MONTANA'S GROUNDHOG: THE MARMOT

The February Thaw is almost as famous as the Chinook Wind and maybe they are close to the same thing.  Calves here are scheduled in February.  Evolution has scheduled the ground squirrels for a little amorous romping about the same time, because then they go back to the burrow to gestate (six more weeks of winter).  Right about now I begin to long for Ground Hog’s Day.  It’s only a couple of weeks away and one likes to be prepared for holidays.

The Montana Groundhog is the marmot.  In fact, all groundhogs are marmots but not all marmots are groundhogs.  The Montana marmots are not woodchucks, but rock chucks.  That means the sport of digging them up with the assistance of terriers is not really possible.  What one needs is the assistance of grizzly bears capable of rolling away boulders at high altitudes where marmots hang out.

A little googling turned up two useful scraps.  One is a song:  “Oh Murmeltier,” which is sung to the tune of “Oh, Tannenbaum,”  (Murmeltier is German for marmot.)  Slang for a marmot around here is “whistle pig” because they are fat little fellows who communicate by making a piercing sound that carries well at high altitudes.  So if you wanted to sing this song in Montana, I would recommend you use the following lyrics, with a nod to Prof. K.B. Armitage who composed most of them.:

Oh Whistlepig, oh Whistlepig,

We celebrate your famous day.

Oh Whistlepig, to you we pray

That winter soon will go away.

We like the sun and daffodils.

We’ve had too much of winter’s chills.

Oh marmot friend, we’re warning you,

If winter stays, you’ll be rock chuck stew!

In case you don’t have a recipe for “Country-Style Rock Chuck Stew,” here you are.

First, catch a marmot.  Clean and skin as soon as possible.  Remove all scent glands, including the small sacs in the back and under the forearm.   Cut off head, feet, and tail.  Cure in cool place by suspending from hook approximately four days.  Soak overnight in salted water to remove wild flavor.    Dredge cut up pieces in flour, salt, pepper and soda, rubbing in well.  Brown in hot oil in skillet, sprinkle with 1/2 teaspoon of sugar.  Reduce heat, add a half cup of water.  Cover and simmer for about thirty minutes or until tender.  Remove cover, cook for ten minutes longer.

Do not cook any of the weather predicting marmots:  Punxsutawney Phil, Beauregard Lee, or Wiarton Willie.  (The last is albino, so you’re not likely to eat him by mistake.)  There are fourteen species of marmot but the Vancouver Island Marmots is one of the most endangered species in the world, so don’t eat them either.  A camera is a good idea since they are quite handsome:  Chocolate brown with a white spot on the chest.  www.marmot.org

Montana whistle pigs, AKA yellow-bellied marmots, are not endangered but why eat them?  They’re cheerful and funny and live where the mountain scenery is most magnificent.  Just watch for bears.

In Pakistan where some soil is gold-bearing, it’s smart to check the chucked-out dirt of burrows in case some little nuggets came along.  As long ago as Herodotus this has been a practice.  Mongolians, a practical sort not unlike Montanans, hunt marmots for food and wear bunny-ears to disguise themselves so they can get close.  More artistic hunters “do a special dance and twirl a yak-tail to catch rodent attention", sort of like flagging pronghorns to make them curious.   In the Alps to cure rheumatism one rubs on rendered marmot fat.

Though marmots could give a person a nasty bite, the real danger (as with many animals) is their fleas which in central Asia still carry the plague that decimated Europe.  You can catch plague as well as analogues on the American prairies, like Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.  (A prairie dog is not in the genus Marmota, but in Cynomys.  I have no idea what that implies.)   These afflictions are more curable today.  Marmot plague (which often afflicts lungs) is spread by coughing.  Do not let a marmot cough on you.

The marmotiers, who are numerous enough to form societies and hold conventions, propose the question of what to do with an orphaned marmot.  The first question that occurs to me is how to tell whether it’s an orphan unless it’s huddled next to the body of its mother’s carcass.  (Marmots like the big rocks piled at the ends of highway bridges and that puts them in harm’s way.)  Next, consider the law in your state.  You will probably need a state and federal wildlife rehabilitation license if you think you’re going to try to save the baby.  Anyway, an established wildlife rehabber can be a big help.  

Those who are experienced say that if the baby has fur and its eyes are fully open, its chances are good.  Check for teeth.  If it still needs milk, we always did pretty well raising ground squirrels (close relatives) on condensed milk thinned with water, sweetened with Karo syrup, and fortified with liquid baby vitamins.  Goat milk is supposed to be better than cow milk.  Big pet stores sometimes have kitten formula, though I’ve never figured out how they milk a cat.  There’s such a thing as “rodent chow.”  Strangely, some marmots like to drink water and some don’t.  No one knows why.

Like all ground animals, marmots can come loaded with mites and fleas.  My advice (from experience) is to take the animal into the shower WITH you and lather you both simultaneously with baby shampoo.  Otherwise the arthropods use your arms for a highway.

People DO keep marmots for pets with varied success.  One family reported that if they go off on vacation, their little whistle pig goes “into torpor” meaning hibernation.  Too bad it doesn’t work with human children.  But if winter strikes and your marmot seems to have died in your sock drawer, it’s probably just hibernating.  A few people say that their marmot toilet-trained itself. (Likewise, some humans.)

UNHAPPY FAMILIES

“Running with Scissors” and “The Squid and the Whale” have very similar set-ups and not that dissimilar outcomes but they are radically different.  I think the diff is in tone, style, point of view, and all the other things that are really tough to teach kids.  These movies are a little too racy to use in high school which is kind of a shame, because that’s the age level of the actual concerns:  how to survive adults, esp. your parents, esp. a certain kind of father in a particular kind of modern society.

