Clara Jane Found A Gun, obit from Great Falls Tribune.
EAST GLACIER. Clara Jane (Daniels) Found A Gun, 84, of East Glacier, a retired cook, died of natural causes Saturday at Peace Hospice in Great Falls.
Rosary is 7 tonight (April 25, Tuesday) at East Glacier Community Center. Her funeral is 3 PM Wednesday at Little Flower Parish in Browning, with burial in Willow Creek Cemetary.
Survivors include daughters Sharron Olson of East Glacier and Donna Found a Gun of Browning; sons Mick Johnson and John Johnson of Bigfork and Gary Addington of Helena; sisters Karen Witsey of East Glacier, Patty Daniels of Rocky Boy and Lorraine Spotted Bear of Browning; brothers Donald McCurtain of Missouri and Charles Daniels of Great Falls; 16 grandchildren, 18 great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren.
_____________
Aside from visiting on the street with Clara and Tom Foundagun when I was lucky enough to pass them in my East Glacier years, I was always pleased when they came to parent-teacher conferences -- and why wouldn’t both sides be pleased with such stellar kids? They maxed the IQ tests that everyone said Indians were too culturally handicapped to understand. They really listened in class and understood the lessons. They behaved but were full of life and laughter. Quite an accomplishment for any parents.
Clara was a school cook -- a beloved figure, no doubt about it, but not one you’d want to rile. (NEVER tease the cook!) Not an intellectual, except that she loved to read. As it happens, East Glacier Women’s Club has a rather exemplary library, mostly stocked with books from Betsey Jennings, the postmaster there for many years and a Hollywood screen writer before that. (Talbot Jennings, her husband, wrote the screenplay for “The Good Earth.”) In the summer East Glacier can be quite cosmopolitan, partly because the Big Hotel draws in high grade tourists and partly because from the earliest days Horace Clarke’s ranch behind the Big Hotel was being managed by his sisters, formidably educated women who collected famous artists and writers. These sibs were the half-Blackfeet children of the Malcolm Clarke whose ranch eventually became the Baucus ranch in Sieben. One of the women, Helen, was the first school superintendent in Montana and brought in the first piano.
Clara’s mother, who was Indian (Sioux? Cree?) or possibly Metis, died when she was ten years old. Her father was English. Her brothers Charles Daniels (now of Great Falls) and Donald McCurtain (now of Missouri) were sent to Haskell while she was sent to Fort Hall in Idaho. Rather than lamenting, Clara found this a rescue and said she was always grateful for the sound high school education she got as well as being protected from the hardships of the Depression.
Clara’s first marriage fell apart, leaving her with two children, I think the two that I taught. She remarried Thomas Found A Gun, a long tall thoughtful man, and for the next 57 years they lived happily in East Glacier in a little cabin. As you see above, she and Tom had a daughter together as well as accepting other children who needed a home.
An ideal Blackfeet woman is one who is rock solid and cheerful in her daily routines, who is a dependable launching pad and refuge for her family, a constant source of nourishment and discipline of every kind. The mother is the heart of the family.
Gary Addington, Clara's son, has been working for the State of Montana in Helena for decades. They tell me that he got fed up with politics and is driving truck now, which shows he is intelligent as well as smart. He was a handsome boy who always reminded me of Richard Burton, but as time goes on, he begins to look more Indian. He wears a big hat and boots now. I couldn’t recognize his sister.
Clara’s eulogy was read by a female relative. I assume she wrote it but didn’t catch her name and am sorry, because it was very well done. She spoke of Clara’s happy memories of fishing for catfish at Fort Peck when she was a child. The most appealing image of all was Clara at Fort Hall in Idaho at boarding school, where she was in the habit of getting up very early in the morning, before most other people. She would go to the kitchen to pick up a chunk of bread right out of the oven and a bowl, which she carried to the dairy for milk right out of the cow. Carefully holding her breakfast in front of her, she went to a high place above the buildings to watch the sun come up.
It’s a very Indian thing to do, but also the habit of a person who can say, “this is the day of the Lord -- rejoice and be glad in it.” The eulogist’s theme was that Clara was a woman of spirit, and she certainly was. I would add to that the quality of “moral courage,” the strength to do what needs to be done because you know that it is right.
That morning in the same church there was a funeral mass for Patrick J. Carlson, a man of many skills including machining, carpentry, welding, world champion level pow wow singing and fancy dancing, horse racing, and playing cribbage. He died young (61) of cancer and even so was preceded by three children: Carl Ray, Patrick Junior, and Velvet. Pat was another naturally religious person of moral courage. He was a “syncretist” who could combine sweat lodges with charismatic Catholic liturgies.
Eight recent reservation deaths remind us that in spring they often happen in clusters, partly because when the green grass comes, old people feel they can let go; partly because when it warms up, the young people mix beer and cars.
Pat Carlson was Darrell Kipp’s cousin and the same age. When they were very small, racing around getting into trouble, they were tended by the old grandmother who only spoke Blackfeet. “How did that work?” Darrell asked Pat. “How did she make us behave?” They laughed, four-year-old cousins again for a minute. Those old ladies had moral courage. They knew what was right. The sheer strength of their conviction was power enough to manage little boys and a lot more besides.
This is what it is like to live in a reservation community -- time passing, taking away beloved people but leaving behind the memories of their strength and spirit so that the survivors can find the moral courage to go ahead into an unknown future. It’s not anything you can do all by yourself.
Monday, May 01, 2006
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
NON-MONETARY COMPENSATIONS
This reservation (and some small towns) made a lot more sense to me when I learned to see the flow of non-monetary compensation. This is especially important when there is no money; for instance, among prisoners who create an economy out of cigarettes. I’m also talking about things that are not material, like secrets, sex, access and privilege. They are most visible when the mini-economy is affected by something that makes it shift. For instance, sex is so easily available (now that the threat of unwanted pregnancy or garden variety VD have been removed) that those who try to make a living by selling “sex” must move to some kind of more intense specialty: the addition of violence or perversion, for instance, or they won’t make money. That, in turn, affects what is accepted in a noncommercial context, in private relationships.
Secrets as commodities are doing a lively trade on the governmental level these days, with the President trying to buy exoneration for bad decisions with selected leaks and disgruntled insiders leaking other shocking facts and then the identity of the leakers becoming new secrets, except when the Vice-President leaks who certain blabbermouths are. But then his pockets go flat -- or ought to -- when the secret is told that it was he, the VP, who leaked this last secret. Of course, he -- as is clear from his income tax disclosure (and the real amount of his income was no doubt secret) -- doesn’t really have to dabble in secrets because he has cash money. Or maybe simple money isn’t really as valuable as secrets.
But what I wanted to get at in this little piece is some kind of understanding of prestige, status -- the sort of thing that used to be called honor, dedication, or even sometimes professionalism. At one time doctors had it. Today in Great Falls the doctors are in a big food fight over who can own a hospital and whether they have to take in emergency patients who can’t pay. This was once unthinkable. Religious orders ran hospitals as mercies, not income generators. Doctors used to signal their professionalism by wearing suits under their white coats, but now many don’t wear white coats at all and most of the doctors around here wear jeans to work. Only people who have little power are reminded to be “professional” by dressing in an expensive manner. But how can a doctor feel “professional” when patients come in waving print-outs of the latest research -- which the doctor has had no time to read. He can only recover his credibility by charging a lot of money. If the insurance company will pay that kind of money, he must know something, right? Sort of a technie.
Teachers on every level -- even as they have begun to do much better financially -- have taken huge losses in prestige. Religious leaders from Fundamentalist preachers to Catholic priests have become figures of mockery. Easy enough to lay this at the door of their own follies: in my generation it would have been inconceivable (!) for a female elementary teacher to become pregnant by her student. And public schools were temples in their own right that churches invaded at their peril. I suppose many will blame immigration which burdens schools with the duty of assimilating them. Maybe others will talk about the Sixties revolution valuing the questioning of authority or maybe that wicked Derrida crowd, who questions our very reality.
What I’d like to reflect on for a moment, is what all this feels like from the inside. My Protestant Irish grandfather desperately wanted to be a person respected in his community, for most of his life the rough little lumber town of Roseburg where he tried to be an orchardist but actually made his living doing construction. Because the little prune farm where he lived had been the home of the school clerk, who left the books behind in the house, my grandfather became the school clerk. Though he repeatedly ran for office, he never won because he constantly quarrelled with his “betters.” School clerk was about as far as his accomplishments went. His chief contribution was getting a new school house built -- the old one had blackberries growing through the walls.
He impressed on his oldest daughter, my mother, that same craving to “be somebody.” Her route to the goal was the PTA where her major contribution was the construction of an outdoor barbecue in the park adjacent to the school, plus a lot of event organizing. If one’s community is small, one needn’t build the pyramids. Vernon neighborhood in Portland was a small town embraced by what became a city. My mother became a school teacher and then the librarian at a small elementary school along the Columbia River. This was her microcosm and she ruled with vigor and laughter.
My mother expected me to become a high school English teacher. She never proposed that I become a college professor, which seemed to her quite exalted. When my first high school teaching job was on the Blackfeet Reservation, she thought that was a nice little adventure before real life began, rather than the lifetime preoccupation it has been. She never expected me to marry, so my relationship with a “famous sculptor” was a puzzle for her, esp. since he was 26 years older than me and a “cowboy” sculptor with a “museum.” She couldn’t figure out whether marrying someone older was a prestige thing to do -- hard to imagine me as “arm candy” -- or whether a cowboy sculptor or his museum were anything but mockeries of the real thing. If I’d been in Manhattan or Paris, she’d have had the literary references, but she’d never heard of Charlie Russell. I thought I was very clever to have succeeded through someone else, so I couldn’t be accused of showing off.
One of Bob’s central preoccupations was wringing respect out of his community for his family and respect out of his family for himself. It took me a long time to bring to consciousness that this was one of the ties between us. What I really wanted to do was to be a writer of significance and Bob promised to support me doing that once he was famous. Rich was not so important, beyond basic survival. We always recognized wealth as a mere instrument. In the meantime, the rest of society came more and more to believe that wealth was not just an indicator but a goal, the definition of success. Screw Hemingway or Rodin -- imitate Donald Trump or that, you know, that computer nerd with all the money.
When I became an animal control officer (a dog catcher) back in Portland, my mother, teachers and friends took this as a total betrayal of any kind of prestige and I rather did enjoy the in-your-face part of it. Iconoclasm came from my father’s side, the Scots prairie homesteaders and inventors. They were social progressives -- my father devoted himself to cooperatives. So I came to define animal control work in terms of reform and progress. (My mother stopped euphemizing that I “worked for the government” and bragged that I was the Margaret Sanger of dogs and cats.) That worked well. But it wasn’t enough.
I’d always been serious about religion (in general, not Christianity) and decided on ministry, at least in part because of the Pacific Northwest groups of Unitarian Universalist ministers at that time. They were all men: powerful, charismatic, driven, and as joined as Arthur’s round table. (Or so I thought.) My mother felt that I had exceeded myself -- she said to me, “Why can’t you just marry a nice minister?” The whole thing became moot when the UU ministry became a second career for middle-aged women. Exactly what I was trying to escape -- them, too, I guess. But in the process of transforming, the UU ministry went from high prestige to just another pink collar vocation.
So here I am back with writing, still believing in the creative as a blessing and a key to significance. Most of this little town would only be impressed if I made a lot of money. I myself was expecting to make at least a little money. It appears that I’ve reached this point just as book-writing has become a kind of sausage-making -- stuffing content into pre-determined categories (none of which my writing fits) and replacing all the wonderful charisma of British-style publishing with a kind of hip-hop blogging, blooking and podcasting that’s all in bits and caught on the fly instead of coherent, nicely bound, and perceptible on the shelf.
My mother (who began to suggest that maybe I ought to get into politics -- she still believed in Mark Hatfield and Neil Goldschmidt) has died and her estate let me buy this teensy crumbling house in this village on the edge of the reservation. Blackfeet crave prestige far more than I do, even their rebels and Neo-Traditionals. But I’ve begun to turn my own iconoclasm on status. What is being a big shot or a saint all about? Why should I want it? What good is it? Why make the sacrifices, carry the burdens, make the efforts, if you don’t get no respect? Where’s the non-monetary compensation? Why participate in that economy? Am I being brave and honest or just trailing along after the culture again?
By now I’m much less invested in prestige than in simple understanding.
Secrets as commodities are doing a lively trade on the governmental level these days, with the President trying to buy exoneration for bad decisions with selected leaks and disgruntled insiders leaking other shocking facts and then the identity of the leakers becoming new secrets, except when the Vice-President leaks who certain blabbermouths are. But then his pockets go flat -- or ought to -- when the secret is told that it was he, the VP, who leaked this last secret. Of course, he -- as is clear from his income tax disclosure (and the real amount of his income was no doubt secret) -- doesn’t really have to dabble in secrets because he has cash money. Or maybe simple money isn’t really as valuable as secrets.
But what I wanted to get at in this little piece is some kind of understanding of prestige, status -- the sort of thing that used to be called honor, dedication, or even sometimes professionalism. At one time doctors had it. Today in Great Falls the doctors are in a big food fight over who can own a hospital and whether they have to take in emergency patients who can’t pay. This was once unthinkable. Religious orders ran hospitals as mercies, not income generators. Doctors used to signal their professionalism by wearing suits under their white coats, but now many don’t wear white coats at all and most of the doctors around here wear jeans to work. Only people who have little power are reminded to be “professional” by dressing in an expensive manner. But how can a doctor feel “professional” when patients come in waving print-outs of the latest research -- which the doctor has had no time to read. He can only recover his credibility by charging a lot of money. If the insurance company will pay that kind of money, he must know something, right? Sort of a technie.
Teachers on every level -- even as they have begun to do much better financially -- have taken huge losses in prestige. Religious leaders from Fundamentalist preachers to Catholic priests have become figures of mockery. Easy enough to lay this at the door of their own follies: in my generation it would have been inconceivable (!) for a female elementary teacher to become pregnant by her student. And public schools were temples in their own right that churches invaded at their peril. I suppose many will blame immigration which burdens schools with the duty of assimilating them. Maybe others will talk about the Sixties revolution valuing the questioning of authority or maybe that wicked Derrida crowd, who questions our very reality.
What I’d like to reflect on for a moment, is what all this feels like from the inside. My Protestant Irish grandfather desperately wanted to be a person respected in his community, for most of his life the rough little lumber town of Roseburg where he tried to be an orchardist but actually made his living doing construction. Because the little prune farm where he lived had been the home of the school clerk, who left the books behind in the house, my grandfather became the school clerk. Though he repeatedly ran for office, he never won because he constantly quarrelled with his “betters.” School clerk was about as far as his accomplishments went. His chief contribution was getting a new school house built -- the old one had blackberries growing through the walls.
He impressed on his oldest daughter, my mother, that same craving to “be somebody.” Her route to the goal was the PTA where her major contribution was the construction of an outdoor barbecue in the park adjacent to the school, plus a lot of event organizing. If one’s community is small, one needn’t build the pyramids. Vernon neighborhood in Portland was a small town embraced by what became a city. My mother became a school teacher and then the librarian at a small elementary school along the Columbia River. This was her microcosm and she ruled with vigor and laughter.
My mother expected me to become a high school English teacher. She never proposed that I become a college professor, which seemed to her quite exalted. When my first high school teaching job was on the Blackfeet Reservation, she thought that was a nice little adventure before real life began, rather than the lifetime preoccupation it has been. She never expected me to marry, so my relationship with a “famous sculptor” was a puzzle for her, esp. since he was 26 years older than me and a “cowboy” sculptor with a “museum.” She couldn’t figure out whether marrying someone older was a prestige thing to do -- hard to imagine me as “arm candy” -- or whether a cowboy sculptor or his museum were anything but mockeries of the real thing. If I’d been in Manhattan or Paris, she’d have had the literary references, but she’d never heard of Charlie Russell. I thought I was very clever to have succeeded through someone else, so I couldn’t be accused of showing off.
One of Bob’s central preoccupations was wringing respect out of his community for his family and respect out of his family for himself. It took me a long time to bring to consciousness that this was one of the ties between us. What I really wanted to do was to be a writer of significance and Bob promised to support me doing that once he was famous. Rich was not so important, beyond basic survival. We always recognized wealth as a mere instrument. In the meantime, the rest of society came more and more to believe that wealth was not just an indicator but a goal, the definition of success. Screw Hemingway or Rodin -- imitate Donald Trump or that, you know, that computer nerd with all the money.
When I became an animal control officer (a dog catcher) back in Portland, my mother, teachers and friends took this as a total betrayal of any kind of prestige and I rather did enjoy the in-your-face part of it. Iconoclasm came from my father’s side, the Scots prairie homesteaders and inventors. They were social progressives -- my father devoted himself to cooperatives. So I came to define animal control work in terms of reform and progress. (My mother stopped euphemizing that I “worked for the government” and bragged that I was the Margaret Sanger of dogs and cats.) That worked well. But it wasn’t enough.
I’d always been serious about religion (in general, not Christianity) and decided on ministry, at least in part because of the Pacific Northwest groups of Unitarian Universalist ministers at that time. They were all men: powerful, charismatic, driven, and as joined as Arthur’s round table. (Or so I thought.) My mother felt that I had exceeded myself -- she said to me, “Why can’t you just marry a nice minister?” The whole thing became moot when the UU ministry became a second career for middle-aged women. Exactly what I was trying to escape -- them, too, I guess. But in the process of transforming, the UU ministry went from high prestige to just another pink collar vocation.
So here I am back with writing, still believing in the creative as a blessing and a key to significance. Most of this little town would only be impressed if I made a lot of money. I myself was expecting to make at least a little money. It appears that I’ve reached this point just as book-writing has become a kind of sausage-making -- stuffing content into pre-determined categories (none of which my writing fits) and replacing all the wonderful charisma of British-style publishing with a kind of hip-hop blogging, blooking and podcasting that’s all in bits and caught on the fly instead of coherent, nicely bound, and perceptible on the shelf.
My mother (who began to suggest that maybe I ought to get into politics -- she still believed in Mark Hatfield and Neil Goldschmidt) has died and her estate let me buy this teensy crumbling house in this village on the edge of the reservation. Blackfeet crave prestige far more than I do, even their rebels and Neo-Traditionals. But I’ve begun to turn my own iconoclasm on status. What is being a big shot or a saint all about? Why should I want it? What good is it? Why make the sacrifices, carry the burdens, make the efforts, if you don’t get no respect? Where’s the non-monetary compensation? Why participate in that economy? Am I being brave and honest or just trailing along after the culture again?
By now I’m much less invested in prestige than in simple understanding.
Monday, April 24, 2006
SMALL TOWN WATER
Many of the orginal settlers of this area made their livings as dry-land farmers, growing barley and wheat. There was not water close enough to the surface to dig or drill to get irrigation or even household water in some places, so the farmers trucked water from Valier and drained it into cisterns buried near the house. No one wasted water.
When I moved into this house, built in the Thirties, one of its shortcomings was the lack of closets. It wasn’t about lack of water -- it was about lack of money for the amount of clothes that we all wear today. In the Thirties and earlier, one had a Sunday best, a Sunday second best (last year’s best), and everyday clothes -- maybe three sets of overalls and shirts or dresses with aprons. Even when I was a child in the Forties, the rule at our house was to wear everything at least three times before it was washed. As soon as one got home from school, one hung up one’s clothes straight and hanging free so they could be worn again. Towels were supposed to be dried on the rack and used again for a week. A woman who cleans houses in Valier now tells me that none of “her” families hang up towels or even put them in hampers -- they are simply left on the floor after each use until someone has time to run them through the wash. They are big fat towels -- doesn’t take many of them to make a load.
