Blog

I’m going to try to put up a new picture every day by about 7 a.m. mountain time.

Also, some new sidebar features:

• Calendar: Days on which I’ve posted are bolded, gray, and italicized. Clicking on them takes you to the post or posts from that day.
• Recent Posts: Lists titles of and links to, well, recent posts.
• Tags: Now that I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.3.1, I can “tag” each post with words related to the subject, and these tags will show up in the left sidebar in the aforementioned “Tags” section. You can click on the tag to see all the posts it’s associated with; the bigger the tag, the more posts it connects to. (I’ve only tagged the last few posts, so there’s not much to find yet.) So far I’m doing this pretty randomly, but I think I’ll need to come up with some principles to guide my tagging choices so that you’ll find more than just a fleeting mention when you click.
• Recent Comments: Links to recent comments.

Enjoy!

This one snuck up on us. I was on my way out to the library yesterday when A. looked out the window and said “is that snow?” It was, but it was so small I could barely see it and it certainly wasn’t accumulating. In other words, it looked like the kind of “snow” we’d gotten used to in Baltimore. I drove to the library and checked out an armload of books, and by the time I was driving home the snow still wasn’t amounting to much. It wasn’t until we were about to turn in that we noticed that the snow had been steadily mounting up all evening, at least two or three inches’ worth on the deck and deck railing and on the heavy branches of the blue spruce out back, although it still didn’t seem to be sticking to any actual concrete.

When I got up this morning I noticed (1) a lot more snow on the deck and (2) that it was still snowing. I took the pictures I posted below not much later; as you easterners can see, we’re talking about an amount of snow that would cripple Baltimore for three or four days. Though last night we’d joked about whether A. would get a snow day, my first instinct this morning was that she had a decent shot. I fired up the laptop to check the university web site. But I began to remember that we live in Montana now as I searched and searched and not only couldn’t find a cancellation or closure notice, I couldn’t even find the place where such a notice would be, like “click here for weather closing information” or “campus will open on time today, Monday, November 19.” In other words, not only would A. not get a snow day today, the locals weren’t even considering it as a possibility. This was further underlined when A. called the Mountain Line to see if her bus would be running. The response was along the lines of “ummmmmm… why wouldn’t it be?”

There are all kinds of good reasons not to shut down here for a storm that would have easterners panicking and hoarding toilet paper: people are used to this kind of weather here, there are a lot more plowing companies ready to go to work, if you shut down for every couple-of-inch snowstorm in Montana you wouldn’t get a lot done, etc. We easterners are supposed to be pansies for shutting down so easily, which I wrote about almost a year ago. I came across another interesting viewpoint in a book my father gave me for my birthday this fall, a collection of the journalist Pete Dexter’s columns called Paper Trails. Dexter, who was raised in South Dakota, describes witnessing a car accident in Philadelphia, during a blizzard.

“A car was coming out of a gas station, another car wasn’t going to let it in. They came together at maybe two miles an hour, looking right at each other, and then they bumped fenders.”

He continues:

“Thirty inches of snow can fall on Vermillion, South Dakota, and people get around. Six inches stops everything in Philadelphia or New York [or Baltimore]. The reason isn’t that Vermillion has more snowplows or less cars. The reason is that in Vermillion, South Dakota, people give each other a little room.”

This certainly rings true, speaking as someone who still can’t get used to how willing the drivers here are to look for and stop for pedestrians, not to mention how you can actually just go 40 MPH in a 35 MPH zone and no one behind you seems to be about to explode with apoplexy. I had a friend in Baltimore who went off to Richmond for law school and developed a technique for spotting fellow Baltimoreans based on how angry they always seem, which made sense to me. Combined with their lack of practice driving in snow, those certainly aren’t people with whom you want to be sharing slippery roads.

Still, A. and I grew up on the east coast and snow feels like a holiday to us, so A. was sad to have to head out to work, and I’m not finding it any easier to get my head in the game here at home. Light flakes drifting down, mini-avalanches coming off of tree branches, birds making little trenches as they alight on the layer covering the deck railings. Compared to what I’m used to of late, this is a lot of snow, and it’s still mounting up.

Maybe I’ll just go check how much toilet paper we have.

