour and wormy bacon from the Great White Father on this side, then traveled over to the Canadian side to see what the Queen had to offer.

Which also makes it a little ironic that Native Americans, often renamed by missionaries, sergeants and agents who couldn’t spell Native American languages (and sometimes didn’t spell English very well either) are the ones who go into war dance mode when someone purporting to be Indian writes a book or someone who is not Indian writes about supposedly “secret” and therefore privileged information. The cry is “Hey, I was gonna write that and get rich!” This is not unlike the movies everyone claims to have been stolen from the screenplay they were gonna sell some day.

Of course, in the Aquarian Age a lot of people changed their names, which might be the reason older, more traditional, white folks get mad about it, esp. when they are names like “Starshine Squirrel Nest.” They aren’t even too comfortable with a feminist name like “Mary Lucydotter” though that’s been the practice for many years in the Scandinaavian countries. It aggravates them that Asians might put “last names” (family names) first and “Christian” names last, not noticing that they might not be Christian. Then there are the models, porn stars, famous men, Middle Easterners and so on who only go by one name. How’s a person supposed to know where they came from? Or those Spaniards with ten names in a long string -- who can remember them?

Doubling back to Native American names, we probably ought to forgive the problems of some guy sitting at a rickety desk with a big ledger and a pen whittled out of a feather, trying desperately to understand what a toothless old woman with a blanket up over the bottom half of her face is saying her name is, much less wring a birth date out of her. The mistakes that guy made under the pressure of the moment have been compounded by the confusion between blood quantum and pedigree. Pedigree is the recorded parents of a person and is based on written records. Yes, like fancy animals. Records depend upon: a) writing, b) a place to keep the writing safe, c) an authority figure who is trustworthy about writing things down, d) a population small and interwoven enough to prevent people from (ahem) representing their daughter’s child as their own, e) a culture that cares about such things instead of other concerns like whether there is enough to eat.

Blood quantum canNOT tell who is an enrollable Indian or not. It MUST depend upon pedigree, recorded descent. The original idea was that only full-blood Indians would count as Indians because they were the point: people who were already on the land and entirely different from the invaders. Then there were so many half-bloods because of white men having babies with Indian women, that they were added. (Whose idea do you suppose that was?) Originally the argument was that Indians would simply die out due to intermarriage with white folks. Then quarter-blood (by pedigree) people were added. (Some controversy there within the tribes.) A precedent was in the handling of slave pedigrees which were also ownership records, so that the whites in that situation argued that the least fraction of African blood required that the person stay a slave. Owners wanted them black as possible, while slaves might want to be as white as possible so as to “pass” -- that is, pass out of slavery. (A death of the old life.)

Advertisers who say they can tell whether an individual’s blood marks them as Indian are not exactly lying, but they are exaggerating to the point of near-falsehood. They can only tell you whether you have alleles (little gene groups) consistent with one of the three main groups of Native Americans, but anyone COULD have those alleles and anyway, tribes were assortments of people in community with each other, not necessarily blood descendants of each other. Anyway, the affinities were more cultural than genetic. The two major leaders of the Blackfeet fullblood communities at the turn of the 19th century were Sanderville brothers who had a big quantum of Mexican blood. Mexican, of course, being one kind of NA mixed with Spanish.

But white people love the mystical idea of being related to Indians, now that they aren’t being murdered by cavalry anymore. Truthfully, the white people who came to this country the earliest are the most likely to have some Indian genes, often disguised as “French,” simply because the opportunities have been so many. If a genetic survey were taken of the North American population and all the Europeans with no Native American alleles were sent back to Europe, the way all the buffalo with cattle alleles are slaughtered, I wonder how many would have to leave. Ten per cent? Half?

What I’m sneaking up on is the enormous emotional reaction to authors, particularly memoirists, who claim they are Native American. This will be a thread for a while. Don’t hesitate to comment.

MONSTER MASH (UP)

The ultimate mash-up, which means compiling together a lot of “stuff” (code like writing) was probably the Bible, where bits were quoted together and sometimes edited by busy scribes getting as much stuff as possible onto one scroll. The results were called “the Old Testament,” or “the Apochrypha” or “the New Testament” or “the Gospels.” If you try reconciling the four “gospels” that were finally accepted by the committee that reviewed and sorted all this mish-mash, you’ll see that they are irreconcilable, thus came from different origins. Scholars can tell from clues when something different was shoehorned into a pre-existing document, so if you have access to a “rainbow” Bible in which the different sources are in different colors, the mozaic nature of the text becomes clear.

Today’s term, mash-up, comes from music in which music from different sources are mixed up together. I suppose one could even say that Paul Winter’s ecstatic combinations of instruments and animal sounds are essentially a “mash up.” It’s the old idea of the two things that combine to create a third thing. Thesis, antithesis, hypothesis. So “mash-up” is not essentially anything but a strategy.