Valier was built on the premise of irrigation: that irrigation ditches would make this high prairie into a lush green Eden to rival Iowa. No one thought about the short cool growing season. The water did make some difference and the fact that the ditches were mostly dug by hand by reservation Indians working for a low wage helped their economy a little. Now the irrigation impoundment lake (“Lake Francis”) has become a great talking point for “development” for boats, fish, jetskis and the like. On the promise that the campground will be a big money maker, water and electricity have been installed. Also, a great many trees have been planted around town, all of which must be watered to survive.
A schism is developing over water. The town wells are low and not refilling. Global warming is permanently melting the mountain snowpack that feeds the underground aquifer. We’ve just been through five years or more of drought, but this year started off wet, so the newcomers think, “Ah, not to worry!”
Valier’s town water mains were installed decades ago when water was cheap -- and, anyway, a life entitlement! No one could even conceive of denying water to another living thing! Clean piped water was basic. No meters were installed. Now I pay the same amount for water as everyone else, though I have no washing machine, no dishwasher, no bathtub (I shower), no automatic sprinkling system, and no hot tub. Many neighbors have all those things plus teenagers -- multiple bathrooms, always wet with use.
Several new households have been added to town. Pinky, next door, used to say that if all the leaks in the town water system were fixed, we’d have twice the pressure. On a hot summer afternoon one can step into the shower and get a mere dribble of water, while all over town the sprinklers are spraying away, watering the grass with expensively chlorinated potable water. No one ever thinks of installing a second parallel irrigation system of NON-potable water just for yards -- they only want green lawn. Think of the cost of a new system!
The town water/sewer bill keeps going up -- it was thirty-something dollars a month when I came in 1999 but now it’s fifty something. There’s a major sewer project coming this summer. We may have to drill another well. Installing meters would cost money. I listen constantly for the subtle singing that means something in my cobbled-up system is leaking under my house. One would think plumbers would be easier to find in a place like this, but they are not. The last work under this house cost $400.
Some towns in this fix have fallen for the idea of the privatized water system -- a company will just take over the system, own the improvements, and sell the water to the town efficiently. Tired citizens won’t have to worry their pointy heads over the problems of meeting legal requirements and standards or being sued for lead in the water or whatever. Just let the professionals take over and enjoy the the benefits of expertise. Luckily, in Montana we have the perfect two-word phrase for warding off this idea: Montana Power!! Deregulating that formerly-dependable heating entity allowed it to redefine itself as a half-baked cyber-enterprise that sold off the power system to square-headed Dakotans who are still mopping up the floor with our bank accounts and refusing to sell it back to us so we can re-regulate it. (The cyber part went bankrupt.) Let the Californians laugh about ripping off Aunt Millie! The Dakotans are taking ample revenge for all those jokes Montanans tell about them!
In a world that doesn’t value society, that doesn’t see anything wrong with draining little villages of their few amenities, that only respects profit in the ten per cent range, someone somewhere this very minute is trying to figure out how to sell you air to breathe. Probably they’re just waiting until the regular air is so polluted you’ll have to buy air in bottles, like the water.
In the meantime the newcomers to Valier -- their bankrolls all safely protected somewhere else -- are trying to legislate us into “cuteness” with pretty yards and newly painted houses, never giving a thought to how much our water and sewer are costing. After all, these old women living on $400 Social Security weren’t clerks that waited on THEM when they were young. These old men with tiny incomes never pumped THEIR gas for them. How can they feel any obligation?
As we head towards four dollar gas, we are looking around at each other in Valier. We have one gas station, one grocery store, no laundromat, and the state just passed a law saying that your neighbor can’t pick up your prescription for you when they have an errand at the county seat. There’s no bus service, the “Senior Surrey” doesn’t come to Valier, and it’s thirty miles to the next settlement. We are in this together.
Someone who has decided to move out west has asked me by email if I had any advice. I do. Bring your own air and water.
When I moved into this house, built in the Thirties, one of its shortcomings was the lack of closets. It wasn’t about lack of water -- it was about lack of money for the amount of clothes that we all wear today. In the Thirties and earlier, one had a Sunday best, a Sunday second best (last year’s best), and everyday clothes -- maybe three sets of overalls and shirts or dresses with aprons. Even when I was a child in the Forties, the rule at our house was to wear everything at least three times before it was washed. As soon as one got home from school, one hung up one’s clothes straight and hanging free so they could be worn again. Towels were supposed to be dried on the rack and used again for a week. A woman who cleans houses in Valier now tells me that none of “her” families hang up towels or even put them in hampers -- they are simply left on the floor after each use until someone has time to run them through the wash. They are big fat towels -- doesn’t take many of them to make a load.
Valier was built on the premise of irrigation: that irrigation ditches would make this high prairie into a lush green Eden to rival Iowa. No one thought about the short cool growing season. The water did make some difference and the fact that the ditches were mostly dug by hand by reservation Indians working for a low wage helped their economy a little. Now the irrigation impoundment lake (“Lake Francis”) has become a great talking point for “development” for boats, fish, jetskis and the like. On the promise that the campground will be a big money maker, water and electricity have been installed. Also, a great many trees have been planted around town, all of which must be watered to survive.
A schism is developing over water. The town wells are low and not refilling. Global warming is permanently melting the mountain snowpack that feeds the underground aquifer. We’ve just been through five years or more of drought, but this year started off wet, so the newcomers think, “Ah, not to worry!”
Valier’s town water mains were installed decades ago when water was cheap -- and, anyway, a life entitlement! No one could even conceive of denying water to another living thing! Clean piped water was basic. No meters were installed. Now I pay the same amount for water as everyone else, though I have no washing machine, no dishwasher, no bathtub (I shower), no automatic sprinkling system, and no hot tub. Many neighbors have all those things plus teenagers -- multiple bathrooms, always wet with use.
Several new households have been added to town. Pinky, next door, used to say that if all the leaks in the town water system were fixed, we’d have twice the pressure. On a hot summer afternoon one can step into the shower and get a mere dribble of water, while all over town the sprinklers are spraying away, watering the grass with expensively chlorinated potable water. No one ever thinks of installing a second parallel irrigation system of NON-potable water just for yards -- they only want green lawn. Think of the cost of a new system!
The town water/sewer bill keeps going up -- it was thirty-something dollars a month when I came in 1999 but now it’s fifty something. There’s a major sewer project coming this summer. We may have to drill another well. Installing meters would cost money. I listen constantly for the subtle singing that means something in my cobbled-up system is leaking under my house. One would think plumbers would be easier to find in a place like this, but they are not. The last work under this house cost $400.
Some towns in this fix have fallen for the idea of the privatized water system -- a company will just take over the system, own the improvements, and sell the water to the town efficiently. Tired citizens won’t have to worry their pointy heads over the problems of meeting legal requirements and standards or being sued for lead in the water or whatever. Just let the professionals take over and enjoy the the benefits of expertise. Luckily, in Montana we have the perfect two-word phrase for warding off this idea: Montana Power!! Deregulating that formerly-dependable heating entity allowed it to redefine itself as a half-baked cyber-enterprise that sold off the power system to square-headed Dakotans who are still mopping up the floor with our bank accounts and refusing to sell it back to us so we can re-regulate it. (The cyber part went bankrupt.) Let the Californians laugh about ripping off Aunt Millie! The Dakotans are taking ample revenge for all those jokes Montanans tell about them!
In a world that doesn’t value society, that doesn’t see anything wrong with draining little villages of their few amenities, that only respects profit in the ten per cent range, someone somewhere this very minute is trying to figure out how to sell you air to breathe. Probably they’re just waiting until the regular air is so polluted you’ll have to buy air in bottles, like the water.
In the meantime the newcomers to Valier -- their bankrolls all safely protected somewhere else -- are trying to legislate us into “cuteness” with pretty yards and newly painted houses, never giving a thought to how much our water and sewer are costing. After all, these old women living on $400 Social Security weren’t clerks that waited on THEM when they were young. These old men with tiny incomes never pumped THEIR gas for them. How can they feel any obligation?
As we head towards four dollar gas, we are looking around at each other in Valier. We have one gas station, one grocery store, no laundromat, and the state just passed a law saying that your neighbor can’t pick up your prescription for you when they have an errand at the county seat. There’s no bus service, the “Senior Surrey” doesn’t come to Valier, and it’s thirty miles to the next settlement. We are in this together.
Someone who has decided to move out west has asked me by email if I had any advice. I do. Bring your own air and water.
Sunday, April 23, 2006
"MONTANA 1911, A Professor and his Wife among the Blackfeet"
April 23, 2006, and it’s a cold day on the edge of snowing on the high Montana prairie. I sit in my little house, which is drafty because I’ve been de-winterizing and chilly because I’m resisting the expense of turning on the floor furnace. The reality of what I’m reading presses on me. The book is “Montana 1911,” a translation of a diary kept by “Willy” Uhlenbeck during the summer that her husband was studying the Blackfeet language.
She is a few miles north of here, on the reservation, and though it is August, it is cold, raining, with slippery gumbo underfoot. She and her husband are dependent on the Tatsey family for their food, transportation and shelter, which is to say meals of “cow tongue, rice and apricots,” transportation by rickety “buggy,” and a tent shelter that is easily penetrated by both wind and water. Their feet are constantly cold because of being wet, so they stay in the “camp bed” as much as possible. This was the life of a prestigious German scholar in those days and most of the time it was compensation enough to know they were doing important work.
To establish another relationship for me, 1911 was the year Thad Scriver went back to Quebec to marry Wessie, the girl from the prosperous farm next door. When she saw her new home, a small two-story house in Browning, she was in despair. Wessie was my mother-in-law -- hardly a scholar, but used to a comfortable life. She would have welcomed a long chat over tea with Willy Uhlenbeck, but neither knew of the existence of the other. The Uhlenbecks traded at the Sherburne Merc where they bought endless amounts of candy to smooth their social relationships with Blackfeet of all ages and types. Candy worked a bit better than whiskey, but -- looking back -- was not much better for the people. (“Candy is dandy but likker is quicker.”) The other remedy, for themselves, is hot tea. I make a cup of hot tea to share with them in absentia as I read.
This book, “Montana 1911,” is translated and edited by Mary Eggermont-Molenaar, who lives in Calgary. The first half book is Willy’s diary, the second part is stories collected by Uhlenbeck, and there are three other essays, by Inge Genee, Alice Kehoe (who was an anthropologist here in the Fifties) and Klaas van Berkel. In addition, there are two translated essays originally by J.P.B. de Josselin de Jong and many photos, mostly by the same. Though it might appear to be a technical, hard-to-read, textbook, it is in fact as engrossing and enlightening as McClintock’s “The Old North Trail,” another of the basic documentations of the Piegan in that time period. One is quickly drawn into this world proceding on two levels, one the most basic material culture of survival on the prairie just before WWI (tents, blankets, luggage, and tin basins) and the other a highly developed verbal and philosophical pursuit still not surpassed.
Willy speaks of ordinary things: which of the children seems shy, the lives of the horses, the hot afternoons when she washes out her handkerchiefs and finds that the first is dry before she has finished sudsing the last, the sheets of flowers and the glory of the sunsets over the mountains. She is very open to salvation by scenery. And, with a photographer’s eye, she describes the physical charms of the Indian people whom she often remarks are “soft” or “gentle,” with shining eyes. She criticizes fat, dirt and slyness. Things are “nice” when they are harmonious and pleasant. The book is dedicated to Annie Tatsey, who strove daily to make life “nice” for her family and the Uhlenbecks.
Uhlenbeck himself doesn’t appreciate scenery so much. His stomach hurts, his feet are freezing, he is happy only when he is working with his little file cards. The translator, who has done research on these people in Europe, assures us that the man is a neurotic, probably a latent homosexual, and unable to sustain an ordinary teaching schedule in a university. Yet he has made this major contribution, partly through the help of devoted university students. He loves the Indian children and brings them back to Willy in the tent for candy. (It is Willy who keeps him functioning. They have no children of their own, so the professor is her child.) The happiest times are when the adults come to sit at his feet while he reads back to them the Blackfeet stories he has transcribed in their language. They can understand what he says and are amazed. If there is a problem with teaching Blackfeet as a written language, it is that there is nothing to read in Blackfeet -- but here it is: the texts to work through in the same way Dutch Willy works through “Adam Bede” to learn English better.
Things were not going well that August. The weather was tough -- but the real problem was Tatsey, who had agreed to take them in and provide them with “teaching” all summer. Indians do not confront -- they evade. Tatsey is clearly going back on his deal but he is elusive, always with an excuse, an errand that has to be done. Maybe the problem, thinks Willy, is really that his oldest daughter is dying in one of the flimsy tents. She has tuberculosis “probably,” says the agency doctor who barely glances at her. In the same miserable tent, without even a camp bed, the 95-year-old grandmother is also dying. She says that she hopes the girl dies first so that there will be someone to greet her after she dies herself. Tatsey has no way to save them and Willy quickly exhausted her small store of medicines she keeps for Uhlenbeck.
Joseph Tatsey is listed in the invaluable record of the Blackfeet census of 1907-08 as half Blood Blackfeet and one-fourth Piegan Blackfeet. On his father’s side he is related to Culbertson’s wife, the formidable Natawista. He is a go-to guy, so he doesn’t just take care of his own family but is constantly asked to counsel and assist other Indian families with difficulties -- in those days everyone of every kind has difficulties, so he is busy. John Tatsey, who was the sole police in Heart Butte for many decades and wrote a column in the paper about the local reprobates, is remembered fondly. But today it is the “Tatsey-akis,” the Tatsey female descendants, who are go-to people. They know individuals, strategies, precedents, and how to use them. Many have achieved prominence in education. They are bold and competent women.
Another “big man” of the times was Joe Kipp, whose store and boarding house occasionally became refuges of the Uhlenbecks when Tatsey broke camp, went off with their household, and disappeared temporarily. They were in residence with Kipp when David Duvall, the resourceful informant for Clark Wissler who did much of the basic anthropological work on Blackfeet, became distraught over a quarrel with his wife and shot himself to death in another room. Willy tries to know as little as possible about it.
Mary Clearman Blew once said something in conversation almost off-hand, but it has remained with me. It was concerning the importance of “first generation” witnesses to history. The Uhlenbecks, Tatsey, Kipp, Duvall -- all of them were not just witnesses but participants -- they WERE history. There is nothing here about scalping or making slaves of captives. Nothing about sex or addiction. This is about rebuilding a society.
The Uhlenbecks didn’t come for Indian Days or to write popular fiction. They weren’t wealthy dilletantes. When one of the Tatsey children brought them some pancakes and bacon in their tent because they were too sick with one of the constant colds to go over to the Tatsey camp, Willy says they ate with their fingers because she had neither fork nor knife. Yet when individuals tried to buy candy from her she was careful to protest that she was not a mere tradesman. Her sweets were gifts, given according to whom she thought deserved them.
Probably I’ll write more about this book later, but it is clear that a real library about Blackfeet must include this important -- and newly accessible thanks to Mary Eggermont-Molenaar -- collection of stories. It is VERY expensive, but well worth the cost.
“Montana 1911, A Professor and his Wife among the Blackfeet” edited by Mary Eggermont-Molenaar. 2005, University of Calgary Press, 2500 N.W. University Drive NW, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 2N4. www.uofcpress.com. ISBN 1-55238-114-5.
She is a few miles north of here, on the reservation, and though it is August, it is cold, raining, with slippery gumbo underfoot. She and her husband are dependent on the Tatsey family for their food, transportation and shelter, which is to say meals of “cow tongue, rice and apricots,” transportation by rickety “buggy,” and a tent shelter that is easily penetrated by both wind and water. Their feet are constantly cold because of being wet, so they stay in the “camp bed” as much as possible. This was the life of a prestigious German scholar in those days and most of the time it was compensation enough to know they were doing important work.
To establish another relationship for me, 1911 was the year Thad Scriver went back to Quebec to marry Wessie, the girl from the prosperous farm next door. When she saw her new home, a small two-story house in Browning, she was in despair. Wessie was my mother-in-law -- hardly a scholar, but used to a comfortable life. She would have welcomed a long chat over tea with Willy Uhlenbeck, but neither knew of the existence of the other. The Uhlenbecks traded at the Sherburne Merc where they bought endless amounts of candy to smooth their social relationships with Blackfeet of all ages and types. Candy worked a bit better than whiskey, but -- looking back -- was not much better for the people. (“Candy is dandy but likker is quicker.”) The other remedy, for themselves, is hot tea. I make a cup of hot tea to share with them in absentia as I read.
This book, “Montana 1911,” is translated and edited by Mary Eggermont-Molenaar, who lives in Calgary. The first half book is Willy’s diary, the second part is stories collected by Uhlenbeck, and there are three other essays, by Inge Genee, Alice Kehoe (who was an anthropologist here in the Fifties) and Klaas van Berkel. In addition, there are two translated essays originally by J.P.B. de Josselin de Jong and many photos, mostly by the same. Though it might appear to be a technical, hard-to-read, textbook, it is in fact as engrossing and enlightening as McClintock’s “The Old North Trail,” another of the basic documentations of the Piegan in that time period. One is quickly drawn into this world proceding on two levels, one the most basic material culture of survival on the prairie just before WWI (tents, blankets, luggage, and tin basins) and the other a highly developed verbal and philosophical pursuit still not surpassed.
Willy speaks of ordinary things: which of the children seems shy, the lives of the horses, the hot afternoons when she washes out her handkerchiefs and finds that the first is dry before she has finished sudsing the last, the sheets of flowers and the glory of the sunsets over the mountains. She is very open to salvation by scenery. And, with a photographer’s eye, she describes the physical charms of the Indian people whom she often remarks are “soft” or “gentle,” with shining eyes. She criticizes fat, dirt and slyness. Things are “nice” when they are harmonious and pleasant. The book is dedicated to Annie Tatsey, who strove daily to make life “nice” for her family and the Uhlenbecks.
Uhlenbeck himself doesn’t appreciate scenery so much. His stomach hurts, his feet are freezing, he is happy only when he is working with his little file cards. The translator, who has done research on these people in Europe, assures us that the man is a neurotic, probably a latent homosexual, and unable to sustain an ordinary teaching schedule in a university. Yet he has made this major contribution, partly through the help of devoted university students. He loves the Indian children and brings them back to Willy in the tent for candy. (It is Willy who keeps him functioning. They have no children of their own, so the professor is her child.) The happiest times are when the adults come to sit at his feet while he reads back to them the Blackfeet stories he has transcribed in their language. They can understand what he says and are amazed. If there is a problem with teaching Blackfeet as a written language, it is that there is nothing to read in Blackfeet -- but here it is: the texts to work through in the same way Dutch Willy works through “Adam Bede” to learn English better.
Things were not going well that August. The weather was tough -- but the real problem was Tatsey, who had agreed to take them in and provide them with “teaching” all summer. Indians do not confront -- they evade. Tatsey is clearly going back on his deal but he is elusive, always with an excuse, an errand that has to be done. Maybe the problem, thinks Willy, is really that his oldest daughter is dying in one of the flimsy tents. She has tuberculosis “probably,” says the agency doctor who barely glances at her. In the same miserable tent, without even a camp bed, the 95-year-old grandmother is also dying. She says that she hopes the girl dies first so that there will be someone to greet her after she dies herself. Tatsey has no way to save them and Willy quickly exhausted her small store of medicines she keeps for Uhlenbeck.