The first mile along the gravel road that might or not be the right road is always the most difficult. There’s the fear that the nine-year-old Toyota Corolla will not prove up to the rough surface. What if we break down? Will we have to capture the llama standing guard over a flock of sheep a few fields back to protect us from wolves as begin the long slog back to town? There’s also the vague sense of trespass, exacerbated by the knowledge that most everyone in these parts has guns. But I take comfort, somehow, in the speed limit signs, token representatives of civic government, like little embassies, assuring us that we are in a public place after all and can count on the right of free passage, provided of course that we do not exceed forty miles an hour. Gradually the rumble of gravel under the tires fades into the background. As for the wolves, well, we’ll cross that bridge if we come to it.

And suddenly these thoughts are swept away by the exhilaration of discovery, success, like what Peary must have felt when a second and third check of his instruments confirmed that he was standing at long last on the North Pole. There, at the five-mile mark, just where it should be if (1) this is the right road and (2) I’m reading distance on the map correctly, the long-sought goal: ten or so silver silos and a jumble of long low cream-colored dormitory-like structures on the right side of the road, substantial modern buildings that are a far cry from the modest, weather-beaten, barely-there ranch houses we’ve seen along this road so far. The outpost of a religious sect whose members are “highly skilled agriculturists, formidably competitive with family farmers and ranchers” if ever there was one.

The road turns sharply to the south, just like the map says it should. Tucked into the corner of a field, just inside the fence, as final confirmation, a sign: “New Rockport Colony.”

Also: “Disease Control Program.”

Also: “Keep Out.”

We stare down the road into the colony for a long minute, and then, since we have no particularly compelling reason to ignore this sign, A. backs the car around and points us back toward Choteau and our motel. On the way, we cross paths with the first vehicle we’ve seen on this road, a big blue Ford pickup headed for the colony. The driver, a shadow in a broad-brimmed hat behind the tinted glass nods and waves as he passes. Technically we have failed, but my heart is light and full of song for the glorious beauty of this particular gravel road in this particular state at this particular moment in my young life.

We first heard of the Hutterites not long after arriving in Missoula this summer. Our main source was a new friend who teaches at a Hutterite school, and the impression we formed from a not-very-detailed conversation with her was basically that Hutterites are in some vague way “like Amish and Mennonites,” live off by themselves on “colonies,” and do a lot of farming. That’s about all we had to go on when the sign appeared in front of Pattee Creek Market in late October: “Reserve Your Hutterite Turkey Today!” One day we stopped in and ordered one for pick-up on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, a sixteen pounder that would be big enough to share with the international students and other temporary orphans from the university we had decided to invite over to share in the warmth and joy of our happy home.

Now, I have this writing habit or you could call it call a compulsion and sometimes the energy and desire to do something about it courses through me like fire in prairie grass and there is nothing for it but to either find something to write about or pour myself a glass of Maker’s Mark. On the Thursday before Veteran’s Day weekend we were out of whisky and it occurred to me that maybe I could travel to the Hutterite colony where our turkey was going to come from and write about the trip. It would be a quirky travel essay contrasting the Hutterites’s way of life with ours, dazzling readers along the way with great swaths of poetic description of the astonishing terrain of the state of Montana, our new home. It would be like journalism or something. Maybe I could even submit it somewhere. I called the market and learned that our turkey would come from either the New Rockport or Birch Creek colonies, both out near Choteau, two hundred miles east of Missoula as the car drives, which seemed doable. A. looked only slightly dubious when I proposed the trip.

The day before we left, I got on-line and started to read up on Hutterites. As I began my research, it felt thrillingly ironic and post-modern to be learning about these primitive farmers via the internet, and I even took some notes on this irony, thinking it would make for a good passage in my essay. But as I read further I learned that Hutterites don’t exactly lead primitive lives. I read some more, and then I crossed out all the ironic stuff and collated my notes into the kind of wise yet approachable paragraph that all the best essayists use to sprinkle book learning in among their personal impressions in order to keep their readers from noticing how self-indulgent the overall essay is:

There are in Montana small communities of a close-knit Christian sect whose members call themselves Hutterites. Like Amish and Mennonites, with whom they trace their origins back to the sixteenth century and certain disagreements with the mainstream of the Protestant Reformation, Hutterites are Anabaptists, meaning they are not baptized at birth but rather as adults, and then only after making an informed, free-will confession of faith. Also like Amish and Mennonites, Hutterites are pacifistic, reclusive, and suspicious of many aspects of the modern world. But this suspicion does not lead Hutterites to reject modern technology per se: though they disapprove of photography and television, they willingly use telephones, automobiles, and, most importantly, state-of-the-art farming equipment. And unlike Amish and Mennonites, Hutterites do not believe in personal property. They own their land and equipment in common, so that each colony operates essentially like a small farming corporation, with all of the efficiency, “rationality,” and economies of scale this permits. As a result, they are considered highly skilled agriculturists, formidably competitive with family farmers and ranchers. In fact, at a recent conference on real estate and development issues facing Montana and the west, I saw one rancher just about swallowing his tongue in an effort not to say something impolitic about his neighbors, the Hutterites.

