Drumlummon views: the online journal of Montana arts & culture, volume 1, number 1-2 (Spring/Summer 2006) (2025)

OCR

HELENA, MONTANA

VOLUME I, Nos. 1-2
SPRING/SUMMER 2006

Copyright © 2006 Druml[...]on of original content from Drumlummon View: must a) seek copyright
from the authors/ artists and b)[...]Butte—Bar Patron, © 2005 David] Spear, Strike I/Vert
Pietarex

Drumlummon Viewx
Drumlum[...]

COPYRIGHT STATE[...]ISSUE’S NEW WORK Io

from “The Waterfall,” a poem by Melissa Kwasny

from “Hidden Birds,” a novel—in—progress by Deirdre
McNamer

from “In the Lay of the Land,” a novel—in—progress by
Matt Pavelich

“Butte’s America,” a portfolio of photographs by David
Spear

FROM THE[...]aw, originally
published in 777e Furmer’r Wife, I93I

from “Food of Gods and Starvelings’: Selected Poems of
Grace Stone Coates”

from “Notes for a Novel: Selected Poems of Frieda
Fligelman”

Fri[...]the Second
Story Cinema, Helena, MT, January 22, I977 (courtesy
Alexandra Swaney 8cJoseph Munzenrider), Windows
Media Player or RealPlayer required

ESSAYS 85
Folklife 85
“‘It’s Not a Ghost Town “til the Last Dog Leaves): The
Ghosts of Tradition in a Montana Mining Camp,” by
Darcy Minter

Literatu[...]f
Richard Swanson,” by Ben Mitchell

Regurdlem, a short video by Martin Holt, Montana Art
Wo[...]

“Illustrations for a Text That Does Not Exist: Doug
Turman’s Waterco[...]ian Kahn, Home Ground Radio

Windows Media Player ora novel by Annemarie
Schwarzenbach, translated by Chris Schwarzenbach

REVIEWS 234

L. A. Haflman: Pbotog‘rapber oft/.773 Ameritan I/Vert, by Larry
Len Peterson, reviewed by Mark Browning

We Know W170 I/VeAre:Métir Identity in a Montana
Community, by Martha Harroun Foste[...]

regional culture.

1%?

First, a few words about the name DRUMLUMMON: In
1875, Irish immigrant Thomas Cruse discovered a fabulously
rich mother lode north of Helena, Mont[...]lle, see Darcy Minter’s essay,
“‘It’s Not a Ghost Town ‘til the Last Dog Leaves’: The Ghosts of
Tradition in a Montana Mining Camp” in this issue of DV). The[...]ced at least $30 million in bullion,
making Cruse a very wealthy man indeed. Here at Drumlummon
Insti[...]rdependence of the local and the global.
Far from a simple reclaiming of regionalism from
perc[...]

scholars, and translators who venture far afield.

The seconc regionalist concept we find c[...]e time taking into account broader

trends within a given discipline, can be an effective deterrent ([...]lism of

Liberation. This is the manifestation of a region

that is especially in tune with the emerging

thought of the time. We call such a manifestation

“regional” only because it has not yet emerged

elsewhere. . . . A region may develop ideas.

A region may accept ideas. Imagination and

intelligence are necessary for both.

Kenneth Frampton, a key theorist of the concept, notes that,

in crit[...]bjects of
intense debate). Though we may champion a Regionalism of
Liberation and encourage the “ma[...]ord
its readers, both inside and outside Montana, a more nuanced
understanding of our place in the wo[...]This year, because
we’ve made our first issue a double, watch for our third issue in
Novem[...]

A journal with as diverse a table of contents as Drumlummon
Viewr’needs man[...]the landscape, and
we are fortunate to have both a cadre of committed and astute
Contributing Editor[...]TN; and Griff Williams, San
Francisco, CA. To see a complete listing of our Board of Advisors,[...]

such a marvelous job of designing this first issue.

Vlay Sam get a kidney he goes three times a week for dialysis
Vlay your grandson who has star[...]the
Ritalin

Vlay the young man who was stabbed—a good ranch—hand they
say

Vlay my aunt with dia[...]e—
see how they struggle to stand up—
Here is a jar of wild chokecherry jam
Here is a pouch of Old Red Man Lucky Strike
Here is a dollar bill for each of your fifteen grandchildr[...]the rest of the bannack
toilet paper army jacket a Pendleton blanket
Here in the old days grandpa ga[...]m in the bundle
and sets the bundle swinging with a stick
Now since the black spades of aspen[...]

fugitive voices

find us

9.
A Madonna sits in a painting in the Castelvecchio in Verona,

a tapestry deep with scarlet and gold hung behind her.

It is meant to be a garden, but without Renaissance

perspective, the[...]verywhere/unmoving/in the evenings oft/7e world.

I wake at four a.m. in an ancient room in the Hotel Scalzi,

one with twenty foot ceilings and bare walls. There is a window
over the alley which I kept open even as I slept. Students
drinking wine below. Time is a cloud above me, dissolving into
faces, voices, si[...]nguage his great—grandfather
speaks—

What if a bear came, he jokes. What if great—grandma did?[...]lity oft/7e fiction in [lye end

[but lms carved a trace, the marble threshold of the cathedral
worn[...]like to call it,

an evening of the glare of day, a force somehow opposite to

gravity.

10.
No water[...]ids.
The motorcycle was stolen from the backyard.
A young rodeo rider

who got drunk at the ba[...]

Squirrels, rabbits, the small ones die.

A black bear leaves paw prints on the front door.
L[...]ss prohibitive next to the
cement plant. There is a water line drawn on the land. We
often cross it, run into it, a sluice through the salt ditch
and blue yarrow.

T[...]ir
homes and families in the east. It is not food or shelter
they are after—you’ve heard they feed[...]amps, infinity
pools, pink flamingos.

There is a certain emptiness between the ancient years of
ro[...]leads workshops in correct listening,
although it would be a different place here, blue dragonfly,
dry specie[...]e Roman columns, without the
irrigation.

Whether or not we are part of this, should we still f[...]

I4

12.

Obviously,

we are bent over in t[...]answers
are often surface ones. Though death has a feel to it, we are
home here with leaf and dark t[...]h, feathers, star. Unlike the needles

which form a curtain here.

No answers,
only the names[...]

never encountered a fence. Hunting knives on their belts. Coiled

rop[...]ir saddlebags. Shotguns
to hunt birds to roast on a spit. Saddles their only beds, beneath the
starry vault.

They were a pair, the younger wiry and gap—toothed and
quic[...]that the
writer’s parents had set him loose on a long ride with his younger
brother, the other hor[...]their own, the hundred—mile circle. See you in a few days, the
parents said. Adios. Keep your powd[...]make the ride now.
Lindbergh’s triumphant tour would carry him, the next day, from
the mountains of Gl[...]nto the plains and straight over
their heads.They would see the plane up close.They might see the
man him[...]d grassy—breathed, and they
snorted and stamped a little when the stiff saddles went on. A last
gear check, a piss in the weeds, and they were mounted a[...]

Don Sombra kicked his horse into a singlefoot and reeled off
more. “The immense ni[...]s horse, the just—broke three—year—old,
did a little crowhop and a fast dance sideways, as if a newspaper
sheet had blown up from the ditch in al[...]als their heads, and took off in the new light at a lope.

It was good to leave the road, graveled and straight as it

was, because it would, when full light came, interrupt the feel of
the pampa. There would be farmers on it in their wagons and the
occasion[...]above the
grass, full of birds and waiting. They would camp there, roasting
their kill on a spit.

But first, miles and miles of prairie. Wh[...]was the sense of being seen. Of yourself through a high
hawk’s eye, one that noticed you but didn’t care. Still, it produced a
small quiver of self—consciousness. As you moved, two flies across a
table, you were watched.

From a distance, the Hills floated above the plains lik[...]closeflmong them and
on them and up them—they would be different. The light there
became dappled, var[...]ey the scraped plains, you became the hawk.

They would camp at the base of the Tower, the perfect[...]

I7

To the Tower, they said to themselves. Cbild[...]be
dark tower tame, thought the younger boy, also a memorizer.

At its base, he, Neil, wanted to separate for hunting
advantage and meet in a couple of hours at the camp spot they
knew. It wa[...], was the harm? The kid, Neil, sat his horse
like a burr. He knew what he was doing. They both knew where
they were, and where they would meet in a couple of hours, when
the sun was three inches ab[...]trong.

“Si, si, Don Fierro,” Aidan said.

“I will si si you at the camp,” Neil said, and he was offwith a
clatter.

He had his shotgun in a scabbard on his saddle. He had his
hat pulled low over his eyes. He followed a game trail through the
creeping juniper and the k[...]se of yellow
grass, through more brush. He got to a copse of quaking aspen——
animal tracks here—and he had a drink of water and the last of the
sandwich his m[...]picket Mancha and set off on foot, to sneak up on a pheasant.
He thought of a low place with cattails, maybe a mile ahead. He
remembered it now. He seemed to se[...]exactly where he was going. He urged Mancha into
a trot, then a lope. He ducked when the trail took them through a
thicket of chokecherries and was glad he wore his[...]thered himself low on the big red back.

He heard a gunshot, somewhere off to his right. He stood a
little and turned in his stirrups to see.

And th[...]and
covered an eye and his head felt axed in two. A fly crawled along
the top of his hand and his ha[...]g lump. His face felt bathed in blood.

There was a red horse standing in willowlight. Its head was
lowered but it didn’t eat. It seemed simply to think. One stirrup
had flung itself over the saddle. R[...]Come berg barre. 77211 meyour name 1f you 1747):? a name.

The red horse walked toward him out of the green. It had a long
scratch on its wither. It walked with a slight limp. It huffed, disgusted
at somet[...]

If he had possessed his faculties entire, he would have remembered
that he had ridden away from town[...]t seem to stop. His
mother was waiting for him in a bright kitchen pouring him a glass
of milk.

As the day darkened, Neil moved o[...]and
were answered by something low and harrowing, a long long way
away. A wolf.

They traveled carefully, he and the horse[...]drifted off the far edge of the prairie,
leaving a red line, then a deep blue one. Stars began to sharpen
themselves, a few and then many, and a moon came up that looked
like a dead eye. Clouds floated across it from t[...]

There it was, his bro[...]wn.

The clouds moved off the moon and he noticed a curving
line on the grass, which turned out to be a dry creekbed. A shallow
indentation. The suggestion of a cut bank. He could huddle
against it and think about what to do next. There was nothing he
could build a fire with. There was his saddle for a bed, his saddle
blankets for cover. He made his b[...]while he
knotted them, then crowhopped gently to a better patch of grass
and began to eat. The boy r[...]t into the tin pie plate
he’d brought along for a reason he couldn’t remember now.

The idea of h[...]He could feel the
ground move gently beneath him, a low, syncopated sway beneath
the tiny clatter of[...]ly eleven. The tearing sound of grass stopped for a few

moments, then started again. It occurred to[...]e

from someplace that was not, in this new life, a possibility for him.

Sometimes, on their trips,[...]her took with his three best men on the way home, a loop
straight into the heart of Blackfeet country. They passed twelve
miles of unbroken buffalo, a river of them, the wolves haunting

the border of[...]take guns and horses in the
night, and there was a melee and they shot the boy dead. Another
too. An[...]aring down on them. But not
before Meriwether put a peace—and—friendship medal with George
Washin[...]ger who was
shot and left him there for the crows or his comrades. Neil and
Aidan didn’t like that part of the story much. There was bluster and
unease in it, a preening that they didn’t much like.

The Meriw[...]uri
at the very moment that their comrades fired a gun to announce
that they were there in their boa[...], the

idea of high adventure culminating in such a neat and fateful way.

Neil. The name came to him in a burst of insight and now
he knew he could lie dow[...]moved his hand in any direction
on the ground, he would feel bones. Neck bones hung with a
government medal. In the far distance, he heard another shot.

They shot me, Neil, he heard someone say. I lie here shot.

He woke to two short whistles and a long swooping one. His
horse’s ears flew forward. And out of the dawn there grew a horse
and a rider, small and then not small, and a call.

Aidan had his hat pulled low over his eyes. He rode his horse
at a singlefoot, that go—forever step between walk a[...]sted easily. He looked as if he could have ridden a day like that,
ora little rail
stop, and not far. Their mother’s brother, a doctor, had a little egg—
colored hospital there, and he coul[...]ckered contentedly as

if it was going along with a bad joke. “You lost your hat when you

He reached out and touched[...]muscles moving neatly.
They traveled quietly for a few hours, saying nothing. Sometimes
Neil slept a little. Waking, he breathed his brother’s stron[...]dozed again.

Finally, there was the scrabble of a town ahead. It glinted in
the morning light. When[...]children ducked among the taller, watching ones. A murmur
grew. The sky returned a high, thrilling drone. And out of the
west, lit by the climbing sun, came a bright little monoplane. Neil
couldn’t sit stil[...]arm to
make Lindy tip his wings. On the sidewalk, a sour—faced woman in
a nurse’s cap called to him and shook her finger[...]its wings and the crowd cheered. Neil yipped like a coyote,
and then he turned to the woman in the nurse’s hat and shouted
a string of fake and bawdy Spanish at her, l[...]

22

from “In the Lay of the Land, ”a novel—in—progrexx
Matt Paveljch

Burdened by[...]n old Boy Scout backpack to which he’d strapped a
loosely rolled flannel sleeping bag. Weeds rattl[...]d to
oncoming traffic to discourage the offer of a ride. Sweat rolled
down his neck. A road map of Montana showed at his hip pocket.
Tea[...]nery; they were, some of them, also
beauty salons or second—hand stores or shops for small engine repair.
Concrete figurine[...]e offered
for sale on someone’s tiny lawn where a hand—lettered sign said,

U paint or We paint
Always You’re Choice

He passed a herd of squat black cows, several grain fields
plowed under. From the shade of a fading barn a barnyard dog fired
out to bark and bare teeth at[...]treated through the far
borrow ditch. Drenched in a new, clammy sweat, and extremely
alert, he went o[...]The people who lived on this land
were corrupting a great beauty, and Teague, raised on judgment and[...]ight at all, soon tinted pink,
and he ducked into a culvert to change back into his long pants.
In th[...]he supposed this was
it, he thought this must be a piece of the adventure he’d vaguely
intended. O[...]tion he went on, his own man
now, and he achieved a certain hardihood, a pleasing, groundeating
lope that brought him quite late in the afternoon to the mouth of
a long canyon at the valleys western end. Here the highway and a
railroad track converged to run close along the north bank of a river.
On either side of him slabs of rock reared[...]of the earth. In the canyon
he smelled creosote, a field of mint, alfalfa still, and even the rocks[...]nty—fourth year, he’d exceeded himself out in a wild place
where nature held him in benign[...]

23

beside the river, more or less, for about as long as he’d been walking.
A[...]ally.

He crossed the railroad tracks and climbed a high mesh fence;
he caught on its top strand and fell to the other side to lay for a
long moment on his back, on the railroads vicious red roadbed rock.
He crossed a field that caked his socks with burs. The river at this
point was aa skier’s,
Teague slid down a steep gravel bank, his shoes filling intolerably[...]legged on the little bit of
beach and had removed a shoe and was brushing at his foot when he
lost hi[...]d foot escaped his grasp to rest very briefly
on a round, slick stone in the river. Then he was sitt[...]d. Each time he scrambled and fell back he landed
a little farther into the current with his mouth a little nearer to
going under. Then he was flaili[...]kpack and the sleeping bag, and his shoe, and, as would soon
come to light, everything, sinking out of si[...]bed the crumbling bank.

He lay down in knapweed, a new misery. Thirsty. Worse, much

worse than befo[...]shly resolved not to try the river again. Limping a bit for
want of the shoe, he made his way back to[...]about
that far from the next town on Highway 200, a town whose name
he had already forgotten. He’d[...]e of
Montana. His eyes, he thought, might be just a little out of focus.
He stood at the side of the[...]one’s fool, Teague hoped and expected that this would serve as the
worst moment of his life. Nose blist[...]d many new ones. He’d confirmed himself now
as a little hometown fellow fit only to run a small circuit through
thoroughly expected events, to live a prudent life. Why had he ever
made himself availa[...]ts? Teague recalled his
mother mentioning that as a toddler he’d suffered night terrors, and
he rem[...]iar sound since he’d been standing by the road. A
truck came out from the pines to the east of him and onto the open
flat, a ponderous load of cordwood cinched to its bed. A chainsaw

and a gas can and a mongrel rode on top of the load.Teague raised

24

his arms like a referee signaling a touchdown. He felt foolish about
the gesture, the[...]blem. The truck came on—behind
the wheel, under a black baseball cap, a pretty mouth round an “o”
of decent concern.[...]wed, accelerated
again, passing him, then stopped a hundred yards down the road.
Weaving half on and[...]laterally, and if
Teague had been healthier then, or more capably concerned for

his survival, he’d[...]y
stopped, its bumper not ten feet from his knee. A bumper bent by
previous misuse, a mottled dog grinning down at him.The driver
leaned out. “Hey,” she said. It was a statement, a question, whatever
he wanted it to be. She seemed[...]archment and he could not trust himself to speak. A woman, a girl,
a person of about his own age, whatever that made h[...]wore heavy boots that made her throw her legs in a
rolling gait. Some kind of logger’s get—up. Over her right shoulder
lay a thickly plaited chestnut braid.There was a pack of Marlboros in
her tee—shirt pocket, and she walked like a tough at the county fair.
Two—cycle gas, sawdus[...]en carrying around with him, and
he never knowing or so much as suspecting his own secret tastes.
Accu[...]he company of plainer, softer women, Teague could
think of nothing to say to the handsome one now regarding him like

a found lamb.

“You okay, honey?”

Teague’s i[...]n it, that the girl was the soul of
kindness.

“I saw you when I was going into town,” she said. “What
happene[...]some antifreeze in it. Got beer, though.”

“I’m a pharmacist,”Teague declared. “Or I will be. And
alcohol, if you’re already dehydra[...]d his cutoffs were in the pack,
and the pack—“I couldn’t pay you anything, I lost all my money in
the river. I’m really getting to be in a bad spot.”

“Pay me? What kinda person you think I am?”

He’d never seen anything like he[...]

“Say? About . . . ?”

“Cheers? Or, Here’s to Mabel? Or, what?”

“Oh. To good health?”

“Sure. Yo[...]is quite the . . . Are you
Mabel, then?”

“Am I . . . oh, no. That was just an example. Of something they
might say.”

“Well, you’ll think this is kind of funny, butI took a vow.
When I was thirteen.I was at church camp, and I told Pastor
Stenvold I’d never touch a drop. Of alcohol. And I haven’t, either.
Until now. You wouldn’t believe the grief I sometimes took at school.
Even the real Christian[...]house, everybody, they all loved
this stuff. Now I see why. But, anyway, I wasn’t too good at baseball
or camp crafts, so I just took that vow. I was sort of caught up in the
Spirit.”

“What[...]say, anyway, is “Ignorance is not bliss.’ So I think I’ll have to tell him,
if I can still find him. I think if you make a vow, and then break it,
you have to tell the person.”

There was wonder in the girl’s eyes. “You are a square shooter,”
she said. “I like that. Or I think I do.”

Teague’s hands felt as if they were floating above his lap.

“I’ve never met a pharmacist,” she said. “Except for the ones in

the drugstores, when they hand you your pills.”

“If I’ve passed my boards.”Teague, gaudy in his honesty now.
“And then when I’m certified, then I’ll be, you know . . .”

“Certified. Wow. I’ve never met anybody from Iowa, either.
Where’d you say you were goin’?”

“I wanted to see the ocean.”

“The ocean? The Pa[...]d Handy, Iowa—he
expected eventually to live in a brick residence on Mill Pond Lane
and to serve on[...]urgently wished he might convince
this girl what a capable fellow he was, despite present evidence t[...]w she’d found him.

“You know,” he said, “I had it all planned out. Everything.
I checked all the fluid levels and belts and the spare tire and
everything before I left home. It was going along fine, too. Until
this morning. I stopped to take a picture of an eagle I think it was,
a real big bird—oh man, the camera’s gone, too—but anyway, when

I got back in to go, the K car wouldn’t start. So there I was, middle

26

of nowhere, about a mile the other side of that Pair 0’ Dice bar.
M[...]ere,
an old farmer who kept filling my cup; such a nice guy you couldn’t
say no to him. While Ia Plymouth,”Teague conceded. “But mine’s been . . .
it’s held up really well so far. I’ve made zero major repairs to it. Until
now. Then in Red Plain I find out it’s the wiring harness, a fuse failed
and the whole thing burnt out, the wiring harness did.They said it
might be as long as a week before they can get another one. Because
of the age of the car, which is not so old, or so I thought, but it seems
there’s so few of these l[...]hould’ve seen the rubber on those wires.”

“Ia tow truck.”

“And I bet you talked to Larry. ” She was finally dum[...]essness.

Teague had been captive in Red Plain to a man with a
prominent adam’s apple, a grave manner, and his name stitched
on his shirt.[...]lost
in the lay of the land, and also, possibly, a poor judge of character. “I
only had a week and a half to make this whole trip. So I thought Ia ways from the coast. Especially without

your shoe.”

“Well, I wasn’t . . . I didn’t intend to . . . As I said, I’m in kind of
a spot.”

She hummed a tune having to do, he thought, with a faithful
dog, something numbing from kindergarten or Bible school, barely
audible over her ratcheting engine. She turned off the highway and
onto a dirt road threading first through birch and cott[...]pine that crowded the road so
closely as to form a corridor. A girl in huge boots. He never would
have imagined. He was enveloped by her.