A “screen scrape” is something a little different. In computer terms (I’m quoting stuff I just learned so if I blunder badly, forgive me), most mashups are putting together bits of computer program that might not even be readable by a human being. These are in the interest of analysis or synthesis -- new ways of looking at information. A “screen scrape” is when you take material meant for human eyes and combine it with something else.

Now consider some stuff that has nothing to do with computers but everything to do with lawsuits. An excellent Montana artist has painted an abstract, stylized version of a familiar Charlie Russell painting of a cowboy riding his horse into a saloon. The pleasure of it is seeing in one's mind at the same time the abstracted forms and tweaked colors while remembering the traditional representational version. Consider the satire of “Gone with the Wind” which is the whole novel retold through the eyes of Miss Scarlett’s black slave. Consider the practice of taking the characters of a pre-existing (usually wildly popular) work like “Star Wars” and telling stories about them that were not in the original work. These are not quite mashups. Whether they violate copyright law is controversial.

Copyright is about “intellectual property.” That there stuff is what comes out of a creative mind, which in our ownership society is considered to be as much your property as a physical product like, um , an egg or work you have done: spinning, say, or typing or chopping wood. However, if you did this work while under contract to someone else or simply while on their salary, you cannot claim it as your property. One of the edgier issues has been whether someone who takes your very cells out of your body -- say by removing a cancer or your spleen -- and then uses those cells in research until the cell-line becomes valuable owes you any money. At one point when I went for a pap smear, I was asked to sign a release in case any of the cervix-scrapings turned out to be worth money. The nurse confided that it was a worthless document because the issue is STILL not resolved. Our technology is way out ahead of our law.

But even in the old-fashioned world, back in the Sixties, Bob Scriver discovered that a mold maker and casting company could make illegal copies of his work and sell them while the copyright law only prevented the guy from preventing HIM from casting his own work. A lawyer managed to make the thieves stop. No recompense, just a bill from the lawyer.

But then we visited a major Western art institution where the staff artist sat in front of a casting of a Remington and made a copy in a different scale by eye-balling it, and this was considered legal. Today in Asia there are factories where clever artisans sit copying American sculptures from photos. People buy them because they’re cheap. Many have no "eye" so see no difference and others just don’t care. For a while one of the Cowboy Artists of America wives got the idea that photos of the paintings by their husbands should not be on the art auction websites because they got copied, but then no one could buy them via the Internet. How could the customers know what they were buying? Dilemmas.

When I first started out posting writing on listservs and blogs, everyone was worrying about other people “stealing your work,” esp. in the Native American community where they are constantly obsessed with the idea that they’ve been robbed. (Of course, they have.) But then it occurred to me that posting something constitutes proof of prior existence, which is the key to most copyrights, and also that there are search engines that can find the copies easily, even in the devious homework of some resourceful kid. Besides, I'm always moving on and there's no money in it anyway. I give up on both copyright and property.

Lacking a clear legal set of guidelines, the moral issues raised by mashing music (whether the composer intended it or appreciates it or not) or screen-scraping art have been enforced by dint of outcry. That is, a great hullabaloo by watchdogs who come close to being an American Taliban, always on the alert for incorrectness, whether political or not. (Actually, it’s ALL political. There is no escape.) So if you’re big enough to ignore them, you can just thumb your nose. If you’re small and maybe vulnerable in some other way, like maybe being stigmatized for hiding your true identity (like Jehovah pretending to be a burning bush or maybe Zeus in the form of a bull or swan or golden shower (Ooooo! Naughty!), then you’re going to get slapped with lawsuit threats.

Now if you want to talk about biological mashups, we can either go to tions and ligers, or chimeras which are creatures like mothers whose babies have left cells of their different genome in their bodies after the pregnancy or twins who are born as singletons because they absorbed the other guy at an early stage. Genomic mashups happen all the time with viruses. That's how AIDS came to be.

Maybe the Bible is not the ultimate mashup. Maybe it’s meiosis, the biological process that is the basis of evolution when two genomes entwine to create a new creature, like a person. I suppose that a birth certificate is a copyright for a mashup child. With entitlement comes obligation.

REZ DOGS/PYE DOGS

It’s well understood that the brain addresses reality through concepts it already has and that it is difficult to create new concepts except through new experiences. Much of science is a matter of devising ways to look at reality in new ways through experiment and statistical analysis to see whether subjective assumptions are right. Recently people have begun to look at the most subjective of our realities, our pets and, in particular, dogs with a cool eye.