In addition to using phones, Hutterites have answering machines. I know because I left a long embarrassing message on one the day before we left for Choteau. The message was a recap of the long embarrassing explanation I’d given to the woman of few words who answered the New Rockport Colony’s main listed phone number. I’m a writer, my wife and I just moved to Montana, I’m working on a series of essays about exploring our new home state, I wanted to write about where our Thanksgiving turkey is coming from. I’ve always found that identifying myself as a writer when no one is paying me to be one is extremely difficult, especially when I’m asking for something special or out of the ordinary as a result of this alleged “fact.” Logically, I know that this is just what I have to do if I want to write the kind of essay I had in mind here, but that doesn’t make it any easier.

She asked if what I was writing would end up in a book. “It might,” I said, trying to sound confident, i.e., “it might” end up in a book if there’s room in my book after I put all the other things into my book, but there are books involved, certainly, I’m a real writer, why wouldn’t it end up in a book? She said I would have to talk to the guy who raises the turkeys. I dialed the number she gave me and that’s when I discovered for myself that Hutterites have answering machines. I talked to the turkey guy’s answering machine for so long that a loud beep cut me off in mid-sentence to indicate that I’d run out of tape.

He never did call me back.

We set off from the motel around four. A., who is really very understanding of my strange urges, offers to drive so that I can make observations and talk into my tape recorder. Just to orient ourselves, we first take a quick spin through the little town where we’ll be spending the night: Choteau, MT, on the eastern Rocky Mountain Front. The main street is mostly empty, the shops are mostly dark.

In a parking lot, under the blank pitiless gaze of a rusting Tyrannosaurus Rex statue, we consult the map. Then we head east, across the tracks, and out of town.

We wind out of Choteau on state road 221 and turn north, after about two miles, on state road 220. From the Rockies to Choteau to this very turn, we’ve been driving in a region of rolling hilly grasslands with colors in about a thousand different shades of brown, gold, and yellow: wet blonde hair, beach sand at sunset, old wedding rings, and so on. Cresting a short rise on 220, we go from plains to plane, geometric that is, a glass-flat muddy-looking expanse of farm fields extending as far as the eye can see, except of course for where they run into the cloud-capped Rocky Mountains to the east west. The sun throws the car’s long shadow on the stubbly field beside the road. We pass hay bales stacked in the approximate size and shape of a semi trailer. Cows slump on the ground immobile as glaciers, horses bend graceful necks down to feed, and the occasional lonely house peeks out from its little palisade of trees.

According to the map, we are looking for the second “improved” road north of the intersection of 221 and 220, but we are hampered both because the roads are not labeled on the map and we have no idea what is meant by “improved.” We pass several fine gravel roads, labeled with numbered green street signs just like they would be downtown somewhere (17th, 18th, 19th, etc.), but I am at first convinced that the mapmakers wouldn’t have used such a thick red line to represent gravel. After a while it becomes obvious we have driven too far and we turn back, paying more careful attention to distance and the mile markers along the road. Using the side of my finger as a ruler, I estimate that the second improved road should be about five miles north of the turn we made. Between mile markers five and four, we turn west on a gravel road named 18th.

The further we drive down the gravel road, the stupider I feel about the whole thing. We have no idea if it’s even the right road, but, if it is, the fact that there was no sign back at the highway suggests that these people are not exactly eager for drop-in visitors. Three miles, four. We haven’t seen a single vehicle or person, just ranch fields full of cattle to either side of the road and then the occasional house. Like some ghostly overlay, older houses often stand crumbling somewhere off to one side of the newer ones, co-generational with the rusty pickups subsiding gradually into the earth in the front yards, the past rubbing shoulders uneasily with the present and everyone’s back turned on a future that has not looked good for small ranchers and farmers for quite some time.