“Running with Scissors” is frank about insanity.  (Maybe obsessive.)  The true patriarch in this script is a quack shrink who displaces the mother by taking the boy protagonist into his circus of a household.  It’s adapted from a semi-alleged autobiography (it was and then after a lawsuit it wasn’t), a contender in the big memoir carnival that in this case depends on crayoned outrageousness to mock pop psychology.  Not that it’s much of a challenge, but the Three Stooges scenarios last too long and don’t carry enough edge to do the job.  Leaving up a Christmas tree for months and looking for signs of messages from God in one’s bowel movements are both too banal to be funny.  But then, this whole genre of  hyper-comedy is one that I despise.  I took the book back to the library after a couple of chapters.

“The Squid and the Whale” is quite different.  This is what one might call “subconscious” memoir.  Helpfully, there is an interview on the DVD and the interviewer is Philip Lopate, a wise arbiter and practitioner of memoir.  He knows Baumbach’s family, who are also literati in Manhattan/Brooklyn.    Good thing, because Noah Baumbach is almost totally incoherent in the interview.  But the men agree that this movie is so many layers of reworking away from the original family that it would be useless to think one could get facts from it.  This time the father is the crux of the conflict, whether squid or whale.  Can’t win, can’t let go.  (The reference is to a huge suspended diorama in the local natural history museum.  In Montana the two combatants would be a grizzly and a cougar.  Among the French Animaliers, they would be antelope and tiger.  In the human context they are man and wife, or perhaps father and son.)

The movie itself is far from incoherent nor is it grim, though it’s unhappy.  Scenes are very short, snapshots.  People are unique but not unreal.  It’s a little odd that Alec Baldwin, who plays the alcohol-stunned and soon-dropped father in “Running with Scissors,” and William Baldwin, who plays the tennis pro hunk who comforts the mom in “Squid and Whale,” are brothers.  I assume just coincidence.  Particularly “Squid and Whale” is an Indie low-budget pic made by a circle of high-powered people who all know each other, most of them based in that location.  It’s odd that I know some second/third-circle people: Baumbach’s now ex-wife is the daughter of a good friend of one of my good friends and so on.  I’m a little outside the insiders because of my undergrad degree at Northwestern where the acting program was stellar, more Broadway-based than Hollywood.  

The culture depicted in this film is one that I know from the academic world but also as a UU minister.  It is not much exaggerated.  Men like this, narcissistic to the very edge of psychosis, abound in those environs -- either because they migrate there or because they are created by the context.  Lopate remarks that all writers are monsters to some degree: abusers and neglecters who legitimize themselves by claiming to be brilliant.  The trouble with brilliance as a writer is that it is capriciously defined by shifting culture and has little connection to financial success.  

When the feminists come in, the smart-alec culture cynics go out.  (How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?  Just one, and that’s not funny.)  This is clear in both movies, though the feminism in “Running with Scissors” is deranged.  Both movies agree that female intellectual wives are dowdy, dressing almost like Mormon wives, but at least Baumbach lets his “mom” have a lover.  Knowing Laura Linney, we guess he’s a happy one.  Anyone who gets close to the Annette Benning version or the Jill Clayburgh version is doomed.  All three roles depend heavily on the “aura” of the actress.  Watching Clayburgh is almost unbearable when we remember her in “An Unmarried Woman,” joyfully struggling with a huge painting as she negotiates the windy streets of Manhattan.  It’s a little alarming to see these beautiful women looking so haggard.

Of course, breaking up with Alan Bates is QUITE a different matter than losing interest in Jeff Daniels, who has played these roles so much that some of us despise him on sight.  I hope that’s not his true nature showing through.

The real value of “The Squid and the Whale” is in watching the two sons trying to cope, one just ending adolescence and the other just beginning.  The older tries hard to wear the shell of intellectual judgment while sneaking out enough for girls to try to mother him through sex.  The younger is still at the liquid level: swilling booze and smearing semen -- the magical power of the forbidden substance.  He can still accept actual mothering, but his mother is pulling away, feeling that her job is done and now it’s time for her own life again.  The older son interprets this as wanton betrayal, becoming the little puritan as he condemns her affairs.  I would have liked to have known more about the role of the family cat.

The core problem addressed in these movies is filtered through the people who made them.  “Running with Scissors” is accessible to rural high school culture because it is outrageous but I don’t know what they get out it of beyond the idea that other people are all nuts.  I’m not sure they don’t think it’s more real than it is.  But maybe I’m the one who underestimates how loony it can get “out there.”   To pick up on much of “The Squid and the Whale” you need to know the city and the university.  When those types show up around here -- and they do try to take refuge in what they imagine is a “lesser” and therefore more safe place -- they don’t stay long.

I wonder whether the Valier library has an Philip Lopate books.  Probably not.  

THEY WON'T EVEN LEAVE THE SKIES ALONE! IS NOTHING SACRED?

For the past weeks the temp here has been consistently zero fahrenheit, a little above/a little below.  We’re in the crosshairs of two weather forces: cold cells that come down from the north pole (the geographical one -- they are saying that the magnetic north pole is moving into Russia now, enough of a change to perturb guidance directional systems that are based on compasses) and the jet stream that roars across the continent from the Pacific Coast, always west to east but moving its “stream bed” north in summer and south in winter.  The edge between the two systems rakes back and forth over the land, controlling drought and blizzard, bumper crop and green-tomato years, human comfort and even human death.  It appears that the Farmer’s Almanac, a kind of Bible, has nailed the forecast: cold, deep snow, lasting late into spring.  The climatologists call it an El Nino Year when this specific pattern of weather temperature appears in the southern Pacific Ocean.