Much of the motivation comes from the obvious atrocities of inbred “purebred” dogs that have resulted from 19th century assumptions, particularly the drive to make dogs the subjects of prestige and beauty contests. “Champion,” “with papers,” “not a mongrel” migrated over from the European entitlement class system to the genetics of these animals capable of unconditional love for humans. In the process the fancier breeds have become so twisted with so many painful afflictions that their shortened lives must be a misery.

Another part of the motivation comes from the need to understand pet overpopulation, the public acceptance of mass killing of dogs to get them off the streets. Or perhaps the specific elimination of a troublesome animal. Maybe you remember my earlier blog post about the Lady Princess, living under a trailer on the back of the block, producing ten black wiggly lovable pups, resourcefully eating cats when there was nothing else available. She acquired her name because “Petunia” and I were feeding her and to feed something is to claim it in some way, to take responsibility, and to feel affection for it. Indeed “Petunia” became quite attached to this big, mangy, feral bitch with the sweet face and huge ears. When the sheriff finally shot her, Petunia grieved hard. I felt it myself.

Breed? Some guessed golden lab/shepherd/Akita. That’s what I’d put on an impoundment card if I were still an animal control officer, though after a while in that role one learns that “breed” is a pretty tenuous concept. Lady Princess was a rez dog. This might be a new term to you unless you drive through a reservation. A rez dog, in my opinion, is not a “stray,” which implies that someone somewhere owns it and takes responsibility for it except that it has escaped restraint. Neither is a rez dog a true “feral” dog which is a dog that has been domesticated and then gone wild. Rather the term that comes closest is a pye dog, or a pariah dog, which is a dog that lives with a human community but is not a pet unless someone tries to domesticate it. Otherwise, it lives in that ecology the way a raccoon might or even the whitetail deer that have invaded many towns. On a rez several households may feed a dog, name it, be guarded by it, but no one takes responsibility for it in the way we expect pets to be licensed, vaccinated and possibly spayed or neutered.

The Lady Princess was found in a garage in deadly cold weather with two pups, one dead. She was bone-jangling thin. The household had a split domicile, partly on the rez and partly in Valier, and a LOT of kids. The little girls of the family begged for the salvation of the dog and pup and brought them to Valier for care. In fact, they still have the pup as an “owned” dog. But the Lady Princess was not spayed right away and soon came back into heat. The pack of male dogs in Valier (which is not supposed to exist since we have leash law) drove this female away from the family so that she began to look for burrows around town. There were enough feral and pet cats in town and enough pheasants and grouse in the surrounding wheat fields, that she was able to produce the ten-pack of pups, but lactating pushed her into being more and more bold until I looked out my back window to see her nearly nail Squibbie, my cat. This got my attention. Also, Valier is not a town that tolerates big dogs of unknown origins in their yards. Most people are grass-proud and do not have fences. And they keep their garbage tightly controlled.

The sheriff’s deputy as well as “Petunia,” and I began to work on the problem. At first we women could almost hook a finger under her collar (no tags) but when Petunia did that, the dog went crazy and threatened to bite. In the following weeks people yelled at the dog, threw things, chased her -- then no one could get near. We began to feed the pups as soon as they came toddling out, so eventually we could catch all of them but one. The original family took them back out to Heart Butte. I don’t even want to know. One pup was left, grew waddling fat, and was finally captured, going off in the back of a squad car, curled up on the seat. “I hope he don’t throw up,” said Petunia.

“Oh, the drunks do a lot worse back there,” said the deputy.

In the end the Lady Princess came back into heat, began to fight other dogs and scare people, and by that time she was scabby all over with mange. Mange among dogs and horses has been a sort of animal non-deadly smallpox on the prairies, killing mostly by leaving an animal hairless in a harsh climate. At various times mange plagues have triggered mass killings to try to eliminate it. There are terrifying historical descriptions of whole tribal horse herds gunned down while the people wailed. So the Lady Princess was eliminated. This is a country town. Most people are not sentimental.

I googled “pye dogs” and was startled to find that they have fan clubs and there are even efforts to declare them a “breed” in that stubborn insistence to force reality into human-defined categories. In India there are efforts to capture, sterilize, vaccinate and return them to the street, in the same way that groups hereabouts are treating populations of feral cats.

Rez dogs, pye dogs, call for a whole new way of looking at animals that we think of as “domestic,” meaning “owned.” Our most overriding category is always “property.” The idea is to assign ownership to every creature and kill or exclude the rest of them, rather like the Dawes Act divvying up the prairie, assigning plots and taking the rest. That’s far-fetched, but not by much. The next step is "my dog is better than your dog -- therefore I am also better than you!"