Joseph Tatsey is listed in the invaluable record of the Blackfeet census of 1907-08 as half Blood Blackfeet and one-fourth Piegan Blackfeet. On his father’s side he is related to Culbertson’s wife, the formidable Natawista. He is a go-to guy, so he doesn’t just take care of his own family but is constantly asked to counsel and assist other Indian families with difficulties -- in those days everyone of every kind has difficulties, so he is busy. John Tatsey, who was the sole police in Heart Butte for many decades and wrote a column in the paper about the local reprobates, is remembered fondly. But today it is the “Tatsey-akis,” the Tatsey female descendants, who are go-to people. They know individuals, strategies, precedents, and how to use them. Many have achieved prominence in education. They are bold and competent women.
Another “big man” of the times was Joe Kipp, whose store and boarding house occasionally became refuges of the Uhlenbecks when Tatsey broke camp, went off with their household, and disappeared temporarily. They were in residence with Kipp when David Duvall, the resourceful informant for Clark Wissler who did much of the basic anthropological work on Blackfeet, became distraught over a quarrel with his wife and shot himself to death in another room. Willy tries to know as little as possible about it.
Mary Clearman Blew once said something in conversation almost off-hand, but it has remained with me. It was concerning the importance of “first generation” witnesses to history. The Uhlenbecks, Tatsey, Kipp, Duvall -- all of them were not just witnesses but participants -- they WERE history. There is nothing here about scalping or making slaves of captives. Nothing about sex or addiction. This is about rebuilding a society.
The Uhlenbecks didn’t come for Indian Days or to write popular fiction. They weren’t wealthy dilletantes. When one of the Tatsey children brought them some pancakes and bacon in their tent because they were too sick with one of the constant colds to go over to the Tatsey camp, Willy says they ate with their fingers because she had neither fork nor knife. Yet when individuals tried to buy candy from her she was careful to protest that she was not a mere tradesman. Her sweets were gifts, given according to whom she thought deserved them.
Probably I’ll write more about this book later, but it is clear that a real library about Blackfeet must include this important -- and newly accessible thanks to Mary Eggermont-Molenaar -- collection of stories. It is VERY expensive, but well worth the cost.
“Montana 1911, A Professor and his Wife among the Blackfeet” edited by Mary Eggermont-Molenaar. 2005, University of Calgary Press, 2500 N.W. University Drive NW, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 2N4. www.uofcpress.com. ISBN 1-55238-114-5.
Sunday, April 16, 2006
THE EASTER SERPENT
The carillon at the Baptist church next door is set for new daily hymns every month. This month the 9AM hymn, which is the first of each day, bangs out “Christ the Lord is risen today” except today, Easter, because it’s Sunday. On Sunday the first tune is the call to worship at a quarter to ten. I was not there to see how many Easter bonnets arrived.
The snake, worldwide a strong symbol of renewal and rebirth because it sheds its skin, emerging all new and shiny, is never preached about on Easter in Christian churches because the beast has another role in Christian iconography. (Physicians use the serpent, but as a pair, which makes it different.)
This year shedding a skin is a good symbol for my own renewal because I’m going through my clothes, some of them bought in hopes of losing weight and never worn but now just fitting. But skin-shedding is also an unfitting icon because I’m going back to former clothes -- a snake can’t reassume old skins: it must get bigger and bigger.
My clothes were bought in different parts of what has been a compartmented life. I still have some rather splendid things from the Sixties, like a persimmon velvet jacket with jet embroidery. In the Seventies, as an animal control officer, I bought almost no clothes because I was in uniform. In the Eighties, at seminary, I wore flannel shirts and homemade denim pants. My advisor worried and worried that I wasn’t dressing like a professional. I still have the tweed suit that I bought at graduation, but not the high-heeled boots that went with it. He nearly swooned when he saw that outfit and complimented me so much that it was painfully obvious that he was trying to manipulate me into dressing that way all the time.
I still have my homemade “preaching dresses” meant to look good above the pulpit -- a bow under my chin -- but suggest a robe -- no waist at all. And my preaching blouses are still with me -- the best ones with a little ruffle around the neck and then that bow again. There’s an iconography to collars on religious leaders: the dog collar, the forked tab, the ruff. Mostly they refer to the period in which that kind of leader first emerged.
When I came back to the rez briefly to teach in Heart Butte, I mixed and matched what I had, since there was no money for new clothes, but I was too fat to go back to my preaching clothes. The kids scoffed and sneered, conditioned by television to believe -- like my seminary advisor -- that no white person dressed casually had any value. They themselves wore black sweats. Hoods up. Pulled down over the face.
Back in Portland in my clerical/secretarial job, I was behind the scenes rather than at the counter and could be relaxed. Shirts of all sorts -- never tucked in -- over gaudy skirts. I watched for men’s tuxedo shirts on sale. My attention was on earrings -- real pendant d’orielles -- which I made from beads that I bought from the many bead shops on lunch hour. Now I rarely wear them, forsaking their gypsy attitude for practical gold hoops. Several of those skirts have been converted to sofa pillow covers.
All through every stage my wristwatch has been a large men’s leather strap quartz, good for seeing at a glance while I drove the animal control truck, while I prowled the stacks at Regenstein, while I preached or counseled, while I was packed onto a Portland bus. Now I only wear it if I’m shopping. My wardrobe revolves around fleece shirts, heavy sweatpants and woolly nightgowns.
That’s the way it goes with renaissance, self re-invention, new skins. Throw some things away -- keep others. Adapt to the now. But I was a costumer for a while way back there -- I’m well aware that clothes have a playful aspect -- deception -- and that they can point to the future.
I’ve been very intrigued by the new Pope’s preoccupation with acquiring new and more splendid robes. Even others have remarked at his splendid red kid Gucci loafers. Red shoes, eh? Not the shoes of a fisherman. What if the next loafers are snakeskin?
What does an author wear for readings? Should I show up all in black like a gunslinger? Or denim -- specially tailored -- like Paul Dyck, the artist? I think, depending on income, I’ll incline towards Coldwater Creek and Silhouettes. Both are catalog stores -- that’s what we know about here. Those outfits will be a balancing act between disclosure and disguise. There is an audience to please, but down inside me is an egg that will hatch the next book, an Easter egg, if you like. Some snakes do lay eggs, you know.
I have a pair of red high heels. Haven't tried them on. What if they fit?
The snake, worldwide a strong symbol of renewal and rebirth because it sheds its skin, emerging all new and shiny, is never preached about on Easter in Christian churches because the beast has another role in Christian iconography. (Physicians use the serpent, but as a pair, which makes it different.)
This year shedding a skin is a good symbol for my own renewal because I’m going through my clothes, some of them bought in hopes of losing weight and never worn but now just fitting. But skin-shedding is also an unfitting icon because I’m going back to former clothes -- a snake can’t reassume old skins: it must get bigger and bigger.
My clothes were bought in different parts of what has been a compartmented life. I still have some rather splendid things from the Sixties, like a persimmon velvet jacket with jet embroidery. In the Seventies, as an animal control officer, I bought almost no clothes because I was in uniform. In the Eighties, at seminary, I wore flannel shirts and homemade denim pants. My advisor worried and worried that I wasn’t dressing like a professional. I still have the tweed suit that I bought at graduation, but not the high-heeled boots that went with it. He nearly swooned when he saw that outfit and complimented me so much that it was painfully obvious that he was trying to manipulate me into dressing that way all the time.
I still have my homemade “preaching dresses” meant to look good above the pulpit -- a bow under my chin -- but suggest a robe -- no waist at all. And my preaching blouses are still with me -- the best ones with a little ruffle around the neck and then that bow again. There’s an iconography to collars on religious leaders: the dog collar, the forked tab, the ruff. Mostly they refer to the period in which that kind of leader first emerged.
When I came back to the rez briefly to teach in Heart Butte, I mixed and matched what I had, since there was no money for new clothes, but I was too fat to go back to my preaching clothes. The kids scoffed and sneered, conditioned by television to believe -- like my seminary advisor -- that no white person dressed casually had any value. They themselves wore black sweats. Hoods up. Pulled down over the face.
Back in Portland in my clerical/secretarial job, I was behind the scenes rather than at the counter and could be relaxed. Shirts of all sorts -- never tucked in -- over gaudy skirts. I watched for men’s tuxedo shirts on sale. My attention was on earrings -- real pendant d’orielles -- which I made from beads that I bought from the many bead shops on lunch hour. Now I rarely wear them, forsaking their gypsy attitude for practical gold hoops. Several of those skirts have been converted to sofa pillow covers.
All through every stage my wristwatch has been a large men’s leather strap quartz, good for seeing at a glance while I drove the animal control truck, while I prowled the stacks at Regenstein, while I preached or counseled, while I was packed onto a Portland bus. Now I only wear it if I’m shopping. My wardrobe revolves around fleece shirts, heavy sweatpants and woolly nightgowns.
That’s the way it goes with renaissance, self re-invention, new skins. Throw some things away -- keep others. Adapt to the now. But I was a costumer for a while way back there -- I’m well aware that clothes have a playful aspect -- deception -- and that they can point to the future.
I’ve been very intrigued by the new Pope’s preoccupation with acquiring new and more splendid robes. Even others have remarked at his splendid red kid Gucci loafers. Red shoes, eh? Not the shoes of a fisherman. What if the next loafers are snakeskin?
What does an author wear for readings? Should I show up all in black like a gunslinger? Or denim -- specially tailored -- like Paul Dyck, the artist? I think, depending on income, I’ll incline towards Coldwater Creek and Silhouettes. Both are catalog stores -- that’s what we know about here. Those outfits will be a balancing act between disclosure and disguise. There is an audience to please, but down inside me is an egg that will hatch the next book, an Easter egg, if you like. Some snakes do lay eggs, you know.
I have a pair of red high heels. Haven't tried them on. What if they fit?
Friday, April 14, 2006
THE EASTER PEONY
Today is Good Friday, in the Christian tradition the day that Jesus was crucified and became “the Christ,” the entity sent to redeem all good Christians. In Portland the downtown ministers used to stage an “endarkenment ceremony,” meant to contrast with “enlightenment” which would come at dawn on the third day. The ceremony was Bible readings about the Crucifixion with each of the ministers taking one of Jesus “last words.” A man with a particuarly rich and thrilling voice took the last sentence: “It is done.” All this over a PA system in an ornate old church where the sanctuary had no windows, so that as each sentence was spoken, more lights were turned out until it was totally dark.
Ministers joke about religion a lot and Unitarian Universalist ministers more than most, though it’s inconvenient when some of the ministers are female or black or handicapped, since most jokes everywhere are about what makes us nervous or troubled. Like sex, death, power. Peter Raible of Seattle was always particularly sharp at pointing out examples of our Endarkenment. He’d have had a field day with the present US administration.
But the best symbols come out of truths and in these cyclical ceremonies of seasonal change, they are often weather related. Certainly right here and now our skies are dark with purple cloud, but the rain from them is hopefully calling out what is underground. The bulbs, which have batteries stored from last fall, are pushing up out of the dark soil.
I always enjoyed going to that primal layer when I preached my Easter sermon, which isn’t easy among UU’s who don’t recognize the divinity of Jesus Christ. I never have had patience for smarmy pastel bunnies and chicks. (Anyway, a friend reports that her neighborhood bunny ate all her crocus and the chicks are being tested for bird flu -- talk about endarkenment!) So one year I preached about King Potato. Both Old Joe Campbell (no editor will ever let me call him that, so I’ll say it here) and Mircea Eliade pointed out that the Jesus story comes out of Egyptian mythology in which Osiris is cut up and dispersed as an act of renewal. His sister/wife was dedicated to finding and reassembling him, with the final lost piece being his penis, which was hidden in a pillar. The experts say that this is an interweaving of very early agriculture (tubers had to be cut up and buried in order to start a new plant) with human renewal. (The Egyptians couldn’t have used actual potatoes since that’s an American plant.)
This makes no sense unless you can accept ideas like the one in the recently discussed (it’s been known for quite a while) Gospel of Judas, which insists that someone had to betray Jesus (cut him up) so that he could rise from the dead -- and Judas was the guy whom Jesus specifically asked to do this very difficult thing. (Camille Paglia, who must have thought she was studying obscure and arcane subject matter, has been interviewed on the radio every day this week.)
Every day the newspaper reports another case where someone freaks out and kills his/her immediate family -- even mothers, even ministers’ wives. Is this because their situation has become so barren and corrupt that the ancient and primitive impulse to cut everything up in order to cause a renewal is unleashed by desperation? And was it provoked because the strangehold of the powerful became so choking and anguished?
We’d like to think we’re more sophisticated than that. We hope to create refuges and safety nets and escape valves. But consider Darfur, which no one wants to do. A place where children are taught to chop off arms, feet, lips. How dark does it have to get? Are these family massacres just little Darfur outbursts that are normally suppressed or disabled or transformed?
The human unconscious is huge, bigger than we ever suspected -- even Freud. All those tiny structures in the brain, especially the ones behind the forehead that make us feel for each other and willing to cooperate, are as unconscious as the structures that keep our hearts beating and our lungs breathing. We know how to implant a little machine to keep the heart in rhythm, but there is no machine that can replace the “mirroring” cells, so vulnerable just behind the eggshell of bone in front where skulls are often hit. The idea that the darkness in our heads contains submerged goodness is new.
The growing directions for peonies -- which which I am generously endowed, thanks to previous gardeners -- say that they must go through a really cold winter in order to grow properly in the spring. Only an old-fashioned rose has the lush, almost blowsy, full and pink ruffling of a peony. It’s a far more glorious bloom than the lily we usually associate with Easter. In fact, it’s pastel, sentimental, and appealing as a chick or Easter egg. I may be converted to the idea of the nearly sexual excess of the peony as a symbol of resurrection, rebirth, renewal, return to enlightenment. The “Easter Peony.”
The moon is full right now. According to the radio, which did a little story on names of moons, this is the Christian “Pasque Moon.” But in some culture or other it is called the “pink moon.” (I tried to find this on the NPR website but the issue is confused by a song with that name.) The “pink” moon is called that because so many pink things are in bloom -- cherry blossom country, I guess. A peony moon is not here, not yet. Just the first sharp tips of the plants are showing, more maroon than pink. But any moon would not be so glorious if it weren’t floating in a dark sky.
When I explored this stuff, members of my congregations often said afterward, "I didn't understand one damn thing you said!" Well, that's why they call them Mysteries. Unsolvable but eminently ponderable.
Ministers joke about religion a lot and Unitarian Universalist ministers more than most, though it’s inconvenient when some of the ministers are female or black or handicapped, since most jokes everywhere are about what makes us nervous or troubled. Like sex, death, power. Peter Raible of Seattle was always particularly sharp at pointing out examples of our Endarkenment. He’d have had a field day with the present US administration.
But the best symbols come out of truths and in these cyclical ceremonies of seasonal change, they are often weather related. Certainly right here and now our skies are dark with purple cloud, but the rain from them is hopefully calling out what is underground. The bulbs, which have batteries stored from last fall, are pushing up out of the dark soil.
I always enjoyed going to that primal layer when I preached my Easter sermon, which isn’t easy among UU’s who don’t recognize the divinity of Jesus Christ. I never have had patience for smarmy pastel bunnies and chicks. (Anyway, a friend reports that her neighborhood bunny ate all her crocus and the chicks are being tested for bird flu -- talk about endarkenment!) So one year I preached about King Potato. Both Old Joe Campbell (no editor will ever let me call him that, so I’ll say it here) and Mircea Eliade pointed out that the Jesus story comes out of Egyptian mythology in which Osiris is cut up and dispersed as an act of renewal. His sister/wife was dedicated to finding and reassembling him, with the final lost piece being his penis, which was hidden in a pillar. The experts say that this is an interweaving of very early agriculture (tubers had to be cut up and buried in order to start a new plant) with human renewal. (The Egyptians couldn’t have used actual potatoes since that’s an American plant.)
This makes no sense unless you can accept ideas like the one in the recently discussed (it’s been known for quite a while) Gospel of Judas, which insists that someone had to betray Jesus (cut him up) so that he could rise from the dead -- and Judas was the guy whom Jesus specifically asked to do this very difficult thing. (Camille Paglia, who must have thought she was studying obscure and arcane subject matter, has been interviewed on the radio every day this week.)
Every day the newspaper reports another case where someone freaks out and kills his/her immediate family -- even mothers, even ministers’ wives. Is this because their situation has become so barren and corrupt that the ancient and primitive impulse to cut everything up in order to cause a renewal is unleashed by desperation? And was it provoked because the strangehold of the powerful became so choking and anguished?
We’d like to think we’re more sophisticated than that. We hope to create refuges and safety nets and escape valves. But consider Darfur, which no one wants to do. A place where children are taught to chop off arms, feet, lips. How dark does it have to get? Are these family massacres just little Darfur outbursts that are normally suppressed or disabled or transformed?
The human unconscious is huge, bigger than we ever suspected -- even Freud. All those tiny structures in the brain, especially the ones behind the forehead that make us feel for each other and willing to cooperate, are as unconscious as the structures that keep our hearts beating and our lungs breathing. We know how to implant a little machine to keep the heart in rhythm, but there is no machine that can replace the “mirroring” cells, so vulnerable just behind the eggshell of bone in front where skulls are often hit. The idea that the darkness in our heads contains submerged goodness is new.
The growing directions for peonies -- which which I am generously endowed, thanks to previous gardeners -- say that they must go through a really cold winter in order to grow properly in the spring. Only an old-fashioned rose has the lush, almost blowsy, full and pink ruffling of a peony. It’s a far more glorious bloom than the lily we usually associate with Easter. In fact, it’s pastel, sentimental, and appealing as a chick or Easter egg. I may be converted to the idea of the nearly sexual excess of the peony as a symbol of resurrection, rebirth, renewal, return to enlightenment. The “Easter Peony.”
The moon is full right now. According to the radio, which did a little story on names of moons, this is the Christian “Pasque Moon.” But in some culture or other it is called the “pink moon.” (I tried to find this on the NPR website but the issue is confused by a song with that name.) The “pink” moon is called that because so many pink things are in bloom -- cherry blossom country, I guess. A peony moon is not here, not yet. Just the first sharp tips of the plants are showing, more maroon than pink. But any moon would not be so glorious if it weren’t floating in a dark sky.
When I explored this stuff, members of my congregations often said afterward, "I didn't understand one damn thing you said!" Well, that's why they call them Mysteries. Unsolvable but eminently ponderable.
Monday, April 10, 2006
TOURIST TOWNS
When Glacier National Park was bought from the Amskapi Pikuni division of the Blackfoot Nation, three small tourist towns formed on the boundary. From north to south were Babb at the north end of St. Mary’s Lake, then St. Mary at the south end, and -- across Looking Glass pass -- East Glacier where Highway 2 leaves the reservation, heading west. East is quite distinct from the others in terms of who lives there, style, and so on. For one thing, the road from Babb to St. Mary, which once appeared to be solid forest, has been claimed by many small, not particularly upscale, allotment holders because global warming means they are not sealed in all winter. In East Glacier growth has been around the edges of town and has been summer recreation type.