“Sorry[...]h she was. “Scraped the muffler off last week. I got kinda high
centered. It’s pretty loud if yo[...]nyone he knew, Teague had
always expected that it would come to him, eventually, in some
stately way befitting his patience. A comfortable, durable love. He
leaned out his wind[...]morning, but he knew that
if he said so the girl would think he was getting carried away. As he
happened to be[...]ried?” she wondered as if from far away. “Got a
girlfriend or anything?”

He felt much as he had felt while sitting in the river; the girl
had asked a simple question, she’d want a simple answer. “No,” he

said.

Could she be alone here?

“Yeah,” she said, “I’ve always lived somewhere off in the woods.

Al[...]e just for yourself. That’d
be pretty ideal for a lot of people.”

“Oh,” she said, “that. I think it’s been way overrated.”

They came to a small clearing where an antique bulldozer
stood m[...]to be pets
anyway. And then, the minute you’re a little bit sweet on ’em, then
along comes a cat and chews ’em up for you. Those cougars got[...]e fifty miles outta their way once they’ve
had a nice snack on Fitchett Creek. Cats, coyotes. Man, we even lost
one of these little guys to a hail storm.”

Teague, unequal to so elemental a place or to her great pride
in it, followed the girl’s m[...]travel trailer that had to be her home.There was
a considerable garden enclosed by chickenwire strun[...]ked tomatoes and feeble stalks of corn. There was
a great pile of cordwood on a pitch of high ground, better situated
than the tr[...]out as big. “Fifteen cord,” she said, “give or
take. And I’ve already sold quite a bit right off the truck, too.” She
said she dealt only in larch, that even partly cured larch would fetch
ninety, a hundred dollars a cord. “Bought a winch last year, and it’s
been the best investment I ever made. I can go after the downhill
stuff now, snake it right up on the road. I’m dumb as a post, really,
but I do know where to find the premium firewood. Kee[...]sheathed in naked aluminum. Once it had resembled
a bullet, but now laying coops were built along its flanks. A sleeping
porch also sagged alongside, a slapdash of gray plywood and green
plastic[...]

“You’re miles from the nearest phone, honey.” As if he were
a child wanting comfort and direction. “Why don’t I just feed you?
Myself, I’ve been dreamin’ since noon about some fried spuds and
a little bite of backstrap. Also, I forgot to mention, there’s that
outhouse if you[...]open
door, Teague heard ironware resound dully on a burner. “We run
most of our appliances of propa[...]narrate what he couldn’t see from the porch. “I took
him outta season, poached him. You don’t m[...]egal?”

Teague had never even legitimately shot a deer, though he’d
been on several expeditions f[...]lumsy and loud, his borrowed rifle
sleeping like a babe in arms.

“I was out fishin’,” she said, “and there was[...]e

buck, and he kept hangin’ down by the creek; I drownded a couple
three worms, and there he still was; so I walk up to the truck for my
.270, and when II shot
him. Heart shot. Felt like I ’bout had to.”

He tracked the sound of her b[...]ubstantial floor,
heard her perform some rasping or grinding chore, heard a wood
partition slide open at the far end of the t[...]was not so far
from him.The girl quietly lay down a scolding in terms he couldn’t
make out. Her voice. No answer. Her voice again, a long pause, no
answer. Talking to herself. Terrib[...]ed so.
Taking herself privately to task. But why? A cat, he thought, she
must have a naughty cat, or perhaps aor less, lodged in his imagination wearing a peach
pants suit she’d undoubtedly sewn herself[...]her fog

of old—fogey cologne. Because she was a nice person. A very nice
person. Janice, who deserved better tha[...]the girl had said. She’d said it several times. Or, “our.”
“Our road,” “Our appliances.” There was a car parked in the clearing
with the traile[...]

“I’ve had enough. For me.”

“Yeah,I forgot you’re kind of a teetotaler. I know you’re still
thirsty, though.”

Moving q[...]he went back into the trailer and brought him out a tall
glass of tea. “Sun tea,” she said. “You put the bags in a glass jug and
let the sun color it up. Somethin’ about it, you just get a real nice do
this way, maybe it’s more natural.[...]hey were alone.
The girl wouldn’t be frightened or offended, no, the girl, bless her
heart, would hear any question he might care to ask in exactly[...]he intended it. But what, exactly, did he intend, or want to
know? Do you live by yourself? Are you al[...]sing his glass. “My mom makes it this way, too. I’ve always
preferred it this way.”

She fed him a meal swimming in grease and salt, and
powerfully[...]That was so familiar.”

“Oh,” she said, “I don’t even recall. They kinda spill outta me.

I remember every tune I’ve ever heard, to hum it, but usually not the
w[...]ever the names of “em. Strange, huh?”

“No, I don’t think so. I’m not too musical myself. Not at all,
really. Y[...]ul for whatever little gift you’ve got that
way.I mean, they kicked me out of the church choir, if[...]you?”

“My family is. No,” said Teague, “I guess I am, too. Or at least I
try to be.”

“That’s wild.”

“Wi[...]

“Maybe. But I have to say, the majority of the people in
our church are really nice. It was the same in Iowa City. I’m a
Congregationalist.”

“I probably don’t know what I’m talkin’ about,” she said. “I just
don’t like bein’ looked down on. If I think of it, though, there’s plenty
of other assholes[...]t go to church. My family,
for instance. You must think I’m pretty bad, the wayI t .”

“You’ve been very nice to me,” he said. “Very Christian, I
might say.”

“I’ve got somebody you really oughta have a little chat with.
’Cause, with your education y[...]they were candy. Real
expensive candy. Never saw a pill cure anybody of anything.”

“Deeply Christian,” Teague emphasized. “I’m humbled.” Her
mention of someone else had brought him up short. It implied
a future. He was not interested in her future, or his future, or
anything beyond this moment and its lovely dyspep[...]sh to know who she knew; nor did
not want the day or even the hour to end.

“You’re what? Humbled, did you say?”The girl was satisfied,
entertained. “I never had that effect on anybody before. You’re a lotta
firsts for me. That what I said about my family—I don’t want you
to get the wrong impression or anything, or take it the wrong way.

I really do love ‘em. Most of ‘em. But, religion—wise, you know, I’m
nothing. Must be nice to be a believer. If you really believe.”

Gently she w[...]braid and
ran her fingers through it, and it was a wave, unbelievably abundant,
nearly a cloak on her shoulders.Teague was forming a new faith.

“Love,” she said, “is a very tricky deal.”

“I’ve heard that. But for me it’s been just Mom[...]etty straightforward stuff.”

“Some guys have a way of keeping things simple.I bet you’re
one of “em.”

“I was. Simple. But that might be a nice way of saying stupid.
Because, I think if I’d been paying attention, I would have known
better.I would have known that things are not simple.”

“No.[...]y if you don’t know any other way to be.”

“I can’t believe you don’t have a girl.”

“I do and I don’t.I guess I should have said so before.”

“011»

Teague wallowed in. “I don’t love her, is the thing. We’re
friends. Or just companions you could even say.”

“I’m never sure if guys even need to be in love. I think that’s
way down the list of what they’re looking for.”

“I’d need it,” he said. “I see that now. And with Janice—that’s
her name[...]but . . .
we don’t date anybody else, at least I haven’t . . . but . . . and we have

a lot in common, you know, we’re both goin[...]

“You’ve had quite a day,” said the girl. “You should have seen
yo[...]“You must be awful tired,” she said.

“No. I could go on quite a while longer. I like talking to you.
A lot.”

“I’m kinda bushed. Usually, by this time of year the woods
are closed. Fire danger. But it’s been a rainy summer. Means a
hard winter’s on the way, probably. And, greedy me, I’m gettin’ in
all the wood I can. Hauled two loads today all by myself. ’Bout
wears you out.”

He heard for the first time a sorrow or reluctance in her voice,
something not to do with[...]o take up his plate and her face hovered near him a beat
longer than necessary, within reach he thoug[...]imagined watching her from behind, that her hands would move
with the economy of feeding birds, that living, shining fall of hair
would be swaying in the rhythm of her work. He heard he[...]nd shine in at him
through the plastic screening. A breeze, waxing and waning in the
pines, whispered[...]rd the water running
if she’d brushed her teeth or washed her face, he’d have heard the
bed spring[...]l. In high country. Nightfall had
already brought a penetrating cold.Teague curled in on himself, held
himself. He thought God must be offering him a miserable night
so that he might remember himself[...]els over the other. “Didn’t mean to scare you or
wake you up or anything.”

“I was just laying here, thinking. Kind of thinking[...]didn’t speak, though she seemed to
want to.

“I was thinking about you. Mostly.”

She wore a long tee shirt for her nightgown. It bore the

ghostly imprint of a frolicking unicorn and was so threadbare
he could see through it, there was a remarkably detailed shadow
between her legs.
“I’m just filthy,” she said. “How bout you?”
Teague yawned, or faked a yawn to keep from panting.
“You one of those morning shower people?—Cause I like
to take my shower at night. Hate to go to be[...]e followed her out of the sleeping porch and over a short
wooden walk to a shed; she cast a flashlight on the shed, and a fifty—
gallon drum was mounted on its roof, and a garden hose fed into
that. “If you fill this t[...]y night the water’s nice
and warm. Specially on a day like this one was. Some people’ll go to
quite a lotta trouble for a warm shower.”

“That’s very clever,” said Teague in a voice he’d never

heard before.

“Oh, yeah. O[...]irl lay her towels and the
shining flashlight on a rock near the door of the shed. “Wasn’t my
idea. Come on, I’ll show you how to work it.” She drew the tee[...]d, “is pull on

this deal.” Her hand moved to a sort of lanyard, seized it. Awould need at least a moment more to overcome a lifetime
of modesty. This was a thought far too complex for his present
powers of[...]you’re . . . Here, soap me up, okay?” She put
a bar of soap in his hands, turned her back to him,[...]nd disguising now. The water
seemed to have found a particular course down the inside of his right
pant leg, he was slightly aware of its tickling. “Rub—a—dub—dub,” she
said, and he regretted it, bu[...]il, from just behind him, he heard another voice, a

third voice, raised in fear or pain.

Buliei‘America:A Porgfalio of Pbotograpbx
David]. Spear

In my work I become engaged in the coming in and then the goin[...]s that know me.

In the process of these pictures I travel to this foreign land; like

all outsiders after arrival I feel an urge to belong. But American
culture ofte[...]ere your
parents born? Where are you from?” and I utter inwardly, “ If you’re
from here you can’t be from there.” So I travel to this place, with
each trip arriving an outsider, but with each departure I leave in

a small way distantly connected to the things and these people in

this place I’ve come to know as Butte’s America.

The coming in and the going out I suspect will reoccur here for a

time.

Mart/.77 15, 2006
Strike I/Vert Pitturer
Pablo, Montana

Butte Hom[...]

Cabin O’Wildwindr: The Story of a Montana Rant/J
Installment One

Ada Melville Shaw[...]ummon Institute board member Patty Dean came
upon a marvelously literate first—person narrative written from
the perspective of aa homestead claim in
Yellowstone County in late 1915. Shaw would later serve as

Clouds bung low and [be grease[...]ent contributor to) Me Farmers Wife, gray. Far of I spied the cabin. Drawing by Irvin “Sborly” Sbope. Reproduced

a popular magazine devoted, in Dean’s words, to “providing a bypgrmmion of Suzanne shape 8 the Shape Family.[...]their ideas, letters,

and experiences, employing a crew of field editors who settled alone, a homesteader on semi—desert land with only the s[...]west of cactus, sage, and greasewood country, not a neighbor close by

subscriptions numbering more t[...]ay to its “But how did you ever come to do such a foolish—crazy—

readers in several installmen[...]owever, while preparing to take up the new life—a

Cabin OWildwinds was the very appropriate name I gave to the vivid chapter in my hitherto well—o[...]ot humdrum, existence,
tiny something—between—a—shack—and—a—house in which, when well I felt—though I could not explain my feeling—that I was neither

past what is usually understood to be the prime of a woman’s years,I foolish nor crazy; now that I can look back upon it all, weighing

time when all other doors of egress from a rather bad aspect of my

temporal affairs had sla[...]since there was “nowhere to go but out,” out I went to
“. . . wbere [be we” begins . . .
. .[...]to be greasewood which is to sage as cactus is
to aa woman
friend, who, with money in her purse, had gone a—pioneering
for health’s and wealth’s sake, into territory newly released for
agricultural purposes, I burned my city bridges behind me and
struck trail from a Chicago boarding house for the Unknown, never
dreaming how far afield the trail would lead. For Fate evidently did
not propose to let me off with a mere timid nibble at the edge of the
cake I had so long cried for—ah, no! Very cleverly, most relentlessly,
she set a thorn here and a lure there until she at last drove me out of
a comfortable environment in which I had thought to rest for a time,
to take up and live upon a quarter—section homestead of my own.
And that is how it all began!
When I was planning to put on paper, at least a part of my
experiences covering six years on the plains, I wrote to a teacher
friend who had spent one summer vacation with me in Cabin

OWildwinds and asked her, “What shall I tell and what shall I leave

out?” Her answer came back promptly:

“Good evenin’.”’beptpez‘b. “I come over [a iee could I git [a baul waierforyou ?”
Drawing by Irvin “Sbon‘[...]“The snake at the doorstep which we killed with a hoe and aI recall, a most unbalanced ration.

“The frightful hailsto[...]n like new lumber. Your fright at my illness (for A. was almost
overcome with the shock of the impact[...]t which no loyal druggist nowwill sell—
without a prescription!

“The trips past the wheat field[...]e wondered, scarcely daring to trust ourselves
to think whether there was War or would be War—here at home.

“The nights when we had[...]thirsty, persistent villains. (And one
night when I, at least, exhausted for sleep, went to bed in fu[...]rdraped with netting so as to save my face during a

semblance of a weekly bath!)

So wrote my guest of a few weeks who had not wintered and
summered, alone, in the Cabin she so dearly loved. But if I, who
knew the environment, year in, year out, and[...]the book it held before me, were
to set down all or half that there is to tell, no publisher would so
much as look at my voluminous manuscript! So I shall try to sketch
in here and there the outstanding features of an experience which I
would not spare from my life for bags of gold.

The day I left my friend’s home near the little new town[...]s the level
country, is graved deeply in memory—a picture of light and shade,
of laughter and tears, of fear and high courage. I had engaged a
fellow—homesteader to haul me and mine out to t[...]less intelligent little black cat, Betsy Bobbett; a huge vinegar cask for
water, since I had no well and no money to sink in the gamble for
one; my trunk, filled mainly with books; a few simple and essential
furnishings such as bed, stove, etc.; a three—month’s supply of food,
all canned or packaged.

It was anything but a “nice” day. Clouds hung low and the
greasewoo[...]and grayfl grim
challenge to the tenderfoot and a very lame foot at that! While still
far off I spied the Cabin, its new lumber shining against the dun
background, looking very much like a carelessly abandoned pill—box
which the wind would one day toss out of its path. But it was mine./

With high heart beats I climbed stiny down from the wagon,
my driver looking at the house with a wise eye.

“So you’re goin’ to try to make it here alone? Some gun fer a
woman, I’ll say! An’ you ain’t so young neither!”

With feelings I cannot even now reveal, I put my new
key in my new door and slowly turned the new knob. I was very
sentimental about it—should have liked some sort of ceremony. I
looked in—I had not seen the place since the first stringers[...]cans, tobacco quids, meat bones,
discarded rags. A mess where I had visualized a clean waitingness;
stale odors where there should have been the clean breath of pine. I
think Madam Fate snickered in her sleeve. Did she think I’d weep?
For once, she was disappointed.

My mover and I worked hard and fast and before darkness

settled down, a stove was up, the water barrel was filled from a

As a matter of factfl fact I seriously understood later on in
my mad career—that rain was a life—saver to the homesteaders on
the new land,[...]cast their
lot. But that night, in my ignorance, I hated it, for I had but the
narrow personal outlook—what was it[...]outlook that is the seat of most of our
miseries. A year later, rain, no matter what passing personal[...]o we
learn—so the soul is trained!

But [17372, I shivered away from the chill of the elements,
shu[...]red to the crass ignorance of me,
fool/fool/fool/ I did not like the voice of that coyote “singing in the
rain!”I did not like the unshaded windows beyond which lay black,
impenetrable gloom! I did not like the discomfort, the strangeness,
the silence! I did not like to think that no matter what might be my

need, there was no human help within call! I did not like to face

the untried future! In fact, for a bad ten minutes I did not like any
of it and had there been way of[...]ail picked up en route from town to
homestead.Two or three books sent by knowing friends, magazines,
newspapers, letters—a fat package of them. After all, I was not
wholly cut off!

Clasping the material evidences of friendship and love to my
heart,I proceeded to indulge in what women understand as the relief
of “a good cry.”Then I dried my eyes and began to read, and as I read
these messages from here and there, one even[...]urned. After all, this was going to be all right! I was
just tired. Blow wind, out there on the flat! I’ll give you fields of grain
to blow over, in t[...]s darkness—the merciful
veil of night? There is a light that never goes out—the light of love!

I finished my letters and the wee Cabin was filled with a glory that
surely must have shone out through its[...]as going to be—it mart be great! great! great!

I sat thinking. The fire burned out. The damp chil[...]in wooden walls. Utter weariness took hold of me. I must
go to bed. I looked around—bed? At that first slight move a[...]ce? .

. . Many nights of many weathers and moods I spent in Cabin

O’Wildwinds but that first night remains in a class of its own.
What says Millay?

So I lay awake, tense, numb with cold, quivering and a[...], who liked the new home just then no better than I did, took
advantage of my state of mind and leape[...]made their
music through them.There had been one coyote singing when the
lamp was lighted—now there was an army of them; or was this vast
plain the gehanna of lost souls wailing for their sins? Every now and
then, Lassie would raise her head, the hair lifting along her spine,
and with a deep—throated growl seemed to be warning Something to

keep off. And there I lay whispering to my flat soul, fool! fool! fool[...]ame—morning olwoyr comes! There was much to do.
I was at length a sure—enough pioneer.

“But what did you get o[...]are solid values quite apart from money.
What did I get out of it? Much, every way—more than I can convey
in words. It was an investment of spir[...]which has never ceased to accrue.

Then and there I began to lose a certain helplessness and
nerlmem, to use a graphic word of my old grandmother’s, bred of city
life and a desk job. Then and there I began to work out the truth of
the paradox that i[...]ne to do wlmt is to be done wbetber
one can do it or not! In other words, I began to discover within
myself, power, strength, ability, which I should never have known
existed in me but for the[...]f need which
uncovered them to me. Then and there I began the search within
myself for that mental and spiritual equipment which I had to have
if I were to go through with the Adventure; patience,[...]tiveness.

There was no bakeshop within reach and I must have bread! To
have bread, I must have money for flour, yeast, salt, water—for even
water had to be hauled and paid for; I must find someone to haul
the flour and the water to my door and pay for the service; I must
find someone else who would go to the timber, bring logs to me at so
much per[...]her someone else with time from his
own acres who would cut the logs up for my stove; I must know how
to build a bread fire; I must learn how to make the bread and, while I
was learning, eat with more or less relish my own sorry experiments.
No use making a fuss about it—fussing only intensified matters.

On many a winter morning, when I reluctantly turned back
the covers, the thermomet[...]y bed registered IOD—ISD—ZOD

below zero, for I had neither fuel nor stove which would “keep” fire

The winds that whi[...]the unbroken miles shook
the Cabin till sometimes I stood ready to fly for the open. When I
set out to walk to the nearest neighbor’s and r[...]ob to find out how to go ahead
just the same. If a rattle snake gave me “good hunting!” as I passed by,
still it was my job to know what to do[...]ely nights and long lonely days—and
Sunday, had I permitted, would have been the worst of all. There
was mental pois[...]no real woman wants that to happen.

So fate and I reasoned together. Had I not always yearned to be free
from certain shackl[...]you are; now live up to the game! And there was

a bit of mockery on the Old Dame’s face. But she was right.I war

free! Free to rave to heart’s surfeit over star or snow crystal, wild
flower or rainbow, racing clouds, snowy peaks, miles and mi[...]ses, sunrises, moon sets, sunsets,
silence. Twice a day only the distant whistle of a steam engine broke
the quiet. There was no one to protest or scoff when I got up in the
middle of the night to stand on my porch and view the midnight
skies. Or, feeling chilled to the bone, hours before dawn,[...]ainst the purple night sky of the west.

For half a century, life—that is to say the organized,
sta[...]by civilization—had
not been any too kind to me.I had felt bruised, starved, deprived,
cheated, but could not shake loose. But now here I was—free—a
homesteader, a pioneer. I could work in my own way, play in my own
way, learn the secrets of nature, do without what I could not get,
enjoy what I had, read, think, shout, sing, pray, laugh, weep, without
let or hindrance. I was independently alone with Nature, had all the[...]cup was dry. For the barrel my
mover had filled would soon be empty and I did not know where to
get more. And even the brav[...]most inventive,
cannot do without water.

Across a stretch of very rough land lay the homestead of a lone
man whom I shall call A. Q, a one—time country school teacher from
a far eastern state. He had a well but as he was very seldom at home,
hi[...]

One morning, scanning the distant road through my good
field glasses, I saw some men evidently at road work. I set out
through the hot sun to interview them. I bad to 1747):? water! I found
a group of five, all busy with shovels and picks. They did not greet
me enthusiastically—I suppose I looked as if I needed something
and in that country at that time[...]dependent. Moreover, lone women homesteaders
were a nuisance.

However, I stated my need. Apparently none of them
had time or strength to spare. I made it very plain that I would
pay—anything—for hauled water. Grim indifference. I felt as
if they shouted at me: “What did you co[...]e you belonged!” One of them said: “There’s a woman two
miles up the road has a horse—she hauls her own water. Ain’t
you got no horse?”

1% street—car habituéfl horse!