Rez dogs are a survival of the wild pre-white prairie and nomadic settlements. Once again I recommend the “Rez Dogs” video produced by Robert Hall. www.reznetnews.org/multimedia/video/rez-dogs (Not to be confused with Ironman Mitchell’s vigorous comedy/mocumentaries.) The video explains how dogs are woven into tribal life historically, mythically, and practically. One of their themes is that the dogs are so much a part of the lives of the street people that they might be reincarnations of dead winoes. Another is that rez dogs take responsibility for themselves, rustling for food, finding niches for sleep or warm walls for sunning. They are like a parallel and interwoven tribe with its own rules and ordering principles.

It made a major impression on me that when all the dogs actually WERE eliminated from the streets of one of the small rez towns, the bears and cougars felt free to prowl all night. Ecological niches are always filled by something. I have a friend who suggests that getting rid of all the deer in town is simply a matter of suspending the leash law.

I try to be anti-romantic and not overly idealistic. Rez dogs, pye dogs, may have a lot to teach us about our need to impose ownership and neatness on the world. And what about this: is there such a thing as “pye people” who live like pye dogs all through our human settlements, not belonging, living off our leftovers?

ANOTHER MILLION DOLLAR INDIAN ARTIFACT COLLECTION: DAVID HUMPHREYS MILLER

I was interested in the Great Falls Tribune Sunday story (8-31-08) about the proposed acquisition of the David Humphreys Miller collection. Actually, they say it's worth 1.4 million. (Inflation, you know.) With the Miller collection in mind, let’s take a look at what makes collections of Indian artifacts (and portraits) valuable.

First of all, let’s be blunt. Indian artifacts were often the trophies of the wars that cleared the prairies for white development. A scalp, a quiver, a shield, guns and bows and so on might have been actually collected off the field the way my uncle acquired Herman Goering’s tableware and stationary after WWII. This collection is in part made valuable by its connection to the Battle of the Little Big Horn or the Battle of the Greasy Grass or Custer’s Last Stand. Naming rights to the event is part of the dynamics.

Second, Indian artifacts were often sold because the People were pressed into need by the loss of their former economy and the graft of the US government, from agents to railroaders, who constantly skimmed tribal wealth. (One might accompany this point with the CMR portrait of the Indian mother selling a buffalo horn hat rack, trudging down the sidewalk in front of an elegantly porched Great Falls house where a prosperous but oblivious white woman rocks her child.)

Third, Indian artifacts are based on the 19th century assumption that Indians were doomed as a separate people, that the death of their previous culture would mean NO culture at all, so they would stop existing. The idea is that we killed them, but we saved their good stuff as curiosities or maybe “works of art” or for a veneer of scientific research.

Fourth, religious artifacts are laden with the “magic” quality that many attribute to the American Indian of the 19th century and that contemporary Indians use to accrue value and status to themselves. But it’s my understanding that the value and status of ceremonial objects and their allocation to the stewardship of individuals, though they were connected to prosperity (both bringing it and necessitating it for the expensive performance of the ceremonies) actually belonged to the tribe itself. That is, the elders of the tribe determined worthiness to manage ceremonies, because the "magic" affected the welfare of the whole.

Yet this is problematic because the “tribe” was an assemblage of independent bands whose leadership shifted according to the task at hand so as to put capable people in charge. There was no “tribe” as a whole until the US Government began to impose the requirement so as to have a coherent entity with which to deal, who could sign treaties in the European manner. Many problems have been created by their failure to recognize that in the best of times (even now) the bands never universally assented to decisions. The tribe’s most powerful portion, not necessarily a majority, is associated with a lot of small groups who go along only if they must and often with a great deal of noisy objection. If two factions are about evenly matched -- well, watch the newspaper.

Even in the case of Lyle Heavyrunner, who is a good man and a capable leader (as well as posing for one of the buffalo hunters in Bob Scriver’s major bronze called “Real Meat”), is only a member of one branch of the Eagle Calf (John Ground) family and the branches are not unanimous among themselves. Add the complication of several different tribes intermarrying and interacting (or parts of tribes since no two tribes merged -- certainly not traditional enemies like the Sioux and Blackfeet) and the fact that some of these artifacts (Black Elk’s) possibly represent a synergy with Christianity, and entitlement becomes very cloudy.

Sioux are not a prominent tribe of Montana, are they? Aren’t they a South Dakota-based tribe these days? Or maybe Hollywood-based? (The pattern has been that Sioux play the parts and Blackfeet do the dangerous stunts and provide the horses.) Are the Sioux willing to let these materials stay in Montana or are they going to come over and claim them back the way the Blackfeet went up to Edmonton and demanded back the materials Bob Scriver sold up there?

As long as we’re talking about the Scriver artifact collection (which included a gun collection and a RCMP uniform collection), it should be noted that the materials defined as “Sacred Bundles” soon left the Royal Alberta Museum as “loans” to the Blackfoot groups in Alberta and possibly a sale to a Montana Blackfeet person. Also, Scriver artifact materials that were NOT in the sale to the RAM, were impounded at the border when they were sent north by Lorraine Scriver and/or returned to Lorraine Scriver by the RAM curator. They were left for safekeeping at the Montana Historical Society, but impounded by Fish & Game, and went from there back to individuals in the Blackfeet Tribe not representing the tribe as a whole, who has no suitable secure repository anyway.