I did some phoning last night because Scriver Wife Number Two, Jeanette Caoutte Scriver Chase, had died in Grants Pass, Oregon, in a nursing home at an advanced age and, since I couldn’t get the Browning paper to print an obituary, I needed to tell her friends. (In her eighties my mother used to froth and foam about her old friends disappearing without a trace -- no one bothering to let her know.) The young ones around here don’t remember Jeanette -- heck, they don’t even remember ME! (Third wife.) The youngest don’t remember Bob, who died in 1999.
Two of Jeanette’s good friends lived in the little resort towns. In East Glacier Doris Sherburne lives with her son and runs one of the better motels, where their clientele has returned every summer for many years. They live well -- they have the inland craving for shellfish so often eat bouillabase, accompanied by the proper wine on an elegantly appointed table. Sherburne is the name of one of the original white settlers. In fact, the patriarch hired Thad Scriver, Bob’s father, to come to Browning to work in his mercantile store in 1903 and supported Thad when he started the Browning Merc. One of his sons is the favorite “bad guy” on the lips of those who pursue reservation corruption. Doris married a different branch. I taught school with her son, Terry, who was hired to teach French and also taught Blackfeet (with the help of Katharine Grant) in one of the more sophisticated early attempts (they had headphone booths).
East Glacier is a railroad town -- in fact, in the early days (Fifties and Sixties) -- the rivalry between one side of the railroad and the other side was so strong that there had to be two grocery stores and in January snowdrifts emotions flared so high that people ran off with other people’s spouses or set fire to each other’s houses. The main Glacier Park offices are in West Glacier (the other side of the Rockies) but there is a significant ranger presence in East. The major railroad hotel is here, so in summer the place is overrun with earnest kids from Minneapolis -- or used to be. Now that the Great Northern has become the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe, the summer help is much more diverse and much more expectant of adventures. The historic Clarke legacy is close to the surface here, since this is where their allotment was (they sold the land for the Big Hotel) and where they welcomed their high level friends. (Famous artists and movie stars like Clark Gable.) Today’s Clarke Art Gallery is run by his daughter across the street from the Sherburne’s motel.
Doris hires locals for her motel help and is inventive enough to have devised teams for room cleaning and set-up so the check-out turnover goes more quickly. Two women invade each room as it’s emptied and go through a prescribed routine of scrubbing, changing sheets, and so on. They are allowed to keep the TV on and follow the soaps as they go. They were the first in town to fold the ends of the toilet paper rolls into little V’s.
Everyone in East Glacier is a little careful about bears, which often come into town. In fact, another next-generation Sherburne daughter-in-law was on the phone when her small daughter came to tell her there was a bear on the roof. She didn’t believe it until she heard a lot of scrambling up there. Now her real estate business is called “Bear On the Roof.” Google it -- you’ll see.
St. Mary is also close enough to the Park to see an occasional bear. The major hotel in this town is Hugh Black’s. That’s not its name and Hugh has been gone for decades, but locals still call it that. One of the sons built a new detached multi-storied wing with family money, but when it came time to divide the inheritance, some family members demanded a larger share than he felt he deserved, since he had developed the idea. Legal measures deadlocked, so this son went into the building and stripped it: doorknobs, hatracks, toilet seats, wall-heaters -- all came out and were sold.
Ruth Johnson, Jeanette's friend, and her family have developed a different sort of presence based on a cafe and campground. She started the business in a little cabin on the highway and the family lived in a tent behind, alongside the supplies. If intruders got into the supplies, looking for booze but not finding any in this Methodist establishment, Ruth dealt with them harshly. I don’t mean a tongue lashing. Yet Ruth is probably the most trusted confidante of cowboys and ranchers up that way. I think they see her as an equal. Nowadays the family lives up the hill from the road but their well is just down from the Black dump, which is full of paint and preservative residue. They have been plagued by cancer.
The Johnsons have been the source of many teachers and administrators for the Browning schools. Ruth likes genealogy and has been quick to claim her heritage, which goes back to the Mayflower. To her, in spite of her family being mixed with Blackfeet, the Mayflower was the beginning of America.
Babb sheltered no friend of Jeanette’s that I could think of. The tourist “industry” people there are a generation older than the ones in St. Marys or East Glacier. Thronson’s tried homesteading in the days when the new railroad was pulling in dreamers all along the Highline. When they went bust -- like everyone else -- they came to the Park and built small log cabins for tourists -- in those days a hardy bunch who wore jodphurs and laced boots to their knees. Every morning Thronsons carried over a bucket of water and armload of wood to each cabin. The sheets were washed by hand and ironed with the kind of iron one warms on the woodstove, so I don’t think they were changed daily. The log cabins are still there though not in use since the newer motel was built, the store is still there, and the Thronson’s granddaughter, who must be approaching fifty? by now, bought the Bob Scriver cabin which was halfway between St. Mary’s and Babb, about where the Winold Reiss art school was in the Twenties. Jeanette lived in that cabin and ran a little trinket shop in St. Mary to help finance the building of the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife, now gone.
These towns at the interface between GNP and the reservation have always been “white” towns, but that’s changing. They’ve always been identified with the town's major families, but that’s changing, too. The feuds that used to be so bitter have been replaced by drug-fueled rages.
Jeanette’s friends. If you were casting them with movie stars, they’d be Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Ruth Roman. Women of substance and opinion. They got things done. In old age they are still formidable, and so was Jeanette, right up to the last.
I did some phoning last night because Scriver Wife Number Two, Jeanette Caoutte Scriver Chase, had died in Grants Pass, Oregon, in a nursing home at an advanced age and, since I couldn’t get the Browning paper to print an obituary, I needed to tell her friends. (In her eighties my mother used to froth and foam about her old friends disappearing without a trace -- no one bothering to let her know.) The young ones around here don’t remember Jeanette -- heck, they don’t even remember ME! (Third wife.) The youngest don’t remember Bob, who died in 1999.
Two of Jeanette’s good friends lived in the little resort towns. In East Glacier Doris Sherburne lives with her son and runs one of the better motels, where their clientele has returned every summer for many years. They live well -- they have the inland craving for shellfish so often eat bouillabase, accompanied by the proper wine on an elegantly appointed table. Sherburne is the name of one of the original white settlers. In fact, the patriarch hired Thad Scriver, Bob’s father, to come to Browning to work in his mercantile store in 1903 and supported Thad when he started the Browning Merc. One of his sons is the favorite “bad guy” on the lips of those who pursue reservation corruption. Doris married a different branch. I taught school with her son, Terry, who was hired to teach French and also taught Blackfeet (with the help of Katharine Grant) in one of the more sophisticated early attempts (they had headphone booths).
East Glacier is a railroad town -- in fact, in the early days (Fifties and Sixties) -- the rivalry between one side of the railroad and the other side was so strong that there had to be two grocery stores and in January snowdrifts emotions flared so high that people ran off with other people’s spouses or set fire to each other’s houses. The main Glacier Park offices are in West Glacier (the other side of the Rockies) but there is a significant ranger presence in East. The major railroad hotel is here, so in summer the place is overrun with earnest kids from Minneapolis -- or used to be. Now that the Great Northern has become the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe, the summer help is much more diverse and much more expectant of adventures. The historic Clarke legacy is close to the surface here, since this is where their allotment was (they sold the land for the Big Hotel) and where they welcomed their high level friends. (Famous artists and movie stars like Clark Gable.) Today’s Clarke Art Gallery is run by his daughter across the street from the Sherburne’s motel.
Doris hires locals for her motel help and is inventive enough to have devised teams for room cleaning and set-up so the check-out turnover goes more quickly. Two women invade each room as it’s emptied and go through a prescribed routine of scrubbing, changing sheets, and so on. They are allowed to keep the TV on and follow the soaps as they go. They were the first in town to fold the ends of the toilet paper rolls into little V’s.
Everyone in East Glacier is a little careful about bears, which often come into town. In fact, another next-generation Sherburne daughter-in-law was on the phone when her small daughter came to tell her there was a bear on the roof. She didn’t believe it until she heard a lot of scrambling up there. Now her real estate business is called “Bear On the Roof.” Google it -- you’ll see.
St. Mary is also close enough to the Park to see an occasional bear. The major hotel in this town is Hugh Black’s. That’s not its name and Hugh has been gone for decades, but locals still call it that. One of the sons built a new detached multi-storied wing with family money, but when it came time to divide the inheritance, some family members demanded a larger share than he felt he deserved, since he had developed the idea. Legal measures deadlocked, so this son went into the building and stripped it: doorknobs, hatracks, toilet seats, wall-heaters -- all came out and were sold.
Ruth Johnson, Jeanette's friend, and her family have developed a different sort of presence based on a cafe and campground. She started the business in a little cabin on the highway and the family lived in a tent behind, alongside the supplies. If intruders got into the supplies, looking for booze but not finding any in this Methodist establishment, Ruth dealt with them harshly. I don’t mean a tongue lashing. Yet Ruth is probably the most trusted confidante of cowboys and ranchers up that way. I think they see her as an equal. Nowadays the family lives up the hill from the road but their well is just down from the Black dump, which is full of paint and preservative residue. They have been plagued by cancer.
The Johnsons have been the source of many teachers and administrators for the Browning schools. Ruth likes genealogy and has been quick to claim her heritage, which goes back to the Mayflower. To her, in spite of her family being mixed with Blackfeet, the Mayflower was the beginning of America.
Babb sheltered no friend of Jeanette’s that I could think of. The tourist “industry” people there are a generation older than the ones in St. Marys or East Glacier. Thronson’s tried homesteading in the days when the new railroad was pulling in dreamers all along the Highline. When they went bust -- like everyone else -- they came to the Park and built small log cabins for tourists -- in those days a hardy bunch who wore jodphurs and laced boots to their knees. Every morning Thronsons carried over a bucket of water and armload of wood to each cabin. The sheets were washed by hand and ironed with the kind of iron one warms on the woodstove, so I don’t think they were changed daily. The log cabins are still there though not in use since the newer motel was built, the store is still there, and the Thronson’s granddaughter, who must be approaching fifty? by now, bought the Bob Scriver cabin which was halfway between St. Mary’s and Babb, about where the Winold Reiss art school was in the Twenties. Jeanette lived in that cabin and ran a little trinket shop in St. Mary to help finance the building of the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife, now gone.
These towns at the interface between GNP and the reservation have always been “white” towns, but that’s changing. They’ve always been identified with the town's major families, but that’s changing, too. The feuds that used to be so bitter have been replaced by drug-fueled rages.
Jeanette’s friends. If you were casting them with movie stars, they’d be Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Ruth Roman. Women of substance and opinion. They got things done. In old age they are still formidable, and so was Jeanette, right up to the last.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
POVERTY AS A CHOICE
My income puts me four dollars over the poverty line, but this is a choice -- as school teachers these days say in a blaming voice as though that explained everything. I knew I would never get even the first book written unless I escaped Portland and deadhead salary work. I saw poverty as a kind of freedom, a purity, a simplification. So I retired a little too soon.
The picture in my head that I went towards was basically a cabin. Many times in my life I’ve moved to a new place by putting all my belongings in storage, driving ahead in my small van with only the basics (computer, mattress, folding table and chair, stack of books, fork and frying pan) to rent a marginal studio apartment and live in it, basically camping, until I’d made enough money to fly back, rent a moving van, and bring the rest. Though I was always happy to see my things again, I also cherished the month or so when the space was empty of all but light and appliances.
This little 800 square foot house seemed enormous at first, but filled up fast, partly because I had some of my mother’s furniture with me. But also because as soon as I had enough bookcases to shelve all the books and enough filing cabinets to sort out my boxes, they exploded to fill the rooms. This kept me from feeling impoverished even though I was still feeding myself the same way I fed the cats: open a can, dump it in a bowl, heat it in the tiny old microwave and eat. It was a chop-wood-carry-water life until I began to sink under undiagnosed diabetes, which I thought was just aging. Then I began to push aside the papers, neglect the yard, and nap with the cats. Now that I’m diagnosed, I’m rich in energy again, but there will be no more simple meals and fingersticks are part of what has to be a regular discipline.
I begin to understand that the world sees diabetes -- like everything else -- as a marketing opportunity. Even if I don’t need meds, I still need a doctor and the gas to go see her, a little machine and the supplies for it. I need advice and recipes and more access to better food. And my yard -- according to the neighbors -- needs a power-mower, plants, etc. George W. Bush wants me insured for drugs. I'm a pass-through for pharmaceutical profiteering.
The first book is written and sold but it turns out there will be no money for a year and then it will be a modest amount. The fact is that our culture no longer values writing. Our media has gone digital video and may not return. Everyone writes -- not very well -- but the publishing houses have crashed. Indeed, the newspapers and magazines are crashing. Writers are as unemployed as Detroit assembly line workers. Rolling poverty.
All this is expectable and rational to some degree. I didn’t expect this much inflation this fast (what cost $30 when I came in 1999 is now $50) and I didn’t expect this town to change. Our first Hummer is now parked in front of the post office every morning -- the driver has bought the Stone School Bed & Breakfast (a conversion of the first public school in Valier) and expects to live “a spiritual life” there with her two golden labs. (It has a quite remarkable purple chandelier as well as a view of our nearly dried-up lake.) The previous big city import insisted that we become a “tree city,” create a pocket park on the highway, and install water hookups for the campground -- even though there is not enough water in the town wells to water our little vegetable patches. My neighbors across the street -- the ones who complain about my yard -- have three bathrooms, a hot tub, a dishwasher, a laundry (2 kids, a LOT of washing), and underground automatic watering. I have one bathroom, no dish or clothes washer, no hot tub (or bathtub, since I installed a shower), one hose with a sprinkler on the end. There are no meters in town so we pay the same flat rate for water. Somehow there are a lot of people trying to force their lifestyle onto me -- shifting their financial burden first.
But I can suck it up, be a bit of a martyr, and consider myself a role model. I came expecting to stay maybe twenty years: I’ve been here seven years now and am mostly achieving what I set out to do. People in Valier never expected me to stay more than a couple of years and find it positive, if surprising, that I’m still here. The people who count cut me a little slack.
Social pressure in the United States is something else. Christian America has always been of the opinion (secretly or not) that a person who is not prosperous is not favored by God. Something must be wrong with them, whether sin, deformation, or laziness. This small town has its share of the alcoholic, the maimed, the never-quite-right, the trauma-survivors. The ones who have money are tolerated. The ones who get “big checks from the government for doing nothing” are highly resented, even by their own relatives. We hate the poor, as New Orleans demonstrated.
But now we’re moving beyond that. Mitt Romney in Massachusetts wants to require people to buy health insurance by law, punishing anyone who fails to do so with fines, and imposing health insurance on them by withholding the fees from their wages or taxes. In Montana we already have required auto insurance.
There are two forces entwined: one is the enumerating and classifying of everyone, a syndrome brought on computers IMHO. The government wants to number the hairs on your head -- all the while keeping their own heads covered with secrecy. The second force is redefining what might be simple incompetence or bad luck into a defiance of “God Government” and criminalizing it. We’re back to debtor’s prison. Can systematic weeding-out of “cripples” be far behind? Why wait for them to die of poverty, when they can just be neatly shot?
Moving here from Portland probably did as much or more to restore me than the diabetes diagnosis. Not only was the atmosphere there full of strange molecular substances. (I’m convinced the Portlandia Building is a “sick” building contaminated with fungus, etc., even while putting aside the day that bus exhaust so invaded the inadequate ventilation system that one entire floor began to vomit and was sent home.) In addition there was crime everywhere: in my apartment a cocaine dealer across the hall, a cocaine dealer who moved in with the woman who lived directly under me, cars stolen from the curb under my window or sometimes just their wheels, rapists in the news everyday -- some of them people we knew. Not the victims, the rapists.
Paranoia put all our cortisol levels as high as they would be if we’d been in a car wreck. Some people could not function without tranquilizers. Every clerk in the Permit Center was on mood elevators. There was random shooting on the streets, even in daytime, and constant bomb threats. Some guy flipped out and held hostage a high-rise building near us. It contained a TV station which could not broadcast what was happening for fear of tipping off the invader about what the cops were doing. This was in Portland, considered an idyllic green place to live.
It was like coming into an inheritance to return to this dry, windy, pop. 300 village. Now I’m wealthy in time, materials, ideas, security, sunlight... But that only increases the necessity of simplification, discipline, awareness. While this lasts. Across the street the little house of one of my neighbors has been emptied over the past week or so. She is in a nursing home. The very large family cleared out what they wanted, then held a “garage” sale. We wait to see who buys the little house. It is not grand enough to attract a Hummer driver, thank... um... Buddha.
The picture in my head that I went towards was basically a cabin. Many times in my life I’ve moved to a new place by putting all my belongings in storage, driving ahead in my small van with only the basics (computer, mattress, folding table and chair, stack of books, fork and frying pan) to rent a marginal studio apartment and live in it, basically camping, until I’d made enough money to fly back, rent a moving van, and bring the rest. Though I was always happy to see my things again, I also cherished the month or so when the space was empty of all but light and appliances.
This little 800 square foot house seemed enormous at first, but filled up fast, partly because I had some of my mother’s furniture with me. But also because as soon as I had enough bookcases to shelve all the books and enough filing cabinets to sort out my boxes, they exploded to fill the rooms. This kept me from feeling impoverished even though I was still feeding myself the same way I fed the cats: open a can, dump it in a bowl, heat it in the tiny old microwave and eat. It was a chop-wood-carry-water life until I began to sink under undiagnosed diabetes, which I thought was just aging. Then I began to push aside the papers, neglect the yard, and nap with the cats. Now that I’m diagnosed, I’m rich in energy again, but there will be no more simple meals and fingersticks are part of what has to be a regular discipline.
I begin to understand that the world sees diabetes -- like everything else -- as a marketing opportunity. Even if I don’t need meds, I still need a doctor and the gas to go see her, a little machine and the supplies for it. I need advice and recipes and more access to better food. And my yard -- according to the neighbors -- needs a power-mower, plants, etc. George W. Bush wants me insured for drugs. I'm a pass-through for pharmaceutical profiteering.
The first book is written and sold but it turns out there will be no money for a year and then it will be a modest amount. The fact is that our culture no longer values writing. Our media has gone digital video and may not return. Everyone writes -- not very well -- but the publishing houses have crashed. Indeed, the newspapers and magazines are crashing. Writers are as unemployed as Detroit assembly line workers. Rolling poverty.
All this is expectable and rational to some degree. I didn’t expect this much inflation this fast (what cost $30 when I came in 1999 is now $50) and I didn’t expect this town to change. Our first Hummer is now parked in front of the post office every morning -- the driver has bought the Stone School Bed & Breakfast (a conversion of the first public school in Valier) and expects to live “a spiritual life” there with her two golden labs. (It has a quite remarkable purple chandelier as well as a view of our nearly dried-up lake.) The previous big city import insisted that we become a “tree city,” create a pocket park on the highway, and install water hookups for the campground -- even though there is not enough water in the town wells to water our little vegetable patches. My neighbors across the street -- the ones who complain about my yard -- have three bathrooms, a hot tub, a dishwasher, a laundry (2 kids, a LOT of washing), and underground automatic watering. I have one bathroom, no dish or clothes washer, no hot tub (or bathtub, since I installed a shower), one hose with a sprinkler on the end. There are no meters in town so we pay the same flat rate for water. Somehow there are a lot of people trying to force their lifestyle onto me -- shifting their financial burden first.