They call it El Nino because it happens at about Christmas:  they mean the infant Jesus.    It’s an intrusion of religion into science.  When the reverse pattern appears, scientists are even-handed metaphorically and call it “la Nina.”  People like dyads, two extremes pulling and pushing. (Good/evil)  What will they do if a third pattern appears?  Le Neuter?  Or should it be LA Neuter?  If it’s neuter, there no article in the romance languages that will do.  It will have to be THE Neuter.  Or just Neuter.  Null.

No one know why these huge macro-patterns develop.  We do know why the planet is warming: us.  Walking through the room, I heard Al Gore’s voice on the radio asking,  “Don’t they know the glaciers are melting?  Don’t they know the currents in the ocean are changing?  Don’t they know that sea level is rising?”  The paper today told about remains of people, sometimes ancient, and airplane wreckage being revealed by receding ice.   Specific anecdotes about missing people and their grateful mothers gets our attention.  The idea that the ice leaving Greenland is making it so much lighter that it is causing the weight dynamics of the underlying tectonic plates to change, possibly causing readjustments in the form of earthquakes all over the planet, or the idea that Tibet, which gets ALL its water from melting glaciers, will have to emigrate -- those ideas are too big to grasp.

Not even the skies are safe.  The scientists have trespassed on traditional systems of interpretation, first by saying that Pluto is not a planet after all -- just a big asteroid -- and now by saying that the Zodiac has changed.  Here’s the new system:

Capricorn
January 20- to February 16

Aquarius
February 16 to March 11

Pisces
March 11 to April 18.

Aries
April 18 to May 13

Taurus
May 13 to June 21.

Gemini
June 21 to July 20

Cancer
July 20 to August 10

Leo
August 10 to September 16

Virgo
September 16 to October 30

Libra
October 30 to November 23

Scorpio
November 23 to November 29

Ophiuchus
November 29 to December 17

Sagittarius
December 17 to January 20 

I’m kind of miffed.  I mean, many of my assumptions about myself are “scorpionic,” as my friend Aad puts it.  I mean, Scorpios are supposed to be very sexy and passionate.  I’m just older, not milder.  But then I have to admit the zodiac is partly a distant observed real pattern -- well, from our point of view -- and partly a human construct, overlay of images.  One woman remarked, “Astrologers these days pay more attention to what’s happening on earth than what’s happening in the stars.”  Tim says,  “We are all overwhelmed -- get over it.”  

So I looked up “whelm” and discover that “over” whelm is redundant.  It means to cover something with an overturned vessel or bowl and it also means an engulfing flood.  We’re all whelmed.  At one time people thought that the sky was a big blue bowl, black with stars at night.  At one time people who were caught in floods thought they were the only ones, that the world was destroyed and would have to be made new.  Religious institutions (not the spiritual impulse but the human organizations who try to capture the traffic) were quick to assure everyone that the only way to be safe was to be obedient, to follow rules.  THEIR rules.

But their rules are no more dependable than the weather.  Take our most personal aspects, our bodies, our selves.  We are whelmed with new information about how it works, what is bad for us, what we should do to save ourselves.  We are whelmed by a new universe within that is a system of whirling morphing molecules that intensely affects the weather of our minds.  And we realize that our inner floating Greenland is underlain by the floating, clashing tectonic plates of our cultures, ideas mixing, birthing, dying.

This is rhetoric, not reality.  I would use it as the early part of a liturgy in which the old-think Christians would confess their sins.  Most of our sins are only limitations, real or not.  Right after this Confession of Sins comes the Assurance of Pardon, which depends upon a big Force in the sky.  (Yeah, that dependable sky -- sarcastic voice here.)  Instead, I go to the Assurance of Participation, which is located in the person.  (Individual -- sorry: I grew up in the USA.)  Classically, the definition of Sin is Separation from God.  So I’ll just conflate God with the world.  (The churches who claim access to some other world are irrelevant anyway.)  

If you participate in the world, you are part of it and therefore immortal by definition.  (A mortal is a human.  An IMmortal is more than that.  If you are part of the world, you are more than one mortal.  Goodbye, individualism.)  Participation means giving up control.  Churches don’t like that.  

I’m just waffling around.  Maybe later the ideas will gather into a pattern.  Maybe later than that the ideas will suggest practical things to do when one is whelmed.

What I learned when I was the flood plain lady for the City of Portland, was that human systems are only provisional guesses about what might really happen.  You can make all the maps you want -- in the end you’ll have to watch and maybe swim.  But the danger for houses is not so much in whether they will float away or withstand the water.  The danger is in all the debris that the flood smashes into your house.  Broken bridges, lost autos, and your neighbor’s house.  Take that metaphorically.  

BILL ZELLER'S STILLED HEART

Many people in today’s world survive the horrors by simply not knowing about them.  Even if they know about them, they turn their heads away.  It’s too terrifying and they don’t know what to do about it anyway.  If you are one of those people, don’t read this blog and, specifically, don’t read this post.  