The Museum of the Plains Indian remains the property of the US Government, who has tried to give it to the tribe, who will not accept it because they also want enough money to maintain the Museum. As standards for museums keep rising -- climate control, access, insurance -- and because the Museum is built on a flood plain (like much of Browning), this is problematic. The damage from the 1964 flood, which destroyed much valuable material plus damaging the foundation, has never been repaired. (This was a war-time no-frills build financed by the Crafts Association of the US Government and the Lions Clubs of America.) The bottom line is whether the university system is capable of guarding and preserving the Miller collection.

The nature of institutions is that they have very weak memories, especially since the people with expertise often come from elsewhere and don’t know the local history and culture. Institutions are political animals and if anyone thinks that the “white” population of Montana is less divided than the historical and present Indian population, they haven’t been paying attention. In an era when institutions are never properly funded -- partly because of so many competing needs like poverty, crop failure, wildfire, and weather disasters and partly because of resistance to taxes and regulation -- institutions are far more tempted than usual to deaccession materials to fund salaries and maintenance. It has been a scandal everywhere.

In this Miller case, the anonymity of the selling party, masked behind representatives, is traditional. It is unclear how the legal owners acquired the collection. Also unclear is how much compensation those representatives are expecting: the honor of it all? Friendship? A percentage? It also worries me that the appraiser is nameless: he could be anyone, maybe the present Museum Services Manager of the Montana Historical Society, an expert on Native American materials who was let go from the Portland Art Museum. (The reason for parting was temperament, not irregularities with his work.) Appraisers are normally paid, sometimes a percentage of the value of what they are appraising, a practice that probably needs to be rethought.

Another factor is the copyright issue in regards to such materials as Miller’s 1957 book: “Custer’s Fall: the Indian Side of the Story.” The law has been changed so much in the past few years, sometimes with retroactive inclusions, that an expert would be needed to confirm that indeed the materials were still under copyright rather than public domain. (Someone is recasting Scriver bronzes copyrighted in the Fifties, I assume because they think they are public domain.) Beyond that, copyright rests on the absence of challenges from the persons who are rightfully entitled to the materials. Who would try to declare standing in the case of Miller’s writing and photographs? Does he have descendants? Why are they not identified?

My last point is a bit of a niggle, but I’m going to put it in just the same. Adolph Hungry Wolf (some people will quit reading at this point) personally and at his own expense, both money and effort over decades, has published a four-book compendium of photos and documents specifically about the South Piegan Blackfeet in every aspect. Anyone can buy it for $400 and have a lot more on hand than the Miller collection.

Unless one is looking for war trophies. Maybe the wars have continued, but more subtly than just killing an enemy outright. Oh, and since it seems to have dropped out of institutional memory, Bob Scriver played an important part in the Exalted Ruler effort by creating a small bronze that was sold in large numbers.

THREE WORDS: UNITY, CONSCIENCE, MEANING

In order to write to write coherently about worship/ceremony/liturgy across the category lines of religion, I am concentrating in part on the characteristics of the ecology in which the cultural religious concepts were formed and in part on the management of consciousness in the individual mind as it goes from the profane to the sacred. This is a new way of thinking that wasn’t available when I was in seminary because ecology itself wasn’t so well understood and the research through fMRIs hadn’t been done yet. So, much of the thinking was through personal reflection in that person’s own culture. Though it was self-serving, that seemed inescapable.

There is another dimension, which is just what this management of consciousness was supposed to “do” anyway. Compel conformity? Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable? Give us a rest or even renewal? Impress us with the power of the officiant? Earn you a scouting badge?

I pick up really great ideas from strange places, one of them being book reviews and advertisements for books. (Saves the time involved in reading the whole book!) I found three words in the Daedalus (book remainder house) squib for a book commenting on the Gettysburg Address. “The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows,” by Gabor Boritt. [Daedalus is at www.salebooks.com or 800-395-2665. I’ll take my 10% cut in books please. ;-) ]

So let’s see what these three words, which I’m sure were carefully chosen (by Ken Burns), not thrown together, and see what they can suggest to liturgy, church services. The three words are UNITY, CONSCIENCE, and MEANING. Let’s say good liturgy has all three of these characteristics.

UNITY in liturgy has meant the cohesion of the faith community held together by its common goals and usually a kind of social cohesion that comes from being educated similarly, having the same income level, speaking the same language (like English), and taking for granted certain things about how life really “is”.