But I can suck it up, be a bit of a martyr, and consider myself a role model. I came expecting to stay maybe twenty years: I’ve been here seven years now and am mostly achieving what I set out to do. People in Valier never expected me to stay more than a couple of years and find it positive, if surprising, that I’m still here. The people who count cut me a little slack.
Social pressure in the United States is something else. Christian America has always been of the opinion (secretly or not) that a person who is not prosperous is not favored by God. Something must be wrong with them, whether sin, deformation, or laziness. This small town has its share of the alcoholic, the maimed, the never-quite-right, the trauma-survivors. The ones who have money are tolerated. The ones who get “big checks from the government for doing nothing” are highly resented, even by their own relatives. We hate the poor, as New Orleans demonstrated.
But now we’re moving beyond that. Mitt Romney in Massachusetts wants to require people to buy health insurance by law, punishing anyone who fails to do so with fines, and imposing health insurance on them by withholding the fees from their wages or taxes. In Montana we already have required auto insurance.
There are two forces entwined: one is the enumerating and classifying of everyone, a syndrome brought on computers IMHO. The government wants to number the hairs on your head -- all the while keeping their own heads covered with secrecy. The second force is redefining what might be simple incompetence or bad luck into a defiance of “God Government” and criminalizing it. We’re back to debtor’s prison. Can systematic weeding-out of “cripples” be far behind? Why wait for them to die of poverty, when they can just be neatly shot?
Moving here from Portland probably did as much or more to restore me than the diabetes diagnosis. Not only was the atmosphere there full of strange molecular substances. (I’m convinced the Portlandia Building is a “sick” building contaminated with fungus, etc., even while putting aside the day that bus exhaust so invaded the inadequate ventilation system that one entire floor began to vomit and was sent home.) In addition there was crime everywhere: in my apartment a cocaine dealer across the hall, a cocaine dealer who moved in with the woman who lived directly under me, cars stolen from the curb under my window or sometimes just their wheels, rapists in the news everyday -- some of them people we knew. Not the victims, the rapists.
Paranoia put all our cortisol levels as high as they would be if we’d been in a car wreck. Some people could not function without tranquilizers. Every clerk in the Permit Center was on mood elevators. There was random shooting on the streets, even in daytime, and constant bomb threats. Some guy flipped out and held hostage a high-rise building near us. It contained a TV station which could not broadcast what was happening for fear of tipping off the invader about what the cops were doing. This was in Portland, considered an idyllic green place to live.
It was like coming into an inheritance to return to this dry, windy, pop. 300 village. Now I’m wealthy in time, materials, ideas, security, sunlight... But that only increases the necessity of simplification, discipline, awareness. While this lasts. Across the street the little house of one of my neighbors has been emptied over the past week or so. She is in a nursing home. The very large family cleared out what they wanted, then held a “garage” sale. We wait to see who buys the little house. It is not grand enough to attract a Hummer driver, thank... um... Buddha.
Sunday, April 02, 2006
BARE-FOOTIN'
Robert Parker Lyrics - Barefootin Lyrics
Everybody get on your feet,
You make me nervous when you in your seat
Take off your shoes and pat your feet,
We're doin a dance that can't be beat
We're barefootin', We're barefootin',
We're barefootin', We're barefootin',
Went to a party the other night,
Long Tall Sally was out of sight
Threw way her wig, and her high sneakers too,
She was doin a dance without any shoes
She was barefootin', She was barefootin',
She was barefootin', She was barefootin',
Hey little gal with the red dress on,
I bet you can barefoot all night long
Take off your shoes and throw them away,
Come back and get them another day
We're barefootin', We're barefootin',
We're barefootin', We're barefootin',
Lil John Henry he said to Sue,
If I was barefootin' would you barefoot too
Sue told John, "I'm thirty two,
I was barefootin ever since I was two
They was barefootin', they was barefootin'
They was barefootin'', we barefootin'
We barefootin' we barefootin'
We barefootin' we barefootin'
We barefootin' we barefootin'
We don't have no shoes on
This lovely little song came on the radio a week or so ago and it’s been floating around in my head ever since. The central idea is going to a dance, getting into the mood, and kicking off one’s shoes to do a little rhythmic movin’ in one’s bare feet. Be natural, get with the scene, connect to that cool floor.
I’ve always loved going barefoot. In the days back in Portland when I walked home from school on hot pavement, my shoes came off as soon as I got to our lawn. My mother always claimed I learned this trick in California when we went to visit my father’s brother and his family. But then, my father always sang to my mother (who was named Lucy), “Lucy, put your shoes on -- you’re in town now.”
Barefoot: sensuous and free, dancing in California, hick behavior of a country girl, and more. My brother once said, when we were discussing insurance in our late middle-age, “I’m walking barefoot though the world.” He meant this to mean that since he had no insurance there was nothing to shield him from injury or from the costs associated. Therefore, he must be alert to avoid broken glass, rusty nails and scorpions, but he seemed to be confident he could do that. (In reality neither of my brothers was fond of going barefoot.) A certain amount of fatalism here.
Once at a party or something, a handsome young man remarked, “I could never make love to an older woman because their feet are so ugly.” I knew what he meant: feet tortured into bunions and snaggly toes because of being crammed into small high-heeled shoes for so many years that they can NOT go barefooted -- their Achilles’ tendons have shortened to fit high heels and stretching them enough to keep heels on the ground is painful. I guess that young man would have to make love to older women who keep their Manolo Blahniks or Jimmy Choos on while in the act. Over the years I’d look at my feet and wonder if they were yet ugly enough to prevent a young man from devoting time to me.
I took pride in my high arches, though they often made shoes uncomfortable and then suddenly in my late fifties, I began to have plantar fascitis, which is an inflammation of the sheet of tissue over the bottom of the foot. What was tricky about it was that it turned out to be due to torn cartilage in my knee, which was allowing my ankle to twist. Even before that I’d gone to what I once scorned as “old lady shoes,” meaning something like orthopedic sandals with cushy soles. All my life I’ve walked a lot and in Saskatoon I used to walk across the bridge to downtown -- past a shoestore. The first cushy flat, wide sandals were English. They were still not the plain brown Oxfords I was forced to wear as a child, nor the slightly high-heeled lace-up shoes of my grandmother, which made her swollen ankles bulge over the top. Anyway, nowadays old ladies wear athletic sneakers. Or as they say in England and Saskatoon, “trainers.”
But now I’m having to face a new issue. One of the great preoccupations of people who advise diabetics is the dire warning that if they don’t do the right thing, they will have their feet amputated. I know this is the truth -- after all, I know several people who HAVE lost their feet. But it always makes me think of that terrible Hans Anderson fairy tale (immortalized in the movie, “The Red Shoes”) about putting on shoes that dance, dance, dance, obsessively until the wearer is exhausted and can only be released by chopping her feet off. (They cheated in the movie -- in the story the feet go dancing off in the shoes, but in the movie the shoe-maker takes them off dead Moira Shearer’s feet and mimes them through her steps.) It’s a curse, a punishment for pride and obstinacy.
The health care people say that every night one must wash one’s feet carefully with warm water -- NOT soak them, which I would like to do -- and inspect for small wounds. Any break in the skin must be sterilized and covered with a bandage. And one must wear “cushy” socks. NOT darned socks.
All my socks are darned. Now that I’m old and my circulation isn’t so good (oh, oh) I’ve compromised with life enough to wear socks, but I wear them in slippers and clogs and sometimes just on the floor -- “sock-footin’” -- so they get holes. I’m careful when I darn -- I learned in 4-H sewing how to diligently weave in and out. (I used to know a guy who just ran a thread around the perimeter of the hole and pulled, cinching up a drawstring.)
When I was a young adult in Browning, there was a cabin across the street from the museum -- typical Sixties Moccasin Flats poverty home. I stopped in the door on some errand once. The entire furnishings were a refrigerator with a TV on top and a broken-down ancient sofa. The little boy in that house started out every morning in socks without shoes and by sundown he was only wearing sock cuffs. Everything else had worn away. I don’t know who provided all those socks but no shoes.
Oh, there’s lots more to think about. Army socks, for instance. Luxury socks. Novelty socks with individual toes. My policy is to buy maybe 20 pairs, all exactly the same. That way when one goes missing, it’s not a catastrophe. Once I was in the laundromat where a lady had done that: her socks were from Hanes with pink toes and heels. She had rolled them up in pairs and they looked like little pink bunnies tumbling around the folding table.
The hardest part of the foot care regime is clipping toenails. I’ve almost lost enough weight to get at the right foot, but I still can’t quite get a good grip on the left foot. What does it mean? Am I losing more weight on one side? Are there more organs on one side? What’s in there on the left side anyway? This is the part where you need a foot buddy -- both to swap foot care and to provide reassurances.
To bring this full circle, let me say that I’ve lost about as much weight as I can by merely dieting. But spring in Montana means that it’s not always good enough weather to walk far enough to wear off pounds. So my solution is to play music and do a little “bare-footin’.” I wouldn’t want to dance in public, but here on my rugs (I love my rugs, soft patterns of pale blue and gold and russet!) I can cut loose as much as I like. And since I’m not wearing red shoes, I don’t have to worry about my feet waltzing off without me.
Everybody get on your feet,
You make me nervous when you in your seat
Take off your shoes and pat your feet,
We're doin a dance that can't be beat
We're barefootin', We're barefootin',
We're barefootin', We're barefootin',
Went to a party the other night,
Long Tall Sally was out of sight
Threw way her wig, and her high sneakers too,
She was doin a dance without any shoes
She was barefootin', She was barefootin',
She was barefootin', She was barefootin',
Hey little gal with the red dress on,
I bet you can barefoot all night long
Take off your shoes and throw them away,
Come back and get them another day
We're barefootin', We're barefootin',
We're barefootin', We're barefootin',
Lil John Henry he said to Sue,
If I was barefootin' would you barefoot too
Sue told John, "I'm thirty two,
I was barefootin ever since I was two
They was barefootin', they was barefootin'
They was barefootin'', we barefootin'
We barefootin' we barefootin'
We barefootin' we barefootin'
We barefootin' we barefootin'
We don't have no shoes on
This lovely little song came on the radio a week or so ago and it’s been floating around in my head ever since. The central idea is going to a dance, getting into the mood, and kicking off one’s shoes to do a little rhythmic movin’ in one’s bare feet. Be natural, get with the scene, connect to that cool floor.
I’ve always loved going barefoot. In the days back in Portland when I walked home from school on hot pavement, my shoes came off as soon as I got to our lawn. My mother always claimed I learned this trick in California when we went to visit my father’s brother and his family. But then, my father always sang to my mother (who was named Lucy), “Lucy, put your shoes on -- you’re in town now.”
Barefoot: sensuous and free, dancing in California, hick behavior of a country girl, and more. My brother once said, when we were discussing insurance in our late middle-age, “I’m walking barefoot though the world.” He meant this to mean that since he had no insurance there was nothing to shield him from injury or from the costs associated. Therefore, he must be alert to avoid broken glass, rusty nails and scorpions, but he seemed to be confident he could do that. (In reality neither of my brothers was fond of going barefoot.) A certain amount of fatalism here.
Once at a party or something, a handsome young man remarked, “I could never make love to an older woman because their feet are so ugly.” I knew what he meant: feet tortured into bunions and snaggly toes because of being crammed into small high-heeled shoes for so many years that they can NOT go barefooted -- their Achilles’ tendons have shortened to fit high heels and stretching them enough to keep heels on the ground is painful. I guess that young man would have to make love to older women who keep their Manolo Blahniks or Jimmy Choos on while in the act. Over the years I’d look at my feet and wonder if they were yet ugly enough to prevent a young man from devoting time to me.
I took pride in my high arches, though they often made shoes uncomfortable and then suddenly in my late fifties, I began to have plantar fascitis, which is an inflammation of the sheet of tissue over the bottom of the foot. What was tricky about it was that it turned out to be due to torn cartilage in my knee, which was allowing my ankle to twist. Even before that I’d gone to what I once scorned as “old lady shoes,” meaning something like orthopedic sandals with cushy soles. All my life I’ve walked a lot and in Saskatoon I used to walk across the bridge to downtown -- past a shoestore. The first cushy flat, wide sandals were English. They were still not the plain brown Oxfords I was forced to wear as a child, nor the slightly high-heeled lace-up shoes of my grandmother, which made her swollen ankles bulge over the top. Anyway, nowadays old ladies wear athletic sneakers. Or as they say in England and Saskatoon, “trainers.”
But now I’m having to face a new issue. One of the great preoccupations of people who advise diabetics is the dire warning that if they don’t do the right thing, they will have their feet amputated. I know this is the truth -- after all, I know several people who HAVE lost their feet. But it always makes me think of that terrible Hans Anderson fairy tale (immortalized in the movie, “The Red Shoes”) about putting on shoes that dance, dance, dance, obsessively until the wearer is exhausted and can only be released by chopping her feet off. (They cheated in the movie -- in the story the feet go dancing off in the shoes, but in the movie the shoe-maker takes them off dead Moira Shearer’s feet and mimes them through her steps.) It’s a curse, a punishment for pride and obstinacy.
The health care people say that every night one must wash one’s feet carefully with warm water -- NOT soak them, which I would like to do -- and inspect for small wounds. Any break in the skin must be sterilized and covered with a bandage. And one must wear “cushy” socks. NOT darned socks.
All my socks are darned. Now that I’m old and my circulation isn’t so good (oh, oh) I’ve compromised with life enough to wear socks, but I wear them in slippers and clogs and sometimes just on the floor -- “sock-footin’” -- so they get holes. I’m careful when I darn -- I learned in 4-H sewing how to diligently weave in and out. (I used to know a guy who just ran a thread around the perimeter of the hole and pulled, cinching up a drawstring.)
When I was a young adult in Browning, there was a cabin across the street from the museum -- typical Sixties Moccasin Flats poverty home. I stopped in the door on some errand once. The entire furnishings were a refrigerator with a TV on top and a broken-down ancient sofa. The little boy in that house started out every morning in socks without shoes and by sundown he was only wearing sock cuffs. Everything else had worn away. I don’t know who provided all those socks but no shoes.
Oh, there’s lots more to think about. Army socks, for instance. Luxury socks. Novelty socks with individual toes. My policy is to buy maybe 20 pairs, all exactly the same. That way when one goes missing, it’s not a catastrophe. Once I was in the laundromat where a lady had done that: her socks were from Hanes with pink toes and heels. She had rolled them up in pairs and they looked like little pink bunnies tumbling around the folding table.
The hardest part of the foot care regime is clipping toenails. I’ve almost lost enough weight to get at the right foot, but I still can’t quite get a good grip on the left foot. What does it mean? Am I losing more weight on one side? Are there more organs on one side? What’s in there on the left side anyway? This is the part where you need a foot buddy -- both to swap foot care and to provide reassurances.
To bring this full circle, let me say that I’ve lost about as much weight as I can by merely dieting. But spring in Montana means that it’s not always good enough weather to walk far enough to wear off pounds. So my solution is to play music and do a little “bare-footin’.” I wouldn’t want to dance in public, but here on my rugs (I love my rugs, soft patterns of pale blue and gold and russet!) I can cut loose as much as I like. And since I’m not wearing red shoes, I don’t have to worry about my feet waltzing off without me.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
NORTHFORK, a Silvery Prairie Movie
We know about Rorschach inkblots where a set of intricate but accidental sprawls of ink squished by folding paper are presented to a person who is expected to “see” or imagine by being reminded of various figures. These are presumed to have bubbled up from one’s subconscious, revealing one’s inner life. If you see all rabbits, fine -- but what does it mean? If you see all foxes, also fine -- but what does it mean? It’s more art than science -- more party game than analysis.
“Northfork” might be a film that is as interpretable as an inkblot, but I think it was filmed here on the east slope of the Rockies in what had to be spring or fall -- probably fall -- because at that time the land here is the opposite of an inkblot. Rather it is a silver screen on which one can cast not shadows but light shows: gleams, dusty rays, prism refractions, haloes, shafts of light, skies silvered with cloud, heads backlit by sun.
Briefly, in case you never heard of this movie, it was done by the Polish brothers (that’s their name rather than their nationality and I don’t know how “polished” they are) who are notorious for making cryptic, pretentious movies. In this case the occasion is the building of Hungry Horse Dam, which stands for all dams and for all huge Corps of Engineers industrial projects that change the face of the land and destroy human community in the name of progress.
I understand dams. I grew up in Portland, Oregon, downstream from major dam projects built in my childhood, most notably Bonneville. I remember when it was finished that my family went on the tour, descending down into that massive concrete structure and standing by the turbines, thrumming with unearthly power. And we watched the lady who sits at a window by the fish ladder with a little clicker to count the salmon. This replaces, of course, an ancient culture of Indian people who stood on flimsy little scaffolds that looked like diving boards, netting the huge salmon as they innumerably leapt upward through rapids toward the headwaters to spawn, then die to feed the bears and eagles, the offal replacing the nutrients constantly washed downstream by the Columbia River.
Hungry Horse Dam is on the west side of the Rockies where there is enough water to make a really big dam effective, but the movie was shot on the east side. Hungry Horse was the source of many impressive black and white publicity photos that provide the title backgrounds and recurrent images in this stripped down, nearly black-and-white movie. But outside the photos, the shots are all of the land at its most “bleak,” severe and unflowered, just dry grass for the hairy cows and young fenced buffalo (raised for food), and mountains on the horizon. The latter are white with snow, pretty much, and snow comes lightly during the story. Only at the end is the land seen as beautiful with closeups of sleeping waterfowl and exploded cattails in the potholes left by the ancient glaciers.
The feeling is very much like Ingmar Bergman's movies, the measured and meditative use of scene: what Paul Tillich might call the “ground of being.” Clearly there is meant to be religion, stalwartly represented by Nick Nolte with long hair and a cassock. (He’s looking a little rough these days, though he’s two years younger than me!) He tenderly cares for the pivot point of the narrative who is a little boy, grievously ill and claiming to be an angel.
Do you remember the Christmas story, “The Littlest Angel?” Or maybe some of the little boys in Maurice Sendak’s phantasms. That’s the kind of little boy this is. Like the little boy in “Who Has Seen the Wind?” who goes to the church to ask for answers from God, whom he assumes lives there. Maybe “The Little Prince.” Bergman never uses a little boy -- he often uses a troubled woman as his central personality. There is at least one echoing scene -- the little boy and one of the “angels” go silhouetted along the horizon in the same way as the characters in “The Seventh Seal.”
There are four “angels”: A Johnny Deppish young man with artificial hands and an array of jeweler’s loupes and spectacle lenses to help him read scripture. His name is Happy. There is a hollow-eyed cowboy (who looked to me to be wearing a Bob Scriver buffalo skull bolo tie) who never says anything -- he’s “God.” He turns out to be a skypilot. God never tells you anything. You have to get Happy (rabbi?) to read scripture. And there is an English gent, complete with accent, feather boa, and either a tea cozy or mob cap on his head. He perennially sips tea, which he is willing to share, and clearly is one of those church ritual and circumstance people.
The most angelic and only female angel is Darryl Hannah in a sort of Elizabethan shirt. She is admonished, “Don’t let your maternal nature unman you.” She is nurturing, concerned, grieving, joyous, aching, protective, and all the parental qualities. Pretty much like the actress, who once played a mermaid in a different movie and who visited a Great Falls motel where there is a swimming pool with a bar built into the side and put on a mermaid suit to divert the drinkers for a while. (Normally there are several athletic young local women who do the honors.)