Tim Barrus and I are people who see trouble and head straight for it -- Tim more than me, but then the trouble I’ve seen has been minor compared to what Tim knows and lives with, fighting with his endless energy and rage even as his body fails him.  The hardest thing for him when he was attacked by the pseudo-literati over his Nasdijj gig, which put his profile up high enough to make him a target, was double.  On the one hand the superficial little twit who made the big revelation had the idea that a nice-appearing house and conventional-SEEMING family meant that no one there was ever abused.  On the other hand he exposed that family without even knowing it, sending them into desperate coverup mode and separating them from Tim even more.  He didn’t know about the uses of disguise, being intent on crowing from rooftops himself.

Now comes the death of a Princeton Ph.D. candidate, Bill Zeller, who was known for his brilliant computer programming.  His suicide note rips the covers off a family as full of abuse as Tim’s. The story was published in the Huffington Post.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/07/bill-zeller-dead-princeto_n_805689.html

That’s not all.  His female relative is a blogger who was also abused throughout childhood.  These situations develop whenever there is poverty, lack of education, closed head trauma, drug use, alcohol abuse, violence.  Anyone who thinks this sort of thing just doesn’t happen to the upper classes and that if they can just manage by hook or crook to get up there into the prosperity zone, they will be safe, is deluded.  Anyone who thinks that suppressing and hiding what has happened to them can make it go away, is deluded.  But sharing the story has taken this woman to grad school and recovery -- or at least compensation/coping.

Tim understood that early and set out to take a devil’s route, but one that was empowering enough to keep him alive.   Both Zeller and Barrus are prodigious workers, Zeller at programming and Tim at his vlogs and boy group, Cinematheque -- now The Studio.  Tim and Bill both say that the intense concentration of work is the only way to escape pain.  Got that?  The best drug is work. 

I will make nothing of the difference between Zeller’s solitary programming and Tim’s communal vlogging.  I think both men are intelligent contributors.  The difference was in temperament, Bill’s quietly imploding and Tim’s dramatically exploding.  As some perceptive person asked in the many online comments,  “What if Bill had written that eloquent suicide note and then SENT it while staying alive?”  

In the note Bill hints that constantly fighting alone was beginning to feel like a pressure-cooker, that he might explode in a way that would hurt others.  What if someone had recognized that and intervened?  The signs were far more subtle that the Arizona shooter, but they probably weren’t invisible.  Still, his relative couldn’t see them and she had suffered in the same way, just reacted differently.

Tim has looked for a specific marker:  infection with HIV-AIDS acquired by hustling or by drug use.  Once he had a core group, the boy-telegraph system brought more boys.  The work he offers them is art: studio art, street performance, vids.  And when the dark monsters rise up, he takes them to a red chair and makes the monster sit there and account for itself.

My friends and relatives are nervous about my friendship with Tim.  Am I becoming a dotty old lady?  Does this mean my house will fill up with delinquents?  Am I possibly carrying HIV and not telling anyone?  (Remember my name is Mary: it would be an Immaculate Infection.)  Most of them decide not to think about it.  I myself RE-think it constantly.

Not long ago a college professor I respected, an email friendship, found out about Tim and googled.  He read Wikipedia and LA Weekly and Matthew’s little brags.  He went ballistic, accusing me of depravity and enabling a monster.  (Whose name he failed to spell properly.)  So I did another self-check.  Passed.

When one does emergency responder work, even just being an animal control officer, it’s there in front of your eyes.  If a dog in the family is being abused, you can bet the children are, too.  When one lives on a reservation or in any other high-deprivation, high-risk place (which might be a fancy condo or a mansion behind walls), the violence and secrecy will be obvious.  Scary.

People want to say,  “Oh, that’s not me.”  Even though they have mocking parents, raping sibs, not enough to eat, no safe place to sleep.

Joel Johnson, writing on the blog called “Gizmodo” says:  “I think a person has the right to live or end their life as they choose. If Zeller really felt that suicide was his only option, so be it. But as someone who has had similar experiences in my own life, I want to say to anyone else who feels the way Zeller felt: You can't escape your past. Not completely. But you can deal with it. You can contextualize it. You can learn how to prepare for the times when you feel like it's not even on your radar and then it totally broadsides you.”

http://gizmodo.com/5726667/the-agonizing-last-words-of-bill-zeller

Zeller said he went to doctors and found no help there.  Few ministers and not many psych people have the willingness to confront and participate that it takes.  Zeller's suicide demands a COMMUNITY response and I don’t just mean the Internet community or the American community or the religious community.  (There is some heavy responsibility in that last.)  I mean the human community that brings babies into a world that is too apt to destroy and deform them.  How is it that this kind of sexual and violent abuse hasn’t evolved out of us?  Maybe it’s the secrecy.  Maybe secrecy can deny evolution.

Johnson says:  “And you can talk to people. You really can.”  Because you are not alone.  There are others out there just like you and there are people who are not, but who will believe you.  It’s heart breaking that a programmer only blogged about tech stuff and not his own dark heart, now stilled.

A CAT DAY

Sharon Brogan (www.sbpoet.com) began Friday cat days long ago and that's how I met her.  She is in Montana, but on the west side of the Rockies, which makes a lot of difference.  She's a good poet and a fine photographer.  Me, not so much.  This is a bit of an homage to Sharon, who has again begun to blog.  Spread the word!

FIRST some home shots.  The yellow cat is Crackers.  The tortoiseshell is Squibs.  Their names come from an old prairie story in which a man calls his britches his "squibs and crackers."  These cats are too fat.  They were the only kittens in one last batch from an elderly calico.  Crackers has all the personality of a sofa pillow.  Her coat is rough, she has sinus trouble and is probably diabetic.  She sleeps with me at night.  She sleeps without me all day.  Squibs is a much softer and far more active cat.  She has a not-too-bad overbite and something is wrong with her rear gear, possibly from being thrown (the kittens came from a Great Falls  Air Force family in the midst of a divorce -- lots of angry people) or possibly from falling, since she has always climbed a little beyond her ability level.