There are two kinds of congregations in the Christian tradition. One is the parish, which is based on territory and means that everyone within a certain area belongs to that district’s church. In the USA the only systems like that now are schools and voting districts, political areas. The Catholic church once was like this, but the system requires that everyone belong to the same basic religion (as it was in medieval Europe) and, often, that they don’t even realize there are alternatives or are prevented by law from seeking them out, like early Protestants or in the USA early Quakers, except by leaving. The strength of this idea is that the priest becomes invested in the well-being of the greater whole: even the heretic is his business. Even the impoverished. Even the diseased. You couldn’t just exclude people you didn’t like. (If they were really awful, you could burn them at the stake.) Some of the early frontier Protestant ethnic congregations, separated from the larger world by speaking a different language and preferring different food and clothing, became parish congregations. Maybe Hutterites are a little bit like that now, albeit their parish is only the size of their colony.

Protestantism resulted in the “gathered” congregation, where people who were like each other in some compelling way, maybe in their belief in a major idea like “following the light” (Quakers) or freedom of thought (Unitarians) or universal forgiveness (Universalists), came together -- but they went to this church on their own, out of choice, and could exclude others. In a city where there is enough population density, like seeks like (Black with Black, Greek with Greek, gays with gays). Also, a congregation, regardless of denomination, may form around the personality of a minister.

The trouble with a “gathered” congregation is that it may include people looking for something but who are inclined to keep looking. Or who are simply -- in the USA -- always on the move. This led the Alban Institute to suggest that a congregation is no longer a group that comes in and sits down in the church together, but more like a “passing parade” where people join the march, carry the flag a while, then take a different direction. The UNITY of such a group can be fragile, particularly when the larger culture -- which is quickly becoming a global culture -- is morphing so rapidly that a major and worthy idea may simply collapse. What does universal salvation mean when no one believes in hell anymore? What holds a Finnish Lutheran congregation together if no one speaks Finn anymore? What do you do when “Christian” means minority?

CONSCIENCE is one of the most unmanagable parts of religion, because there are such different ways to internalize what we must do to be saved. The Old Testament depended upon rules. The New Testament is supposed to depend on principles, mostly those of love for one another. Not so long ago, we went to “situational ethics” in an attempt to figure out what to do if neither rules nor principles really works for an individual. Now that our understanding of conception, gestation, birth and marriage have all been so thoroughly changed, how do we blunder through the production and sheltering of children? But the truth is that we learned as little children a certain “way” and this is what feels “right.” Hard to change.

And how do we do the right thing when so much with devastating consequences happens where society can not get at it: international corporations with more power than the United Nations. We make legal rules but they’re easily undercut by simply not enforcing them or funding their enforcement or moving the headquarters offshore. What do we do about African chaos and starvation? Our attempts to suppress drug use, like our earlier attempts to suppress alcohol use, have simply created a whole separate underculture where the ethic is quite different than ours.

The people who can step out of this underculture generally do it only through religion, something to believe in. This is what people mean when they say that the pen is mightier than the sword: they do NOT mean that writing laws can stop wars. They DO mean that a huge magnetic idea can pull everyone together and overwhelm individual advantage or hopelessness.

Then MEANING. People who do not want to go on say that life has become meaningless. People may have had a bad goal, like getting rich, salvation by prosperity. Oh, how that grips our country and is fanned by advertising! Religious liturgy ought to give life gravitas, significance, worthy goals. If it can confirm what’s already motivating people, great. If it can call them to a greater purpose or restore lost meaning, that’s truly inspiring, breathing hope into them.

You can use these three words, UNITY, CONSCIENCE, and MEANING to test political rhetoric. As Abe Lincoln knew, sometimes politics and religion are marching together in the passing parade. When it happens, it’s mighty powerful, a true Grace. That’s when a few well-chosen words, like the Gettysburg Address becomes a liturgy, an act that binds us together.

WE LIKE 'EM TOUGH: Scotty Zion

Yesterday I was in Great Falls for an early-in-the-day eye exam, so I dropped by the faux Starbucks in Barnes & Noble in the middle of the morning. There was Scotty Zion, starting another book, though his daughter, Candy, has said she’s not up to formatting a fourth one. Well, she’s young. Scotty is over ninety now though he had a stroke last spring (he’s about recovered) those old guys just don’t know how to stop.

I’ll give you a little sample of his writing, so you can see why I like Scotty. (One reason is that I know he won’t sue me for doing it!) in his books are lots of photos, but I’ll stick to the covers. This is a good subject for writers: PENS.

“I just got a new writing pen. A nice fat one that fits in my big mitt pretty good. A drive-up bank teller was nice enough to give it to me. It’s sure a lot better than the pens I grew up with with the self-fed on ink.