Over against this angel crew, who have evidently come to witness the death of the community, most vividly represented by the flooding of the graveyard, is a set of Kafka-esque bureaucrats -- all men of roughly the same appearance, all dressed as men were in the Fifties in long coats and fedoras. (We call ‘em “stingy brims” here.) Each black hat has a white feather tucked into the band, like the white spot in the black half of a yin-yang swirl. Basically human and decent, they are charged with the terrible task of clearing out the balky remnants in homes. It’s interesting that in two of the other angel movies I have (“Michael” and “City of Angels”) the angels are John Travolta and Nicholas Cage, both wearing the long black coats but not the hats. In fact, both are all TOO human, which is the plot point. Interesting that they are also tall, dark males. In "Northfork" Hannah is the only blonde female and she wears a black wig -- like an Orthodox Jewish woman.
These bureaucrats walk through the damn’s [sic] guts, stopping to pat the bump where one of the workers was accidentally entombed. (Famous references to real cases and well-known short story here. "The price of progress.") They constantly gripe and wisecrack, just the way real bureaucrats do. (“Stop screwing around,” they admonish one young couple who is doing just that.) One pair of them (they work in pairs like Mormon missionaries) is a father-son team with a mother in that cemetary, unclaimed.
I can’t think of anyone else who has used this prairie this way. Normally it is photographed as a panorama of deep romanticism, a Charlie Russell land of sunset hues and colorful characters. This movie uses grassland the way Bergman uses the sea, the stony beach. Dwellers here are aware that this used to be the floor of an ancient sea and is saturated with salt and alkali. But there are no Lot’s wife’s stories in the movie, unless she is in the coffin the father and son finally retrieve.
Much to think about. The movie is rated PG-13 (because of that young couple “screwing around”) but I think it should be rated “mature audiences only.” Or maybe to be brutally honest, “pretentious adult audiences only,” though one really doesn’t need a tea cozy on one’s head. On the other hand, if you are against symbolic ideas, progress as calamity, and Ingmar Bergman, go see those other angel movies.
I’m pretty sure those other two are rated “R” because in both a cherubic blonde young woman (one of them Meg Ryan) doesn’t just get “touched” but “screwed” by an angel. This is more Greek than Judeo-Christian and if you want to speculate on the children who result, that’s a whole different set of movies.
“Northfork” might be a film that is as interpretable as an inkblot, but I think it was filmed here on the east slope of the Rockies in what had to be spring or fall -- probably fall -- because at that time the land here is the opposite of an inkblot. Rather it is a silver screen on which one can cast not shadows but light shows: gleams, dusty rays, prism refractions, haloes, shafts of light, skies silvered with cloud, heads backlit by sun.
Briefly, in case you never heard of this movie, it was done by the Polish brothers (that’s their name rather than their nationality and I don’t know how “polished” they are) who are notorious for making cryptic, pretentious movies. In this case the occasion is the building of Hungry Horse Dam, which stands for all dams and for all huge Corps of Engineers industrial projects that change the face of the land and destroy human community in the name of progress.
I understand dams. I grew up in Portland, Oregon, downstream from major dam projects built in my childhood, most notably Bonneville. I remember when it was finished that my family went on the tour, descending down into that massive concrete structure and standing by the turbines, thrumming with unearthly power. And we watched the lady who sits at a window by the fish ladder with a little clicker to count the salmon. This replaces, of course, an ancient culture of Indian people who stood on flimsy little scaffolds that looked like diving boards, netting the huge salmon as they innumerably leapt upward through rapids toward the headwaters to spawn, then die to feed the bears and eagles, the offal replacing the nutrients constantly washed downstream by the Columbia River.
Hungry Horse Dam is on the west side of the Rockies where there is enough water to make a really big dam effective, but the movie was shot on the east side. Hungry Horse was the source of many impressive black and white publicity photos that provide the title backgrounds and recurrent images in this stripped down, nearly black-and-white movie. But outside the photos, the shots are all of the land at its most “bleak,” severe and unflowered, just dry grass for the hairy cows and young fenced buffalo (raised for food), and mountains on the horizon. The latter are white with snow, pretty much, and snow comes lightly during the story. Only at the end is the land seen as beautiful with closeups of sleeping waterfowl and exploded cattails in the potholes left by the ancient glaciers.
The feeling is very much like Ingmar Bergman's movies, the measured and meditative use of scene: what Paul Tillich might call the “ground of being.” Clearly there is meant to be religion, stalwartly represented by Nick Nolte with long hair and a cassock. (He’s looking a little rough these days, though he’s two years younger than me!) He tenderly cares for the pivot point of the narrative who is a little boy, grievously ill and claiming to be an angel.
Do you remember the Christmas story, “The Littlest Angel?” Or maybe some of the little boys in Maurice Sendak’s phantasms. That’s the kind of little boy this is. Like the little boy in “Who Has Seen the Wind?” who goes to the church to ask for answers from God, whom he assumes lives there. Maybe “The Little Prince.” Bergman never uses a little boy -- he often uses a troubled woman as his central personality. There is at least one echoing scene -- the little boy and one of the “angels” go silhouetted along the horizon in the same way as the characters in “The Seventh Seal.”
There are four “angels”: A Johnny Deppish young man with artificial hands and an array of jeweler’s loupes and spectacle lenses to help him read scripture. His name is Happy. There is a hollow-eyed cowboy (who looked to me to be wearing a Bob Scriver buffalo skull bolo tie) who never says anything -- he’s “God.” He turns out to be a skypilot. God never tells you anything. You have to get Happy (rabbi?) to read scripture. And there is an English gent, complete with accent, feather boa, and either a tea cozy or mob cap on his head. He perennially sips tea, which he is willing to share, and clearly is one of those church ritual and circumstance people.
The most angelic and only female angel is Darryl Hannah in a sort of Elizabethan shirt. She is admonished, “Don’t let your maternal nature unman you.” She is nurturing, concerned, grieving, joyous, aching, protective, and all the parental qualities. Pretty much like the actress, who once played a mermaid in a different movie and who visited a Great Falls motel where there is a swimming pool with a bar built into the side and put on a mermaid suit to divert the drinkers for a while. (Normally there are several athletic young local women who do the honors.)
Over against this angel crew, who have evidently come to witness the death of the community, most vividly represented by the flooding of the graveyard, is a set of Kafka-esque bureaucrats -- all men of roughly the same appearance, all dressed as men were in the Fifties in long coats and fedoras. (We call ‘em “stingy brims” here.) Each black hat has a white feather tucked into the band, like the white spot in the black half of a yin-yang swirl. Basically human and decent, they are charged with the terrible task of clearing out the balky remnants in homes. It’s interesting that in two of the other angel movies I have (“Michael” and “City of Angels”) the angels are John Travolta and Nicholas Cage, both wearing the long black coats but not the hats. In fact, both are all TOO human, which is the plot point. Interesting that they are also tall, dark males. In "Northfork" Hannah is the only blonde female and she wears a black wig -- like an Orthodox Jewish woman.
These bureaucrats walk through the damn’s [sic] guts, stopping to pat the bump where one of the workers was accidentally entombed. (Famous references to real cases and well-known short story here. "The price of progress.") They constantly gripe and wisecrack, just the way real bureaucrats do. (“Stop screwing around,” they admonish one young couple who is doing just that.) One pair of them (they work in pairs like Mormon missionaries) is a father-son team with a mother in that cemetary, unclaimed.
I can’t think of anyone else who has used this prairie this way. Normally it is photographed as a panorama of deep romanticism, a Charlie Russell land of sunset hues and colorful characters. This movie uses grassland the way Bergman uses the sea, the stony beach. Dwellers here are aware that this used to be the floor of an ancient sea and is saturated with salt and alkali. But there are no Lot’s wife’s stories in the movie, unless she is in the coffin the father and son finally retrieve.
Much to think about. The movie is rated PG-13 (because of that young couple “screwing around”) but I think it should be rated “mature audiences only.” Or maybe to be brutally honest, “pretentious adult audiences only,” though one really doesn’t need a tea cozy on one’s head. On the other hand, if you are against symbolic ideas, progress as calamity, and Ingmar Bergman, go see those other angel movies.
I’m pretty sure those other two are rated “R” because in both a cherubic blonde young woman (one of them Meg Ryan) doesn’t just get “touched” but “screwed” by an angel. This is more Greek than Judeo-Christian and if you want to speculate on the children who result, that’s a whole different set of movies.
"HOOKING UP" Not "Snagging"
By “hooking up” I don’t mean what is called, here on the rez, “snagging.” (Finding a partner for -- ahem -- affection.) Any snagger looking for help from me would be in deep trouble. What I’m talking about is how one thing attaches to another -- the metaphor rather than the Saturday night dilemma.
I once saw a cell’s surface -- probably an animation. I’d always thought of a cell as being rather like a pingpong ball -- a smooth round object albeit very small. (Of course, I knew about amoebas, but I figured their boundaries just came loose.) The animation showed that the surface of a cell -- round or not -- is bumped, indented, pierced, and flourescing with teeny structures. Ion pumps stick through the cell wall so they can move molecules in and out. There are small “docks” where antibodies attach -- or maybe viruses. And so on. Surprisingly mechanical appurtenances. Little hooks that meet little loops. Some meds are designed to have loops that occupy the hooks that would otherwise be snagged by viruses. The loops and hooks -- docks -- are shaped to accept only certain molecules.
On thought, I realize that a cell is a middling-large structure of the flesh -- underlying it is the structure of the molecule, which is atoms stuck to each other with electromagnetic force. (I don’t know how cells stick together to make organs and muscles -- Velcro? We know that chromosomes are connected to their partners by tiny zippers.) Actually, most molecules are assemblages of other molecules with certain characteristics that make them form chains or balls or jungle gyms.
It wasn’t until prions came along that we learned that molecules had to “fold” a certain way, which arises from the subtle forces among the atoms. Since atoms come in different isotopes, depending on THEIR components (protons, neutons and the circling electrons), the kind of atom used to build a molecule can put the electromagnetic forces -- the glue and dotted lines -- in the wrong places to fold properly. The result, as in Mad Cow Disease, can be fatal to the entity created by the supposed proper coherence of all these little parts. They just don’t do what they’re supposed to do.
Now that I’ve established my metaphorical pattern, let’s move to talking about the creature that is Society or -- with a little indulgence from you -- to a Tribe. The fish I’m after is white people who try to “hook up” with a whole tribe, whether for business or as reporters or just because they want a relationship with “Indians.” My point is that they usually can find no point of attachment that is really helpful to either.
The most common “hook up” is not unlike snagging. A young male writer or adventurer comes to a rez town and goes to get a beer. While looking around, he spots what looks like an Indian who soon joins him to help him drink beer. This becomes the point of attachment and, of course, “our” young man from then on is treated to a beer-joint view of the rez. He hears a lot of jail gossip, violent opinions about the tribal council, and speeches about the need for law and order. Drunks are always in favor of law and order, even as they describe the most ghastly of offenses which they claim to know are overrunning everything.
Or maybe it’s an anthropologist or sociologist who comes and he or she asks around in stores for wise old people who know about the past. Pretty soon they’re bumping around in the country and find someone who looks pretty old who tells them lots of stuff. When the anthro (who is the fiftieth that summer) leaves with a notebook full of colorful information, the “old person” goes to the trunk in the back bedroom to peek in their copy of “The Old North Trail” to see whether they got it right. Hopefully, the anthro left some bucks on the table.
A modern phenomenon is the group “hook-up.” Some church or other service organization decides it would be great to bring a group of teenagers to the rez to do good. So someone local has to make a list of needed “goods” and arrange for accommodations for a bunch of teens who virtually live in the shower. With luck they bring their own supervisors.
In the business context the Tribal Council has finally created a port in its fort, so to speak, by presenting Siyeh (a wholly-owned subsidiary) as their ion pump, the entity that is ready to receive and interpret proposals and even initiate some of their own. These are people with the knowledge and skills to sit down in a conference room and address both the sales pitch and the paperwork that follows. Not everyone will want to use this opportunity, feeling that they should be more entrepreneurial by cultivating their own gatekeeper. More shortcuts.
In the past visiting academicians often had to rely on a friendly white person to get access to personal stories or photos. For one thing, academics rarely have enough money to make a long trip or stay in motels long enough to make contacts. Since the Blackfeet Community College was founded, this has become another way to make contact, but they don’t seem to have any person designated to field stray explorers, anthros, or academics. Instead, such persons come to sit in the Commons and what follows is rather like the beer-drinker’s bond except that it is politically centered. The lingerers -- who are not always teachers -- love politics. These are the people who’ve been sitting together to talk since paleolithic times. Now they often use French theory though they’ve never read the original texts. Deconstruction, post-colonial, the “Other.” That sort of thing.
Now and then a person who is not attached to any rez group will become a focus of inquiry. Sometimes such persons really are historians and ritualists. Maybe promising athletes. White inquirers often fall in love with them and idealize them in books, so that the inquirer -- as opposed to the tribal member -- will seem specially gifted and lucky to have been honored with this person’s attention. Once a person -- often presented as very old -- is the star of one book, soon he or she attracts other authors.
Most of these points of access are meant to fend off curious outsiders, isolate them somewhere so they won’t meddle, and keep their ideas away from the children. They are defensive structures rather than nourishing. Nourishment is brought in by tribal members who go out to conferences, much as hunters once went out to bring back meat. Sometimes -- esp. when dealing with schools -- it’s hard to figure out what happens to that food when it gets back to the tribe. Is it quickly eaten? Is it discarded as unpalatable? Does someone hoard it?
One of my shortcomings (which for ego reasons I maintain are generally misplaced virtues) is that I often let metaphors run away with me, so let me bring this back to reality. Since I’ve been blogging, I’ve clearly allowed Google and Blogger to become hooks and loops of my cell skin, so people who are trying to find out about artifacts, ancestors, and other matters make contact with me.
I’m not a Blackfeet. I try to figure out which people or offices inquiries ought to reach and to guide them there. This is both so that I won’t be accused by the Blackfeet of trying to act like one and horn in on their world, and so the inquirer can go ahead and explore if they are tactful and energetic enough to follow up.
But I love hearing about it. Once in a while there is even something about my own past, like the message from Mildred Colbert’s grand-niece. Miss Colbert, a Chinook Indian, was my fourth grade teacher and the grand-niece sent me a photo of Miss Colbert’s grandmother. I forwarded it to one of my “tribes” -- the Vernon Grade School Class of 1953 -- and they put it in their “medicine bundle,” their scrapbook. None of us is Indian but we claim Mildred Colbert in a way I doubt she ever thought about. We’re hooked up.
I once saw a cell’s surface -- probably an animation. I’d always thought of a cell as being rather like a pingpong ball -- a smooth round object albeit very small. (Of course, I knew about amoebas, but I figured their boundaries just came loose.) The animation showed that the surface of a cell -- round or not -- is bumped, indented, pierced, and flourescing with teeny structures. Ion pumps stick through the cell wall so they can move molecules in and out. There are small “docks” where antibodies attach -- or maybe viruses. And so on. Surprisingly mechanical appurtenances. Little hooks that meet little loops. Some meds are designed to have loops that occupy the hooks that would otherwise be snagged by viruses. The loops and hooks -- docks -- are shaped to accept only certain molecules.
On thought, I realize that a cell is a middling-large structure of the flesh -- underlying it is the structure of the molecule, which is atoms stuck to each other with electromagnetic force. (I don’t know how cells stick together to make organs and muscles -- Velcro? We know that chromosomes are connected to their partners by tiny zippers.) Actually, most molecules are assemblages of other molecules with certain characteristics that make them form chains or balls or jungle gyms.
It wasn’t until prions came along that we learned that molecules had to “fold” a certain way, which arises from the subtle forces among the atoms. Since atoms come in different isotopes, depending on THEIR components (protons, neutons and the circling electrons), the kind of atom used to build a molecule can put the electromagnetic forces -- the glue and dotted lines -- in the wrong places to fold properly. The result, as in Mad Cow Disease, can be fatal to the entity created by the supposed proper coherence of all these little parts. They just don’t do what they’re supposed to do.
Now that I’ve established my metaphorical pattern, let’s move to talking about the creature that is Society or -- with a little indulgence from you -- to a Tribe. The fish I’m after is white people who try to “hook up” with a whole tribe, whether for business or as reporters or just because they want a relationship with “Indians.” My point is that they usually can find no point of attachment that is really helpful to either.
The most common “hook up” is not unlike snagging. A young male writer or adventurer comes to a rez town and goes to get a beer. While looking around, he spots what looks like an Indian who soon joins him to help him drink beer. This becomes the point of attachment and, of course, “our” young man from then on is treated to a beer-joint view of the rez. He hears a lot of jail gossip, violent opinions about the tribal council, and speeches about the need for law and order. Drunks are always in favor of law and order, even as they describe the most ghastly of offenses which they claim to know are overrunning everything.
Or maybe it’s an anthropologist or sociologist who comes and he or she asks around in stores for wise old people who know about the past. Pretty soon they’re bumping around in the country and find someone who looks pretty old who tells them lots of stuff. When the anthro (who is the fiftieth that summer) leaves with a notebook full of colorful information, the “old person” goes to the trunk in the back bedroom to peek in their copy of “The Old North Trail” to see whether they got it right. Hopefully, the anthro left some bucks on the table.
A modern phenomenon is the group “hook-up.” Some church or other service organization decides it would be great to bring a group of teenagers to the rez to do good. So someone local has to make a list of needed “goods” and arrange for accommodations for a bunch of teens who virtually live in the shower. With luck they bring their own supervisors.
In the business context the Tribal Council has finally created a port in its fort, so to speak, by presenting Siyeh (a wholly-owned subsidiary) as their ion pump, the entity that is ready to receive and interpret proposals and even initiate some of their own. These are people with the knowledge and skills to sit down in a conference room and address both the sales pitch and the paperwork that follows. Not everyone will want to use this opportunity, feeling that they should be more entrepreneurial by cultivating their own gatekeeper. More shortcuts.
In the past visiting academicians often had to rely on a friendly white person to get access to personal stories or photos. For one thing, academics rarely have enough money to make a long trip or stay in motels long enough to make contacts. Since the Blackfeet Community College was founded, this has become another way to make contact, but they don’t seem to have any person designated to field stray explorers, anthros, or academics. Instead, such persons come to sit in the Commons and what follows is rather like the beer-drinker’s bond except that it is politically centered. The lingerers -- who are not always teachers -- love politics. These are the people who’ve been sitting together to talk since paleolithic times. Now they often use French theory though they’ve never read the original texts. Deconstruction, post-colonial, the “Other.” That sort of thing.
Now and then a person who is not attached to any rez group will become a focus of inquiry. Sometimes such persons really are historians and ritualists. Maybe promising athletes. White inquirers often fall in love with them and idealize them in books, so that the inquirer -- as opposed to the tribal member -- will seem specially gifted and lucky to have been honored with this person’s attention. Once a person -- often presented as very old -- is the star of one book, soon he or she attracts other authors.
Most of these points of access are meant to fend off curious outsiders, isolate them somewhere so they won’t meddle, and keep their ideas away from the children. They are defensive structures rather than nourishing. Nourishment is brought in by tribal members who go out to conferences, much as hunters once went out to bring back meat. Sometimes -- esp. when dealing with schools -- it’s hard to figure out what happens to that food when it gets back to the tribe. Is it quickly eaten? Is it discarded as unpalatable? Does someone hoard it?