The gravel pops and murmurs under the tires. A huge flock of birds crosses the sky in front of us in a dozen or so long, undulating strings, the color of smudged pencil lines against the white wash of clouds. So big is the sky over this immense flat plain, unrolling eastward from the Rocky Mountains at our back, that it is two or three minutes before the birds fade from view on the southern horizon. I look after them for a few seconds before switching on my tape recorder and narrating a description. There is always something to write about and there is A. beside me and this is how I hope it will always be.

In which I mention spiders and announce my plans to post a new essay every Sunday.

Back when I toyed for about five minutes with the idea of becoming a professor, I remember reading about a woman who was driving a school bus in order to be able to afford to keep working as an adjunct in English literature. She claimed to be fine with this, at least in the sense that she had never expected much better, and argued that you shouldn’t even try to become a professor these days (at least in the humanities) unless motivated by something other than the prospect of making a living, like a poet. That is, you should only do it if, the same way a poet writes poems, you would be willing to do it for free. I gave up the idea of becoming a professor but the impoverished adjunct’s way of looking at things has stuck with me in the form of a general philosophy that it’s important to pay attention to how you really want to spend your time, and besides, who doesn’t want to be “like a poet,” even if, in this example, it is just another word for banging your head against the wall.

I once took an on-line journalism course through Media Bistro in which I was mocked by the instructor for a statement he found on one of the web sites I kept before this one, something about how the mere fact of getting paid for a piece of writing is no sure mark of its quality, that what matters is how the writer feels about it, etc., etc. It was a journalism course, meaning that everyone in the class was there to polish marketable skills, so I understood where he was coming from. But I’m not about to let go of the idea that there are certain activities each of us needs to do whether anyone is paying us for them or not, and I am absolutely certain that – with writing in particular – too much attention to marketability is sure to change the shape and feel of what we’re doing, which in turn may defeat the purpose and turn the whole activity into something other than whatever it is we “need” to do.

I mean, there’s writing and then there’s writing.

For about the past month, I was working on an impressionistic and discursive essay that I figured would have important things to say about the creative urge and how writing works, perhaps only for me personally but even if so it seemed a question worth pursuing. I’ve put that essay aside for the time being in favor of remaining sane, but here’s something I found in the course of my research, from a public address by the German writer W.G. Sebald in which he describes a 1976 trip he made to Salzburg to visit his long-lost school chum, the painter Jan Peter Tripp, whose work Sebald seems in the oblique Sebaldian manner to be crediting with first inspiring him to consider becoming a writer. Sebald describes the profound effect on him of one of Tripp’s pieces in particular, an engraving showing “the mentally ill judge Daniel Paul Schreber with a spider in his skull,” and asks “what can there be more terrible than the ideas always scurrying around our minds?” The engraving and Sebald’s question call up, for me, a song my mother used to sing to me when I was a child, in which an old woman swallows first a fly and then a series of successively larger creatures, each one intended to eat the one preceding it. Specifically I think of the spider, which the old woman swallowed immediately after the fly and which “wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her.” Consideration of first causes is a natural tendency at moments when the empty page looms and yet offers no suggestions concerning how to fill it. That is, why the hell do I feel the urge to do this? And what, oh what, will quiet that urge (other than whisky and anti-depressants)? At times, such questions can feel urgent indeed. “I don’t know why she swallowed the fly,” goes the song’s refrain. “Perhaps she’ll die.”

So no more early-morning scribbling in notebooks that will never see the light of day. Here’s the plan: an essay a week on this web site, and no cute categories or other prescriptions concerning what sorts of essays they’ll be. I’ve announced grand plans like this in the past, of course, but this time around I know some of the things that went wrong, mainly biting off more than I could chew and also getting too specific about what I was going to do. I used to have the idea that I could post regularly here and then work on more personal stuff on the side and somewhere during all of that also make a living, all of which I now realize from experience just won’t work. And I want to focus on the essay form, since, as E.B. White once wrote, “only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays,” and that looks like a glove that fits.

As for my old Media Bistro “professor,” of course I’m open to submitting things to magazines and the like, but I can’t worry about that too much to start with. When I am submitting things, I want to be able to point to a steady body of work that has been appearing here, weekly and column-like, as part of my bona fides. It doesn’t do me much good to get some random essay published somewhere after weeks of trying if the effort is distracting me from practicing: I don’t need the independent validation, and I have faster ways to earn $100. So I’m going to plug along for a while here before worrying too much about that side of things, and if you find yourself thinking that something I’ve written is good enough to publish, don’t worry, something else I write will be, too. Of course, if someone comes along and wants to hire me for an E.B. White-style weekly column (does anyone print that sort of thing anymore?), well, all bets might be off.