“Now, the pens we had in the old Zion School were all equipped with a slightly upturned point made of steel and split down the middle from a hole a quarter inch up from the point. You dipped the point into your inkwell, which was an inch deep, and one and one-half inches across, with a hinged lid. The teacher kept a bottle of about a quart capacity on her desk to fill the inkwells as needed. I remember when the weather turned cold, inkwells, bottles of ink, drinking wataer, along with everything thing else, frozen up. Probably because the coal fire left at the end of the day wasn’t usually tended until rekindled next morning.

“Those of us who were lucky enough to have a longhaired girl in the seat ahead of us discovered that little girl’s hair soaks up quite a bit of ink, especially if their hair was braided. The trick was to dip their braids without getting caught by the teacher or the victim. At least not immediately.

“The old-time pens were pretty useful for things other than writing, too. They made great spears to throw and stuck in almost anything, including children’s butts! I can just imagine in later years one of those kid’s spouses asking, “Honey, how did you get that little blue spot on your ass?”

What makes this good is the specificity, the measurements and the timespan both remembered and imagined. Here’s another couple of paragraphs from a later page:

“Ever wonder why the farmers in the early days sat on a stool that did not have two, three, or four legs, but rather one? Well, the answer is simple. Much of the milking was done in the corral which, of course, wasn’t very level or suited for more than one leg.

“That meant you had to hold the milk bucket between your legs, and by holding onto the cow’s tits, balance yourself and pull at the same time. There was always a certain amount of squeezing involved to get the squirt of milk to come. As kids grew older and more adept at milking, some of the squirts ended up in the gaping mouths of cats that surrounded the milking site. That is, until the nearby parent heard the squirting sound in the pail stop and instead yelled, “Forrest! In the bucket, not in the cat!”

He describes a few disasters, then says, “Boy when I grew up I found that moving houses was a lot easier than milking a bunch of wild cows by hand!” Alongside a few other little projects, Scottie built and moved a whole lot of buildings around North Central Montana. In fact, his brother Bob built my back garage and so-called bunkhouse in 1964 for the crew rebuilding Swift Dam, but I forgot to ask whether he moved them down here after the rebuilding was finished. The original dam is the one in Ivan Doig’s book, “The Whistling Season.” Until a few years ago, most people knew each other and the history of their buildings as well. Now a lot of buildings don’t seem to have histories. They were just built a short while ago.

But the mountains stay and the back cover of this book shows Scottie and his daughter Candy, with their faithful dog “Arm rest.” (I forget his real name, but he’s a Kelpie, a working dog.) This view is about twenty miles directly west of me, where Scotty grew up near Choteau. That’s A.B. Guthrie, Jr.’s Ear Mountain over Scotty’s left shoulder. You have to include the “junior” when you talk to Scottie, or call him “Bud,” because Scottie remembers the “senior.”

Scottie is looking Mr. Death in the eye now, like Max Van Sydow (whom he resembles) playing chess with the Grim Reaper in "The Seventh Seal," and he figures he and his wife’s mingled ashes will become part of this landscape. Mine, too, wind willing. This little “butte” where the three are sitting has dino bones embedded in it and probably if you looked, you’d find evidence of Indian burials.

Gettin’ old ain’t easy, but the hard part int decidin' where to be scattered. It’s witnessing as the others slip away and the life across the country changes both for better and worse. Neither Scotty’s nor my books are for sale in Barnes & Noble, which is managed from Manhattan by a corporation boss. (My theory is that they’re thinning out the local books because they’re getting ready to bail out of Great Falls.) But we both carry copies of our books in our pickups, so we fetched them and exchanged money. I came up short by a dollar, which I’ll mail to Scottie along with a print-out of this blog. I guess neither of us ever imagined a coffee shop in a bookstore, but we ain’t above enjoyin’ it while it lasts.

If you want a copy of this book or the two earlier ones, “Been Any Bigger, I’d Have Said So!” or “Piece of Cake, Scotty, Piece of Cake”, contact Scotty Zion at 460 McIver Road, Great Falls, MT, 59404. 406-454-3394. He don’t do Internet. When I gave him my bookmark, he carefully tore off the little stub with my mailing address and put it in his pocket, but threw the rest with the blog url’s away. But if I showed him some of my actually printed Lulu.com Blackfeet books, he’d whip out his money. If he wants me to, I’ll format his #4 book and get it onto Lulu.

THREE RELATED WOMEN

A F250 four-wheel-drive diesel crew cab pickup towing a huge horse trailer pulls up in front of my house. They do it all the time, but for once I know the driver -- my niece! Well, I mean, I’ve never met her before, but I’d know she was my niece no matter what she was driving the way I’d know my brother, her father, if he rose from the dead and walked into the room. She came with her mom, also a first meeting. Such events can be a little tense and I’d worried that they might feel sleeping in my dubious “bunkhouse” would be just a little too much of an adventure, but their plan for the previous night had been to sleep in the horse trailer, so I needn’t have worried. (They were transporting llamas rather than horses, so that did make such a choice a little less problematic.)