One of my shortcomings (which for ego reasons I maintain are generally misplaced virtues) is that I often let metaphors run away with me, so let me bring this back to reality. Since I’ve been blogging, I’ve clearly allowed Google and Blogger to become hooks and loops of my cell skin, so people who are trying to find out about artifacts, ancestors, and other matters make contact with me.
I’m not a Blackfeet. I try to figure out which people or offices inquiries ought to reach and to guide them there. This is both so that I won’t be accused by the Blackfeet of trying to act like one and horn in on their world, and so the inquirer can go ahead and explore if they are tactful and energetic enough to follow up.
But I love hearing about it. Once in a while there is even something about my own past, like the message from Mildred Colbert’s grand-niece. Miss Colbert, a Chinook Indian, was my fourth grade teacher and the grand-niece sent me a photo of Miss Colbert’s grandmother. I forwarded it to one of my “tribes” -- the Vernon Grade School Class of 1953 -- and they put it in their “medicine bundle,” their scrapbook. None of us is Indian but we claim Mildred Colbert in a way I doubt she ever thought about. We’re hooked up.
Thursday, March 23, 2006
THE GLYCEMIC INDEX AND ME
The glycemic index is supposed to score foods according to how quickly they are digested into the blood. Foods that practically go straight into the blood stream (making glucose levels go up quickly and abruptly) are “high” glycemic and those that take a while to go into the blood stream are “low” glycemic. The benchmark (reference point) might be glucose itself (100) or white bread (100). The score of the food is not obviously related to whether it’s carbohydrate, fat or protein -- it’s IN ADDITION to the other characteristics of the food.
In general, foods that soft, sweet, fluffy or processed (mixed with chemicals or puffed or reconstituted) tend to have HIGH scores and those that are compact, fibrous, chewy, and plain -- think roots -- are low scorers.
The idea is to eat foods with low scores. Just look on the list when you’re deciding on a veggie or fruit and pick one low. And the preparation can make a difference as well: noodles that are al dente are low, but as they cook longer and get mushier, they go up the list. Some kinds of rice are high and others are low. Wild rice is low, but it’s not even a rice -- it’s grass seeds. A big old baking potato is high (it’s been sitting there converting into sugar) but a small new potato is low (it still thinks it’s a root).
Of course, you need to eat what’s low fat and not load up with protein (hard on the kidneys). And now pesticides can be a worry or “germs” when foods are coming from undeveloped countries. I’m not even going to mention politics.
So these are my principles. (Subject to change):
BIG MARY MOONSHINE’S THEORY OF DIABETIC EATING
1. Eat more or less the way Weight Watchers’ recommends. Most of us have done the drill so many times (we always lose before we gain again) we’ve got it down pretty well. Units and all that. If you feel left out, go find a group to join. If you feel insecure, buy one of those dishes with three sections: one big (meat) and two littles (starch & veggie). But remember a bowl on the side for your salad.
2. Forget government recommendations. It’s all puppetry with the hand of big ag inside anyway. Forget any recommendation from a “name” doctor and greet the American Diabetes Association with scepticism as well. (Major corporations pulling strings there as well. Most of the glycemic theory is developed in Australia. I can imagine some promo guy at General Foods screaming, “Curse those Aussies and their kangaroo Internet!”)
3. Boiled grain of some kind is a good breakfast. (I have a Scots bias to oatmeal, but don’t eat the “quick” stuff.) I was raised on cracked wheat mush every morning, just like Laura Ingalls Wilder. I never did put cream and sugar on it. Now I don’t put jam and butter on it anymore. Cut dried fruit into it or frozen berries, but not the kind frozen or canned in syrup -- the unsweetened kind from bags. Or fresh! Throw in nuts. Wheat germ. Flax seeds. (Steady there. Watch the calories and -- ahem -- effects.)
4. Panini presses for sandwiches are great because they convert oaty, nutty, seedy bread into a compact, slow to digest mass that tastes good. My formula for the sandwich is meat, cheese, green stuff, and then use your imagination: tomato, green pepper, marinated stuff like red sweet pepper, onion, olives, sauerkraut, pickles, peanut butter, radishes, etc. and then some kind of sauce with zip to it: horseradish, honey-mustard, hot ketchup -- I’m about to try chipotle mayonnaise to see what that’s like. If the sandwich doesn’t have some zing, it might not register that you ate.
5. Rule of thumb: for every ounce of red meat, an equal ounce of green leaves, like bagged spinach or other salad. I’m trying to wean myself off of creamy dressings. I still miss Green Goddess. We had a horse that loved it, and I did, too.
6. Supper is meat the size of a pack of cards or the palm of my hand. A starch. A salad. Veggies. Maybe a fruit. I’m exploring foreign starch staples like cous-cous. Throw beans into everything: big red ones, little black ones, garbanzos, green.
7. When you just canNOT stand it any longer, a supply of non-fat, non-sugar pudding mix made with skim milk. Don’t just get chocolate -- try pistachio, butterscotch, etc. If you have an ice cream machine, try freezing it. Or get low-fat fruit-flavored yoghurt and run that through the machine.
8. High quality strong coffee. Alfalfa tea. Regular tea chilled and mixed with skim milk, when I need reviving. NO POP. NEVER. NO BOOZE. NEVER. I haven’t messed around with hot chocolate, having quickly given it all away as soon as I was diagnosed.
9. Curiously there are two common substances that really do bring down one’s blood sugar: cinnamon (one teaspoon in one’s morning mush is good) and vinegar (all those marinated veggies and salad dressing). But there’re a lot of phony claims for this and that, too.
10. Food is attached to exercise. You MUST exercise. You cannot eat a stringent enough diet to lose weight and still get enough nutrition to be healthy. Walking or whatever movement one does MUST be done consciously and diligently or the dieting means little. This is the hardest part for me. I just don’t like to move around, though it’s easier now that my weight is twenty pounds less. Now that my blood sugar is controlled enough for my eyes to work properly, I end up reading again -- which is great but sedentary. If only it used more calories. It’s NOT that I watch TV. My TV antenna fell down years ago and I don’t have cable or satellite. (I do watch one movie at a time on video or DVD.) I do hunch over the computer hour after hour. I should set a timer.
11. Glucose/insulin is highly psychoactive. Now that I’m monitoring all the time, I see that one of my best indicators of sugar overload is a down-trending mood and up-trending fatigue. If the stats are good, I feel cheerful and energetic. Of course, it helps to feel like a success.
12. One of the hard things was getting past feeling defective. Over the years I’ve been “accused” of being diabetic though tests always said I wasn’t. Older females loved to play the game of “what’s the matter with Mary?” (My mother decided it was lupus. I have no lupus symptoms.) So it was a temptation not to tell anyone about my diagnosis.
But I felt that I was in solidarity with the Blackfeet tribe, which is facing and battling diabetes even as it steals their sight and their feet and their longevity. So I tell everyone, esp. store keeps who haven’t realized they’re missing a marketing opportunity by not stocking plain food. The upshot is that I find a remarkable number of other people have diabetes. Some have had it for years and I never suspected.
Diabetes is often presented as hereditary and inescapable, but there is a small minority that considers the possibility that a virus, a mutation, a pollution, might be out there. Studies show that diabetes, or at least glucose metabolism, is hitched to just about everything else in the body from emotion to liver function to breathing to athlete’s foot. The key to the problem might not even be in the Isles of Langerhans after all -- might be cortisol levels, corn sugar, cleaning sprays.
At least I can be fairly certain that I’m not going to die of tuberculosis like Thoreau or arsenic poisoning like Louisa May Alcott. Every age has its perils -- this is the one that intersects with me. So I’ll handle it! With my glycemic index at hand!
In general, foods that soft, sweet, fluffy or processed (mixed with chemicals or puffed or reconstituted) tend to have HIGH scores and those that are compact, fibrous, chewy, and plain -- think roots -- are low scorers.
The idea is to eat foods with low scores. Just look on the list when you’re deciding on a veggie or fruit and pick one low. And the preparation can make a difference as well: noodles that are al dente are low, but as they cook longer and get mushier, they go up the list. Some kinds of rice are high and others are low. Wild rice is low, but it’s not even a rice -- it’s grass seeds. A big old baking potato is high (it’s been sitting there converting into sugar) but a small new potato is low (it still thinks it’s a root).
Of course, you need to eat what’s low fat and not load up with protein (hard on the kidneys). And now pesticides can be a worry or “germs” when foods are coming from undeveloped countries. I’m not even going to mention politics.
So these are my principles. (Subject to change):
BIG MARY MOONSHINE’S THEORY OF DIABETIC EATING
1. Eat more or less the way Weight Watchers’ recommends. Most of us have done the drill so many times (we always lose before we gain again) we’ve got it down pretty well. Units and all that. If you feel left out, go find a group to join. If you feel insecure, buy one of those dishes with three sections: one big (meat) and two littles (starch & veggie). But remember a bowl on the side for your salad.
2. Forget government recommendations. It’s all puppetry with the hand of big ag inside anyway. Forget any recommendation from a “name” doctor and greet the American Diabetes Association with scepticism as well. (Major corporations pulling strings there as well. Most of the glycemic theory is developed in Australia. I can imagine some promo guy at General Foods screaming, “Curse those Aussies and their kangaroo Internet!”)
3. Boiled grain of some kind is a good breakfast. (I have a Scots bias to oatmeal, but don’t eat the “quick” stuff.) I was raised on cracked wheat mush every morning, just like Laura Ingalls Wilder. I never did put cream and sugar on it. Now I don’t put jam and butter on it anymore. Cut dried fruit into it or frozen berries, but not the kind frozen or canned in syrup -- the unsweetened kind from bags. Or fresh! Throw in nuts. Wheat germ. Flax seeds. (Steady there. Watch the calories and -- ahem -- effects.)
4. Panini presses for sandwiches are great because they convert oaty, nutty, seedy bread into a compact, slow to digest mass that tastes good. My formula for the sandwich is meat, cheese, green stuff, and then use your imagination: tomato, green pepper, marinated stuff like red sweet pepper, onion, olives, sauerkraut, pickles, peanut butter, radishes, etc. and then some kind of sauce with zip to it: horseradish, honey-mustard, hot ketchup -- I’m about to try chipotle mayonnaise to see what that’s like. If the sandwich doesn’t have some zing, it might not register that you ate.
5. Rule of thumb: for every ounce of red meat, an equal ounce of green leaves, like bagged spinach or other salad. I’m trying to wean myself off of creamy dressings. I still miss Green Goddess. We had a horse that loved it, and I did, too.
6. Supper is meat the size of a pack of cards or the palm of my hand. A starch. A salad. Veggies. Maybe a fruit. I’m exploring foreign starch staples like cous-cous. Throw beans into everything: big red ones, little black ones, garbanzos, green.
7. When you just canNOT stand it any longer, a supply of non-fat, non-sugar pudding mix made with skim milk. Don’t just get chocolate -- try pistachio, butterscotch, etc. If you have an ice cream machine, try freezing it. Or get low-fat fruit-flavored yoghurt and run that through the machine.
8. High quality strong coffee. Alfalfa tea. Regular tea chilled and mixed with skim milk, when I need reviving. NO POP. NEVER. NO BOOZE. NEVER. I haven’t messed around with hot chocolate, having quickly given it all away as soon as I was diagnosed.
9. Curiously there are two common substances that really do bring down one’s blood sugar: cinnamon (one teaspoon in one’s morning mush is good) and vinegar (all those marinated veggies and salad dressing). But there’re a lot of phony claims for this and that, too.
10. Food is attached to exercise. You MUST exercise. You cannot eat a stringent enough diet to lose weight and still get enough nutrition to be healthy. Walking or whatever movement one does MUST be done consciously and diligently or the dieting means little. This is the hardest part for me. I just don’t like to move around, though it’s easier now that my weight is twenty pounds less. Now that my blood sugar is controlled enough for my eyes to work properly, I end up reading again -- which is great but sedentary. If only it used more calories. It’s NOT that I watch TV. My TV antenna fell down years ago and I don’t have cable or satellite. (I do watch one movie at a time on video or DVD.) I do hunch over the computer hour after hour. I should set a timer.
11. Glucose/insulin is highly psychoactive. Now that I’m monitoring all the time, I see that one of my best indicators of sugar overload is a down-trending mood and up-trending fatigue. If the stats are good, I feel cheerful and energetic. Of course, it helps to feel like a success.
12. One of the hard things was getting past feeling defective. Over the years I’ve been “accused” of being diabetic though tests always said I wasn’t. Older females loved to play the game of “what’s the matter with Mary?” (My mother decided it was lupus. I have no lupus symptoms.) So it was a temptation not to tell anyone about my diagnosis.
But I felt that I was in solidarity with the Blackfeet tribe, which is facing and battling diabetes even as it steals their sight and their feet and their longevity. So I tell everyone, esp. store keeps who haven’t realized they’re missing a marketing opportunity by not stocking plain food. The upshot is that I find a remarkable number of other people have diabetes. Some have had it for years and I never suspected.
Diabetes is often presented as hereditary and inescapable, but there is a small minority that considers the possibility that a virus, a mutation, a pollution, might be out there. Studies show that diabetes, or at least glucose metabolism, is hitched to just about everything else in the body from emotion to liver function to breathing to athlete’s foot. The key to the problem might not even be in the Isles of Langerhans after all -- might be cortisol levels, corn sugar, cleaning sprays.
At least I can be fairly certain that I’m not going to die of tuberculosis like Thoreau or arsenic poisoning like Louisa May Alcott. Every age has its perils -- this is the one that intersects with me. So I’ll handle it! With my glycemic index at hand!
Sunday, March 19, 2006
STEVE POLLOCK: Homeboy Superintendent
GF TRIBUNE “POLLOCK MAKES BLACKFEET HISTORY”
Steven Pollock’s family is honoring him today with a ceremony at 10 AM on the campus of the Blackfeet Community College in Browning.
Pollock made Blackfeet history when he was appointed in mid-February as superintendent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs on the Blackfeet Reservation.
“This is a historical moment because Steven is the first Blackfeet tribal member to hold this position of superintendent,” said Betty Cooper, a tribal council member and Pollock’s aunt.
Keith Beartusk, regional director for the Rocky Mountain Region of the BIA, said Pollock is not the first Native American to return to his home as a BIA superintendent, but this is a first for the Blackfeet.
“I would agree that this is a historical moment,” Beartusk said Monday. “Other tribes, even within this region, have had this, but this is a first for the Blackfeet.”
As superintendent, Pollock is in charge of all tribal programs except for law enforcement and education, according to Beartusk. He manages 60 full-time employees and that will double during the summer, Beartusk said.
Pollock is a civil engineer, and in that capacity he worked for the Blackfeet years ago. He worked for the U.S. Forest Service and most recently served as a dam safety officer for the Rocky Mountain Regional Office within the BIA.
Pollock’s appointment took effect Feb. 19.
______
Here are Pollock’s own words as quoted by the “Glacier Reporter” in the March 16 issue: “This is beyond my imagination and beyond my expectations. I thought about the job. Is it meant for me to take on responsibility and try to help our tribe as it grows and becomes a sovereign nation? I believe very strongly this is where I was meant to be.
“We are here to assist at the will of the Tribe. No longer is the BIA the paternal father of the Tribe. The Tribe stands on its own now. It’s up to the Tribe to determine its own destiny, now and forever... so I pledge on behalf of the BIA that I will cooperate. I will assist, I will endeavor to see our Tribe succeed.
“This is really important to me. On my first day, driving to Browning to go to work, I saw children waiting for the bus, and I thought, what is their world? What is Browning to them? Is it a world of hope and promise?... I hope so. It’s our responsibility as leaders to provide that for our children.”
_________
Comment by myself: I remember Steve Pollock as a high school English student. He was conscientious, intelligent, and easy-going. In a climate where political tumult prompts people to dredge up old grudges and complaints, I don’t hear any about Steve Pollock.
The first Indian agents were mostly the winners of political spoils and the dregs of Civil War survivors. The idea of “faith-based” management meant that the Blackfeet were assigned a Methodist minister as superintendent in spite of early contact with Jesuit Missions, thus touching off yet another source of division in a climate already divided. Then the Indian superintendent started a war with the school superintendent, driving another wedge. Division has been the Devil afflicting the tribe ever since.
Every time I hear the phrase “Brokeback Mountain,” I don’t think of Annie Proulx’s story but rather of the actual mountain up behind Heart Butte named “Major Steele’s Back.” If it ain’t broke, it sure is sagging. The real Major Steele was agent in the James Willard Schultz days and both of them had back problems. Schultz found that “l’herbe” (today we’d say “grass”) helped relax his own back but Steele resorted to morphine. To disguise his zonked-out state, he did business through a little closeable hole in his office door, rather like a speakeasy door or maybe the doors of the early trading forts. Finally the reservation doctor blew the whistle on him.
We’ve come a long way since then. Bill Grissom, agent in the Sixties, was a earnest and intelligent man who was a genuine hero during the 1964 Flood, operating heavy equipment himself as well as organizing search and rescue operations 24/7, following up with emergency measures to house survivors, and then planning years of rebuilding. (Too bad they didn’t have someone like him in charge in New Orleans.)
There have been Indian BIA superintendents in Browning already, but none who were “homeboys.” Pollock joins many other quiet achievers. People who drive through Browning and say, “Oh, it’s so depressing,” cannot see the real changes. No one invited them to the Honor Ceremonies and there’s no reason why they should have been. This is a matter of deep satisfaction for the Amskapi Pikuni, something neither Schultz nor Steele ever imagined.
Steven Pollock’s family is honoring him today with a ceremony at 10 AM on the campus of the Blackfeet Community College in Browning.
Pollock made Blackfeet history when he was appointed in mid-February as superintendent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs on the Blackfeet Reservation.
“This is a historical moment because Steven is the first Blackfeet tribal member to hold this position of superintendent,” said Betty Cooper, a tribal council member and Pollock’s aunt.
Keith Beartusk, regional director for the Rocky Mountain Region of the BIA, said Pollock is not the first Native American to return to his home as a BIA superintendent, but this is a first for the Blackfeet.
“I would agree that this is a historical moment,” Beartusk said Monday. “Other tribes, even within this region, have had this, but this is a first for the Blackfeet.”
As superintendent, Pollock is in charge of all tribal programs except for law enforcement and education, according to Beartusk. He manages 60 full-time employees and that will double during the summer, Beartusk said.
Pollock is a civil engineer, and in that capacity he worked for the Blackfeet years ago. He worked for the U.S. Forest Service and most recently served as a dam safety officer for the Rocky Mountain Regional Office within the BIA.
Pollock’s appointment took effect Feb. 19.
______
Here are Pollock’s own words as quoted by the “Glacier Reporter” in the March 16 issue: “This is beyond my imagination and beyond my expectations. I thought about the job. Is it meant for me to take on responsibility and try to help our tribe as it grows and becomes a sovereign nation? I believe very strongly this is where I was meant to be.
“We are here to assist at the will of the Tribe. No longer is the BIA the paternal father of the Tribe. The Tribe stands on its own now. It’s up to the Tribe to determine its own destiny, now and forever... so I pledge on behalf of the BIA that I will cooperate. I will assist, I will endeavor to see our Tribe succeed.
“This is really important to me. On my first day, driving to Browning to go to work, I saw children waiting for the bus, and I thought, what is their world? What is Browning to them? Is it a world of hope and promise?... I hope so. It’s our responsibility as leaders to provide that for our children.”
_________
Comment by myself: I remember Steve Pollock as a high school English student. He was conscientious, intelligent, and easy-going. In a climate where political tumult prompts people to dredge up old grudges and complaints, I don’t hear any about Steve Pollock.