I’ll post the essays each Sunday, no later than noon Mountain Time (two p.m. Eastern Time). Enjoy, and thanks for reading.

The memorial service for poor Max Lentz wasn’t the only connection between Missoula and West Virginia a week and a half ago. My parents, who recently moved from the longtime family home in the D.C. suburbs to a small college town in West Virginia, were here in Missoula for a visit. As everyone knows, there’s nothing like hosting out-of-town guests to help you see your surroundings in a new light. Of course, since my wife and I only arrived here in August, it’s not like we’re quite used to the place ourselves yet. But more on that in a minute. Meanwhile, it will help you understand what I’m about to write if you know that – in the way of many western U.S. towns – there are two mammoth white letters inscribed on the sides of two mountains on Missoula’s eastern edge, an “L” on Mount Jumbo and an “M” on Mt. Sentinel, so large that they are visible throughout the town and for miles beyond.

Now back to Max Lentz. The Missoula native attended high school at World Class Kayak Academy here in town. (This is as reported in the Missoulian.) Max was on an academy kayaking trip to West Virginia earlier this month when he attempted to navigate a section of rapids on the Upper Gauley River. The seventeen-year-old – described by one of his teachers as a highly skilled kayaker – was following a standard route, a route he had just watched other kayakers use without incident. But as Max slid through the chute, his kayak nosed into a rock crack and became wedged there, and the force of the rushing water held him down even as it batted his would-be rescuers away again and again from their desperate efforts to pull him free. The rescue, which commenced within minutes, eventually turned into a recovery, and four hours passed before his body could be pried from the river’s grip.

My parents set out across the country by train at just about the exact same time Max and his schoolmates must have boarded their plane for West Virginia. My parents traveled by sleeper car, the last civilized means of travel left to us. (Actually, my mother says that the coach seats didn’t look bad, either – remember, this is a different train from, say, the commuters that ply the D.C.-New York line. Really different. When we dropped them off at the Essex station near Glacier National Park at the end of the week, and I got my first up-close look at their train, it was like a silver castle rolling by on wheels, or something out of the 1950s-era Robert Heinlein/Airstream-trailer-influenced vision of the spaceships that we were all supposed to be driving by now. It’s called the Empire Builder, which seemed appropriate, even if – with our proconsuls and legions posted to Mesopotamia – it’s a name that makes you squirm just a little.)

A. and I drove up on Friday and met my parents at the Izaak Walton Inn near the little “town” of Essex, on the fringe of Glacier National Park. The inn has been in operation since the 1920s and functions almost as the de facto train station. The staff has to run out back and wave to the trains as they go by. The motto on the inn’s promotional materials is “Where time slows down and lets you catch up.” We caught up by reading in the lobby by the fire, walking in the woods, and taking leisurely meals in the inn’s restaurant, where a fine huckleberry cobbler is to be had.

Back in Missoula, with my parents quartered for the week in our guest room, we fell into a similarly relaxed routine. A. was off to work each day, of course. I would put in a few hours myself, then my parents and I would drive out to explore. We took walks, meandered through the UM campus, enjoyed lunch at Dauphine’s. One afternoon we stopped to read the names on the war-memorial statue by the grand old courthouse. As I hinted above, it was a little strange to be showing my parents around a town I barely feel like I know myself. They asked questions, and either I wouldn’t know the precise answer or my response took the form of pedantic, anthropological theories: “Well, I believe this may date back to the Populist era of the late 1800s…” Missoula doesn’t feel like home yet, and I don’t know if it ever will. Maybe it’s not dirty enough.

A week after they arrived, it was time to put my parents back on the train so that they could continue on their way to San Francisco, where my brother is now living. We collected A. from work a little early and drove back up to the Glacier National Park area, two and a half hours along winding blacktop, through the Indian reservations, past immense Flathead Lake, gazing ahead at mountaintops disappearing into and then poking out of the tops of the clouds. On the hillsides, thousands of fir trees poked up at the sky, shaped like sharpened pencils stuck point upward in the rocky ground.