The three of us turned out to have a whole lot in common and why wouldn’t we? Genetically, culturally, ethnically, and every other way but age, we weren’t that different. I’m almost seventy, Adrienne is twenty-seven, and her mother Susan is fifty-five. All of us are artsy, all of us read, all of us love animals, all of us can drive a stick-shift pickup, though I’ve never driven a four-wheel drive. I’m the shortest, too. They’re five-nine with feet like Jackie Onassis -- long. I’m only five-six-and-a-half, probably shorter by now, but my feet are longer than the size seven-and-a-halfs they started out. Wider, too.

We’re emotional but not demonstrative. Adrienne and I like boundaries and Susan likes to take care of people and things. We’re all three both romantic and idealistic, which can be problematic when the principles don’t match up. I mean, we’re people who expect a lot and attempt a lot.

I’ve always made my living by being on a salary until now. Adrienne is a modern hunter/gatherer who does artificial insemination on cows, shears llamas and alpacas, runs county fairs, and works in a biological research lab while she continues towards a Ph.D. in Animal Studies or something like that. Her mother was a graphic artist, then bought a ranch and raises llamas and sheep, but lately her ram got “rambunctious” and bashed her headlong into a wall. This came too soon after a couple of fractious llamas ricocheted her head off the inside of the trailer. Since my brother’s life was tragically (Is that too strong? I think not.) altered by a head blow in a fall, this makes us nervous. (It’s not what killed him -- he died of a heart attack years later.)

We had a lot of discovery to do, as they say. Time-lines and old photos and genealogy charts and speculation about patterns. Susan accurately noted that I have the same mild paranoiac assumptions that started out mild in my brother and became full-blown wild tales in the next ten years post-concussion, his convictions about conspiracies preventing him from getting both medical treatment and welfare support, because as soon as they started filling out paperwork and asking questions, he imagined they were up to no good and announced he was in the secret employ of the CIA assigned to check up on them. Once, they were ready to arrest him for impersonating an officer, but he stormed out.

Adrienne and I have the same nose and she has her father’s unibrow, which turns out very nicely when properly plucked. A sort of Brooke Shields effect. (I have a few four-inch hairs in mine which hide when I get out the scissors.) She has Paul’s fair skin, which flushes even rosier than mine, which is more ivory. We sat there looking at each other and analyzing. Adrienne has more booty that either me or her mother. We're bosomy babes. Hair is a continuum: my white scrazzly thin stuff, Susan’s elegant straight gray bob, and Adrienne’s titian riot, enough to make Anne of Green Gables turn, well, green.

We counted up the closed-skull head traumas: too many -- and years ago no one realized what they were. We just thought people were being ornery. It’s only now that the Iraq veterans are beginning to tell their stories that we know to even think of it. We talked about terrible burns and foreign expeditions and menopause.

Then we changed gears to tell funny stories and Crackers came to walk around looking at everyone in case they had a can-opener in their pocket. Finally the cat zeroed in on me and mentioned in a little voice that no one had FED her for quite a while! Squibbie failed to come in until everyone was tucked in asleep. Adrienne showed me two cartoons on YouTube of cats taking desperate measures to get fed -- both involved baseball bats. (Put in stuff like "cat food" + "cartoon" to find them.)

We went through the old family albums from back in the days when my father was a wool-buyer for Oregon Wool Growers and took many a snapshot of sheep and sheepdogs and sheepherders. Susan and Adrienne lit up like Christmas trees, admiring the photos, so I pulled them out of their little black corners and gave them over. That neatly solves one of MY problems: what to do with this careful archive that doesn’t interest anyone anymore -- or so I had thought.

When it was time to get back on the road, out came the cell phones. My old eMac fired up and messages began to fly around. A guy with a mule wanted a ride for the two of them from Columbia Falls to Corvallis, the same route Adrienne was taking. She voted for picking up the unknown guy and his unknown mule. Her mother was opposed. I stayed out of it. David, dad and husband, was expecting them for a family reunion. Many opinions, much information. Check the weather. What about a motel? Are you sure that’s the right mileage? Is this cheese too old to take back on the road? Where to buy ice?

Way back at the beginning of time, the Pinkerton girls (my mother and her sisters who are Adrienne’s grandmother and great-aunts) took a road trip to the beach and up to Washington. They stayed in cabins so primitive that they looked just like my bunkhouse and didn’t even have beds, so it was like sleeping in a horse trailer. There were more of those women: seven. The end result was a photo album I still have. Family, especially for women, is a kind of warrant for adventure. Can’t know what to expect, bound to make discoveries, and relying on the enormous comfort of female relatives.