The first Indian agents were mostly the winners of political spoils and the dregs of Civil War survivors. The idea of “faith-based” management meant that the Blackfeet were assigned a Methodist minister as superintendent in spite of early contact with Jesuit Missions, thus touching off yet another source of division in a climate already divided. Then the Indian superintendent started a war with the school superintendent, driving another wedge. Division has been the Devil afflicting the tribe ever since.
Every time I hear the phrase “Brokeback Mountain,” I don’t think of Annie Proulx’s story but rather of the actual mountain up behind Heart Butte named “Major Steele’s Back.” If it ain’t broke, it sure is sagging. The real Major Steele was agent in the James Willard Schultz days and both of them had back problems. Schultz found that “l’herbe” (today we’d say “grass”) helped relax his own back but Steele resorted to morphine. To disguise his zonked-out state, he did business through a little closeable hole in his office door, rather like a speakeasy door or maybe the doors of the early trading forts. Finally the reservation doctor blew the whistle on him.
We’ve come a long way since then. Bill Grissom, agent in the Sixties, was a earnest and intelligent man who was a genuine hero during the 1964 Flood, operating heavy equipment himself as well as organizing search and rescue operations 24/7, following up with emergency measures to house survivors, and then planning years of rebuilding. (Too bad they didn’t have someone like him in charge in New Orleans.)
There have been Indian BIA superintendents in Browning already, but none who were “homeboys.” Pollock joins many other quiet achievers. People who drive through Browning and say, “Oh, it’s so depressing,” cannot see the real changes. No one invited them to the Honor Ceremonies and there’s no reason why they should have been. This is a matter of deep satisfaction for the Amskapi Pikuni, something neither Schultz nor Steele ever imagined.
Friday, March 17, 2006
"REALIST VISION" by Peter Brooks
"Realist Vision" by Peter Brooks. ISBN 0-300-10680-7
His website:
www.law.virginia.edu/lawweb/Faculty.nsf/FHPbI/A269
Also see Yale University Press (yalebooks.com)
There’s an old joke about an anthro who goes to darkest Africa and meets a chief. The chief likes him and wants to give him a wife, but the anthro says he already has a wife and pulls out a photograph to show the chief. The chief looks closely and says, “She’s very small and flat, isn’t she?”
The point is that we forget that the only true version of reality is another set of reality exactly like the first -- even a photo is a selection, a redaction, a virtual indicator. Though important artists at the first part of the 20th century took a long leave from depictions of reality in order to explore and argue about what might be “realer than real” through cubism and so on, the at least recognizable rendering of reality some way or other has persisted for both artists and writers. This book by Peter Brooks is a collection of essays about that. The first essay begins: “I think we have a thirst for reality.”
What that means in the age of photography, reality television, psychoanalysis and deconstruction (to get at our “real” motives), is what Brooks sets out to explore. His second sentence is “Which is curious, since we have too much reality, more than we can bear... We thirst for a reality that we can see, hold up to inspection, understand.” Like that anthro’s portable wife. An intimacy with the life of another.
The writers considered are Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, George Eliot, Zola, Gissing, Henry James, Joyce, Proust, Woolf. One has to remark that they’ve been considered before and probably will be again, which suggests that they are preserving something important to us. This reconsideration reveals new layers.
A few of the artists are shocking, though the cover art, a 19th century gent on a Paris balcony, is charmingly impressionistic and the “key” engraving from Alain-René Le Sage, which shows a man being tempted by the devil to look into houses with their roofs removed, is conventional in engraved style.
Then comes the unsettling work of Lucian Freud, not just the nudes but also urban buildings. Courbet, Millet, Ford Madox Brown, Ingres, Marville and Braquehais (both photographers), Delaroche, Monet, Manet, more Caillebotte, Degas, Tissot, Estes, Duane Hanson, John DeAndrea and back to a portrait of Lucian Freud’s huge male model, exposed and seemingly dumped on a pile of rags. Some of these are quite charming -- even TOO charming -- and some are, like DeAndrea’s polyvinyl nudes,so disconcertingly real that even an African chief would think they might take a breath. It's hard to think about them because the scramble of the senses in trying to assimilate them. It's beyond apologizing to Duane Hanson's janitor because one thinks he's real, because it puts us smack between reacting and intellectualizing.
Brooks patiently teases out why these works were considered shocking at the time, why some of them have become wallpaper now, and what there is to understand in them yet -- no matter that we are too sophisticated to remark on nudes or even stare if anyone is looking. In the process of considering Brooks’ thoughts we “see again” and our reality is deepened. He writes gently, humanely, and with a huge breadth of background. The discussion is often intimate, about the nudes or even genitals (Nana’s “sexe” as a symbol in Zola), and yet he neither veers into eroticism nor into medical dispassion. He is mature in a world that seems never to value maturity. I have no idea how he got that way, but I intend to use him as a role model.
I was trying to think of a contemporary writer I would consider as writing this quality of fiction -- true but penetrating -- and came up with Ursula LeGuin. I would love to read what Brooks thought about a sci-fi and fantasy author who is more realistic than most New Yorker or Atlantic short story writers. I’ll bet you ten dollars she knows that story about the anthro's small flat wife and has reflected on it. I wonder if she reads Peter Brooks.
His website:
www.law.virginia.edu/lawweb/Faculty.nsf/FHPbI/A269
Also see Yale University Press (yalebooks.com)
There’s an old joke about an anthro who goes to darkest Africa and meets a chief. The chief likes him and wants to give him a wife, but the anthro says he already has a wife and pulls out a photograph to show the chief. The chief looks closely and says, “She’s very small and flat, isn’t she?”
The point is that we forget that the only true version of reality is another set of reality exactly like the first -- even a photo is a selection, a redaction, a virtual indicator. Though important artists at the first part of the 20th century took a long leave from depictions of reality in order to explore and argue about what might be “realer than real” through cubism and so on, the at least recognizable rendering of reality some way or other has persisted for both artists and writers. This book by Peter Brooks is a collection of essays about that. The first essay begins: “I think we have a thirst for reality.”
What that means in the age of photography, reality television, psychoanalysis and deconstruction (to get at our “real” motives), is what Brooks sets out to explore. His second sentence is “Which is curious, since we have too much reality, more than we can bear... We thirst for a reality that we can see, hold up to inspection, understand.” Like that anthro’s portable wife. An intimacy with the life of another.
The writers considered are Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, George Eliot, Zola, Gissing, Henry James, Joyce, Proust, Woolf. One has to remark that they’ve been considered before and probably will be again, which suggests that they are preserving something important to us. This reconsideration reveals new layers.
A few of the artists are shocking, though the cover art, a 19th century gent on a Paris balcony, is charmingly impressionistic and the “key” engraving from Alain-René Le Sage, which shows a man being tempted by the devil to look into houses with their roofs removed, is conventional in engraved style.
Then comes the unsettling work of Lucian Freud, not just the nudes but also urban buildings. Courbet, Millet, Ford Madox Brown, Ingres, Marville and Braquehais (both photographers), Delaroche, Monet, Manet, more Caillebotte, Degas, Tissot, Estes, Duane Hanson, John DeAndrea and back to a portrait of Lucian Freud’s huge male model, exposed and seemingly dumped on a pile of rags. Some of these are quite charming -- even TOO charming -- and some are, like DeAndrea’s polyvinyl nudes,so disconcertingly real that even an African chief would think they might take a breath. It's hard to think about them because the scramble of the senses in trying to assimilate them. It's beyond apologizing to Duane Hanson's janitor because one thinks he's real, because it puts us smack between reacting and intellectualizing.
Brooks patiently teases out why these works were considered shocking at the time, why some of them have become wallpaper now, and what there is to understand in them yet -- no matter that we are too sophisticated to remark on nudes or even stare if anyone is looking. In the process of considering Brooks’ thoughts we “see again” and our reality is deepened. He writes gently, humanely, and with a huge breadth of background. The discussion is often intimate, about the nudes or even genitals (Nana’s “sexe” as a symbol in Zola), and yet he neither veers into eroticism nor into medical dispassion. He is mature in a world that seems never to value maturity. I have no idea how he got that way, but I intend to use him as a role model.
I was trying to think of a contemporary writer I would consider as writing this quality of fiction -- true but penetrating -- and came up with Ursula LeGuin. I would love to read what Brooks thought about a sci-fi and fantasy author who is more realistic than most New Yorker or Atlantic short story writers. I’ll bet you ten dollars she knows that story about the anthro's small flat wife and has reflected on it. I wonder if she reads Peter Brooks.
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
HARD SPRING
Some years come onto the east slope of the Rockies with a great softening of rain and warmth, so that the leaves unfold with gratitude and the grass leaps up to meet the new calves. This one (2006) is so dry and still so cold that it keeps the ground stony and the chlorophyll unkindled. Maybe it’s better for the births of calves to have plain earth so long as the rancher provides plenty of feed and bedding -- even shelter. One rancher explained how he trucked a length of 4-foot-in-diameter culvert pipe out to the field and heaped it up with manure on both sides, then filled the bottom with straw. He says the calves crowd into it gratefully.
I’m sure it’s warmer than this house when the temps get really low, but in fact we’re teetering back and forth over freezing -- ice, puddle, ice, puddle, ice -- depending on where the sun is shining. When I sit reading, I don’t realize I’m getting hypothermic until I stand up and find myself stiff, a bit confused, surprised when I look for my big thick fleece shirt only to find that I have it on but remain chilled. The cats go out in the stiff dun grass and sit right at the edge of a shadow of a building, as though either the cold were a carpet or the sunshine were a blonde and polished wooden floor, too slick to sit on. I have more rugs than usual on the floor indoors, in case of mud, and they sit on the rugs, but at the edge or, even better, one corner.
That is, Squibbie (the self-appointed sentinel tortoiseshell) moves all day between one edge and another, hoping to be disguised as she scans the long alley to the east, the short (but more trafficked) alley that runs north and south parallel to the lot line. (This lot is at the meeting of a T.) Crackers, the big blonde broad-butted cat with a sinus problem as bad as mine (sometimes I have to stop and listen to figure out who is making that terrible snoring: the cat or me), sleeps all day with her face pressed into the warm electrified bed. She’s more truly crepuscular -- active at dawn and twilight.
We’re having a leash law problem so at every hour I’ll be quietly reading when a cat shoots by and either dives under the bed (Crackers) or leaps to the top of the etagere (Squibbs) with tail expanded but trailing -- not held upright as usual. When I go to look for the intruder, I might find someone’s big fat lab or it might be Caspar, the cat from across the street. Caspar has tended to leave us alone after his winter adventure. He was napping on top of the family’s sporty yellow car, nicely arranged on the sunwarm metal, when the Mom came out and drove to work several blocks away. She wondered what all the laughing and pointing was about -- surely, she had remembered to comb her hair. When she parked, Caspar launched into space and went off like a bottle rocket. Everyone figured the cat was heading home. But it was two weeks before he got there. It was evidently a sobering experience, though some argue that a kind but tyrannous old lady pulled him into her household. If so, she never gave him anything to drink, for his first act on coming home was to rush to the bathroom for his customary source of water.
Aside from cat adventures, this spring is memorable for me in two ways: after a lifetime of being accused of having diabetes, always exonerated when the blood tests showed otherwise, I finally DO have diabetes. Somewhere I had read that when a person reaches the tipping point in their life, they can -- by following all the good health rules -- move back physiologically by ten years. I’m embarked on this and have lost between fifteen and twenty pounds besides slowly gaining stamina by walking. In fact, my body “snapped back” so easily that I can only attribute it to having done all the right things at the same time that I indulged in the wrong things. I ate my cracked wheat mush and THEN scarfed chocolate. Up until my dog-catching years (the Seventies) and the ministry, I was really pretty healthy.
My mother was a farm girl who -- between the Depression and her father’s mismanagement of their prune orchard -- grew up on home fresh eggs, chicken, garden vegetables and -- through the winter rainy winter -- homemade bread with applesauce on it. She thought this was a normal way to eat. Combined with the nutrition lessons promoted by the government during WWII, her standards made her insistent about balanced meals -- NOT hamburgers and milk shakes except when we were traveling.
I have no doubt that this diabetes can be managed, though it seems to take a lot of time and thought.
The other factor this spring is having sold my biography of Bob Scriver. The University of Calgary Press board has voted unanimously to publish “Bronze, Inside and Out.” I’d thought I wouldn’t talk about it until I had signed a letter of agreement, which is what they do instead of a contract, but neither side is waiting around. We’re both at work on the long series of tasks that will produce -- NEXT spring -- an actual book one can put on the shelf. I’m very glad that it’s this particular press and proud that my editor really loves the book for its own sake -- not because she is impressed by Bob Scriver.
But fiscal restraint is the call of the day -- there won’t be money for either of us until the sales begin to roll in. I have no doubt they will, even if by then Bush has brought the world crashing down on our heads. It’s a funny book, a love story in several ways, and a tale of success against all odds. But editing, proofing, and getting permissions is harder than writing.
Truly, this spring is hard. We’re realizing that drought is no longer a matter of a set of bad years from which there is recovery, but is a constant state. Almost everyone by now knows someone who has been killed in Iraq and we are not sure what for. We’re advised to “cowboy up,” but some are becoming a little too armored against loss and disappointment. Old age creeps among my friends and former students, now and then taking one of them off in cold jaws. The Blackfeet obits often attribute the death to diabetes. I yearn for a wood stove, but anyway there’s not a lot to burn on the prairie.
I bought this house almost exactly seven years ago, on the way home from the C.M. Russell Museum Benefit Auction. It was the most reckless and the best thing I ever did. (All gratitude, again, to my mother whose estate made it possible.) It’s the reason I could get the book written, the way I reconnected with the best parts of myself as well as my best friends, and one of the ways I beat off diabetes as long as I did.
It’s a hard spring but the cats and I survive here in slightly more elegant fashion than the calves in their culvert. Quite independent of the temperature, the days are getting longer and the poplars, in spite of twenty-below-zero temps a few weeks ago, are extruding those sexy little purple pollen tassels. Crackers and I will sneeze but then we’ll smile. Squibbie,in the meantime, is watching the geese (who are already pairing up) and thinking about our location on a major migratory flyway. Cats are killed by "bird flu."
I’m sure it’s warmer than this house when the temps get really low, but in fact we’re teetering back and forth over freezing -- ice, puddle, ice, puddle, ice -- depending on where the sun is shining. When I sit reading, I don’t realize I’m getting hypothermic until I stand up and find myself stiff, a bit confused, surprised when I look for my big thick fleece shirt only to find that I have it on but remain chilled. The cats go out in the stiff dun grass and sit right at the edge of a shadow of a building, as though either the cold were a carpet or the sunshine were a blonde and polished wooden floor, too slick to sit on. I have more rugs than usual on the floor indoors, in case of mud, and they sit on the rugs, but at the edge or, even better, one corner.
That is, Squibbie (the self-appointed sentinel tortoiseshell) moves all day between one edge and another, hoping to be disguised as she scans the long alley to the east, the short (but more trafficked) alley that runs north and south parallel to the lot line. (This lot is at the meeting of a T.) Crackers, the big blonde broad-butted cat with a sinus problem as bad as mine (sometimes I have to stop and listen to figure out who is making that terrible snoring: the cat or me), sleeps all day with her face pressed into the warm electrified bed. She’s more truly crepuscular -- active at dawn and twilight.
We’re having a leash law problem so at every hour I’ll be quietly reading when a cat shoots by and either dives under the bed (Crackers) or leaps to the top of the etagere (Squibbs) with tail expanded but trailing -- not held upright as usual. When I go to look for the intruder, I might find someone’s big fat lab or it might be Caspar, the cat from across the street. Caspar has tended to leave us alone after his winter adventure. He was napping on top of the family’s sporty yellow car, nicely arranged on the sunwarm metal, when the Mom came out and drove to work several blocks away. She wondered what all the laughing and pointing was about -- surely, she had remembered to comb her hair. When she parked, Caspar launched into space and went off like a bottle rocket. Everyone figured the cat was heading home. But it was two weeks before he got there. It was evidently a sobering experience, though some argue that a kind but tyrannous old lady pulled him into her household. If so, she never gave him anything to drink, for his first act on coming home was to rush to the bathroom for his customary source of water.
Aside from cat adventures, this spring is memorable for me in two ways: after a lifetime of being accused of having diabetes, always exonerated when the blood tests showed otherwise, I finally DO have diabetes. Somewhere I had read that when a person reaches the tipping point in their life, they can -- by following all the good health rules -- move back physiologically by ten years. I’m embarked on this and have lost between fifteen and twenty pounds besides slowly gaining stamina by walking. In fact, my body “snapped back” so easily that I can only attribute it to having done all the right things at the same time that I indulged in the wrong things. I ate my cracked wheat mush and THEN scarfed chocolate. Up until my dog-catching years (the Seventies) and the ministry, I was really pretty healthy.
My mother was a farm girl who -- between the Depression and her father’s mismanagement of their prune orchard -- grew up on home fresh eggs, chicken, garden vegetables and -- through the winter rainy winter -- homemade bread with applesauce on it. She thought this was a normal way to eat. Combined with the nutrition lessons promoted by the government during WWII, her standards made her insistent about balanced meals -- NOT hamburgers and milk shakes except when we were traveling.
I have no doubt that this diabetes can be managed, though it seems to take a lot of time and thought.
The other factor this spring is having sold my biography of Bob Scriver. The University of Calgary Press board has voted unanimously to publish “Bronze, Inside and Out.” I’d thought I wouldn’t talk about it until I had signed a letter of agreement, which is what they do instead of a contract, but neither side is waiting around. We’re both at work on the long series of tasks that will produce -- NEXT spring -- an actual book one can put on the shelf. I’m very glad that it’s this particular press and proud that my editor really loves the book for its own sake -- not because she is impressed by Bob Scriver.
But fiscal restraint is the call of the day -- there won’t be money for either of us until the sales begin to roll in. I have no doubt they will, even if by then Bush has brought the world crashing down on our heads. It’s a funny book, a love story in several ways, and a tale of success against all odds. But editing, proofing, and getting permissions is harder than writing.
Truly, this spring is hard. We’re realizing that drought is no longer a matter of a set of bad years from which there is recovery, but is a constant state. Almost everyone by now knows someone who has been killed in Iraq and we are not sure what for. We’re advised to “cowboy up,” but some are becoming a little too armored against loss and disappointment. Old age creeps among my friends and former students, now and then taking one of them off in cold jaws. The Blackfeet obits often attribute the death to diabetes. I yearn for a wood stove, but anyway there’s not a lot to burn on the prairie.
I bought this house almost exactly seven years ago, on the way home from the C.M. Russell Museum Benefit Auction. It was the most reckless and the best thing I ever did. (All gratitude, again, to my mother whose estate made it possible.) It’s the reason I could get the book written, the way I reconnected with the best parts of myself as well as my best friends, and one of the ways I beat off diabetes as long as I did.
It’s a hard spring but the cats and I survive here in slightly more elegant fashion than the calves in their culvert. Quite independent of the temperature, the days are getting longer and the poplars, in spite of twenty-below-zero temps a few weeks ago, are extruding those sexy little purple pollen tassels. Crackers and I will sneeze but then we’ll smile. Squibbie,in the meantime, is watching the geese (who are already pairing up) and thinking about our location on a major migratory flyway. Cats are killed by "bird flu."
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