This window looks into the back yard and is next to my computer.  

This is supposed to be my reading chair.

Crackers likes something against her back, especially if the electric mattress warmer is still on.

A heating pad will do.

But the computer lamp is also good.

Squibs thinks the back garage belongs to her and anytime the weather permits, she's out there supervising.  In front of her is a hole just the right size for a cat.  This requires extra vigilance.

Mr. Puss is a tuxedo cat, hence the formality.  Not My Cat.  (NMC for texters.)

Pele was either named for the footballer champion or for the Hawaiian god of fire, lightning and volcanoes.  He is exceptionally athletic but more light than heat.  (NMC)

Baby pictures.  Crackers "fronted" for Squibs when they were little.

Unknown tortie from the newspaper.  Torties tend to be compact, vigorous, and clever.  They are always female because the have three colors and the third color is on the second X.  (NMC)

The two most important sentry points are in the back of the house next to the computer . . .

and the front of the house where a cat can get up high and peer out between the blue bottles.

Every cat needs a good buddy for a nap, though Paul claims he hates cats and says this was his girl friend's cat.  (NMC)  Paul likes chickens but I don't think he naps with them.

Cats love readers and have discovered how to manage brain to brain transmission.  Sue is a constant reader and her husband is a constant photographer.  (Photo by Clyde)  Boots is a constant presence. (NMC)

That's a cat policy.

ANOTHER TALE FROM PAUL WHEELER

Seems my folks had inordinate trust in me, or maybe it was just the times. Hmmm, then too, maybe they were just trying to get rid of me...

For a while I lived alone in an old stout trailer.  It had been my dad's, maybe since it was new and he sold it to me when I was 15 or so. He helped me pull it to some property he's swapped surveying for on the Smith River and that was my home away from home. Probably told you stories about the old timers there, one living in a sheep wagon and the other in a cabin near by. If I haven't told ya the stories I should. They were interesting folks.

We got back there in the Spring, and found that a bear had broken out the window over the sink and denned on my bed! caved it right in. Ransacked the cupboards for anything edible, finally bit into a can of insect repellant and made a new exit. Took me awhile to get all that fixed. That thing served me well over the years, and I got a heck of a lot of use out of it.

Smith River was heaven for a prairie kid. Mountains, fine river, chock full of big trout and grayling, endless places to explore. A half wild horse herd that if you were wily enough to catch up, could be made to ride, after you came to an understanding. The entire area was heavily used by native peoples of long ago. Lots of caves, almost all of them had pictoglyphs on the walls and ceilings. When it came time to pick our lot in exchange for the surveying of the rest of the ranch, I got to do the picking. It was easy, and I didn't even have to think about it. It was the only place that had a small natural rock arch that had been used as an ancient shelter, and showed heavy use over the years by the smoke patina. It was my secret place, overgrown and hidden by brush and trees.

This place was cut out of a big family ranch, the Copeland place. Don't know how many acres it comprised, maybe thousands. Right next to the new subdivision there were two old-timers that had lived there, mostly forever. I can't recall the one's name in the cabin, he was just Mr. Copeland to me, uncle to the guy, Ken who was doing the development. There must have been some sort of primitive road in there to begin with, but one of my first jobs was helping Ken build the new road in. I'd follow behind his bulldozer with a shovel, filling in here and there, and rolling rock off the side. Before that road was done, I'd collected a whole sock full of various types of arrow heads, including a metal one. My best find was an old clay pipe, that I unfortunately broke while excavating it. I was able to glue the bowl back together but never could find the rest of the stem, it just had about a half inch of the stem left. Might have been why it was discarded in the first place.

Back to Mr. Copeland. Nice old feller, he welcomed having a kid to follow him around occasionally, as long as you didn't become a pest. He'd lived there full time for a good many years, must have been in his 70's then. Cabin was old, small, but plenty for him and he loved the place. His old bamboo fly rod and creel hung right next to the door, and the river was only about 30' away. He trapped a bit in the winter, fished most every day. His nephew Ken brought him in supplies every once in awhile. I don't know that he ever went out, except in the end, which is an awful story.

His buddy Scotty, lived about a half mile up the river, right below my new place, but across the river. His summer digs was an old sheep wagon. He kept a old horse and a dog. Scotty was a little slower to warm to me. I'd be fishing the river in a hole right across from his camp and we'd wave to each other, but he never came across to say howdy. After a couple weeks of waving, he finally motioned me across, pointing out the old ford, which I should have recognized, but didn't.

Neither of these old fellers were at all happy with what was going on. They knew their lives were about to change and their paradise about to go down the tubes. I was an interloper, but I think they were just so lonesome they couldn't help themselves. Scotty and I became good buds. He'd often invite me across for dinner, which was always interesting. 

Don't know if you've ever been in a sheep wagon, Mary, but they're all set up pretty much the same. Just inside the doorway is a small stove, next to a small table, with a bed across the back, really the front of the trailer, and storage under the bed and on the opposite wall from the table. The roof was two layers of canvas with an air space between, I guess for insulation. Scotty was very neat and organized and you had to be careful that anything you moved or bumped into got put back in exactly the right spot again or he'd be hovering over you, readjusting it, just so. I suppose you get that way in such tight quarters. His possessions were simple. He had a couple tin plates, a couple tin cups and utensils, always laid out, upside down on a clean piece of newspaper. Oh, that's right, that's how we got to be such good buds. I always saved newspapers and brought boxes of them in, because he loved to read every word in them before using them up completely. The placemat was only their first use, and I'll leave it up to your imagination what an old trapper might find them useful for in their final sacrifice.