My parents were the only ones boarding at West Glacier, where the station – which really only functions as a bookstore these days, apparently – closes each day at 4:30 p.m. So we waited for the 8:21 to Seattle in the dark, bundled against the cold, leaning under the station overhang to get out of the rain. While we waited, two freight trains idled on the tracks in front of us, and it was possible to imagine that there had been some sort of mixup, that my parents’ train couldn’t possibly make it through, or that it would slide past on an outer track and forget to collect these two passengers. But at the last minute the freights rumbled away and the aforementioned silver, castle-like, two-story glory of a train eased into view. A door opened in the side and a conductor popped out and asked for my parents by name. We hugged goodbye in the rain and watched them settle into their berth, two seats facing each other by a lighted window that suspended them before us in the dark, as if on a television screen. Then the train pulled away into the trees, and there was nothing to look at but the rain and the dark shapes of the trees in the park.

The first time I saw the name “Max Lentz” was on a riverfront stroll with my parents on their first day in Missoula, along the path in Caras Park. The name was written on a card affixed to a large vase of flowers that someone had left by the path near Brennan’s Wave, the brief bump of rapids in the downtown section of the river, where the kayakers practice. At that moment, “Max Lentz” didn’t mean anything to me, but I must have marked the name in some corner of my subconscious, because “Lentz” sounded familiar a few days later when my mother observed white letters spelling it out high on the side of Mount Jumbo. The “L” is always there, of course, but – sure enough – as we drove up Broadway from the UM campus on a sunny afternoon, we could see the smaller letters spelling out the rest of the name, small enough that it seemed possible, though unlikely, that they’d always been there and I just hadn’t noticed them yet. After my parents left, I read in the paper that his friends had put the letters there, just for a day or two, and that the “M” on Mt. Sentinel had likewise been amended briefly to read “Max.”

My mother and I had just walked the trail up to the “M” (letters “a” and “x” had not made their appearance yet). It was a strenuous walk, back and forth across steep switchbacks, pitched at an angle so that it was almost like walking up stairs the whole way up. We encountered a lot of other hikers. The only one panting worse than us was a black dog with white eye patches. From the trail and from the base of the “M” we had gazed out over Missoula, the streets of the university district marked out by neat rows of trees now wearing their final golden coats before winter. Looking over at Mt. Jumbo, my mother had asked what the “L” stood for.

I didn’t know, I told her. I just got here myself.

For Lentz, back on the Upper Gauley River, October 5th started out as just another day of doing what he loved. Then thump, his kayak inexplicably came to a stop and suddenly all of this water was rushing over him. I’ll leave it to you find your own lesson in this, but I’m just glad that I got to see my parents last week. All we know for sure about this uncertain world is that it is always later than you think.

Wasps keep getting into the house. Big, nasty-looking wasps. We find them crawling disconsolately on the sliding door to the deck, or sometimes on the living-room window. They must be weak, ready to die, because they often do. Right now there are four dead wasps in the tracks of A.’s office windows and the deck door. My past practice was to suck the living ones into the vacuum cleaner, sneaking up behind them with the hose, closer and closer until they suddenly disappear into the guts of the machine with a rattle. “You can change the bag next time,” A. says. Now this feels cruel, so I’ve taken to catching them with a glass and releasing them outside. Of course, I botched my first effort to be “less cruel” and just about cut one of them in half with the glass I was using. While I thought about what to do next, I had a close-up view of the thing’s stinger, flexing and groping for something to hurt, and I think we can all identify. Who hasn’t felt that way? We think they might be getting in through the air conditioner, which we should cover up anyway with the onset of winter. So the wasp problem shouldn’t be a problem for long.

I worked until eleven a.m. or so and then drove my parents downtown. We strolled by the river, ate lunch at Dauphine’s, visited Fact and Fiction. It was 99-cent movie day at Crazy Mike’s video rental, so we stopped by to stock up. We strolled the new releases, and what a vomitous bunch of movies they were, but that’s Hollywood today: very smart people making awful movies that are designed to do nothing more than make money from certain segments of the population that can be expected to spend a lot of money renting awful movies. I found that I didn’t even need to slow down and look at titles until I spotted a movie that the store held only a few copies of. Most of those were crap, too, of course, but, in general, the fewer copies of a certain movie that a store carries, the higher the chances that I will be able to watch it without wanting to run out into the backyard, douse myself with gasoline, and set myself on fire.

