Settling In

Smoke from fires in Idaho blew into the Missoula Valley yesterday, tinting the sky an evil, sulphorous yellow and leaving a pinkened sun to squint weakly through the haze. Somehow, according to this morning’s paper, the Idaho smoke helped the firefighters battling the local blazes (less oxygen for our fires?). Either way, it was the perfect atmosphere in which to view the demolition derby at the county fair last night: the sense that the world was on fire anyway seemed to further justify smashing three dozen cars to pieces, with the smoke from the oil burning in their shattered crankcases and the dust kicked up by their spinning tires rising to mingle with the dark cloud squatting down from on high. Cars caught fire, and rough-looking men in orange t-shirts sauntered out into the muddy track with fire extinguishers while the audience looked on almost disinterestedly placidly. The easterner in me wants to write that the crowd of 5,000 or so spectators, crammed onto aluminum bleacher-style seats in the fairground’s grandstand, cheered savagely with each new crushing impact, but they actually seemed oddly calm to me. Beer was available in a separate area, down a tunnel under the bleachers and past a phalanx of Missoula County deputies who now, under a recent court ruling, must actually receive law enforcement training before being set loose with badge and gun. And the founder of the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival passed away a week ago Sunday at the ripe old age of 64…

This place is going to take some getting used to. Everyone is so nice, for one thing. We went to Staples on Saturday so I could order some business cards, and it was like I was Michael Bey in the Armani outlet on Rodeo Drive. The printing-services clerk spoke to me in soothing, supplicative tones, laying out all of my options and apologizing every time any other customers diverted his attention from me for more than three seconds. In Baltimore, in the same situation, the clerk would have been angry at me for even walking in, and the help would have been limited to his saying something like “let me know when you’re done so I can charge you.” We moved on to the Verizon store, because my phone wasn’t reliably turning on. It was nice enough to learn that Verizon actually supports its phones and could give me a new one under warranty without requiring me to renew for a thousand years first — not exactly the sort of corporate helpfulness one expects these days, frankly — but the interaction with the salespeople was also utterly absent the skeezy, lip-licking pushiness I’ve come to expect in such stores. The same thing happened at the Vann’s Outlet, where Vann’s — a sort of Best Buy-like appliance and electronics store — sells its scratched and dented goods. We purchased a mismatched washer and dryer set for about $500, which, again, would have been nice enough even if it had required negotiating with Dick Cheney himself, but the salesman was so endearing there was the risk that we would start throwing hundred dollar bills at him on top of that nice price, just for treating us like human beings. The stereotype holds that the easterners from the big city should be tough sells, suspicious, hard, and flinty. But I’m finding myself just melting in the presence of all of these smiles and hearty greetings.

When I’m not wondering what sort of scam these people are trying to pull, that is.

A. and I are getting used to being used to each other, slowly but surely. It’s strange not to wake up and immediately calculate how many more mornings there are before we must separate again. (About 250 at this point, actually, but I’m not really counting yet.) On Friday we drove to the Village 6 movie theater, which is proud of its recent switch to an all-digital projection system with “millions of colors” (I guess they’re holding off on cleaning the carpets, though) to see Knocked Up. We’ve been spoiled by the Charles Theater in Baltimore, where the previews are kept to a minimum, so it was with increasing irritation that we had to sit through about twenty minutes of not only previews but commercials, which I guess most everyone else must be used to by now. I was especially tickled by the segue from an ad for some sort of hair-straightening appliance (“one handed!” “gets the frizz out”) to a recruiting pitch from the National Guard that mainly featured footage of guardsmen rescuing American flood victims although it did briefly allow as how sometimes you might get sent on a “foreign deployment.” But the women don’t have to cut their hair off in the military (only men are liable to get lice, I guess), so maybe it wasn’t such a contradiction after all. Then there was a weird moment of dislocation when the preview for Hairspray came on, and I realized that “Baltimore” probably sounded like some incomprehensibly exotic locale to everyone in the theater but us. I felt a sort of pride that I had some connection to this place that probably no one around me ever wants to visit, but then I remembered that they didn’t even film the damn thing there anyway. As for Knocked Up, it’s pretty funny once you get past the first half hour of wondering why on earth any living female would give this guy the time of day, much less, well, you know. Also, there was this weird crudeness that seemed to go too far sometimes. Scenes would be funny enough already, and then one of the characters would descend into a level of scatalogical excess that felt out of keeping with the semi-realistic way in which most of the interactions played out, and it felt like the writers were just trying to shock. (Let me just say that there is a scene of scatalogical excess in 40-Year-Old Virgin that made me laugh until I cried, and which I think does work, so it’s not like I’m just easy to shock or something.)

The U-Pack trailer is supposed to get here “late Thursday morning,” according to the Montana dispatcher, which is a bit of a disappointment given the original promised Tuesday arrival and the fact that I need a suit from out of that trailer in time to get on a plane to A.’s friend’s wedding in Pittsburgh on Friday. But we “can pretty much bank on it,” according to U-Pack, so we’ll just have to keep our fingers crossed. Nothing else has worked smoothly on this move, so why should this? At least we’ve found a local company that will supply a couple of movers or “lumpers” as I believe I understood them to be called who can help us unload for $15/hr/man. I had to ask for this price to be repeated, sure that it should have been $50, not $15. But no, I’d heard it right the first time.

It will be nice to have furniture. For now, we are sleeping in the living room on a much nicer air mattress than the one we abandoned in Baltimore. We eat leaning against the wide, bar-style kitchen counter or picnic style on the floor, taking turns using the one folding camp chair. A more varied wardrobe would be nice, too, although I think I may finally ease up on the collared shirts. Everyone else out here seems to affect a sort of “rafting casual” look at all times, and as you all know it’s absolutely vital to me to fit in, so maybe I’ll have to invest in a pair of these weird close-toed sandal-shoe thingies. But no flip-flops, although — from the looks of things — I probably won’t enjoy much success out here in my ongoing campaign to get men to stop wearing these things, men’s feet rarely being anything anyone wants to have to look at. Besides, what if you had to do something or take action, and then later you had to admit, “well, I could have helped/stopped it/run for assistance, but I was wearing flip-flops?” But if you can live with that, go for it, I guess…

So, yeah, sandal shoes. Must fit in, at all costs…