Scotty's dishwashing method was a bit unsettling. He'd carefully ladle whatever was for dinner. Even stew went on a tin plate, and strong, boiled coffee with every meal. When we were through eating he'd set the plates down on the floor for the dog to lick spotlessly clean, then he'd carefully turn them upside down again on a new piece of newspaper. One night we were sitting in there talking, or more likely, he was talking and I was listening, but there was a furious scrabbling between the two layers of canvas. He reached under his bed and hauled out an ancient .308 and started following the noise with the end of the barrel, while I was cowering on the floor with the dog who knew what was about to happen, trying to stay out of his way. BOOM, the wagon filled with gun smoke and the scrabbling stopped. He put his gun away, stepped over me to open up the top half of his door to air the place out, and I came to understand all the patches on his canvas roof. It appeared Scotty didn't much cotton to packrats.

TALES FROM A DOG CATCHER by Lisa Duffy-Korpics

This is the only book  -- besides mine -- about dog-catching written by a dog-catcher that I know of .  Copyright in 2009, it is already remaindered, but you can find remaindered and used books easily by Googling or by checking http://www.abebooks.com or http://www.alibris.com or Hamilton  http://www.hamiltonbook.com/hamiltonbook.storefront  which is where I got this book.  There’s also Daedalus, http://www.daedalus-books.com/

but they tend to skim humanities cream.  (That’s where I found “The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping,” the first Tim Barrus book I read.  NOT a dog-catching story.)

Should you look for this book?  If you like this cover, you’ll like this book, which is just like this funny lovable upside-down dog.  Lisa has published stories in the “Chicken Soup” series of books, so that’s another indicator.   I self-publish my “dog catcher book” (“Dog Catching in America”  www.lulu.com/prairiemary/  )  and my style is far more outrageous than Lisa Duffy-Korpics.  Editors would likely trim my wings.

That’s a product of the context.  Lisa was very young, working for a small town police department as a civilian employee in a Hudson River Valley town.  As a backup she was sometimes a school crossing guard or a matron for female prisoners.  She refused to go into a house that had a bat in it.  Her transportation was a station wagon.  She had enough time in her schedule to drop by for lunch with old lady cat hoarders.  There were no drug labs, murderers, or African lions.  (There WAS a wallaby.)  In the end she became a social studies teacher and married -- I suspect the lucky guy was the wildlife rehabilitator who helped her with a one-legged duck.

Portland, Oregon, in the Seventies, was a different kettle of fish.  (I never impounded a fish but we did some cruelty inspections of icky -- technical term -- fish.)  I dashed from one call to another, which was just as well since my ideas for filling up free time usually got me into trouble. (Like the time I handed out license applications in Laurelhurst Park and started a riot.)  We made formal arrests and helped the coroner get bodies into zip-up bags because our uniforms were washable.  We were part of the sheriff’s department and drove pickups with canopies.  (Now Portland AC is part of environmental services and drives expensive compartmented trucks, but they still wear sheriff’s uniforms.)  I was the first woman and I was over thirty, a former teacher.

Given all that, I only caught Lisa out once -- she described a calico cat as a male, but all calico cats are female: the gene for the third color is on the second X chromosome.

It’s as though “Anne of Green Gables” had written this break-your-heart, warm-your-heart book, earnest, positive, and gently funny.  That one-legged duck had to be kept overnight and would NOT stop quacking!  A rather fabulous Marilyn Monroe clone complained about raccoons coming to her window to watch her undress.  The first story is about a feral white dog protected by ancient nuns in the woods near the convent.  There are often quick turns you don’t expect:  like the woman who thought a stray dog was the reincarnation of her husband, but allowed it to be adopted by someone else because she’d already lived THAT life.  Now she was ready for Merry Widowhood!  

The men Lisa worked with were like the men I worked with -- maybe quite a lot like emergency responders and law enforcers everywhere.  I don’t know whether they are that way because that type is attracted to the work and successful at it (I’m excluding the ones who are there for the power to abuse) or whether the work makes them the way they are, creating smooth stones by knocking off the edges.  They often harassed and mocked her in a friendly way, but also stepped in to protect her -- even sending her home now and then.  But not bothering to tell her about a big hole she’d scraped in the seat of her pants when sliding down a steep hill to keep a band of turkeys out of traffic.

One tension in community animal work is obvious in the difference between the law-enforcement police/sheriff angle and the humane-society animal welfare side.  Less obvious, but perhaps more relevant, is animal control as defined by the shelter full of animals -- which is the usual focus of outsiders because they love the dogs but the public hates the expense as well as the similarity to a jail -- and ACO responses IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD.  That’s where the action is.

That’s why Lisa’s book is the same as mine but different from mine -- because our neighborhoods were different, though Portland was divided up and assigned as though each “beat” were a small town.  And that’s why Lisa’s book is just like mine, because a good officer of any kind gets to know the people and animals and develops strategies for handling them as well as a network of allies.  This book could not be written by a shelter attendant.