One movie I picked was “The Agronomist,” Jonathan Demme’s documentary about the Haitian journalist Jean Dominique, who did his job – i.e., challenging the thieves and murderers who ran his country, from Mother Teresa’s good friend Duvalier, through the horrid General Cedras, and even including the initially well-intentioned Aristide – so well that he was gunned down by thugs a few years back. The movie was a one-night rental, so we watched it last night. I was expecting a bit of a broccoli movie, i.e., a movie you don’t enjoy watching but know you should. (You know, “eat your vegetables” and all that.) But the movie was transfixing, from interviews with the charismatic Dominique (an odd-looking man who was never far from his pipe), to footage of voudou ceremonies and street demonstrations, to the director’s unobtrusive narrative style in which the subjects are mainly left to speak for themselves except for occasional clarifying captions briefly explaining the context of a certain historical development. Out of many aspects of Dominique’s character and personal history that struck me, I was particularly affected by the way this man, educated in a French university, a film lover, a quoter of Shakespeare, an eloquent – even poetic – writer and speaker, demonstrates the important role of art in helping people to imagine a better world, even as he worked to give a voice to illiterate Haitian peasants, who it may be fair to describe as some of the most unfortunate people on earth. I highly recommend the movie if you’re the slightest bit curious about Haiti or journalism, although it may make it difficult to do mundane things the next day like, um, keep a pointless blog.

On Friday it finally dawned on me that, for all the locals’ talk about recent winters being “much warmer than usual,” winter here will be nothing to take lightly.

As I’ve mentioned, it’s been getting cool already, temperatures dropping into the thirties at night and rising back into the fifties – occasionally maybe only the forties – during the day. When I first get up to type these entries I’m bundled in sweat pants, shirt, bathrobe, etc. I get dressed later in the morning, and in recent days I’ve found that jeans and a long-sleeved shirt isn’t always enough to keep me warm, even inside at my desk. The last few days of last week I ended up putting on a watch cap and my new vest (which I should tell you more about) just to get me through the late morning and early afternoon. Sutton, you ask, why not turn on the heat? And I answer two things. First, it’s only October, and things are going to get a lot worse before they get any better, so we don’t want to fall back on having heat too early. (What if, in the heart of winter, the heat doesn’t feel like enough as a result?) Second, and this is related to the first point, this house doesn’t have central heat, it has baseboard heaters, each controlled individually. Once we start using these things, I’m sure they won’t be that difficult to deal with, but for now they seem like an impossible pain in the ass, and that’s kept us from firing them up. It will also be fun to see the resulting electric bills once we finally do, although of course by “fun” I mean “the opposite of fun.”

Anyway, Friday was a cold, gray, drizzly day. I set out for class in a turtleneck (yes, me and Al Gore), my new vest, a light jacket (the one with the elbow patches, which I wear to look academic so that no one on campus suspects me for the interloper I am), a wool watch cap, plus the usual pants, shoes, etc. Not the warmest outfit I could have mustered, but still, it’s only October. As I made my hunched way across campus, collar turned up against the rain, I really felt cold. I looked at my “fellow” students and tried to gauge their reactions to the weather. Were they behaving as though the weather had finally turned?

Let’s just say I saw a lot of flip flops. I think it’s going to be a cold winter.

Friday’s lecture topic was the late-1800s feud between Montana copper baron Marcus Daly and William A. Clark (as in, I guess, the Clark Fork River that runs through the middle of town – one fun thing about studying history is learning the meanings behind all of the local place names), another captain of Montana industry. Both men had money, but the professor described Clark as “one of the richest men in the world at the time”; Daly was the founder of the Anaconda Mining Company, which at one point employed half of all Montanans. Historians don’t agree (as usual) as to the reason for the feud, but it was probably related to bad business dealings/rivalries and/or the fact that Daly was Irish Catholic and Clark Scottish Protestant (two classes of people not generally given to holding hands and singing rounds of “Kumbaya” together), not to mention Clark’s frequent public disparagement of one of Daly’s close friends and business partners, a man of Middle Eastern descent (!), as a “nigger.” Anyway, Clark would have given anything to become Montana’s first U.S. Senator, and Daly would have given anything to stop him. And later, after a pretty significant fight over that issue – a fight that grievously corrupted Montana politics for years and pretty much made the state a nationwide laughingstock – Daly would have given anything for “his” town of Anaconda to be named the state capital, while, basically to spite him, Clark wanted it to be Helena. Between the two men, over $1 million was expended in bribes, gifts (liquor and cigars), and advertising intended to shift public opinion on this issue one way or the other. But, when the vote came, people simply voted for the town closest to where they lived. Helena, boasting more residents, took the day, and all of that money turned out to have been spent for naught.