I shook my head and was turning away when the least[...]ed up from his work
and regarded me severely.

“I’ll fotch yuh a bar’l fust thing in the mornin,” he said, “but
that’s all I kin do. Got enough of me own. Old woman, she keep[...]away with so much water, beats me—must drink it or water this
here cactus with it or somethin’I I’ll be around early. You be up—I

ain’t got no time to waste on no wimmen homesteaders!”

I swalowed my feelings—water is water—turned ab[...]i, home, and with some long, long thoughts dipped a
cupful of warm fluid out of my vinegar cask, sip[...]ng, at dawn, appeared my recalcitrant knight with
a water barrel in his wagon, his well—fed horse t[...]his barrel
to mine, and when he had finished and I handed him a silver dollar
with words of genuine thanks, he glared at me as if he would like to
kill me, pitched the coin across the room[...]to his horses and was gone.

But water ix water! I drank. It was “sweet”water—heaven’s
own gift. I filled the animals’ dish.I took a bath. I washed up a
collection of dishes. I reveled otherwise until some of the fearful
dryness in me seemed assuaged.Then I put the problem away for a
day or so. Sufficient unto the day is the moisture ther[...]the widows curse, my supply
grew fearfully less. I had not neglected a single opportunity of
interviewing such people as I chanced to meet, but no help came.

One evening I was preparing my supper of canned tomatoes,
as the wettest food I had, when Lassie’s bark announced a caller.
GladlyI hurried to the door.

Approaching at a sedate pace was a huge, gaunt, gray horse
mounted by a small, thin, ragged, fair—haired boy with wide blue eyes
and a sensitive, even high—bred face. His air was timid, appealing.

“Good evenin’I” he piped, reining in the enormous animal and
pulling off his tattered straw hat. “I come over to see could I git to

haul water for you?”

66

Now I had been under the impression that hauling water—or
anything—was a man—size job and this child, why, I wanted to hold
up my arms, have him slide down in[...]vident physical needSflnd mother
him.

“You?”I asked. “Can you haul water? And where do you come
from?”

“Yes’m. I kin do it.” There was resignation in his voice. “I’m
aimin’ to go to school all winter an’I have to earn my books an’ clo’es.
. . . You want water, don’t you? A man told me.”

“Why—yes!” Pitying amazement made my words come slowly.
“I need it badly but—how will you manage it?”I did not know
country children then.

“My grandfather says I kin use his stone boat an’ old Doll here.
She a[...]hard work, but he says he’ll keep her
for me if I use her right and “tend her myself. She pasture[...]she don’t hardly cost nothin’. We just had us a well drilled
and the water’s good and Grandfather says it has to pay for itself. I’m
used to haulin’. I hauled all our folks used for a year before we got the
well, from a spring “way over yonder.”

“And where do you live?”

“ “Bout a mile n’ a half over that way,” gesturing into the
deepening night. “It’s more’n two and a half round by the road but
there’s a man lets me come through his place—he lets me let down
the wires if I put ‘em back right.” He sighed faintly. Letti[...]es and getting them back right was not so trivial a task for
such slender, ill—nourished muscles as his.

“And what shall I pay you?”

“I don’t know,” his clear eyes studied the distance. “ “Bout

whatever you think right, I guess. Would fifty cents a haul be too
much?”

“All right, sir! Can you[...]some hot toast and jam with me? It is good jam—I
brought if from Chicago!”

But he shook his head, replaced his hat, and, quite with the air
of aI don’t like to do “In after
dark but there’s some moon tonight if it don’t cloud over. I thought
I better git over before you got someone else. Only way I can see to
earn my books and cloes. . . . You don’t need to come down to the
gate—I’ll put it up all right—I’m used to gates. Good night!” Again
that fain[...]ioneer earning an education
in the wilderness. As I nibbled my cold toast, the story of Elijah[...]

a dirty cotton tobacco sack.

Thereafter, for many[...]weathers and nearly always in darkness, for
they would not let him earn his pittance until all the home chores—
by which he earned his “keep”—were done.I forget just how many
cows he milked, how many pig[...]ay, enjoyment, comfort,
rest and good food.

Once I ventured to increase the little sum per barrel bu[...]el head, open and close the devilish wire gates—Ia wild wind. “But I reckon ‘t aint no one’s fault. When I’m
grown up and have an education I’ll have it easier maybe—Gra’ma
says so. I thought I’d like to be one of these here writers for the
papers—that wouldn’t be so hard, would it? I’d like it. You’d git to
know a heap.”

Resolute and industrious to the core, t[...]nd pail, turning his ragged gloves into icy mail, I bought

extra pairs of warm mittens and ma[...]

Whenever he would stop for it, I insisted on a big cup of rich
hot cocoa. Drawing his sleeve app[...]fter
the last sip, and looking at me solemnly, he would say, “That there’s
sure good smH—we don’t[...]rs, pat
his thin shoulder for good—bye, and, as I closed the door behind
him, shout to heaven to wi[...]l “trial by water” on the semi—arid plains. I
have given this filll—length portrait of him b[...]n of her barren lands.

The water problem solved, I was well launched on my high
emprise. Cabin OWildwinds more or less sheltered me from the
elements, I had dog and cat for company, letters from distant friends
whenever I could get someone to bring the mail, and out ther[...]ed soilI—to engage my skill, two willing
hands, a head willing enough to learn but at first practi[...]simplest knowledge of agricultural procedure. How would
it all come out? I faced the future with a smile and pinned on my
building—paper covered wall a word from Rabbi Ben Ezra:
“7ben welcome eaeb rebufl
771a! turnx eartbiv xmootbnexx rougb,
Eaeb xting [bat[...]es, suflcicient
and to spare, but they came with a magnificent accompaniment
of encouragement, insp[...], mental and
spiritual.

With water in the barrel,I looked hopefiJlly ahead.

(to be continued in the next issue of Drumlummon Views)

A wafer barrel in bi; wagon . . . [be price/[...]

[river], swimming in moonlight,[...]9205 and early half of the 19305, Coates had over a
hundred poems and short stories published, edited[...]cal essays for state—wide papers, and
published a novel—Blank Cberriex (1931)flnd two books of
p[...]Storiex cited twenty of her tales as Distinctive or
Honor Roll stories, and John Updike chose her “[...]energy, possibly indicative of manic
depression—a condition shared by many people who have c[...]

When Mead and Mangelr Wurzel—ho[...]e food of gods and
starvelings.” Here, we offer a handful of the poems that will appear
in “‘Fo[...]t Breakfast
“Where were you, last night?”

“I was in bed . . . sleeping

(from Mead andMangelrW[...]an you restore

The trampled grape to the vender,
Or water a dead plant?

I tell you quietly

Our life together is closing.
If I lied to you

Saying I was happy,

I deceived myself,
Supposing

Steadfast lies

Must[...]of Women

Beside you . . . of course!” There is a hardness in woman like the hardness of falling wa[...]ulses what it compels; her life is barred

“And I was leaping To man by her moving purpose. Who has[...], and burying Jesus, Though she curve to him like a wave her strength is hard.

And patting Go[...]

And a woman can leave a man, without quitting his dwelling, Ergot is on me. I shall be festive

To loneliness deeper than night[...]gone.

While life conceived in me is dying.
When I sit passive I shall soar restive
Till I look down on great birds, flying.

(from Mead andMangelrWurzel [Caldwell, ID: The Caxton I am deception to those who see

Printers, Ltd., 1931], p. 4.1)

Village Satiety

Satire sits on a satin cushion,

Cups her chin, and looks at the street;
Qlestions: lethargy—or devotion?—

Prisons me here on this window seat.

To watch the villagers empty ashes,
A wagon rattle to two white horses,
Purse—gut gro[...]ater courses.

Satire broods at the empty window:
I will be 117m, and I shall do w,
Hug my knees as wise as a Hindu,

And watch stupidity come and go,

While I live a hidden life more sparkling
Than lights that scream on a city street,
With secret ways of thought, more da[...]er meet.

Only coifed hair and tints that perish,
A flat bosom and crooked knee.

In me is what the[...]Ltd., 1931], p. 70)

To H—

Only to the simple or the very wise

Or those who, having hungered long, are fed
Does Hea[...]give its glory to their daily bread.

Of these am I—never wise, my candor gone,
But one long hungered, now in you content;
And I have seen God moving in the dawn
When our communion was His sacrament.
My silence would more fitly meet your own,
But the words press—that you will leave unread
Though not unsmiled at. Never am I alone
When you are whom I seek. Uncomforted
You do not thrust me out. If nights are deep

I care no longer; on your arm I sleep.

Portulacas in the Wheat

My mother was a woman rich in life
Wisely controlled, renewed abu[...]oundings; limpid, loving Truth,
Worshiping Right, a living loyalty!

She gave me all I know ofhonor, faith,
Hatred of lying, scorn of littleness;

She gave me allI cherish, save two things:
A sensuous joy in life that she half feared
For me, and pagan gladness in the sun

Even when I sinned—most, when I sinned, I think!

One hot, late morning, sun high overhead,
(Havi[...]ked,
Closeted, sentence served, and so, relaxed)

I watched the binders drop their yellow loads;
And,[...]d
The shivering ecstasy of mimic fear,
Pretending I must hunt all day, all night,

A thousand, thousand miles to find my home!
The wheat was higher than my head, that year;
It caught my hair, I know, and tangled it;

So, bending to avoid the tugging stalks,

I came upon a wonder at my feet.

I looked and held my breath, and looked again,

The[...]ed to her skirts, and looking up,
Ankle in hand—a much—corrected trick
That deep excitement alway[...]n breath came back, the words came tumbling, too:
A miracle! A marvel in the wheat,

That she must see!

She ans[...](For she was courteous even when she spanked)
“I have no time to listen, child. Sit down!”
—She held a heavy platter in her hand—
“Now keep from under foot till I have served

The dinner, for the teams are turning in!”

I sat and swallowed tears—not bitter ones;
Mine lay behind the lashes, quick to ease
Grown—up rebuff or happiness that hurt.

The men came streaming in,[...]es—
Who doubts?—as wide and eager as before,

I told him of the marvel I had found.

Without a word he leaned to take my hand,
And went t[...]

Blossoms! A myriad of them, flaming silk, Veered suddenly, and made a vexing end.
Of colors flaunted by the Sun! They[...]l we dare not step, then scattered out,

Each one a passionate discovery! (from Portulmm in [be Wbeat[...]o hold

The moisture, little surface to the sun;

I trotting by him, deeply satisfied.

My mother to[...]No! They were rich enchantment, silken flame,

A whole new continent in Fairyland!

That timeless, golden afternoon I held

Grave converse with my Fellows of the Sun,[...]ords.

Deep in the sun—drenched wheat, content, I heard
The whirring binders drop their tawny loads
Nearer and nearer, clanking nearer still;

A pause, a question, then my father’s voice,
Abrupt, imperative, “Swing out, I say!

The child shall have her flowers! Swing ar[...]ather’s pride

Ltd.,1932], pp. 13—16)

Hills

II shall walk them again,
And again and again.

Before I had striven

My heart had abandoned strife;
Now I have given

Over effort and pain;

Why should a dusty desk
Command my life,

When God is o[...]

Or hustling husbands frown.

They roll their meager[...]art,

Driven by dull chatter

On dingy street

To a place apart;

ButI know where she is hiding.

There’s a cliff where pines are riding,

And exultant winds confiding

Strange intentions of their own.

I shall make my way alone
Past the green alfalfa ti[...]And no curious eye can find me;
Only then shall I be free

For the prairie and the foothills
And th[...]y wheel and reconnoiter
And protestingly retreat

I shall climb the lichened boulders,
Studyin[...]

Leading upward from the rill

Is a deer trail hunters follow,
That winds high above a hollow
Where the bluebells are a lake.
One quick, stinging breath I take
Coming near.

I shall stand there long, and gaze,
And go softer o[...]ssion of blue flame.
Once so quietlyI came

That I glimpsed a wary deer
Marshalling her baby fawn;

They were there—and they were gone.

I shall climb the steepening ledge
With its fern an[...]stern edge,
With the valley wide below it,
Stands a tree that loves the granite
And the cloud—sweep and the wind.
Its grim roots to me are kind.

I shall so sit so quietly

Chipmunks thinkI do not matter,

Scampering like mad across my feet.

I shall neither feel nor think,

Nor with teasing values reckon;
IfI sleep I shall not know it.

I shall rest; and cease to be

All that people know[...]their drumming,
Glowing cedar birds flash free,

I shall smile, for peace is near;
But I shall not look or beckon

Or entreat her swifter coming.

When the wind has hu[...]And haunted birds fall dumb,

Peace wi know that I am hers;

Peace wi touch my breas[...]

76

from “Notexfar a Novel: Selected Paemx of Frieda
Fligelman”
(Dru[...]their second daughter, Belle). Herman
Fligelman, a Jew, had fled the pogroms of his native Rumania[...]d
in Helena, where he started the New York Store, a department
store that prospered with the mining o[...]ir father loved learning. They grew up consulting I/Velzrter’x
Unabridged Dittiomzry at the dinner[...]n allowed his daughters to
leave the state to get a first—rate education. Frieda attended the
Univ[...]logy at Columbia University. She also studied for a year

at the University of California, Berkeley.[...]roeber; she
also took classes with Franz Boas and A. A. Goldenweiser; the
historian Charles Beard; socio[...]gue. Her first sweetheart
may have been Hu Shih, a fellow Ph.D. candidate at Columbia,
who would become China’s most famous modern scholar durin[...]lutionary literary renaissance. Frieda later told a friend
she had been very much in love with him, but because of his
childhood betrothal to a Chinese girl at home, they did not become
further[...]h.D. comprehensive
exams at Columbia and spending a few years working as a
sociologist, Frieda went abroad. Freed from working by a stipend
from a trust fund set up by her father, she sailed to Eu[...]es, taking classes with
Professor Henri Labouret, a linguist and ethnologist.

Sparked by her studies with Labouret, especially a class
in the Fulani language of West Africa, she conceived of a way
to demonstrate that a non—western language was as complex as

modern European languages. Labouret would later write of Frieda’s

Language in Sotiology to this Montana scholar. The dedication
called her,

a precursor who, more than four decades ago,

was r[...]d to

see it vindicated. . . .

The twenties were a heady time to be in Paris, especially for
a young woman interested in ideas and culture. One[...]a might have had, but
one in particular unleashed a different sort of writing in her. She
turned to p[...]n when she found herself hopelessly

in love with a married colleague. The relationship, consummated or

not, did not last long in its romantic phase, to[...]n she
returned to the United States, she compiled a 27o—page typewritten
manuscript of 930 of these poems, which she variously referred
to as Notex of a Lonexome Woman, Notex for a Novel, or Warning to
Youtb, dedicated to “all sorts of me[...]ey look like poetry,

because

the linear form is a dress that can be worn by

any idea. What is impo[...]re an
aspect of life. They are just as legitimate a form as
Alexandrines or sonnets. . . . these are the notes of

a lonesome woman.

One can well imagine that loneliness could have overtaken
sanity, especially for a woman who had so deliberately removed
herself fro[...]family in the pursuit of knowledge. Frieda spent a great deal
of time alone in her lodging, “keepi[...]e heat of grief and longing and transform it into a desire to

completely herself. Here follows a selection of her poems:

Nature 8L Culture

1 hav[...]and years of culture
Stand beside me smiling

And I write suavely:

Sir, would it not be possible

To reconsider the matter

Fro[...]ll—ordered drawers and
card—catalogues,

Like a pioneer who gazing on

broad prairies

Sees the c[...]fields

As ripening grain.

1%?

Narrow Streets I

Our only view

In looking out on nature

ls seei[...]nd dressing

Shaving and playing cards.

Oh gosh! I’d give my bath—tub
For ten miles of st[...]

Perversity I could easily give you a kick
I venerate so much the mystery of the mind Into perdition, had I the skill.
For all the comfort it has given me,
For all the pillows it has laid on rocks, Not that I care the least
Where you might land
Sometimes it seems to me:
I carry my mind about upon a tray, But only to clear my way
Like John the Bapt[...]How strange and fair that suddenly my friendship I am the paradox that must be solved
Turned to Love[...]is any decency in nature

Love so elemental

That I would die in joy I am the moving finger of an evil fate
For one lon[...]That will write boldly to protest its chance.
1%? I am the warning
That each must be God!
Dantesque
I am too catholic 1%?

And thus I suffer from lacunae,

Condemned for warmth to gather Offer
Only the passing sparks I could consider you
From far—off fires. A bird of passage,

A sight to lift the eyes a moment
1%? And remark, “Bound South,

Th[...]

Oh bird ofpassage, I had

built for you a nest

To shelter through the roughest days,
If yo[...]Recoil before brutalities

Whose only purpose

Is a cloak for vanity.

How foolishly I cry,

Oh may the time

Make haste to show itself[...]is thought

Requiring welcome gestures:

Reading, I reach to press your hand,

Walking, I glance with questioning smile,

Lying at rest, I seek repose against your breast—

And what are[...]bsence were of no account,

And my seclusion were a prize.

My being is soft as a smile
(Tho smiles are long since forgotten).
You can not touch me with bitterness;

I am untouchable.

1%?

And send me news by strangers!
Like a perverted husband

Who sends his wife upon the streets
To whet his appetite.

1%?

I have not wept

But now it seems to me
My rest is after long, long
Weeping in the dusk,

And I so weary, I have
Forgotten why I wept,

And wonder that you’re gone.

1%?

Refusal

I can not meet you cordially as a friend.

You are a snarling beast
In wait for peaceful prey,
And I too much in love with life

To waste it in a futile match of wits.

1%?

Solution
Now at the end,
I find me how to live.

Now at the end,

When ther[...]lities;
Elegantly, graciously, bestowingly,
As if a crown!

But I tell you it is a crown of iron;

It gives me a headache.

1%?

Realism

If we decide to l[...]

Theology

And I, ifI were God,

Would I, too, forget compassion
And confuse philosophers

Till they found reason in my whims,

My hit or miss of hurricanes.
Or would I still remember
There is pity in the human heart.

1%?

If you should come again

And find me waiting,
Would you be glad

I cared so much?

Or would you be moved to scoff:
Women are fools for being

So specialized.

1%?

I, too, have become ruthless:
Not wantonly, as they who seek

A small illusion of importance.

But to preserve th[...]Freedom from malice; longing for love.

1%?

If I Were the Queen of Sheba

I can imagine

Being the Lady Sultan

Of Arabia

With something like a harem
Full of lovers—

But they would not be slaves
No more than doctors

Are slaves to suffering patients
Or professors to eager students
Or actors and performers

to our need of re—creation.

And I would send

for Ahmed or Abdullah

And then for Ali, Shem and Japeth,
Yaku[...]mory for names
Call for the one who’s gentle as a hound,
And then the one who’s timid as a doe
That hardly dares to come

And lick th[...]

Then I would call for him
Who loves to strut,
Thrusting his he[...]Like the huge—antlered deer,

Who seems to wave a proud and graceful flag

As he runs lithely fort[...]The beautiful youth

With resolute noble eyes—

I would not touch him

Save to stroke his hands,

Enquire[...]ome rude problem

Of the universal pain.

And all would come

With firmly glistening limbs,
Clean from cool baths

Or working in the breeze.

They would be glad to come,

As glad to go;

Returning to their fascinating art or craft
Where some fair damsel

Is their bright companion.

For they would not be slaves
Locked for my pleasure,
Waiting in anxiety

The imperious call of master.

They would come gladly
As a beautiful pause
In their beautiful work—

Our caresses

Would be the joining limbs
of comrades creating beauty;
Our curving arms

Against the pillows

And each other

Would make designs

To rival autumn trees.

And as the leaves dropped
From our longing

And a short winter covered us
With gentle snow,

Slowly[...]passing winter

And after half—an—hour
Spring would come again.

At charming tasks

Outside the windows

Would wake and call us

Not to waste in an unconsciousn[...]ss

So great an art

That now its hurt had become a melody
And she was lost in wonder

And a strange delight

At the abundant charm of[...]

86

“Itit Not a Ghost Town ‘til the Laxt Dog Leaver”
77Je Gbo[...]e just west of the state capital in Helena. It is a
mountain village of fifty or so homes amidst the debris of a once—
thriving gold camp. In the late nineteent[...]e called ghost towns. Though it has been branded

a ghost town by the tourism industry, on the surface, Marysville
defies this classification. It is a living community whose residents
share a powerful connection to their place shaped by a long history
there and an intimate relationship w[...]ral
resources. Its residents resent being labeled a ghost town. As one
informant remarked, “It’s not a ghost town until the last dog
leaves.” And yet, I found Marysville to be a town alive with ghosts,
a community where the places and the people of the[...]Marysville
redefines the popular notion of what a ghost town is: it is a vital
community where the living coexist with the[...], it is obvious that
someone struck it rich here, a town emerged to service the miners
and then reced[...]imprint here and
evokes stories of what was once a thriving community, infatuated
with gold and the[...]h her husband’s
family in the 1950s, took me on a tour of the town. She pointed out
places t[...]

Sullivan had[...]rysville to live more than twenty
years ago after a long absence. He remembers what the place
looked[...]e was growing up there in the 1930s and 1940s.
“I used to sit on the rock piles over there by the c[...]they came in right underneath where
our home was. I watched the engines turn around down at the
turntable. At that time . . . every place you looked there was a house
in these hills, practically on top of each[...]thing left.”These missing landmarks are as much a part of
Marysville to Ruth and Earl as what remains there.