Inevitably, a good ACO ends up in classrooms and dealing with the media.  It’s tough to get the real story across to a young reporter from a big city who thinks impoundment is cruelty.  They just can NOT get their minds away from familiar and reassuring images.  Maybe that’s why I especially liked Lisa’s darkest and most fanciful story in which a dog is the villain, a big monster of a dog who lures innocent strays into the highway where they are crushed while it watches from the barrow pit.  It’s a Stephen King tale.

I want to talk to Lisa, so I called the Lyons Press, which is a subsidiary of the Globe Pequot Press in Connecticut.  (It has ties back to Montana, but that’s irrelevant.)  The weather has closed them down for the day.  (Montana giggles.)  I’ve tried to find Lisa’s phone number via the Internet with no success.  Maybe she’ll Google herself and find this.  I hope we make contact.  There are a LOT of female dogcatchers out there now, but not many of either gender actually gets around to writing a book.  There is no class or even video that can teach a person how to be a good dog catcher, but maybe a book like this comes close.  It’s the attitude.  (Even upside down, like the cover model, counts.)  

WHAT CAN BE TAUGHT?

There’s a sequence of jokes about metaphors for people’s minds.  Maybe it started with the remark about a mind “like a steel trap.”  And the riposte, “yeah, rusted shut.”  

This morning mine is not rusted shut but so full of a blizzard of stuff that I’m incoherent.  If you’re looking for coherence, move on.  My mind is like a sheet of flypaper: a lot of tiny moving buzzing bits in no particular order.  But I’m going to try to stick to one question.

What can be taught?

Wrong question.  What can be learned?

Education went horribly wrong at some point which I’m going to suggest was the fulcrum of tipping between teaching and learning.  The idea developed that a young person was an empty vessel to be filled with “knowledge” and then labeled like an egg: “work with hands,” “college material,” “hopeless,” “actively exclude”, “baby maker.”  Or as Aldous Huxley had it in “Brave New World,” alphas, betas, etc.    But there are really only two important categories:  pupils, those who show up and sit there; and students, those who "study."  And two kinds of teachers:  those who think it’s about THEM and those who think it’s about students.  (BUT IT'S NOT !!!  Don't let kids run everything!)

Maybe things changed because so many men came back from war wanting to know things and prepared to find them out for themselves.  Maybe the ensuing prosperity just made their descendants soft.  That generation is gone.  This generation of warriors is about to take hold.  I welcome them.

The first thing is waking up.  Too many people are sleep-walking, even the ones sleeping in cardboard boxes over steam vents.  

The next thing is looking around:  who are all these others?  

Next:  what can I do?  Crawl?  Push stuff over the edge?  Pile stuff up?  Stuff stuff into my mouth?

These three questions cannot be taught.  Not even in day care.  Hopefully they unfold from family and biology before getting to school age, but then they are part of learning for the rest of life.

For what will I be rewarded and for what will I be punished?  Another joke:  a woman had two children, a boy and a girl.  When the girl did something bad, she was punished and she stopped.  When the boy did something bad, he was punished and he did it anyway.  The mother asked him why.  He said,  “It was worth it.”  So -- this is a sexist joke, but people understand stereotypical sexism that labels girls passive and boys aggressively seeking and acting.  All students should be boys.  I mean, “like boys.”  The mother/parent was a teacher: wanting to know what was going on in the student.  Not the curriculum.

I’ve written two curriculi and am proud of them.  The first one could not be taught at the level of competence of the other teachers on the “team.”  “Team” was the buzz word at the time.  I soon learned that it meant I was expected to teach the other teachers.  My arrogance was matched by my stubbornness and the impossibility  of creating a curriculum,   teaching it to the teachers, teaching the students, writing the worksheets, reading research.  

My next brilliant idea was drafting the students to do all this stuff.  We would not use the “given” materials cranked out by compressing sawdust into particle board.  We wouldn’t even saw lumber -- we would grow trees.  “Tell me about your lives.”

Oh, no.  See above:  for what will I be rewarded and for what will I be punished?  We were on a reservation trapped between two forces:  those who wanted to guarantee the uniqueness and potency of the ancient culture of the people and those who wanted to be treated just exactly the same as every other “American.”  It’s a junior high problem:  how to be just like everyone else but unique.  Education means conformity if it’s teacher-based.  The missionary model.

Another story:  Saladin (or some other warrior chief) walks through the garden swinging his sword.  Every flower that sticks up above the others has its head cut off.  Students know this.  It’s safe to be hidden.  It’s as true for teachers as students.  Principals are often old coaches.  They want a team, not stars.  The second curriculum could not be understood by the principal.

One of the basics of learning is memorization, as basic as dribbling a basketball.  Memorize the alphabet, the times tables, all the linking verbs and all the prepositions, as many of Shakepeare’s sonnets as you can manage, whatever Holy Books there are, including the oral Blackfeet-word-for-Blackfeet-word recitation of the “Napi stories.”  (Not the child’s versions with all the penises removed.)  These are keys that unlock so much else.  Go to a cocktail party in certain places and say,  “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote. The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,”  The whole room will respond with,  “And bathed every veyne in swich licour ..”  I cheated -- I used Google.  I didn’t memorize it myself -- I just knew I should because it was a password to that group.  But I didn’t want to go there.   In other times and places it will be Beatles lyrics, etc.   Find the keys and own them. 

You CANNOT teach someone to memorize.  You CAN make it a little easier:  I used to have packs of cards, each with a letter of the alphabet, which I’d hand out pre-scrambled to teams so they could try to get them in proper order while racing against the clock and each other.  Etc.  You could do that for yourself.  You can pressure the students, reward them, assure them it’s important, that they can do it.  Understand I’m only using this as an example.  The principles (NOT principals!)  apply even in grad school.  And after.  You could do that stuff for yourself.