In the evening, I drove back to campus to pick A. up and we headed down to a barbecue being thrown by the Department of Biological Sciences in Kiwanis Park, close to downtown. It was still rainy and cold, but there was a pavilion, and, in addition to the various grills smoking away, someone had lit a fire in one of these saucer-shaped backyard-fire containers that seem to be all the rage these days, and so there was a spark of warm cheer to the event. Or was that because of the keg of beer? We spent a long time talking to a colleague of A.’s, and I learned that he has been teaching himself how to hunt with a bow (a traditional bow, no less). He plans a hunting trip soon, solo, to try his hand at bow hunting for elk, and another one to help a friend take a deer. The friend will be using a rifle, and he will help his friend flush the deer. I asked if I could tag along for the latter trip, and he said he didn’t see why not.

This barbecue was unusual, so far in our Missoula sojourn, in that it involved no bear sightings. Not that we really expected there to be bears, since we were downtown and surrounded on all sides by either residential areas or the downtown business district, but it is a fact that, out of three barbecues we’ve been to so far, bears were spotted at two of them. And it is a fact that the area seems to be absolutely crawling with bears. I can’t be bothered to go back and make a formal study, but I’m pretty sure that it’s accurate to say that The Missoulian has carried at least one bear-related story per day for weeks. Not all of these involve actual attacks, but, when they don’t, the subject is the increasing encroachment by bears into areas they once steered clear of. This is their hyper feeding season, when they desperately try to pack on the pounds in order to be able to hibernate all the way through the winter, and of course there is less and less food for them as the planet continues its not-so-slow slide into environmental ruin. I already mentioned the bear shot in Idaho a few weeks back, the first grizzly spotted there since 1946. An update on that story informs us that this bear can be determined through genetic evidence to have traveled over 160 miles to reach that area, which can partly be chalked up to the wanderlust that some grizzlies feel (though this wandering was over three times longer than what’s typical), but of course food scarcity has to be taken into account as well.

The bear stories made such an impression on me that, for this past weekend’s trip to Glacier National Park (on which more later), I decided to pick up a can of bear spray, i.e., pepper spray specially formulated for use against bears (I think mainly because it discharges in a 30-foot “shotgun-cloud” pattern). I wondered if I were being paranoid. We never ran into any bears, as it turned out (well, just the one dressed as a Montana State Trooper in the hotel lobby, but he seemed friendly enough), but just this morning I was leafing through The Missoulian when I saw this headline: “Carroll Student Attacked by Bear.” (It seemed intent on eating him, until a friend fired a pistol and it ran off.) And on the article’s jump page, there was a smaller item about a hunter in Yellowstone who killed another attacking grizzly with a pistol, which, from everything I’ve heard on the subject of shooting grizzlies using anything other than a powerful rifle, is really only possible if you can aim your shot up through the roof of the bear’s open mouth. (In Into the Woods, author Bill Bryson, while he is outfitting himself to hike the length of the Appalachian Trail, overhears a gun-store owner offer to file the sights off of the handgun that a customer has just announced he is purchasing for bear defense, because – the gun-store owner explains – it will then hurt less when the bear takes it away and shoves it up the guy’s ass.) And last night I was flipping through the local “alt-weekly,” the Missoula Independent, where I saw mention of “frequent black-bear sightings” in town, especially in yards that boast unharvested apple trees and, of course, around unsecured trash cans. And yesterday evening, we were walking on a trail through Moose Can Gully, a quarter-mile from the house, surrounded on all sides by houses, when two kids we encountered (chopping down trees with an axe, curiously enough) told us excitedly that they had seen bear scat and “signs” in the gully. So now, I’ve gone from wondering if I were being paranoid in planning to take bear spray along to Glacier, to wondering if I should carry it with me at all times.

Oh, and, in other news, a sex offender disappeared from his work-release job yesterday. The article was headlined “Search is on for escaped sex offender,” but I think it should have read “Madman on the loose” because that’s the guy’s actual last name.

I will be in Glacier National Park all weekend, fighting grizzly bears, “godless killing machines” that they are. So no posts until Tuesday morning. See you then!