A knowledge of the invisible landscape is an indicator

of sense of place, that distinctive feeling for or attachment to a
place that evolves through intimate experience of[...]sults gradually and unconsciously
from inhabiting a landscape over time, becoming familiar with its
physical properties, accruing a history within its confines” (Ryden,
38). Sense of place also arises from a familiarity with the history
of a geographic area. It comes from an understanding of what
occurred there and an afiection for the people who came before. It
is this afiecfion that Ruth and Earl feel when they look[...]tainly been
aHected by it. It has created in them a need for stability, to be a part
of a continuum of history, and to carry on the legacy[...]the miners who preceded them there. Marysville is a community
that is literally surrounded by and holding fast to a past defined by

impermanence.

88

Most of the people I interviewed grew up in Marysville
in the decades[...]high
school to attend college, join the service, or earn a living and raise
a family, and they have returned in the last twenty[...]he
consequences of rootlessness? Do they long for a permanent place,
and if so, how is this longing expressed?” (Tuan, 158). In Marysville
it is expressed in a nostalgic attachment to a place and its history,
vocalized through stories[...]are both Marysville returnees. Earl explains: “I’ve been
all over the United States and other places andI never found any
place I’d rather settle than Marysville. . . . This is[...]ething
about the place, but if you lived here for a while it seems like you

always come back.”[...]vernacular expression, of the local lore that is a vehicle for
communicating the consciousness of a community or a culture.
In Marysville, personal and traditional[...]ants of
miners.

Kent Ryden calls folk narrative

a vital and powerful means by which knowledge
of th[...]ng in the invisible

landscape—is in large part a creation of folklore

and is[...]ven form,
perpetuated, and shared; the meaning of a place for
the people who live there is best captu[...]n, 4.5).

Stories of Marysville’s history paint a picture of a typical
gold—mining camp, one of the richest in the West. Everyone has
a tale about Irishman Tommy Cruse who first found gold here

in 1876. As a placer miner downstream on Silver Creek, Cruse
figured there had to be a “mot 1er lode” in the mountains upstream
that[...]w miners, Cruse persevered and

eventually became a multi—mi ionaire. Figures vary, but during[...]ks were extracted and pounded twenty—four hours a day in three
mills with 120 stamps. All this star[...]ey that was ever loaned to
Tommy Cruse was [from] a gal that lived there [Silver City], a
Mrs. Brown. And she said, ‘Tommy, this is the last of it. I’m not
loaning you no more money.’ And he took[...]ed he found this [the
Drumlummon vein] and became a multi—millionaire.”

The idea that anyone can[...]sts in Marysville. It was not

that long ago that a man like Tommy Cruse, who was flat broke

90

and considered crazy, could become a millionaire by digging a
hole in the ground. Miners were single—minded a[...]s in
their quest for gold. Ruth O’Connell tells a story of a miner who
tunneled underneath the town of Marysville in pursuit of a vein.
“Dan [Sullivan] ran a tunnel from their house and meandered
under the t[...]one week days, one week swing, etc. It was
always a puzzle to us as to what right he felt he had to mine this
way, but I guess no one ever questioned it.”

Despite thei[...]s childhood home.

According to Frank, the miners would tunnel “so far and
then they’d leave part of the lead. If they took the lead, the ground
would come down. So they’d leave that solid ground there and go
around it and just a keep a going. . . .There’s all kind of pillars left

w[...]om the abandoned mines. Says Earl: “We’ve got
a lot of active miners like us. We mine it every day we go out. We’re
stil looking for rocks. . . . I carry a pan and a miner’s pick. I’m
always looking. [Jim’s] always looking. And[...]dentity. Though most of them have
never worked in a mine, their identity is bound to history, to the
land, and to mining. Feeling connected to the history of a place
contributes to a strong sense of self in that place, says K[...]

yearn to return to an earlier time. Mining was a dangerous—
sometimes deadly—pursuit. There were few luxuries or modern
conveniences, and winters could be brutal,[...]” explains Earl. “Everybody was happy. We had a great
time. We made our own fun. It was good clean fun. I wish we could
have lived 100 years ago. I would have loved to have lived in those
early, early days. . . . Because that’s what I enjoy—doing what those
guys did without tools.[...]make it that way by going out looking
for bottles or gold. We’re trying to relive it.”

According to Yi—Fu Tuan, “whenever a person (young or
old) feels that the world is changing too rapidly[...]nearby ski hill will be purchased and

expanded—a psychic friend told Ruth O’Connell that Marysville
would be like Park City, Utah, one day.

Afraid[...]

Marysville’s mines and most of its building[...]impulse to search for gold.
These residents share a powerful connection to their place shaped
by pers[...]there.

When one considers the popular notion of a western ghost
town, Hollywood images prevail: an[...]nd well. It is their vision that
makes Marysville a ghost town, not the fact that it is included in
t[...]arl Fred,Jim Wilhoit, and Frank Warburton tell of a
gentleman who, in the I93os, built several miles of the Marysville
road with only a pick and a shovel. On one of their recent
prospecting trips[...]him, but he was sitting there
watching us.”

“I’m sure he was,” replied Earl.

Works Cited
Ry[...]e Landxtape. Iowa City: University of
Iowa Press, I993.
hoelken, Barre. “Folklore and Reality in th[...]eth. Lexington: The
University of Kentucky Press, I990. I4—27.

‘uan, Yi-Fu. Spare andPlare. Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota
Press, I977.

Walker, Giles. Geology andHiItory oftbe Mary[...]tana. Butte:

Montana Bureau ofMines and Geology, I992.

94

Sandra Alcaxxer: A n Appreciation
Melissa Kwasny

Sandra Alcosser, M[...]st Poet Laureate,
grew up thirty miles from where I did, in South Bend, Indiana. In
many ways, our li[...]stern farming/ industrial towns. Her father owned a body
shop, my parents and grandparents a Polish bar. We both loved and
feared our people a[...]aragus” and in books. Alcosser received her M.F.A.
in Poetry in 1982 from The University of Montana, where she studied
with Richard Hugo. I graduated from there in 1977. We were both
influenced by and, in a way adopted by Hugo, unlikely girl poets
from the[...]academy as poets in the schools and communities.

I met Sandra Alcosser in April 2000 when she came to
the Holter Museum of Art to read in a series Rick Newby and
I were curating. I wish I would have known her sooner. Hers is
a quicksilver intelligence, generous, wide—rangin[...]tor and her environmental
activism. Yet, it is as a poet that one gets to know her best. Her
voice is such an intimate, honest voice that it seems as if a sister
speaking in a dream language of memory and image—fields of
g[...]ities of place, whether it be Louisiana, Montana, or
the Midwest, or through her striking use of image, how, as Judith[...]e might be lost to us.” In this
essay, however, I would like to focus on Alcosser’s exploration of
the[...]culture, and, ultimately, as guiding force behind a form.

1%?

A [Jody growr from itx erotit entanglement and tben[...]st section of Alcosser’s book Extept by
Nature, a highly erotic, disruptive, even wanton collection[...]qualibrium, what another poet,
Anne Carson, calls a “reaching out from what is known and present
to[...]us.
Alcosser’s images are intensely sensual. “I have touched
everything,” she writes in a lovely poem about preparing herself
and her rooms for the return of a long—absent husband.The
sensuality is ho[...]

Man and nature. Mind and b[...]ender, race, religion, even species. “How
could I convey that curious and erotic moment when a body is
attracted to another body for nothing mor[...]Autumn Courtship of Surface—Feeding Ducks.”

A [Jody growr. It is entangled in other bodies, bod[...]gees and soap slivers.” In
these poems, eros is a presence and a power, inhabiting the space
between woman and man[...]n the poem “Thirst,” one feels the drought as a condition both of
the human body and that of the[...]est,
they flirt and roll their moist shoulders.

I remember when I had no lover,

how my every motion was thirst.
I curl beside my husband tonight under the motley s[...]with nature and our place
within it (“Sometimes I don’t know who I am— / my age, my sex,
my species— / only that I am an animal who will love / and die,”
Alcosser writes in the poem “By the Nape.”), seems crucial in a
time when warnings come from our wounded earth, w[...]e reunion 15 the recovery Of meaning. . . .

1%?

A [Jody growr from itx erotie entanglement and tben[...]e, though
eros is pleasant, it is also dangerous, a threat to what has been
established, a threat to peace. “It was for me, a very troubling place,”

Alcosser says of[...]

with Judith Moore. “I felt really uncomfortable, almost ashamed,
that I had that information, that I witnessed it.” In the section of
Louisiana poem[...]rational growth,” her friends
who “cultivated a madness of operatic proportion” threaten her
ph[...]is lured into
its otherness, its strangeness. “I want to be brave, to bathe / myself
in the humid[...]ation, the draw and drawing back from the
foreign or strange are intrinsic to the movement of eros.There is,
of course, real danger—“I have placed / a hand on blind branches,
/ felt it flame with fi[...]at they are drawn to each
other. “Tell me about a lover,” one says, “causing a lip of wine to
sing under her index finger.”Th[...]bject of many poems in this book.
In “Taboo,” a stranger enters a woman’s home to watch her and her
lover while they sleep, sweaty and exhausted “like a pair of white
summer shoes.”The potential danger is explicit: “I knew if I moved,

I would jeopardize my lover’s life, the strangers, mine[...]ence, breathing the same scent of spider lily. “I
can see you,” the woman whispers into the dark.

In “Maximum Security,” a woman hears on the radio news
of an escaped priso[...]r the deadly dangerous?” In “Wildcat Path,”
a woman who has barely escaped death by a cougar who followed
her home, tearing her nylon d[...]n
who worked in her father’s bodyshop, how they would “line the
shop sink, naked / to the waist, scou[...]ls refusing to be reasonable, refusing to be
safe or saved, risking all. A boy is caught on an ice floe and when
Search and[...]m he wants to be left alone.
An abandoned mallard would “rather freeze than take grain” from

the spe[...]ou never wanted
to drive top speed,

to slam into a tree or dive

from a ledge or catch fire

or slit your wrists

ourselves.

1%?

A [Jody growr from itx erotie entanglement and tben[...]ot
be said, too, ofa poem? What form, then, might a poem take that
grows from its entanglements, that acts (enacts) a reconciliation of
nature and culture?

In the aforementioned essay, Alcosser relates a discussion
with poet Pattiann Rogers wherein they[...]ed as either traditional (with rules of
meter and/or rhyme imposed by culture) or variously as open,
free, organic, meaning a form that grows out of the poems own
necessities. Is it, I wonder, possible to speak of erotic form? And
if[...]sciousness.”

In many of Alcosser’s poems#and I would like to look
particularly at “Skiing in Moonlig[...]lines and
images are themselves erotic, by which I mean ungoverned by
logical expectations. One might call this kind of writing free
association, but that would limit the knowledge gained to the
mind’s. One m[...]e poem begins with an image of the fading day and a
moon occluded by clouds “like a sweater pulled over the heart of
the moon.” Rig[...]re humanized and,
if one considers that one pulls a sweater over one’s breast rather
than heart, er[...]dislocated: “Why are so many friends / Leaving or getting left
behind?” What precipitated this turn? Is the line the sounding of
a thought generated by seeing the light withheld? Is it a comment
on the moon leaving, the clouds being left behind and thus a kind
of metaphor of perpetual arrival and departure? In the next stanza
there is a statement: “Mao’s anti—sparrow campa[...]

“The word land[...]ction of essays
on landscape, gender, and art. “A landscape is scenery, scenery is
stage decoration, and stage decorations are static backdrops for a
human drama.” In “Skiing in Moonlight,” the[...]s landscape, and thus, the landscape of the poem? A fox “walks
over hoarfrost not breaking / morning’s delicate lace.” Is this a
metaphor for the woman skiing or a fox that exists in its own right,
who happens to[...]an ice crystal?” Is she speaking of the fox now
or herself or the moonlight shed on the snow?

In this poem, everything is drifting away. The words “leaves
or leaving” occur three times in the first three[...]ides, it will not be
governed by traditional form or linear patterns of thought. It
makes its own patt[...],” the poet answers to the question “Why
will a person freezing to death / Inch into the false wa[...]er starving?
Starving for what? Is eros the wound or the salving of the wound?
Is eros the symptom of our disconnection from the body’s
experience or the cure for it? In many of Alcosser’s poems, t[...]Nothing is pinned
down: “Except by nature—as a woman, I will be ungovernable.”
The poem ends with this remarkable syntactical inversion, a line
that enacts reconciliation. Here, there is n[...]nature and the earth’s, and the possibility of a government

we might place our trust in.

Works C[...]Sandra. Exeept [73/ Nature. Saint Paul: Graywolf, I998.
Carson, Anne. Era; tbe B itterI-weet. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, I998.
Griflfin, Susan. He Era; afE‘verJ/day Lif[...]Biology, Gender and
Sotiety. New York: Doubleday, I995.
Solnit, Rebeccaflr E‘ve Saidta tbe[...]

Four poets, Ed Lahey, Vic Charl[...]Thomas, all have been here for three generations or more (a
thousand generations, at least, in Charlo’s cas[...]These
are not people who came to Montana to teach or to study writing
or to write or have a Montana “experience.” One can imagine a
poet like Dave Thomas somewhere else, say, in North Beach, but
he would always be a Montana poet there. There are many other
strong M[...]tion as, say, that erudite barbarian, Rick
Newby, or the late Blackfeet, Gros Ventre poet James Welch, who
went on to write a handful of highly acclaimed novels, or that
environmental-cowboy—clown—curmudgeon, Wally McRae, or
Sandra Alcosser, that widely regarded poet of man[...]tate as outsiders and embraced it rapidly at
such a deep level as to become adopted in a decade or two. Paul
Zarzyski is a prime example. So is Melissa Kwasny with her primal
“entwinements” to native plants and Native people.I have left out
that Emperor of“Goofy Gas,” Greg Keeler who, ofcourse, is in a
league all by himself, and no doubt others who de[...]ive here,
economically as well as emotionally. It would be, however, a
mistake to consider them to be merely regi[...]

I have quoted Albert White Hat, Sr., on reclaiming[...]d Lahey

On more than one occasion, and in print, I have called Ed
Lahey the Defacto Poet Laureate of Montana, the place, not the
state, apparently offending a gabble of other writers here. Even
Richard Hugo’s poetry, as fine as that can be, sometimes has aA main
reason Ed’s grandfather was hired by the r[...]continues that gift. There is
the story of him as a young man attending a powwow near Deer
Lodge. The Indians complained ab[...]he butcher shop and shamed the man by calling him
a disgrace to his own kind and demanding the return[...]r Lahey is the hands—down best
reader of poetry I have ever heard, his rich Irish voice resonant an[...]ds made more real in the grip of his
sweaty face. I think of him as the Jack Dempsey of Montana poet[...]

association with one of the last of a handful of Chinese herbal
doctors who served the[...]ana,
as was necessary during Prohibition when she would air—drop
all the ingredients for the family moonshine operations into
the ravines outside Butte or Helena, with little chance of being
discovered. E[...]he poem “Icarus Plans to Land Tonight”.

What I will do for the sake of fashion
is simply set fi[...]and carefully brush the ashes
from my legs which I keep for walking
on such occasions.
(Birdr ofa Featber, 34.)

As a result of the family history of mining, his own y[...]of us might struggle with. He makes explicit that a poem
he wrote to honor his miner father is also a poet’s statement about

the difficulties and v[...]p O’Leary’s Iron Works
(for Big Ed)

You hear a lot of lies about O’Leary
but he could seal a crack in steel
no matter what the size.

His arc welder would strike
white fire and a bead

of blue—black rod would slide
along between cherry streaks,
and acrid smoke would curl away
to leave clean married steel,

not too frail, or buttered up

but straight and strong,

hard as mi[...]e you might say,

“don’t use that example

as a metaphor for poetry.
Welding is a matter of utility.”
And you’d be right. Still,

I remember the look on his face
when he’d[...]

and the piece of steel—

a struggle of molecules and will.

Often others would say to him,

“Damn good job,” or some such thing.

If it was, he’d grin, and look again,
as if he thought the natural light
would show a flaw, or bridge
that didn’t fuse—convinced, I guess,
that in his struggle with the steel
he cou[...]uld
conceal the wound
beneath the arc of his art.
I liked him for that.

(full poem, Birdr, 32—33)[...]lf in order to maintain the illusion of
wholeness or competence, knowing that men’s lives depended o[...]acceptance of the limits of his craft,
make this a powerful and necessary poem on the craft of poetr[...]poetry contained in it never violates,

abandons, or sacrifices the sheer reality of O’Leary. Seein[...]into the book,

that O’Leary is dead, buried in a cave—in in the Minnie Jane:

We will uncover th[...]. Come on. Let’s dig up O’Leary.

(Birds 35)

I would also call readers’ attention especially to “T[...]fine examples of Lahey’s mining poems (Birdr, I,
19—20, 4.6).

Lahey has suffered from an increasingly intense case of the
shakes since he was a young man. They became so extreme that he
could not hold his hands still enough to write, to hold a pen or use
a typewriter. At readings he would joke about his shaking hands
as butterflies that some day would simply flutter off away from
him. After months o[...]thing that mattered
most, writing, he sought out a new neurologist. The good doctor
asked if he had ever worked around manganese.Yes, as a teenager
he had been paid ten dollars a day for several months to crawl up

into “empty” manganese gondola cars with a five—pound sledge and

But it has been a mistake to see Lahey’s work primarily in
terms[...]tional capacity in poems
about his grandchildren, a meeting with his ex—wife, his dying
mother, a cold pony in a field outside his apartment, a torn orange
in the street, the chewing power of b[...]balances the tough
reality of the mining poems.

A Blue Saucer

It has been cold, and I
have been ill,

forced at the same time

to pull my own tooth.

I had the urge

while out walking

to rescue a torn orange
open to the sun

lying in the snow,

to take it in

wash it in cool water

keep it on a blue saucer.

I know the sad side ofthe street
to look for the va[...]of the colors, orange on blue, the cool warmth of a tenor
sax, the bite of true winter accepted, brou[...]f his mining poems. They come
from such things as a decades—long study of Buddhism, and four
tours[...]ring of the poet. And yet
poetry and madness have a long and distinguished career together.
One think[...]ed for insanity in eighteenth—century

England, or of Ezra Pound and Theodore Roethke in the last

century, to name just a few. If poetry is a form of madness, what does

I have always considered poetry a form of sanity, perhaps
the only form of it I am comfortable with. How can it be both a
form of madness and a form of sanity? Its sanity is the sanity one
can craft or discover out of the chaos of a life, something to cling
to, something that one is lucky enough to find to do in this life,
something with a reality beyond dollar—power. If one does not
be[...]ng besides drugs, alcohol, sex,Jesus, patriotism, or workism
to hang onto. All poets are not madmen (or madwomen) and all
madmen are not poets, but the c[...]ecause they have
to, because they cannot help it. I want to honor rather than hide
Lahey’s struggle[...]s come to be called “mental illness,”
because I believe it informs the sensitivity, the risk, the[...]earning his poetry, part of the price of
creating a poetry that is as real Montana as the mines, the magpies,
or the Salish. And it is part of our sanity, like Bl[...]t in his essay “The Higher Sentimentality”:

[I]t seems clear that in it [One Flew Over [be
Cukoo[...]and Then—the West of Madness. . . .
It is only a step from thinking of the West as
madness to rega[...]as the Indian, no matter how
subdued, penned off, or costumed for the tourist
trade, survives. . . . If a myth of America is to exist
in the future, it is[...]deepest hearts, to conduct with the mad just
such a dialogue as their predecessors learned long

ago[...]boriginal dwellers in
the Western Wilderness.” (A New Fiedler Reader,

254—56)

Although I would dispute Fiedler’s claim that our
“predecessor[...]ness,” some of Lahey’s

poetry can be seen as a beginning of such a dialogue with madness

that Fiedler calls for.

105

Birds of a Feather

(for Marylor)

A woman I love, my ex—wife
with our infant granddaughter[...]new Safeway

where we were shopping.
“There‘s a sparrow flying overhead,”

she said, when she saw me.
We both looked upwards.
I wanted so badly

to tell her something

she could cherish, so she
would know

that I love her, like her even,
more than I hate her, but all
I could think of was a bird

II came back from my first teaching stint in China, in
July 1991, Ed was up in the mental ward on Three North. I visited
him often, feeling desperate too, having nearly died of pneumonia
in a Chinese hospital and falling in love with a Chinese woman
whom I had to leave behind and who was much too young fo[...]released
and was living downtown on Pine Street. I was worried. I did not
think he was ready to leave the hospital, did not know how he
would manage with himself. But he surprised me. He immediately
began revising a novel he’d been working on for a few years, about
a group of people at war with the mining company setting up a
bootlegging operation during Prohibition. During the next year
or so I witnessed the strongest act of self—healing through the
creative process I ever expect to see. Ed literally brought himself[...]gh the work of finishing that novel. Just now as I write
this piece, this novel, 7773 7771'}: Air Gang, has found a publisher
in Russell Chatham of Clark City Press. Clark City also has
published a “dignified, well thought out,” hardbo[...]

106

Victor A. Charla

When Buffalo Tiger, Tribal Council Chairman of the
Miccosukee Indians of Florida, told a US. Senate subcommittee
on the education of India[...]realize you are Indians,
nothing else but Indians.Think like Indians, be like
Indians, but learn English,[...]both. You can

have three languages, if you want, or two. . . .
(Ivae Spoken, 156)

Vic Charlo’s poe[...]1, “ . . . even though the Bitterroot is
really a part of us, a lot of us never grew up there.” He also spoke[...]Cbetlel; Skyeeme, that means Three
Eagles. . . . I hope. After all these Salish speakers.

. . . I’m not a Salish speaker. My folks, when they
grew up, they experienced a lot of problems going
to school, just knowing the[...]ut those place names, it makes me
really sad that Ia rhythm that is different, odd
even, that does not lay on the ear the way most of the poetry I read
does.I have to reach further than I normally would in order to hear
it for and as itrelf. There is s[...]actured in these rhythms,
something that inhabits a space in between the unrealized memory
of[...]