Doing it for yourself is the key.  When kids complained, I used to say,  “If you can’t learn because of them, learn in spite of them. To spite them.”

How did we get so far off track?  Control.  Kids want control.  So do the adults, but the kids notice that the adults are NOT in control.  They can’t control their own health habits.  They can’t control their economic fate.  The parents complain that the teachers can’t control the children, even though the parents can’t either.  They . . .  oh, you know.  Obama can’t stop war, intercept CEO siphoning of assets, etc.  (Are there any teachers left who remember that et cetera is abbreviated etc and not ect ?)

What can be taught?  Not much.  What can be learned?  We haven’t hit the limits yet, except for the limits imposed by our educational systems.  No wonder youngsters leave.  Esp. the ones who are students, not pupils.  They have stuff to do, stuff to learn.

Buzzing.

GEORGE & PHYLLIS JOHANSON

Much influenced by Life magazine, I thought when I fell in with Bob Scriver that I was joining a sort of group like the abstract expressionists in the Manhattan village.  I wasn’t.  The Montana cowboy artists were quite different from each other and didn’t really gel as a group until the CMR Auction began to assemble them every March.  So when I became an animal control officer back in Portland, OR, after Bob divorced me, and then became a friend and co-conspirator with Phyllis Johanson, one of the most dedicated of animal rescuers, I was delighted to meet her husband George.  Right now George is in the middle of a great celebration of his work and Phyllis sent me a booklet containing his work plus an interview. 

I should probably scatter the art work through the blog, but I’m going to put them together so you can compare them.

“Daub” (detail)  1958    

“Portrait of Gretchen Corbett”  1979

“Beach Follies” 2009

When I was around George, he was painting in the style of the beach scene.  I kidded Tim that his dog Jack in the little white dog on the left and Isabella is in the foreground on the right.  I should have said that it was Tim putting on his swim fins with a boy helping him.  But the truth is that George makes icons or motifs of his own friends and neighbors, plus his version of bits of famous classical paintings.  For a long time there was a rabbit haunting almost every painting.  He’s quite eloquent about how and why he does this.  Phyllis shows up, as well as her long succession of rescue cats, often leaping Dali-style across the picture plane.  The Johanson house is at the edge of woods and when Phyllis goes for a walk up the trail, whatever cats are resident always go along with her in a long single file with their tails straight up in the air.  I used to follow along at the end of the row.

George and Phyllis have compatible temperaments that illustrate one end of the way artists can be, quite the opposite of the stormy near-psychotic alcoholics and ear-cutters we hear about.  (BOTH are valid.)  George often does prints, very exacting and precise work that takes enormous concentration and time.  One morning their son, Aaron, very young and used to working alongside his father, woke early and went into the studio alone.  By the time George got up, Aaron had made his own crayoned additions to everything George had in process.  After George had recovered from the first shock, he willingly “gave up” both the work and the outrage.  Then, Quaker, pacifist, he got interested in what Aaron thought he was adding, how his mind worked.  (Aaron developed into a fine photographer.  These photos are his.)

The early art community in Portland formed around the Portland Art Museum School. (Now the Pacific Northwest College of Art.  http://www.pnca.edu/)   George and friends taught there, which might be part of the reason he can explain what he does.  In the detail from an abstract still-life called “Daub” he points out,  “You get the wall plane of red back there and the floor plane of light blue-green and then the pillars of the table and a kind of jumble of things on the table.”  But the original source is “simply information about where the forms came from, because I think the paintings stand on their own as forces of color and movements and senses of volume and so on, without having to pin them down to a subject such as a still life.  One of my abstract expressionist paintings might be a forest, or it might not be anything specific.  It might be a range of emotions, a statement about emotion.”

I included the portrait of one of the grande dames of Portland to show George’s realistic side.  

But here’s the quote I love best:  “The wonderful thing about painting for me is that it is a sensual expression of the outside world.  I’ve always loved juicy paint in one way or another.  And, if we look at the early paintings from New York, they all have a sense of the deliciousness of the paint, I think.  It’s the sensuousness of paint that compels me, I guess.”

George is incorrigibly optimistic in an intelligent way and from that comes both his and Phyllis’ relentless determination to make things better.  He sees something that I see, which is that the GI Bill that put so many mature but young men into universities had a transformative effect on a lot of things.  They visited the art departments as part of humanities educations and got caught up in enthusiasm.  Even if they didn’t become professional artists, their understanding was much greater.  George feels that was the beginning of a kind of flowering into the supportive audience that art needs in order to survive.

George says,  “My theme is that art is the most important thing in the world and all the rest of what we do is just maintenance.”  “Art in its broadest terms is what we’re really here for, to be creative.  To make something and look at the world and to interpret it through art is the highest activity of human beings.”

And he says (This is where I am with writing!!),  “I think it’s that you don’t know what else is in there that you can bring out.  You don’t know what else there is about you that you’ve got that you can bring out and make a painting out of, and yet it seems to keep coming.  And the more you do, the more that one thing leads to another thing, which leads to two more ideas.  And the thing that I find about working is that working tends to solve a lot of questions about where you’re going, and what you can do and why you’re doing it.”

Rainier Maria Rilke said that artists build their art using the tools and instruments of their lives.  In George’s case that means curiosity, patience, community, generosity, abiding love, family, and juicy paint.

George is represented by Augen Gallery in Portland, OR.  http://www.augengallery.com/  This interview I’m quoting was by Barry Pelzer.