A poem from his early experience of the white world and
how every gain in it entailed a loss of something else, something
from the world[...]last leaves and twenty years this need to write.

I was afraid to write, to fall, to face
the fact th[...]t my song doesn’t sing. This school strange
and I need friends and places that have heart.

I’m caught by priest and parent who want me here.

I want to quit this football, this lie,

and lonely[...]of facing the lie of, what
is it? His identity as a white person? The lie that nothing will be at
stake or lost in taking up with white culture?

I realize now if you
sing Gregorian chant,

you for[...]udents that Charlo is able to discover and foster a
continuity between past and future that allows hi[...]tures. That
recovery probably never will be total or complete in a person of
his honesty and courage, but more and more the poems express
an acceptance and an understanding, a net gain in the ability to
live with the trickine[...]me grace.

Moving In

(fast wind)
Three times now I have read white stories
where folks take old houses or towns in disrepair
and build them back to what th[...]el whole.

The first time in fourth grade reader a family

going the way they want them. I

remember in awe when the young boy

gets the dyn[...]hey have electricity We had kerosene lamps then.

I have new house that is half—assed put together,
half—assed moved into and half—assed lived in.
I’m trying to get my second wind after eleven
yea[...]winter wind.

Children, goats, pony, winter wood, coyote song
and trail of grizzly at our front door are
r[...]ll need since we touch ancestors living here

and I must live perfect fantasy and find fast wind.
(f[...]know in old
Salish tongue. Word for scraper that I

remember now. So hard. So to the point.

Why did I learn how to write? Why did I want to?
Is it worth the loss of your world going[...]ers live now too. (Once,
after both of us had had a couple of drinks, I remember Vic saying
to me, “You’re all just a bunch of damned carpetbaggers anyway.”)

Part o[...]n, the Great—great
Grandson, ofchiefs. Being in a position ofleadership during a time
of rapid, confusing, forced change has to be radically unsettling.
What does it mean to be a leader of the Bitterroot Salish people
in western[...]his father in poems that

honor his capacities as a gambler and that suggest the gambling

skill itself as a metaphor for the luck, risk-taking, and ability t[...]d, and
without becoming lost that he embodied, as a form of leadership. the struggle not to be swallowed up by them, a certain “hard core”

of survival that contain[...]of self—pity:

The Chief
The Chief, my dad, was a gambler at nine.
He was the “Montana Kid” in Arlee rodeo.

With a nickel or dime he would win a fortune,
then travel in style to Missoula by free[...]ill they were broke.
They were rich.

Once he won a pool hall gambling with a dime,

then drank his hard pool hall cider with f[...]zzly sleeps with snow
and we are bound for Canada or Mexico depending
on where little blue might go. I think of you

asleep and keep fire to warm tribal stories.

The night is cold and I should hibernate soon

yet I hear Great Northern pull, a short whistle

and I have a need that listens for no one.

Again, I feel great plain call yet I’m not there

to ride to buffalo yet who will br[...]fied for tourists.
Let them eat four lanes while I carry bittersweet lodge
pole or swallow the loss. This could be a love

poem ifI could only forget the loss. We are safe

yet could I invite you to tipi without that need

to know if cowboy rides the range at the Dew

Drop Inn? Listen, I am the hard core who will leave
you laughing at the door. We need a guide

to follow the middle fork or ask salmon to run

or let fear carry us to that place we need

p[...]

110

I’ll roam the great plain looking for enemy sky.
(full poem, unpublished manuscript)

There is a different feel to this poem; it is less accessibl[...]es they have sustained. How dark ix dark? Dark
as a blizzard is white? The depth of desperation in th[...]faces of all the old chiefs in him. He
says about a poem written from this experience,“ . . . when he was
small I used to look at him. And those days I used to think about
the old folks, my grandparents. And all those old people, and used
to wonder what it would have been like if they journaled. . . . And
so I wrote this poem. . . . And I dedicate it to my son, ‘for Martin
Antoine Victor Paul Charlo. . . .’What I did, what I realized is I
named my son after all the chiefs, all my grandparents. And I call it

‘Generations of Need)”:

Generations[...]we are. He is the little chief without saying.

I read worry of Moiese who states that we
have too much schooling, and now we think
more than we should. He says the people
used to send a young boy to the top of Red

Mountain for the good of all of our people
and we were well. I follow DeSmet’s dream
as I try to freeze a focus on unfamiliar

feelings except that we do b[...]s to keep coming back to
them in the children, to recognize and honor the gift of that stream
of old/ new lif[...]bear expert, Dr. Charles “Chuck”
Jonkel, was a turning point for him. His poems take on a new

confidence and expansiveness. He ask[...]

identification with the imp[...]e? That he can smell

food for twenty miles? That a town is built on ancient

rendezvous ground that was his so long that genes

are imprinted with a map where every stone is turned?
That he can be t[...]the hunt?

Is this justice? You can’t help but think of all native
people in the same fix. You hear odd story about
a three, four time, many time loser bear who would

stretch his neck and close his eyes waiting for[...]ift Current Time, 10—11)

That last question is a dead giveaway, for Charlo himself
is the incorrig[...]of old gambling songs that allow them to win
with a dime, to lose big, and not to get lost. Being incorrigible, in
fact, is a survival necessity, just watch out for the bear t[...]ome in under the radar.

True memory is more than a remembering of something
past. True memory is the[...]curs most clearly in Charlo’s
work when, during a reading and before the “Walking Bear Song”
po[...]as coming from him. It
fills the auditorium with a sound as old as Red Mountain. Vic’s
face, too,[...]pours from him, changes to look like
the face on a Mayan stone carving. Listening, we know we have
w[...]ogic
memory.

In two short poems Charlo expresses a sureness about
continuance and direction a[...]

Victor A. Charlo is our holdout poet, holding out for
impr[...]another aspect of Victor’s writing.
Trie/exier a! Dirty Corner and Moon Over Minion Dam,
the firs[...]Agzigian,
premiered at the Met, in Spokane, 1996. A second group
of four short plays, Biflerrooi, Berkeley, Be/fmi, Benz, also
co—authored by them, form a dramatic unit called “The
Beta Cycle,”[...]

Mark Gibbons’ people came into Montana nearly a century
ago with other Irish, Slavic, and Finlander immigrants in search of

“a fair living.”They found a vestige of it in industrial labor, on the

railro[...]t in the history of this country. His
grandfather woulda
month after that disaster, and six weeks before t[...]e was dragged through the streets
of Butte behind a car, bludgeoned, and hung by his heels from a
wooden trestle on August 17. But it took Delia tw[...]to Dillon, where
they lived in the Cabbage Patch, a section of log cabin shacks that
housed a few black families, the Chinese, and shanty Irish[...]his bones, kept digging for silver and gold like a “flicking
badger.” Ironically, he ended up di[...]llon too. Mark’s father found work in Alberton, a job with the
railroad, where he traveled the sect[...]small, the distances far, the
family didn’t own a car until the 19505, and Mark’s mother took
the train into Missoula once a month to shop. Relationships were
close in the small towns, even if you didn’t like each other. There
was a sense of interdependence. The land and weather demanded it,
the population spread sparsely over a rugged, northern landscape.
And there was a savvy sense of self—deprecation, the glu[...]

114

Spoiled Rotten

I was a rich kid in Alberton, pampered inside

an old two[...]non balls.

We gorged ourselves daily like Romans or kings

eating filthy—rich feasts, everything i[...]wine, felt our way up the
dizzy stairs.

Through a door left ajar, fully framed in a mirror, we saw
nipples

round as our mouths—sec[...]od like Huck

Finn,

our hero back then. We, too, would have settled for a raft
and Jim,

but we damn sure didn’t want to run away. Those days are
still

a toy chest so filled—that the lid can never be[...]t, were worthy of
poetry. That awareness alone is a major source of the power of
Hugo’s legacy here, and Gibbons is a direct descendant of that
legacy. One aspect of G[...]one
who can express it other than through alcohol or violence. In an
interview with James Jay at the back of his latest book, Connemara

Moons/bins, he tells a revealing story about that anger:

. . . my wife worked with a baker, a German baker

who survived the Holocaust.[...]

115

at Safeway, and he was just a fuckin’ workaholic.
He and his wife had survive[...]which was mass produced shit bread.

This guy was a baker! He did pumpernickels and
shit everyday. We[...]ecause he was
laid off and he couldn’t work. So I wrote this poem
that was indicting American Industrial Fucking
Whole System. I was just so flicking angry.

(Connemara Moonrbine, 132)

For years Gibbons has worked as a mover, moving other
people’s furniture. In this poem for a hammered—out old moving
van we get his whole kn[...]r affection:

Mayflower

The loading address was a cul—de—sac
along the seventh fairway.

I parked her, my Mayflower forty—five
foot drop[...]livered
wood—plank walkboard hangs on,
provides a bridge to her open doors,

begs oversized Baldwin uprights

and one—piece slate pool tables.

They’re a rehab pair. Started over

the road together in sixty—four,

they’ll hold or go down together.

This bed—bugger van’s no b[...]off—balance.

Her jagged breathing shudders

to a coughing fit, chokes off,

then wheezes air. Ope[...]om frost boil miles,

salted streets. It’s only a matter of time.

This old girl’s deliver[...]

116

never rat—holed a dime on maintenance

to restore her failing health. Each trip, a gentle
pulling in, followed by the letting go.

S[...]om easing too—many awkward, all—there

hide—a—beds up narrow nightmare stairways.

Next time[...]n with this old van which has
seen the worst that a life of hauling furniture can bring, and will

go[...]ed here,
into affectionate sadness, but also into a respect, celebrating the
endurance of the “old[...]the lives worthy of poetry: uncorrupted by

power or money.”)

Weeds

That was no bum sleeping on your lawn,
bottle tucked under his arm.

Didn’t you recognize his Red Ball tennis shoes,
remember the fish sto[...]s hands, the toothless smile, that time
he danced a jig at Chadwick & Boyd’s Tavern
clowning for rowdy plaid—clad loggers?

A gandy dancer turned choke setter,

he became a Zen cat skinner

before he retired to booze,

had a home but never claimed it,

one of those t[...]

shook so bad he had to drink beer through a straw.

You thought he’d been dead for years

l[...]Springs,
all lost in the flood of sixty—four

or the interstate highway construction.
Don’t be a[...]nd drunk. We are all

sleepers whether we like it ora cross

burn Hell—fire on the Catholic church s[...]e.

You know this sleeper could be Nine Mile Bill
or Freddie Lavois. Still, you must wake him
before s[...]t—black in the bottom
of his eyes, and slip him a five

dollar bill before he goes. You know

this[...]ffection and loyalty in these poems is as deep as a well,
and as reassuring. It is in the blood. The[...]h the fibers of the brain, body, and bowels like a steady

mountain breeze.

In the Blood
1.[...]

mountains put a spell on me?

All I know I don’t understand:

the cottonwood grove on the Nine Mile ox bow;

a coyote pausing at the edge of the road

& smiling before[...]Somehow this ground inhabits me.

For no reason,I refuse to leave

like the Ponderosa snapped off a[...]wind, no storm can drive me away

from this place I call my journey.

My grandfather crossed an ocean,

a continent to settle this land

of rattlesnakes, s[...]d it have been the blackness

of moonless nights, a reflection of their immigrant souls?

For some time I have told myself

I am comfortable with these mysteries:

the lion on[...]tering the alley.
All my stories are here. Why do I think

if I left, I would leave them behind,

as if I could lose dirt & memory like luggage.

When I’m alone I hear voices whisper.

I’m afraid of losing my grip.
II.

Right now I float the Clark Fork,

climb Plateau in my mind,[...]at leads me up Gobbler’s Knob
&back to the pact I made with the deer:
my hands covered with his blood, slippery
& hot, I worked the knife inside his chest,
cut free the entrails and claimed his bones.
Before I was through his agate—black eye
faded milky gray—blue. I cannot

shake it, my pledge to a dead deer,

like my dad’s ashes I poured into this ground.

I need this story to haunt my dreams,
to explain in words what I can’t—

my attachments to dirt & blood & ghos[...]ewy on the rocky hillside; wood
smoke hovering in a stand of lodgepole pine;

cold creek water[...]

Have I become the blood of the deer?

Tied to a rhythm I cannot name?

Stay, stay the course, the buck whi[...], 4.2)

This poem, more than any other, serves as a credo for what I
want to say with this whole piece: that in these four poets there is
a fusion of identity, poetry, and place that few poets achieve. “All I
know I don’t understand: . . . Somehow this ground inhabits me./
For no reason,I refuse to leave/ like the Ponderosa snapped off a[...]wind, no storm can drive me away/ from this place
I call myjourney./ . . . When I’m alone I hear voices whisper./ I’m
afraid of losing my grip.” When Gibbons say[...]on

works directly with his experience to lend it a transcendence of the
ordinary and real world. But a transcendence that carries within
it every bit of[...]that the mutual ties
of affection he carries are a communal thing. Beyond families,
communities, and[...]behind the life ofworking and drinking, becoming
a high school English teacher for nine years, havin[...]the late Bos—early gos changed Gibbons, brought a
maturity to his work, gave him perspective on his[...]rants and
growing up along the tracks, working as aA Letter To My First Born Son,” among
others. The[...]r and love of “Pissed At Potter’s Funeral,”
or the love/hate relationship to a brother expressed through
the death of their dog in “Still Waters, ” all poems I regret not
having the space to present in[...]

place is e[...]in his “forward” to Dave’s book, Burk? Last I/Vretk, to call him:

the national treasure of our small, but extended
nation, a nation founded on those sixties ideals

of a love of language, a respect for hard work,
friendships closer than blood, and a refusal to live
by the bankrupt middle—class ec[...]Dave Thomas has been our saint. . . . has created a
body of poetry that marks him as the last and bes[...]ed prose piece from 1987, “The
Walker,” gives a retrospective account of the events in Seattle le[...]lic movement on the streets of San Francisco.

In a shabby studio below the Pike Street
Market he saw[...]behind the eye and in front of
it. His dreams had a different flavor now. Jack
Kerouac made more sen[...]James Earl Ray shot
Martin Luther King. There was a spontaneous
demonstration in which he figured pr[...], who informed him to either
get with the program or get out. He got out. . . .

. . . and reme[...]

“I remember that moment up there when
a clump of cumulus in the northeast formed itself
into three crosses then quickly became cloud again.
No, I’ve never been to war but I’ve been some

other places.”

Hard work has been one of those “other places,” work on
railroad gangs or big construction projects like Libby Dam, but als[...]tional Public Radio show, 7773
Writer’rAlmanm), a poem which purports to be a list of all the things
a common laborer on the Libby Dam must move amongst[...]de is fundamentally Taoist.

There’s times when I wander
about picking up
and sorting bolts

there’s times when a chance glance

at a star
trying to outshine
the lamps

is all the rest I get. . . .

Oh damn! I forgot nails! 16 common
16 duplex 8’s th[...]

A gandy dancer poem from eighteen years later celeb[...]heavy work going on into middle age, no white— I recall my first
collar position for this poet, a[...]ies
to flatbed truck

we’ve
loaded fifty when
a Rail Link foreman

tells us
—wrong ones these[...]pull
beneath the rail

now the weight

no longer a surprise

middle aged

muscles and joints
creak[...]14.0)

All of Dave’s work wasn’t in Missoula or on the railroad or
some big construction job.There are a number of poems from his
work up in Glacier National Park, digging holes for outhouses or
working for the carpenters at McDonald Lake Lodge[...]let. The mountain sense in them is strong as only a person of

“prairie blood” can muster.[...]

123

Face To Face 0n Apgar
a nameless
terror grabs
me as I stand
with more
before my eyes
than I can
stand to see

a closeness
that threatens
my civilized
mind so use[...]ls
now this huge
circle

beyond my possible
self

a sky so blue
my name

is lost

peaks so jagged
I have no mind
I want

to escape

this voidness
the beauty

it hol[...]rel Buddha
of this place
keeps an eye

on us all

I am nervous
from last night’s
beer breakfast
cof[...]this wind

this wind!

keeps us

all alive

like a broken
down medicine
man I can hardly
stand

I must bow

to the Four Directions
and love[...]

like chlorophyll
coursing leafy veins
in a huckleberry
patch grizzly shit
on the switchback[...]nd power and immensity squeezes the
language into a tight wall of terror, thought, and devotion, dens[...]eyond his own name, mind, beyond language itself, a
ground squirrel brings him back, hardly able to s[...]simple ritual of honoring the Four Directions in a bow.

The key word in this last section is, stran[...]e the food that makes the
shit of the Great Bear, or the Ground Squirrel Buddha, or the poet.
There is an intensity of engagement wit[...]re: this
wind/ this windI/ keeps us/al_l alive/er a broken/ down medicine/
man I can hardly/ stand/ I must bow/ to the Four Directions/ and
love/ the wind(.) This wind keeps us all alive. Like a broken

down medicine. Man, I can hardly stand. I must bow to the Four
Directions and love.

An asp[...]ons of home back up in
Montana working on the dam or hearing the Bitterroot Mountains
singing “a fire of rocks . . . grandmother of sweat[...]

a rattling of small coins starts a riot
of hungry eyes

insulation of money belts

s[...]good leather

on sad pavements made dangerous
by a barricade of eyes

inarticulate termites gnaw

hu[...]e famished are built
from discarded corn flakes

a fierce telepathy of howling drums

paints a slogan on starving walls

everyone hears it pulls
in their heart a beat of pure space avenging
delusions of skyscrapers

and freeways
there is a fast council of beggars and buses
to decide a treaty

with the wind
dark clouds move to adjourn

but no vote is taken
there is a damp hand on my sleeve

and a wide—eyed kid

wants to see a movie
(full poem, Fom‘l Fuel, 27—28)[...]

the dull roar

of traffic around
town

a hint of sun

atop Lolo Peak

stark as the bare

r[...]this graveyard

of machinery

fresh tire tracks
a prowl car

mayb e

a compacter slammed it against a ditch wall when they were too
rushed on a job with a green crew) if you are to experience the best
of[...]here.The innocence of the notion that we should

or can separate the best from the worst is disastrou[...]ly and fierce way out beyond the myth of the old or
new West or the last best anytbing—this is the bloodline th[...]low.

Works Cited
Armstrong, Virginia Irving, ed. I Have Spokenufmeritan Hixtory Hrougb
tbe Voiter oftbe Indianr. Chicago: Swallow Press, I97I.
Charlo, Victor A. S-wi t Current Time. Dixon, MT: Privately printe[...]ntana/Wilderness Institute, 2ooI.
Fiedler, Leslie.A Ne-w F iedler Reader Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books,
I999-
Gibbons, Mark. Sometbing I nride U5. Pablo, MT: Privately printed, I995.
77- CirtlingHome. Flagstaff, AZ: Scattered Ca[...]n: Sun
Tracks and the University ofArizona Press, I990.
Thomas, David A. Forril Fuel Missoula, MT: Montana Writer's
Cooperative, I977.
77- Book; Lart Wretk Missoula, MT: Wild Variety Books, I996.
77- Hellgate Wind. Seattle, WA: Camphorweed P[...]ul Zarzyrki. West
Sacramento, CA: Red Wing Press, I998.

As shepherds blow;

But now and then
A Lion Word
Roars and snaps

And will be heard;

(1[...]ted this relocation and called
Glendive “hardly a poetic background.” In his review of the book,[...]ng is

sometimes evident:

The prairie, yellow as a meadow—lark,

Sings no more the shimmer of wild[...]rural Montana against this author’s desire for a different

kind of life:

I’d like to sit all day beneath a tree,
Like Buddha, hunting in alert repose,
Thoug[...]nly

For not remaining home to mend my hose.

(“I’d Like to Sit All Day,” 1—4.)

first child, Marjorie died a slow and painful death of childbed fever.

Two years later, her parents published her poetry in a slim volume
entitled Frnneonio, named after the F[...]t praised Marjorie’s work and intended to write a preface for
the book. He said her “poems are good enough for publication
regularly [that is, not only in a memorial volume], though I doubt
if we would have the heart to submit them to public criticism[...]ems, like this one,
seem childlike.

Coming Away

I meant to walk once more
On my old, old lawn,

But it began to pour,

And I had no rubbers on.

I meant to look once more
At my old, old place,

But the taxi window wore

A veil of liquid lace.

The sound of regret emanates from these three—beat lines
and rhymed quatrains. “If I Should Live to Be a Doll” opens the
volume, and Frost originally pl[...]reminiscent of her first teacher’s
poetry; “A Road Not Taken,” for all its simplicity,[...]

132

to translate or to approximate the originals. Among these writers[...]Hunter Austin, and Lew Sarett,
who also served as a contributing editor to 7773 Frontier. Their
appro[...]e poetry—
were interesting attempts to preserve a poetry they felt was
vanishing.

More than forty[...]n untitled series of eight poems:

Whatever place
I come on trouble

my death will not be there
I shall pass through

though there may be many arrows

I shall reach

where I am going

as the heart ofa man should be

mine is[...]try and prayers. In 1930, H. G. Merriam published a book

entitled Titeminitum: Snake River People. T[...]on
of the Snake and Clearwater Rivers” (Burnie, I). In this setting,
Burnie gives voice to historic[...]oll, who may be composites
of historical figures or entirely fictional.

Wild Moll

Stabbed to my molten heart

With the long, keen dagger of life,

I danced in the lean, blue flames

Of the passiona[...]rriam and Coleman. Who was Donald Burnie? So far, I
don’t know. Merriam published the book,[...]

autobiography” (Cunningham, 14.0).

Montana Pastoral
I am no shepherd of a child’s surmises.

I have seen fear where the coiled serpent rises,

T[...]nd the wild oat stay.

There is dust in this air. I saw in the heat

Grasshoppers busy in the threshi[...]logies.

What We Can Learn From the Past

What is a Montana poet? What is Montana poetry? Are
these c[...]le who passed
through? People who lived here only a short while? Where should
lines be drawn?

When I started this research project a little over a year
ago, it felt as if there were pieces scatter[...]ing. In reading
through volumes of 777e Frontier, I am struck by the activity within
the literary com[...]oleman, and their
peers were attempting to create a canon of Northwest literature,

an engagem[...]

I34

and establishing camaraderie among the writ[...]wrote the “Literary News”
for 77713 Frontier, a column that contained news of publications, such[...]nd reflect. Beyond connecting,
however, it seems a healthy response to discuss questions that
concer[...]Prore and Poetry. New York: The John Day Company, I946.

Bendon, Dorothe. Mirror Imagex. Rahway, NJ: Horace Liveright, I93I.

Burnie, Donald. Titeminitum: Snake River People. Missoula, MT: Harold
G. Merriam, I930.

Carruth, Hayden. “A Location of J V. Cunningam.”Mi[bigan Quarterly
Review II (I972): 75—83.

Coleman, Rufus A. Wertern Prore and Poetry. New York: Harper and
Brothers Publishers, I932.

Cunningham,J. V. Poem; of] V Cunningbam. Ed.Timothy Steele.
Athens, OH: Swallow Press, I997.

DiPiero, VV. S. “Four Notions.” In Speci[...]ribute to J. V.
Cunningham. Cbitago Re‘vie-w 35.I (I985): I5—2o.

Fraser, Marjorie Frost. Frantonia. New York: The Spiral Press, I936.

Frost, Robert. “To Lesley Frost Francis.”8 October I935. Family Letter; of
Robert and ElinorFrort. Ed. Arnold Grade. Albany: State University

of New York Press, I972.

Howard, Helen Addison.Ameri[an Indian Poetry. Boston: Twayne
Publishers, I979.

Howard, Joseph Kinsey. Montana Marginr. New Haven: Yale University
Press, I946.

Kittredge, William, and Annick Smith. He Lax[...]gy. Helena, MT: Montana Historical Society Press, I989.

Leeper, Marion Lemoyne. Onte M wit War Hea‘ven. Philadelphia:

Dorrance and Company, I939.

Merriam, H. G. Nortb-wert Verre. Caldwell, I[...]td.,
1931.

——. “Book Shelf.” He Frontier I2.I (I93I): 87.

Merwin, W. S. Seletted Tranrlationr 196871978. New York: Atheneum,
I979-

Micken, Ralph. “On the Two Medicine.” He Frontier I7.4 (summer I937):
270.

Pinsky, Robert. “The Poetry of]. V. Cunningham.” In Special Section: A
Tribute to J. V. Cunningham. Cbitago Re‘vie-w 35.I (I985): 4—I4.

Rostad, Lee. Grate Stone Coater: Her Life in L[...]y Wine and Hunger Root. Helena, MT: Falcon Press, I985.

Rothenberg,Jerome, ed. Sbaking tbe Pumpkin:[...]of tbe
Indian NortbAmeritaL New York: Doubleday, I972.

Runciman, Lex and Rick Robbins. Wbere WeAre:[...]ntbo/ogy. Missoula, MT: CutBank/Smoke Root Press, I978.

Sarett, Lew. He Col/ettedPoemx of [em Sarett. New York: Henry Holt and
Company, I94I.

Steele, Timothy “An Interview with J. V. Cunningham.” Io-wa Re‘vie-w I5.3

(I985): I—24.

Center for the Book, I996.

Swann, Brian, ed. Wearing tbs Morning Star: Nati‘veAmeritan SangiPaemx.

New York: Random House, I996.
Van Ghent, Dorothy Bendon. Tbs Eng/ixb Navel: Farm andFunttian. New

York: Rinehart & Company, I953.
Walton, Eda Lou. Da-wn Bay'B/atkfaat andNa‘va/a Sangx. New York: E. P.

Dutton & Company, I926.

(a talk presented at the Montana Historical Society[...]of the Book, October 21, 2005)
Guy Vanderhaeghe

I would like to begin my remarks today on history and the[...]ut also because it offers the occasion to
revisit a state for whose landscape and people I have developed a
great admiration and fondness.

Having said that, I must also confess a certain uneasiness at
this moment, the uneasiness of the interloper and trespasser. After
all, I have written two novels, 7773 Englirbman’r Boy and 7773 Lari
Crom'ng, which are set in part in Montana, a place that is not mine
and which as a Canadian I cannot pretend to know intimately, or
inhabit imaginatively in the way that would be second nature to
a native Montanan. For someone in my position, ther[...]at best to have two legs, and maybe only one.
So I tender both an apology and an excuse, my only jus[...]ters Mart their
journeys in Fort Benton, Montana, I get them across the border
and into Canadian territory as quickly as possible.

I wish to make one other point, and that is that in[...]border between Canada

and the United States was a work in progress, remarkably fluid and
remarkabl[...]s in Fort Benton could be paid in either American or
Canadian currency, a circumstance that, for aI have worked for the past decade
and I provide it as context for my struggle to become an historical
novelist, to attempt to understand what I was doing, why I was
doing it, and what obligations I owed to the rendering of the past
as a writer of fiction. Of course, this matter is not[...]e
awkward position of deciding where to offer his or her allegiance,
to history or to the novel.

At one point I aspired to become an academic historian,
but stra[...]. This apostasy started in
graduate school, where I stole time that was supposed to have

been used to research a master’s thesis and frittered it away

I37

by guiltily writing short stories—a warning for anyone who
supervises graduate studen[...]wise
they may end very badly indeed.

By the time I had completed a master’s degree in history—
just a teeny bit late due to extra—curricular literary activities—I
realized I was temperamentally disqualified from becoming a
professional historian. In his famous essay, “The Hedgehog and the
Fox,” Isaiah Berlin quotes a line from the Greek poet Archilochus:
“The fox[...]atch for someone like me who was
constitutionally a fox, or perhaps more truthfully, a dilettante.

What I failed to recognize back then was that while the
reading of history is the activity of a fox, the writing of history is
essentially the activity of a hedgehog, an attempt to use the tools of
analysis to make intelligible a myriad of detail and to synthesize it
into some o[...]once, ofbeing, in other words,
omniscient. . ..

A novelist these days is seldom judgmental

or omniscient in the historical sense. [Bernard
DeVoto] was much better at the historical
judgment, holding a lot of facts in his head,

seeing the whole picture, making these pieces fit
the picture, and being a god manipulating the
machine, than he was at being a ventriloquist and
speaking out of a single mouth, or, as he would
have to, if he were a real fictionist, speaking serially
out of many m[...]any mouth and still be absolutely right. That’s a

major difference between a Benny DeVoto and a

Faulkner.

I was more suited to play ventriloquist than adopt the single,
rational voice of the historian. This was not a matter of choice, of
deciding one point of view was better, grander, more worthy than
the other, but a simple recognition of whatI could and could not
do.

So history and I parted ways and I commenced to
write short stories and novels which[...]ic mills of
dark, claustrophobic, domestic drama, I retained my love of
history, and in an amateurish fashion continued to read it.

For fifteen years, I made no attempt to manifest this interest

by inc[...]tter into my fiction. The simple
reason was that I suspected that the historical training I had
received would tie me up in knots, that I would be too concerned

with accuracy, fairness,[...]

provided me with a measure of confidence, soothed my conscience
ove[...]ical record.

This initiation was liberating, and I began to see the past
not so much as a daunting minefield, but a fertile pasture of
rich incidents and stories that could be exploited by a novelist.
The play, “Dancock’s Dance,” was followed by two novels, 7773
Englirbmanic Bay, a book loosely based on the massacre of
Assiniboine Indians by a band of wolfers in the early 1870s, and
7773 Lari Croming in which Jerry Potts, a figure out ofMontana
and Western Canadian histor[...]ing these books proved to be more
difficult than I had anticipated.The residue left by my historical[...]greed with those historians who see “faction” or “fictory” as
the work of magpies who pick all the shiny, entertaining bits from
the past, tart them up a little more, and then try to pass these
gaudy tri[...]ry came first, to
hell with considered judgment. I found I was constantly asking
my divided self what I was up to, or should be up to.

The first question I had to attempt to answer was: What
defines the historical novel? The easiest answer is a novel whose
action is set in the past. But the passage of time ensures that this
is a description that will, inevitably, apply t[...]

139

a world far removed from our own. At some point, ev[...]Updike will
inevitably find itself embedded like a fly in the amber of the past.
Eventually, I concluded that what distinguishes novels merely s[...]that such books display.
They are written out of a belief that the unseen hand of history is
everywh[...]t.”

In an attempt to support this proposition, I will have
to refer to my own novels, 7773 Englirbmanic Boy and 7773 Lari
Croming, for no other reason than I have access to the motivations
behind the writing of them. I apologize for this since most of
you will be unfa[...]ompany—the vast majority ofhumanity isn’t. So I hope you will
bear with me.

When I embarked on the writing of 7773 Englirbman’x Boy,
I was not completely conscious of what I was up to—novelists
seldom are. But in retrospect, it’s not surprising that living in
a media—obsessed age I should write a novel chronicling the

beginning of the Hollywood dream factory, or that faced with

daily evidence of the resurgence of fascism I should reflect on

the political uses of film in political propaganda, two strands
present in that novel. Or that living in Western Canada where the
relations[...]tical consequences of the Cypress Hills Massacre, a scarcely
remarked incident in Canadian history that, I believe, had
momentous consequences for the future of my country. Likewise,
7773 Lari Croming contemplates a moment in Western Canadian
history that decisivel[...]t warrior, Jerry Potts, as the embodiment of
what I consider to be the shared history of whites and natives,
not a story of two races inhabiting absolute, separate, and remote
existences in the West.

With time, I also came to believe that one of the truly
distin[...]orical novels is that capital H
History, directly or indirectly, achieves the status of aa theoretical essay about the nature of hist[...]

141

my only reaction to it is a dropped jaw. I made a feeble attempt

in 7773 Englirbman’r Boy to parody this attitude. A movie producer,
Damon Ira Chance, gives another character, Harry Vincent, a

long lecture about how to make successful movies. At the risk of
boring you to tears,I would like to offer an extract from Chance’s
monologue to Harry Vincent, a young scenario writer. The encounter

is described in Vincent’s words:

Chance announces, “Americans are a practical
people, they like facts. Facts are soli[...]The average American feels foolish
when he enjoys a made—up story, feels sheepish,
childish, a mooner, a dreamer. But entertain him
with facts and you giv[...]imself without guilt. He needn’t feel swindled,
or hoodwinked, a hick sold a bill ofgoods by a
carnival barker. He prefers to feel virtuous beca[...]lf.

“You mark my words, Harry, there’ll
come a day when the public won’t swallow any
of our st[...]them to be real.
Everybody wants the real thing, or thinks they do.
Truth is stranger than fiction,[...]aped by intuition.” He

pauses dramatically. “I learned that at the feet of
Bergson. I am a Bergsonian,” he declares, a little
like Aimee Semple McPherson might declare she
is a Christian.

I haven’t the slightest clue what a
Bergsonian is, but it sounds vaguely like
Theosophy, or something worse. “A Bergsonian?”I
say.

Chance answers, “ . . . Bergson taught that
received ideas, habit, routine, turn a man into an
automaton, a robot. What distinguished a man
from a robot is not intelligence—presumably a
machine might some day be constructed that could
outperform a man in the rational faculties—but
intuition. Th[...]ry. Intuition has its roots in our deepest being,
a being that we are scarcely aware of, and because[...]ther human beings,
all art (and here Chance takes a lengthy pause for
emphasis) history. Analysis puts a man outside the
things he studies, while i[...]

Now while I would be the last person to argue intuition is
inessential to any human activity, I am leery of the metafictionists’
assumptions a[...]ion on the grounds that both are “subjective.”I also
wish to raise the obvious point that histori[...]r big bites from the
subject.

On the other hand, I think it equally wrong to dismiss the
historical novel[...]pply to the writing of history proper, just as it would be wrong
to complain that a history does not read like a novel, a frequent
complaint of people who accuse historians of seizing on a vibrant

subject, sucking the blood out of it, and offering nothing but a grey

corpse to the public, a corpse so dissected and autopsied as to be
fright[...]at

t1e historical novelist takes to research. As a writer of fiction I

live and breathe minutiae, quirky odds and ends of information.
For a novelist, it is not the devil that is found in the details. The
cetails are where God resides. A novel cries out for texture to

lend it verisimil[...], read books, use tools, and have occupations. So I have
soent innumerable hours searching out materi[...]t1e American Civil War on the side of the Union. A friend and I

have bounced a four—wheel drive between Fort Benton, Montana,[...]lfers involved in the Cypress Hills Massacre,
and I have tramped the ravines where the Battle of Bell[...]terrain they encountered, the sky and the river.

I have watched videos of all the films of the earl[...]Birtb ofa Nation, who naively believed that film would
settle all historical disputes because every significant event would
be recorded and preserved in vast archives[...]

I43

prided himself on historical accuracy in hi[...]and in
the controversy surrounding the release of A Birtb ofa Nation, a
film President Wilson was reported to have descr[...]istory
written in lightning,” Griffith offered a considerable sum to
anyone who could point out a single error in his depiction of
Reconstruction and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. When a member
of the fledgling NAACP asked him when did a black legislator in
the South ever kidnap a white woman in an attempt to force her to
marry h[...]e
other, for the sake of symbolic resonance, half a century later in
Hollywood. In that novel, I intended to have a movie producer
assassinated outside a landmark theatre during the premiere of
his film[...]raumann’s Chinese
Theatre? The problem was that I discovered Graumann’s Chinese
Theatre had not been built in 1923. However, I learned that
Graumann’s Egyptian Theatre was actuale in service that year. I
seized on this as a second choice. Unfortunately, it proved nearly
impossible to find a picture of the movie palace that could provide
a basis for my description of it. Obsessively, I searched for weeks,
and finally discovered a reproduction of a postcard in a movie
history that gave me enough details to sketch a portrayal.

Just as I felt I was required to visit the site of the Battle of
Belly River, I felt it necessary to hunker amid the lodge pole p[...]ergrowth, to regard the prairie stars, and suffer a swarm of

blood—thirsty mosquitoes to write a scene for 7773 Englirbman’r Boy.

Historians ma[...]shifts
them to centre stage, and spotlights them. I doubt that a historian
of medieval religion would be prompted to scourge herself to
understand the sensations of flagellants, but perhaps I am wrong.
I do suspect if she took such drastic steps she would be an item of
discussion among her colleagues.

Y[...]s choice
is dictated by aesthetic considerations. A novel written about
say—Abraham Lincoln—has t[...]s Hills Massacre and Jerry Potts, an incident and a person
that have never been much documented or written about.

There is another consideration th[...]lievability. In some instances, research
provides a gift to the fiction writer. An account of a herd of buffalo
crossing the Missouri in t[...]

I44

Donald Cameron, who travelled with the wolf[...]Cypress Hills Massacre and, who much later became a successful
Canadian politician, offered me a first hand account of the men in
his party firing on a bull buffalo, simultaneously breaking all four of
its legs, and still being charged by the enraged beast. I wanted this
incident in my novel, but I thought four broken legs would stretch
any reader’s credulity. I settled for one. I didn’t want Cameron’s
report to seem so outrageously fictitious.

No conscientious historian would do what I did, that is
doctor and amend a source. As a writer of fiction qualified by an
adjective—historical—I was confronted with the problem, To what
do I owe my primary allegiance? The demands of history, or the
demands of the novel? In the end, I clearly opted for what I felt
was necessary to ensure the artistic integrity of the novel. I entered
the camp of Mark Twain who said, “First get your facts. Then do
with them what you will.”I decided the noun novel was more
important than th[...]ier’s
head being triumphantly paraded around on a lodge pole after the
victory of the wolfers. Later writers discount this. But as a novelist,
pursuing drama, it was the earliest account that I chose to use in
7773 Englirbman’r Bay. More recent historical work suggests that a
number of Assiniboine women were taken captive by the wolfers
and raped, but in my novel I visited this indignity on a single
young girl, chose to focus all the violenc[...]pacing of the narrative, it struck me

that this would create a stronger, more horrific moment. These are

clear[...]nguage he deploys in portraying the past, whether or not it
will seem to the reader as being true and[...]to draw the veil of
illusion over his judgements, or to masquerade as an actor present
at the events h[...]often sounded ludicrous, wrong. Qleen
Boudicca in a metal brassiere, talking like Andrea Dworkin.

How was II naively assumed that

all those memoirs by cowboys, trappers, and traders that I had
devoured would give me a model for my dialogue, but when I
began to write the novel I was left with a sinking feeling. A passage
from L. A. Huffman who arrived at Fort Keogh, Montana, in 1878,
to take up a position there as post photographer will probably[...]ations. It’s his description of someone

riding a recalcitrant horse named Zebra.

Next thing we se[...]ghtful
and meek—like for saddling, never making a flounce
until his man starts swingin’ up; then of a sudden
he breaks out er—rocketing’, ho[...]

I45

changes ends, caterpillers, goin’ over back quicker’n
lightnin’ . . . He gives Twodot a savage look like a
trapped wolf, tucks the loose coil of that hackam[...]e off—stirrup, but stands high
in the nigh one, a—rakin’ old Zeeb up and down and
reachin’ fo[...]ump until he goes to the earth, feet
upwards like a bear fightin’ bees.

Now a good many of those who published reminiscences
of[...]ced by dime
novel Westerns they undoubtedly read, or perhaps average
Montanans of the 1870s actually t[...]Gabby Hayes, Walter
Brennan, and Slim Pickens. As a literary language it is worse than
inadequate, it is laughable.

What I settled for was an illusion of authenticity. So m[...]s all talk an artificial, invented language that I hoped the
reader woulda dialect that owes
a little to Huffman and a little to Huckleberry Finn; just as my
Hollywood[...]verbal laxative derived from H. L.
Mencken.

When I came to write 777:: Lari Crom'ng, the problem was[...]e most of the novel is constructed in the
form of a series of first person narratives by an Irish im[...]h
painter, and an American frontierswoman. Again, I had little to go
on in many of these cases, but in others, for instance the cultivated
Englishman, I could make use of nineteenth century British
novels and memoirs, etc., for a tentative model of articulation. But
again, even[...]essing himself had to be
tempered and diluted, in a sense “modernized.” To pattern myself
too slavishly on even a great writer such as George Eliot, would
inevitably read as noticeably artificial. So why did I run the risk of
multiple first—person narrativ[...]lture, and class, and to convey that convincingly
I felt it necessary that all the characters, in Ste[...]erms of their own lives and experiences. Although I hoped
my hand in all this would remain hidden, I admit I was attempting
to guide the reader’s responses,[...]ians by laying bare their conclusions in summary, or by

is essentially a story.” Some historians might dispute Creighton[...]the
most apt description of the sort of fiction I endeavour to write.
For me, the historical novel[...]us
to remember that the past was never as clear, or as simple for those
who had to live it as we migh[...]eds to be won by our own efforts, that history is a
subject to be thought through and pondered upon individually.
In writing 7773 Englisbman’r Boy I had hoped to issue a warning:
beware of anyone who hands you history t[...]whether it come wrapped up in histories, films, or historical novels.
And yet, despite the differenc[...]sed. We both turn our eyes to the past
because we think there is actually something valuable to be
discovered there. When I was a student at the University of
Saskatchewan, Hilda Neatby, the head of the history department,
was a fierce critic ofprogressive education and its tendency
to dismiss historical knowledge. In a polemic she posed this
rhetorical question[...]

I47

joys, sorrows, failures, and achievements in the past? It would
almost be an admission of defeat.” In an age in[...]history and historical fiction may help
provide a sober second voice by reminding us that we live b[...]chosen by historians and historical novelists, is a worthy,

and necessary work ofthe present moment.

I49

Brakeback Mountain} Montana Slope
Karl Olso[...]another phenomenon—not unlike killer blizzards or same—sex
desire—best handled with Ennis Del M[...]n unspoken message that comes with it.” But lay a graceful tilde
over the word, thereby transformin[...]d we stumble upon the “control
zone” for many a sexually curious westerner. For while both
wilder[...]Edward Stevenson,
the first American to publish a defense of homosexuality, declared:
“The wide a[...]osexual] tendencies.” Forty years later, Kinsey would note, “the
highest frequencies of the homosexua[...]remote sections of the

country. . .. [T]here is a fair amount of sexual contact among the

older ma[...]ng his queer
power.”

Proulx’s observation of a sixty—year—old ranch hand in a bar
in Sheridan inspired Brokelzatk’x tale of displaced desire. Proulx is a
former technical writer who researches the hell o[...]ress, 2004]), ranching
literature is bolstered by a solid (if unappreciated) sidebar of
homoerotic—[...]ve tapped some of
these queer reserves.

In fact, I view the Montana—based, genre— and gender—[...]by Proulx. Proulx
categorizes Savage’s work as a late entry in the “golden age of
landscape fic[...]ore of Brokelzatk’r air, Savage’s fiction is a perfect—
though no less tragic—counterpart. W[...]a’s landed gentry, the concerns Jack and

Ennis would work for or (if they were lucky) marry into. Savage’s

On the surface Savage’s Montana is a world of “the usual
and the expected, the appea[...]he Beaverhead Valley to Salt Lake City stockyards or Butte’s
amenities, and attempt to keep the vall[...]Nature does some wrangling of its own. Sometimes a man loses his
land, or a lover. Sexually ambiguous ranch hands find their[...]ership of the land,” Savage explains. “It’s
a privilege to able to piss on your own land. If yo[...]r
the ranch, and his wife responds, “Why should a man be trapped
because he’s a man?” When the Metlen ranch is finally reposse[...]Dillon, where
the eyes of close neighbors “cast a lien” on one’s property, he begins
to rethink[...]memory with his
son’s unconventional traits. As a youngster John had “taken a new
gun to bed, but only because his father had g[...]id,
on the other hand

played the piano, which is a thing usually done by

your mother or your aunt. He was of fragile build,

to[...]e social order facts of Nature into patterns that would stir the senses.”

on the playground and in the[...]that order, every
bit of it, and dismissed it as a cripple dismisses his

clubfoot—simply a part of him (52—55).

Social acceptance of David “could not be granted in that town,
in that day, or in any town, in any day. Sheep steer clear of goats. . . .”
John is shocked when Zack, now a soldier, bounds from a train and
hugs him “in public, in town, in a country where it is understood that
no man touche[...]friending
David Lubin: “Maybe if he had, things would have been different for
them.”

Written twenty[...]anch south of Dillon in the 19205. George marries a widow
from a nearby railroad town, and inherits her twelve—y[...]ion brings out an animosity in Phil that leads
to a series of showdowns between Phil and those whom h[...]ncroaching on his all—male idyll. Phil is rude, a misogynist, a
racist, and he takes pleasure in belittling his intellectual inferiors.
But Phil also has a capacity for passion and a vulnerable past,
subtler qualities that tend to w[...]vage uses geology to reveal Phil’s softer side. A hillside

In the outcropping of rocks on the hill[...]face like acne
he saw the astonishing figure of a running dog

. . . in pursuit of some frightened[...]Phil’s mind of the end of that pursuit. The
dog would have its prey. Phil had only to raise his[...]

On a snowy Monday evening in late April 1903, a fierce fire raced
through all six floors of the[...]urs, the stone and brick structure,
considered by a local newspaper to be the “most magnificent
bu[...]side of Chicago devoted to club purposes,” was a total

ruin with losses of $150,000.

1%?

Twelve[...]and business
blocks for six years—had launched a subscription drive to raise
$75,000 to build a permanent clubhouse.

In 1891 the Club purchased a triangular lot for $45,000 in
downtown Helena fro[...]ighteenth—century
London, it nonetheless shared a common male “domesticity” in
form and functio[...]ub represented, in the words of one historian:
“a domestic side to public patriarchy. By offering a private
environment without the stresses of family life and a public realm
without its political responsibilities, occupying a clubhouse suggests
both the comfort and th[...]

I55

Paulxen anal La Valle} original Monz‘a[...]Pbotograpber unidenz‘feal.
Courtexy Monz‘ana I-Iixtorieal Sotiez‘y, Helena (Pat 953—326).

L[...]o two floors high
with an adjacent staircase and a symmetrical arrangement of rooms
0H to both sides[...]bachelor” apartments for non—resident members or
Helena members who preferred to live at the club.[...]n could only enter the Club proper,
however, with a club member and then only at specific times:
“[...]nt on reception nights, no drinks except
lemonade or claret punch of any kind shall be mixed or served
under any circumstances upon the second an[...]ing alley when

with members on Saturdays from IO a.m. to ID p.m.”
@‘Z

The conflagration of 190[...]arly member and guest registers.
The building was a total loss.

Reaction to the Club’s misf[...]

c[...]ose “bachelor” apartment at the clubhouse was a total loss), met
with several other members at a nearby oflcice block and decided to
lease a vacant mansion owned by the widow of a former member.
The minutes of the meeting also re[...]ng’s top floor at 10:35 pm.
and concluded with a note on the formation of a committee to
raise funds for its rebuilding.

Cla[...]the building’s
insurance coverage was and if it would cover the cost of a
new building. Unfortunately insurance covered app[...]subscriptions and announced that
another $19,000 would be secured. A subsequent meeting noted
that the “senti[...]

He also designed a shingled Qleen Anne house in Helena

for international banker A. J Seligman in 1887, submitted entries in
competi[...]Capitol in 1894. and 1897, and
drew up plans for a warehouse in Great Falls in 1901. Gilbert was
familiar with the Montana Club, recalling in a letter, “I remember
with much pleasure having enjoyed the ho[...]Gilbert was interested in the commission and, in a letter
written one week after the fire, proposed that one or two
committee members “visit St. Paul and go Ea[...]New York preliminary to beginning your
own work. I am sure it would be advantageous [sic] to it.” One of
the clubs he no doubt wished the Montanans to scrutinize would
be his newly completed Union Club on Fifth and Fi[...]enient for him to visit at that point and that he
would be glad to send an “experienced competent representative . . .
[to] obtain [the] requirements.” Gilbert would visit later.

Neill immediately telegraphed his friend back, saying: “Think
it essential that you should come personally and[...]capitulated to his friend’s entreaty, noting he would
“come to Helena at once on the understan[...]

I59

discussed the new building and its furnishi[...]preliminary drawings to Club members, noting that a lack
of information on the foundation’s depths[...]ng improvements the club members
desired, such as a vestibule door to keep out the winter chill and
street noise and a basement bar, a “Rathskellar,” a feature he had
also included in his designs for t[...]ceilings as well as the Drinking Room, Guest’s or
Stranger’s Room, and Oflcice.

A mezzanine floor contiguous with the high—ceilinged rooms
provided two “conversation rooms” and a loggia from which club
members could overlook the[...]se wishing to
engage in private social, business, or political discussions could easily
step into alco[...]members were to meet.

The third floor included a Card Room (although he
suggested it be switched w[...]additional space) and siX bedrooms for resident

or non—resident members. The third floor m[...]

I60

Montana Club presentation drawing, Cass[...]er portion of the Card
Room’s seventeen—and—a—half—foot ceiling. The fourth floor was
desi[...]bathrooms with either light
from the light court or the exterior. Gilbert took extra care to
explain[...]nty—five people
at separate tables, as well as a kitchen and commodious serving
room “important in the case of banquets, which Ia
wide, over—hanging cornice. It will make an ornate building, and
one I think that will be satisfactory to the club.” He admi[...]present an appearance that is essentially that
of a club building, and one that will be unique and handsome.” He
closed his seven—page letter, “I have [found] the subject one of great
interest, and while the form of the lot makes it a diflclcult problem
to design, nevertheless, I believe the result will meet your own
expe[...]

would not “impair the appearance of the buildi[...]

Alternative “C” retai[...]so flattened the building’s curved corner into a chamfered one,
and omitted the second—story bal[...]specifications for the Library but “leaving it a very effective and
picturesque room.” Such revisions must have been a concession
for Gilbert, however, given the club m[...]mmittee is adverse [sic] to accepting the changes or alternatives,
designated by you as ‘B’[...]

Paul office make the trip in his stead. A Trempeleau County,
Wisconsin, native, the thirty—three—year—old Carsley had lived in
St. Paul as a boy but lived in Helena for a few years in the early
18905 when his carpenter/d[...]work
for Gilbert. Their professional association would continue off and
on throughout their lives. (In f[...]greed] construction should be started.”

Nearly a year after the fire, on March 17, 1904., the Boa[...]lbert had contacted T. Kain and Sons
who operated a granite quarry west of Helena near Ten Mile
Creek[...]nce is in good
condition they may be jointed and [a] new piece used to take the
place of the broken p[...]xterior appearance
something of the north Italian or Sienese style

of architecture, the broad projecting cornice
supported on timber brackets, together with [a]
plaster frieze, loggia, and the pointed a[...]

Lowertown incorporated a similar chamfered corner and entrance.
Horizontal[...]ment both buildings’ vertical mass into
thirds, a favorite Gilbert device.

The recessed Gothic arc[...]ana Club’s second story. (Gilbert also designed
a warehouse for this same company in Great Falls, M[...]just uphill from the leased
offices’ entrance. A note on the drawing specified: “Old stone work[...]specified vitrified four—inch red tiles with a
single white—dot one—inch tile and meandering[...]ver, the
specification must have been changed to a new design incorporating
a left—facing swastika, a Sanskrit device meaning, “It is we .”[...]

S[...]rniture Co. (who had furnished
the dining room of a Helena house that became the Governor’s
residence in 1913); the newly established Gustave A. Brand Co.,
also of Chicago (whose principal had worked with Gilbert on the
decoration and furnishing of a Summit Avenue residence in St.

Paul when Brand w[...]shing of the first story’s main
hall presented a rather masculine appearance with its paneled
wain[...]rly—twentieth—century furniture line included a wide
range of styles and forms: upholstere[...]

I66

Monmmz Club Ratbxke/lar, probablyjune 1905. Pbotogmpber unidem‘fed.
Courtexy Monmmz I-Iixtorim/ Sotiez‘y, Helena (PAC 88—39 F1).

one addition they made was a bar in the clubhouse’s basement,
the “Rathskellar.” Gilbert had just designed a Rathskellar for the
Minnesota State Capitol with a vaulted ceiling, tiled floor, and
frescoes with[...]in this portion
of the building had low ceilings, a more cozy, even mysterious,
ambiance was the resu[...]lds above
shelves to hold members’ beer steins. A fireplace of red and black
brick (probably the l[...]e Co. that lined the room’s walls and sent them a sample.
A newspaper description of the room attributed the[...]ning Room. The company was
dedicated to producing a high—quality fixture, as they wrote Gilbert
sh[...]staircases continue from the first floor. When a non—service male
(since women’s access to the[...]the clubhouse’s mmtum mnctorum only if he were

a member. The “Guest’s Room,” also ref[...]

I67

Montana Club seconol floor plan, Cass G[...]oom, was placed outside the members’ sphere. If a non—member
somehow arrived in the members—onl[...]aces was the hall identical
in scale (one—and—a—half stories), placement, and function t[...]

I68

Main Hall in Paulsen andLaI/Zzlleit Mont[...]Montana) Standard, Deeember16, 1900.

moldings in a more spare, almost classical style.

Gilbert’s original design called for a sawed—out balustrade,
but the budget constraint[...]to be painted an “old blue color” “to give a

rich eHect as seen in some of the halls of Franc[...]between the first and second floor stairway.
At a May 1904. meeting of the club’s board, building[...]are supplier/ retailer Anton M.

Holter presented a letter from the Union Stock Yards of Chicago
oHering to filrnish a room in the new building. A number of the
Stock Yards’board of directors kn[...]nd commissioned furniture from Duryea
and Potter, a Chicago company, for the Drinking Room just insid[...]tockyard directors had promised.

The one—and—a—half—story Billiard Room, easily viewed from[...]isted gold cords. The multi—story skylight
with a siX—pointed—star leaded—glass design illumi[...]scoting was covered with
Japanese gold paper with a brownish tinge.

The Library, also one—and—a—half stories high, served as a
reception room and completed the filnctio[...]

I69

Moniana Club Drinkingr Room, probablyjune 1905. Pboz‘ograpber
unidenz‘feal. Courtexy Moniana I-Iixz‘orieal Society, Helena (Pat 88—39 F1)

and large one—and—a—half—story windows provided copious light,
an[...]inted in canary yellow. Its walls were covered in a brocade—
pattern wallpaper, possibly of a grey color. The built—in bookcases,
“C[...]

I70

Montana Club Library, probably I une 1905. Photographer unidentgfed. Extant exampl[...]05. Sweet, Minnesota Historical Society (Loc# FM6.I5S rI Neg# [3234), Historical Society Archi[...]

I71

Montana Clubfiflb—floorplon, Cm; Gi[...]e room’s mantel and hearth was specified to be a “Vermont
White” marble strongly veined in bla[...]rs, had member, non—member,

and service areas. A serving pantry, kitchen, and smaller service

Mon[...]c 1905. Pbotogmpbcr
unidentfcol. Courtcxy Montana I-Iixtoricol Society, Hclcmz (Poc 88—39 F1).

areas were located at the rear or north of the building while a
Ladies’ Retiring Room and two dining rooms quit[...]heval mirror
in the Ladies Retiring Room imparted a femininity alien to the
remainder of the clubhous[...]rovided an intimate venue for engagement

parties or other gatherings where women were to be present. The

I72

six—foot dining table could be expanded t[...]insertion of fourteen leaves; the chairs were of a mahogany finish
with Spanish leather seats. This private dining room also oHered
Gilbert a forum to demonstrate his mastery of decorative sc[...]painted white
enamel and the pale lemon ceiling, a shade lighter than the walls,
contrasted with the[...]other rooms.

At some point, possibly around 1915 or so, a hunt—scene
wallpaper was added and it is likely[...]laced the wrought iron one originally specified. A
recessed loggia accessible from the dining room’s double doors
was described in a 1905 newspaper article, “and here, perched high[...]es of the mountains and the city round about.”

A second door exiting from the loggia opened into t[...]fir with an oak
stain, burlap on the walls, and a Japanese gold paper on the ceiling
and cov[...]

Montana Club Dining Room stainedglass mi[...]arsley’s second alteration was to the Guest’s or Stranger’s
Cartoon courtesy Montana Historical[...]e ebbed and flowed
Carsley furnished drawings of a grillwork entrance and balcony as as Prohi[...]

Montana . . . [a] magnificent structure complete in every detail[...]Helena lusty cub.
(953-299), May this be done for a thousand year in The Old
Montana Club. . . .

eco[...]e Montana Club opened to its membership in the of a new century as a cosmopolitan center and the state’s political[...]omic hub.The Montana Club had indeed proved to be a

owned by Cass Gilbert’s boyhood friend, John Neill, headlined it phoenix.
as “[a] Dream in Architecture . . . [the] handsom[...]

A. B. Cook Papers, MC 280, Montana Historical Socie[...]y Press, 1996.

Charles Benton Power Papers, MC 55A, Montana Historical Society,
Helena.

Thom[...]

I77

Truxtees for Those Who Come after U3
Chere[...]re only truxteex for
[boxe [bat come after ux. So I xay notbing but abxolute
neeexxity ean exeuxe [be dextruetion of [bexe buildingx;
and I xay,furtber, [bat xueb aa century has passed since William Morris and his
p[...]of Montana’s history and culture marches
on at a slower, but steady, ongoing and avoidable rate.[...]imes. It
happens in communities, where abandoning or replacing schools and
courthouses is sold to ofl[...]easier.

And it happens at the state level, where a

I78

Smirway, Axy/um Building, Boulder River[...]lish one of the state’s most elegant buildings, a
stately Renaissance Revival building at the heart[...]onse, the Montana Preservation Alliance, of which I am
the director, raised our red flags. “Penny[...]ators; that demolition of this

building not only would erase yet another historic treasure from

Axy/[...]was not in the long—term interest of the state or
the Boulder community in which it resides.

We we[...]pmental Center had oHered to give the
property to a civic group who would take it over and rescue it;
while the Stat[...]

I79

Ornamem‘a/ radiator, Axylum Building, BoulderRiver S5500],[...]ectural qualities.The recommendations came out
of a systematic inventory of more than 1,700 state—o[...]wards of state
heritage, administrators live with a lack of funding to maintain any
of their buildings, and little incentive or reward for doing right by
their historic stock. Failure to encourage agencies to rejuvenate or
reuse buildings of this caliber led to demolition by neglect. Now,

a quarter of a century later, a review of the track record is mixed.
Montanans va[...]uilt

to provide for the state’s less fortunate or less functional citizens.

The Boulder building is a case in point. Erected at a time
when a belief in government and the power of its institu[...]the building is an architectural masterpiece that would have
satisfied GovernorJohn E. Rickards’ posit[...]semi—mute) visited the Boulder campus and gave a glowing account
of the place. “Anyone taking th[...]te,
“will go away with the feeling that this is a mighty good world to
live in, and especially the[...]ontana, since she treats
her unfortunates in such a splendid manner.”3

Thankfully, when ask[...]

to a pile of rubble. In a dramatic turn—around, the Long Range
Building c[...]the end, they
granted the old Deaf 8c Dumb Asylum a reprieve.

Now the stage is set for the next phas[...]and t/yere, but flame
day: are gone. Preservation i3 in tbe buxinem‘ of Mixing

tommunitiex und t/y[...]n leaders determined in the early
1890s to secure a state institution within their valley. Since the[...], the institution has provided employment to many
a Boulder resident. By the 1910s the Boulder school encompassed
at least half a dozen large institutional buildings, a 4oo—acre
ranch, and additional smaller outbuildings. A second building
as large as the school for the de[...]d for what were then called
“feeble—minded” or “backward children.” Known as the Montana

the building: Renovating a building like the old Asylum for the
Deaf & Dumb[...]t’s

important, everything is possible.

Notes

I. Preston Leslie, Montana Governor’r Menage to t[...]T:
Territory ofMontana Executive OflficeJanuary I889).

2. John E. Rickards, Menage of Governor fob[...]of Montana (Helena, MT: State
Publishing Company, I895).

3. G. E. Pinto, “Montana's Great School at Boulder,” He Butte [MT]
Miner, December I9, I915.

I85

fllJe Presence ofAbsence

77."? Regardless[...]r

Museum for their invaluable assistance.

Iwish I could have seen it. Richard Swanson’s Balance a[...]w and wire floating across the sere emptiness of a Northern
Rockies foothills field outside Drummond, Montana. Balance and
Bounty is a work simultaneously mobile and yet solidly rooted[...]w earthward
end. The whole of the eflect (sadly, I only know this from the
photographs)—the broad[...]those sculptural forms—is elegant
and profound, a potent visual mediation on space, landscape,
gravity, animation, energy, and human presence.

I first met Richard in late 1999 and during subsequent studio
visits over the years I learned much about his working methods,
the chall[...]ss

on. And then there was the day—easily three or four years ago

Installation view: Richard Swa[...]rd Swanson.
Photograph by Kurt Keller

now—that I walked up those dark, rickety stairs to his spaci[...]nstructions Balance and Bounty and Prairie
Totem (I995); rope and copper constructions like argentina (1998).
Rather, what I discovered that day on the studio’s north wall[...], flowing black shapes cut out of roofing felt, a group of
enormous, sweeping graphic forms[...]

studio’s floor there was a group of wildly colorful metal sculptures,
stripp[...]nd form than any of his earlier works.

At first I didn’t much like this new work—and I was honest
with Richard that first day. How much[...]difierent than anything Richard
had made before, a virtually complete departure in approach, form
an[...]marvelously

and deceptively simple. Comprised of a single material, welded
aluminum, and an almost m[...]ll connected by elegantly curved lines in
space.

I tbink of [bexe new xculpturex ax ink drawingx, Sw[...]xperience, of sensing three—dimensional form as a drawing is acute,
and yet at the same time discon[...]the aura of Rothko’s saturated colors.
There is a sense of the prexence of abxence in these works, a delicious
tension between the seen and the sensed[...]artixt wboxe work bar
defined etverytbingr [bat I find admirable in xculpture—innovation,

a xenxe of play, ximple color and form, an a[...]

invaluable assistance.

As a young girl growing up on a farm, one of the most profound
moments I experienced was watching Scarlett O’Hara in Gone wit/.77
tbe Wind clutch a fistful of red dirt in her hand and vow that she
would triumph, that she would never go hungry again. That sense
of rootedness,[...]cultural expression, yet for those of
us bred on a family farm, we know that it forms the very core of our
beings.

I am forever rooted to tbe land on wbiel; I war raised. My
eonneetions to plate were generate[...]ry for
rurvival ax land, lzody and rpirit lzeeome a wbole.—Tracy Linder‘

Montana artist Tracy Linder was raised on a farm just west

of Billings, Montana, wher[...]

with the[...]nextricable connections between
family members on a farm, between bodies and the earth.

This visual homage to Linder’s father also functions as a
haunting memorial to a way of life. Much of Linder’s art functions
to negotiate this profound loss, a process of both mourning and
fetishization, a simultaneous letting go and holding on to[...]

TracyLinder, Conversations with the[...]

193

Flesh is a universal phenomenon not unlike the earth itself,
which is also a fabric that binds all living things in a precarious
web of life and death. For Linder, dea[...]ndividual and communal
grief involved with losing a traditional way of life, one tied to the
rhythms[...]ana College in Billings in 1988, Linder completed a Masters
of Art degree in sculpture at Eastern Illinois University in 1989
and a Masters of Fine Art degree at the University of C[...]ones, nails, sinew, leather, corn, rice
and raffia. According to the artist, she wanted to demonstra[...]s,
but not about modern agricultural practices.4

I grew up underrtanding relationrbipr lretween peop[...]eir implieationr ofbope,fizitl7, and fortune. At a veryyoung age
my rister and I were trailing in myfiztber’rfootrtepr earrying irrigation
tulrer in tbe eorn field We would improvire minor meebanieal repairr and

anist in all arpeetx oftl7efizrmproeen. In tbir environment, I learned tbat

tbe demandr of everyday lifi require a renre ofreroureefitlnem in order to
rurvive. It ir a 19?; wl7ere exirtenee dependr upon tbe goodwill o[...],
weatl7er, and ‘tl7e bank? n eertain rerpeetr, a fizrming area lreeomer an
etlmie eommunity.—Tr[...]the artist has suspended in the beeswax. Hair is a dead
substance, yet one associated with life, for[...]he life
cycle may begin anew. One shovel contains a photograph of a ram’s
carcass decaying into the land. The artis[...]nd of the life cycle, to Linder, it also
contains a nurturing element, a lesson she learned as a young child.
When a calf was stillborn, her family would buy another calf, skin
the dead one, and then wrap the skin around the live one, so that the

mother would nurse it in place of her own. The artist b[...]

I94

I95

cataclysmic changes due to uncontrollable f[...]e uncanny permeates
Linder’s work, forcing both a physical and metaphysical reaction in
the spectat[...]as one moves around the tractor hides, not unlike
a rapid series of film projections onto a movie screen. In this way,
the hides function as[...]sappearance of family fizrming becomes imminent,
I believe it is important to document daily processes as a matter of
record Hepbotograpbic element in my work, in efifect, botb represents
a moment of bistoric reality and a recognition of fate. 77Jese images are

situated on nonrtraditional materials in a manner tbat reveals tbe

TracyLinder, Tractor Hid[...]tes wbile retaining aspects of an unbealed wound. I
am interested in wbat will be tbe remains of tbis[...]specially in these upright corporeal
pods, evokes a sense of violence and pain. Indeed, the “unheal[...]een alienating themselves from the
natural world, a process that has accelerated at an amazing[...]

is[...]ptive. The overall contrast is between farming as a way of
life and farming as a business.‘0

Linder’s 1996 leo’r Counting?[...]he left half of the
painting displays an image of a farmer at work in the field, and the
right half exhibits a series of tally marks. Although these marks
can b[...]the cultivation of row crops, they also serve as a visual
reminder that small independent farms are[...]the left represent the traditional family farmer, or the more
contemporary corporate farmer. As[...]

I97

Tracy Linder, Who’s Counting? (Harley[...]commercial fertilizers, and therefore signifies a mode of farming
that prioritizes economic gain ov[...]rming. Like the traditional figure of Death with a scythe,
these modern agrarian monsters invoke fea[...]bandage with straw, which is in turn dead matter, a
byproduct of the harvest and thus death.

With in[...]with the farm, the deep connection that works on a sensual,
thus bodily, level.

This anecdote also[...]dentity. For example, what is the specificity of
a farmer’s subjectivity? Is it more enmeshed in m[...]ith the touch, smell, and taste
of the farm, such a subjectivity might be a more corporeal one,
one more dependent on the bod[...]s, animals, vegetation, and soil—might serve as a source
of strength and a means towards social agency. The specificity of
place would thus serve as an anchor, the relationship with place a
signifier of physical aficinity with one’s environment. Linder’s work
is in keeping with such a model, for she fuses visual representation
with s[...]s
and 1940s, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo produced a series of small
self—portraits that expl[...]

198

Kahlo rendered her often nude or broken body as literally
connected to the earth i[...]e is rendered both active and inert,
for although a warm amber glow infuses the fertile fields of co[...]For both Kahlo and Wood,
their work functioned as a source of empowerment by proclaiming
their aficinity with a specific place and its traditions when both
seem[...]tions. Thus the spectator is
forced to enter into a relationship with her work that emulates the
phys[...]aced filrrows through which one must
navigate in a methodical manner to experience the work i[...]

by using plant fiber as a metaphor for living human skin, Linder
situates h[...]e nihilism of much postmodern art, she has
chosen a path of commitment and responsibility to the values and
traditions in which she was raised. Although a full—time artist, she
lives and works on a farmstead near Molt, Montana, thus choosing
to re[...]atures of baling wire are arranged in two rows on a sheet
of bronze glass, which bears a photo emulsion image of wheat
stubble. Each form is a hybrid combination of cultivator sweep and
hoofed animal leg. Cultivator draws attention to the farm as a site
of cohabitation, one crossed by both wild an[...]iving out on tbeprairie among farmr and raneber,

I am able to witnem tbe ironing of many patbr botb[...]r, and land W itbin tbir intereonneetednen exirtr a
tenuom balanee tbat requirer eareful nurturing; a eertain rtrengtb
and vulnerability lier in tbis b[...]ayrtorday
rurtenanee. Byfoeuring on tbir balance, I am able to reveal rome of
tbe intangibler tbat are being lort ax we eontinue toward a more
eorporatizedAmerica—Tracy Linder”

This[...]now in danger of sudden
extinction. Cultivator is a chilling reminder of this threat, a
haunting vision of life desperately trying[...]

200

Accepting this knowledge “is aa nation of food producers to food consumers, this[...]areness is being lost. Resistance to this loss is a function of
Linder’s artistic practice, for her[...]e with nature.”‘7
Linder’s works do suggest a battle, however, for they function not
only as ar[...]ness. The need to halt this process

and preserve a balanced interconnectedness might be the m[...]

From 2000—2004, Linder worked on a commission for
the Art in Architecture Program of[...]s, Montana. Most recently, Linder has had work in a group show
at the Ucross Foundation, Wyoming, thr[...]x inxeparaalefrom [be land be

narimed and loved

I. Tracy Linder, artist’s statement, 2000.

2. In[...]y Farming, 36—39.

II. Strange, Family Farming, I.

12. Strange, Family Farming, 40.

13. Interview[...].

14. Tracy Linder, artist’s statement, 2000.

I5. Ixaiab, 40:6.

16. Kathleen Norris, Daleotauf S[...]y (Boston
and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), I74.

17. Lucy Lippard, “Undertones: Nine[...]

202

Illuxtratiomfor a Text That Doe; Not Exixt
Doug Turman’s Watercol[...]her
tbz'ngx. Max! of it imide me, deep imide, but
I ’m M full [but it keepr bubbling up.

—Paul K[...],
Renaissance maps, fragments of Dante written in a gorgeous
cursive, 1920s aeroplanes, mid—century[...]Henri Matisse, and Charlie Russell, portraits

of a weeping Meriwether Lewis, green peas, and footpri[...]will include several of the
images listed above (or others from Turman’s vast repertoire).
Turman, based in Helena, Montana, works this swarm of images
into a composition that seems to tell—begins to tell—stops in the
middle of—a lovely and humorous story. The story line may not[...]e Persian

Doug Turman, Trout Dream #34, wanna/or, 7 x 10 imbex, © 1993 Doug

Turman.

miniatures torn from the pages of the narratives they illustrated, or
like Kurt Schwitters’ self—suflicient collag[...]ghtful
journeys, suggesting that their creator is a seasoned traveler who
cannot help but share the sights he has encountered along the way.

Doug Turman is a peculiar sort of traveler. By his own

as how he may be one of the[...]work on all seven continents—he’s even placed a watercolor at
the South Pole Station in Antarctic[...]lly) small and magical works
somehow make visible a vast and richly textured universe, one that
we recognize instantly as home. It is a dream home, to be sure—
our best and most yeame[...]he negative,
the ugly, the very real sadness that afliicts every life. His work has

been acc[...]

Doug Turman, Love Letter #34, waierm/or, 5 x 8 intbex, © 1995 Doug

Turma 71.

Paul Klee[...]the small painting,” and “The Geographer,”

a tribute to a geographer friend who—like the artist—unifie[...]corative arrangement.”Turman has recently begun a new
series he calls “Glimpses of the World Unse[...]et
unnamed new series of watercolors, he animates a world that is
more loosely painted and mor[...]

If landscape appears in a Doug Turman painting, it is more often

vaguely European, and especially Italian, than it is a portrayal of the
vast panoramas of western river valleys or mountain ranges (those
trout are an exception). I[...]l
X—out an identifiable Montana mountainscape, a clearly conscious
negation of his homeland’s tr[...]Lori in Montana—and turns them
into objects of a sly and seditious satire.

Perhaps the Montana tr[...]with extreme looseness and daring, Doug Turman is a master of his
chosen medium. It is only through h[...]and romances—that we can read almost as we read a text. Every
Turman “Love Letter” or “Trout Dream,” every “Conversation
with Paul” or session with “The Geographer,” takes us to another
place (that hitherto unseen world), where things form a perfect
pattern, and we can escape—joyous as carefree travelers—from the

“troubling or depressing subject matter” of our daily lives.

1994 Doug Turman.

@‘1

A jazz drummer as well as a visual artist, Doug Turman is
represented by Lori[...]arison, ofTurman Gallery (www.mrrnangallery.com), a

leading contemporary art space in Helena.

There is a growing awareness of the connection between a

healthy local food economy and sustaining health[...]organizations

in fifty countries. There is even a chapter—0r mnvivirum—in
Montana in Bozeman, w[...]tana, the Corporation for the Northern Rockies is
a key player in this savory revolution. To learn mo[...]RO), whose Abundant
Montana program has served as a model for several other states.
Visit thei[...]

209

a 32—page downloadable (PDF) guide to Montana’s[...]i
Chef Wick Kreig, Crazy Mountain Cbef Big Timber
I ndreland Rant/.77 Angur Beef Amaltbeia Dai[...]

Heirloom Pumpkin & Chocolate[...]

www.montanaflour.com

I ndrelana/ Rant/.77 Beef
170 Glasston Road[...]

be reborn. Transformation is a constant for Julia M. Becker as
well. She creates a drawing, only to paint over it. Cutting the
painting into stencils, she makes a hand—rubbed print. Layering
the print with dressmaking patterns, maps, or EEG readings,

she transforms the print into a collage. By suspending multiple
collages from the ceiling, she gives them a new life as a hanging
tent. Metamorphosis plays out in Julia’[...]ugh
light—flow freely from one to the next, in a continual celebration
of the impermanence of this[...]’s creative life

flies in the face of what we think of as “making art.” Isn’t the end
result of an artistic endeavor a precious object, one to be revered,
protected, ma[...]s simply won’t
do), Julia’s pursuit of art as a catalyst for transformation, rather

than a commodity, becomes a perplexing, if not downright radical,

“Sometimes tlye work is a meditation, a prayer, a discovery, a practice.
It is letting go, trusting, allowing in[...]e layering, more time, more evolution.

Sometimes I need to get lost in tbe work so I can find my way . . . I

don’t analyze my work, or process it intellectually. I trust my beart and
band—tbey know wlyat to do. Sometimes I go at tlye working process in
a way tlyat may appear a little reckless to get past any formal pretense
tlyat may inlaikit a de¢er trutly from emerging in tlye work. I mix colors
tlyat feel rig/9t . . . I accept ‘mistakes’—tlyey become part of tlye[...]rs

revel along with her in the delicate weave of a handmade paper, the

sensuous curve of a found tree—branch, the solid comfort of a lump
of clay. So how do we account for art that s[...]e things to become part of
the metamorphosis. For a moment, we must live in the space in—

between the material and the idea.

“77.76 work is informed by a personal connection to wbat I understand of
Hinduism from my experience in Indi[...]e
is god, god is always transforming. Life is but a fleeting moment.

Anytbing can bappen. Your expe[...]cker.

universal Deatb is always present. Life is a gift and a duty.”

When Julia’s artworks do pause long e[...]ouls have stories to tell. This is
sacred art for a vehemently secular age, and as such, it demands[...]of
metempsychosis, the migration of consciousness or the soul from

one state of being to another. Julia’s artworks encourage a kind of

visual metempsychosis; by inhabiting a sequence of images we, too,
participate in the tr[...]reated out of lumpr of clay tlyatfit in my band.
I ’ll rtart and finirly witly tlye rame amount of clay—notlying it added,
notlying it removed. I make tlyere witlyout looking, often witly my eyer

elored. Or rometimer I ’ll make tlyem during a meeting, under tlye table. ”

She may be on to[...]art may, in fact, describe the world better than
a fixed, precious object ever could. Quantum physics tells us that,
at an atomic level, all objects are in a constant state of flux. In
fact, the act of look[...]changes the experiment. For example, since light
afiecm the behavior of electrons, they behave in a fundamentally
diHerent manner under experimental[...]this intuitively: she often will create
drawings or make clay sculptures with her eyes closed. There is a
moment, in between looking and not looking, when[...].76 ‘otlyer’ imagery, tlye awarenen" of wlyat I ’ll call energetic imagery,
ix wlyat my[...]

xbift. ”

While engaging larger universal idea[...]r art. Her experiences as an artist,
an observer, a citizen, a traveler, a musician, a teacher, an athlete,

a partner, and a mother are woven throughout her art. At its core,[...]iate, physical contact can provide.

“Sometimex I paint witb botb armx, moving like a dance over large
paper on tbefloor. Otber timex it it a quiet meditative miniaturer
painting mode, like P[...]ecker’s artwork may be the perfect antidote for a world
that seems hopelessly entangled in material[...]nd patting it
EC er.

on. .1an myxelfi ‘wby do I do tbix?’It it my prayer for tbe world ”

In 1941, McCullers would dedicate Refleez‘ionx in a Golden
Note: The daughter of a wealthy Swiss Eye to her Swiss friend. Always struggling with depression
textile family (her mother was a Von and addiction, Annemarie died in 1942, after a fall from her
Bismarck and a Nazi), Annemarie bicycle in the Engadine. She was[...]ebelled against the
rigidities of her background. A lesbian,

a drug addict, and a passionate anti—

deal with her life and writings, the documentary,A Swixx
Rene/:11 nnernarie Sebrwarzenbaeb 1908—19[...]pent considerable time in the Middle East,
it, “a ravaged angel.” She was also an and her Dem‘b in Perxia, though labeled a novel, appears to

extraordinarily talented write[...]oducing more than Translator Chris Schwarzenbach, a part—time Helena
Annemarie Seb'warzenbaeb.

ten[...]the Godwin—Ternbach Gallery, Qieens College, “a cult walls, as in earthen ovens, and to emerge in[...]individual who held fascination for entry of even a breath of night—cooled air. The gardens of Shim[...]contemporaries . . . Roger Martin du Gard stayed aa white and shimmering light veiling, due to the he[...]lable angel’. . . while others described her as a mountain wall of the Tauschal in a light gray transparency. Veiled

‘noble being o[...]too white sky, and the plain below was cloaked in a

224

white haze. Just a month ago the plain of meadows, ploughed fields[...]ht—green, yellow and earth—brown.

Now it was a barren desert. And, beyond Teheran, where you find
the ruins of the old city of Rhages, a dust cloud billowed up and
down. There, the camel[...]he road to @m,

bells still chiming. . . .

@m is a holy city. If you are driving from Teheran to Isfahan you
can see, across a broad expanse of water, its golden mosque, but the
highway makes a detour around the city, so you cannot enter its
b[...]Northwest, on the age—
old road to Samarkand.

A few weeks ago the Shah forbade the wearing of the[...]cularly in the
holy cities. Although the Kula was a very unprepossessing, indeed
ugly, visored cap making the wearer look like a tramp or criminal,
it allowed the wearer, when praying, to[...]cially required.That was simply not
possible with a European felt hat, or a little straw cap, or a derby—
and therefore the Mullahs thought their[...]as not to return
home bareheaded.That was indeed a perfectly planned, one might
say Western, operati[...]instead the Iranian diplomats may henceforth wear a bi—point, which
the progress—frenzied West re[...]r patriotism. But
where could the Shah have found a model for the introduction of the
good, ol[...]

Next I turn through the large gateway into a garden. Darkness and
shadow roll over me like waves. A scent of coolness, earth, foliage;
an avenue and the root of a tree leaps up ahead, and, if one tries to
enter t[...]to the side. Now in third gear,
up to the house! I park the car in the shade, get out, walk across t[...]t the double doors made of fine mosquito screen. A piano
can be heard, coming from the living room. I think: Zaddika is still
practicing. Nothing has changed hereflnd I breathe more easily,
relieved of the nameless fea[...]ne of the most beautiful
creations in this world. A band, like a hoop around her forehead,
holds her dark hair back: a combination of an old—fashioned girl’s
haircut and a Nubian small child’s head. Large, soft, gold—colored
animal eyes in a delicate brown face. Her nose starts out wide, as[...]perfect and charming daughters, Zaddika also
has a bud—like, slightly opened and protruding mouth, a chin full of
child—like and defiant resolve, a very thin throat, a neck, curved as if
a little proud or in light sorrow. She is more child—like than he[...]ddika’s oldest sister is lying next to me under a large tree. They have

brought us cushions and ice—cold water in frosted glasses.
“I am leaving,”I say.

“To your English friends?”

“Y[...]

226

We are silent for a while. One hears calls from the tennis court, and[...]alls.
“And if you get fever again up there?”

I looked at her. She was resting on her elbows, and her hair fell like a
shield over her face. She was beautiful, but she did not resemble her
little sister at all. I thought that she had Circassian or Arabian blood.
Her face, much too pale, was drawn from exhaustion and her eyes had

a feverish glitter.
“And you?”I asked.

“I don’t keep track of it any more,” she said. “I always have a

temperature. But my case is different. Nothing can be done about it.”
“The climate is bad for you,”I said.

She shrugged her shoulders. “For all of us,” she said, “but look, I can’t
climb up into the Lahr valley! I wouldn’t survive the trip.”

“Shouldn’t o[...]y lay ahead.

At first our trail took us through a valley, nestled between hills.The
green banks of the brook seem to overflow, as over the edges of a
basket, until they met the descending hillsides. Eventually we came to

a grove of nut—trees, soon after that, grapes.

Then the pass started. I watched Claude lead off, his pith helmet
pushed i[...]g, leaving only the sky and the barren earth, in

a suffocating embrace. We turned and looked ahead: —there, on the
far side of a valley, lay one of those extraordinary mountain r[...]ng slopes, reminiscent of snow slopes. Any minute a slab could
come loose and plunge into the valley, or the uncanny rippling might
coalesce into an avalanche. Crowning the sand slopes, a silver—colored

rock band stood motionless in t[...]most an abyss between two mountain ranges. It was a dead
valley, far removed from the earth, f[...]

Even in the dead moon—valleys there must somewhere be a spring.
What we found was a circular depression; within it a quiet water
surface, stirred only faintly by the entry of a tiny stream of water, as by
a bird’s beating heart.

We drank, resting on our[...]tood next to us, half
asleep, and sheep waited in a circle on the stony slope, all heads down
and tur[...]e Demawend.The pass drops
gently, leading through a stone ravine and runs out into a broad valley.
It takes us an hour to traverse it;[...]nd at its end does not
become smaller; it is like a moon, a smooth cone seen from any side.
In winter it is white: a supernatural cloud—white. Now in July it is
striped, like a zebra. Above you can see the gentle plume of sulf[...]ssyrians gave it that name, as they recorded that a new people, the
“Distant Meder,” had spread out up to its base. But they did not know
that it had been a fire—spewer. Now extinct since three thousand[...]ains, in fertile Syria, in Palestine. Ahead of me I
look at the route which I took through the old lands of Asia

Minor. . . . at its end I find this valley floor! Burnt, yellow! The black
goats and yellow cattle move across it, a fluffy mass, and the sound of
their thousand pattering feet is like a rustling wind. A different rustle
comes from the several thousand[...]s and bodies, over living matter,

reminiscent of a widening conflagration. . . .

My mule stumbles and falls. The Pustin slides down over the neck; I
leap to my feet. Was I asleep? The drivers curse. We go on. . . .

Behind the be[...]m India and are called “Swiss huts,” and have a double
construction, with a sunroof over the smaller interior which is lined
with a stretched yellow material. This creates a sort of shady porch
in front of every tent, where[...]still silvery, soon it will be black. It
is still a pleasure to undress and climb into the river and[...]to the
round, smooth stones. . . .There is always a wind on the riverbanks;
one dries quickly, feels[...]the other riverbank, opposite our camp, on
top of a gravel mound. Built like our huts in the Alps, on[...]that roof and hillside merge.
That’s where the Afie pass ends, an old mule—track leading from t[...]The sound of that name is wonderful: Mazanderan, a land of the
tropics on the Caspian Sea. Jungle, p[...]ssian
railroad begins in the port of Krasnowodsk, a lonely thread of rails
running through the steppe[...]are coming up the valley, and one sees them
from a long way off. Donkeys and riders are coming and s[...]stretch their legs forward and

‘ Txtbai/ebane: a caravansary

fills the doorway of the Khan, wh[...]mory of Moscow

Beginning of August. One year ago I was in Russia. It was hot,

the streets of Moscow[...]terribly slowly, and
then just floating. All in a fraction of a second. A seventeen—year—old
working girl jumped from t[...]ripcord, which should have opened the parachute. Would she

be declared “heroine of the people”?

Th[...]ambition, filling the streets in
white overalls or in the oily uniforms of the metro workers. Until[...]idors of the old house of the
aristocrats, to get a glimpse of the poets. First Gorki, then all the
y[...]because of the
name? Just to be fizr away?”And I thought of Persia’s terrible

sadness. . . .

At that time I was often together with Eva. Her husband was a party
member and spoke sternly and passionately a[...]modern times and especially today, to fight for a community which
would be the society of the future.

He caled himself C[...]), and yet his loneliness among

them was much as a man with exceptional gifts might stand apa[...]

230

a guarantor of humanity’s quest for progress), in[...]of the world which rules. We, on
the other hand, a generation destined to fight and to die, wish at[...]ted, smoldering with an
inner fire, he resembled a militant monk, and at times, an intellectual.
He[...]urgeois clothes, carelessly wore dark blue suits,
a tie. His wife was delicate, blond, quiet, consumed by homesickness.
She had grown up in a farmstead in Holstein, and she should have
spent[...]with
making fruit preserves, baking, chickens and a huge flower garden.
Her husband now would go to Siberia for six months, and that really
fri[...]he said (the three of us were having dinner), “a

revolution is not for fun, and is not created at a convention for poets.”
“Couldn’t you take me along?”

“Impossible. You would only get in my way.”

“Then maybe—in Switze[...]Couldn’t you explain it to Eva?” he asked. “I’d like
her to stay in Moscow and become a worker in a weaving mill. Try to
explain it to her: my responsibility to my comrades won’t permit me
to have a wife who travels to Ascona for pleasure. I must have a wife

who contributes her share.”

“She is homesick,”I said.

“And you?” he asked roughly, “maybe[...]He left, to some kind of night meeting. Eva and I remained seated
at the table. She’s thinking of a meadow in Holstein,I thought, with
spotted cows and red currant bushes. And I: of a lakeshore at

home. . . .

231

Eva had stopped crying.

One day I found myself, alone, on a small Russian steamer on the
Caspian Sea, and the next evening we landed at Pahlevi. It was
raining. A white—tailed eagle was squatting on the rain—[...]he summer
was over, and Russia too was behind me: I watched the vineyards,
the green hills of Georgia[...]iflis and Baku, the return of Asia, and far away a camel

caravan track and the first camels. . . .