The river that runs through Dark Acres looks innocent,
but it’s a devious and dangerous serpent. By Bill Vaughn

[We post this piece again as a warning: Steer clear of the whirlpools at the downstream tip of Radish Island, eight miles west of Missoula.]

IN OUR COLD AND REMOTE MONTANA July 1 has always been the real start of summer. The air finally warms to 90, and much of the snowmelt that swelled the rivers all spring has been accepted by the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico.

This is when Kitty and I put on our swim suits and river shoes and fill our inner tubes from the compressor. Our little stock dogs, Clara the Border Collie and Lyndon Baines Johnson the Corgi, know what’s about to happen, and sprint toward the Clark Fork River, then back again, trying to make us hurry.

The walk across Dark Acres to the river is a few hundred yards, over our long footbridge spanning a slough and under canopies of dogwood and hawthorn. We’re sweaty when we get there, which is good because the water is a cold green shock. And it’s still high enough to make us careful about the crossing to Radish Island, a hundred yards away. Before we step into the water we always remind ourselves that rivers are devious, and you can drown in a bathtub. The dogs are less cautious, heaving themselves into the flow, instantly swept away with the righteous abandon of children who grasp that Swimming Season has just begun. Until the first frosts of October the Radish Crossing will be a daily event.

We’re always curious about how the high water has carved the 40 acres of the island into a new shape. For a few years, after we moved to Dark Acres, the sandy spit on the downstream point of the island was indented by a lagoon. The languid current went round and round, and Radish, a red heeler who was our head dog at the time, liked to paddle in this lazy whirlpool while we took the sun, throwing sticks for him to chase, waving at floaters shooting by in rafts and inner tubes.

But over time the current rushing through the two channels of the endlessly changing river filed away the spit and erased the lagoon. And this abrupt confluence had created a series of harmless-looking riffles. Last September, as we floated beyond the island toward the ruins of the old Harper’s Bridge, which lie just below the beach where I drank beer with my Delta Sigma Phi fraternity brothers in the 1960s, I didn’t think much of it when Lyndon entered these eddies. Clara avoided them, and swam to the bank, looking for dead fish.
But the water here, as we discovered when it tugged at our tubes with a force that left us shaking, was being driven downward by the energy of the collision, gouging a deep hole in the bed of the river and creating a fierce whirlpool.

The moment Lyndon swam into this vortex he disappeared.

I cried out. And so did Kitty. But there was nothing we could do. Our little dog was gone.
And then, just as quickly, he was back, shot from the depths of this churning maelstrom as if he’d bounded onto a trampoline. When we got our hands on him we cried and held him and let him lick our faces. What’s the big deal? he said. Let’s swim.

So when we paddled out to the island on our tubes we got the dogs out of the water as soon as we could, and walked straight to the end of the island. The spit had been honed to a dagger point during the spring runoff. And now there was a series of whirlpools just off the tip, each one more ferocious than the one that tried to steal Lyndon. While Kitty held the dogs I heaved a hunk of cottonwood into them. It immediately vanished. We watched. But it didn’t reappear.

We walked upstream to a sunny spot on the right bank where the current had piled a mound of scrubbed, blinking sand, and lay down on it while the dogs explored a little spring-fed stream nearby. Ospreys and hawks wheeled overhead, and an eagle checked out Lyndon to see if he might be light enough to cart away for dinner.

Then it was dogs all over. Four big beautiful high-bred beasts, dripping water, eyes insane with the pleasure of swimming away a hot Sunday afternoon, suddenly issued from the rushing channel on the left, and bounded across the sand toward us. They were past us in a beat and loping toward the tip of the island as their masters, five twenty-somethings in tubes, three women and two guys, arms linked, shot by us in the rush. I stood up and pointed at the whirlpools.

“Don’t worry, they’re real friendly,” one of the guys shouted.

“Stay away from those whirlpools!” I shouted back, pointing. “We almost lost this one in there last year.” But it was too little and too late. The dogs—a Husky, a yellow lab, a Doberman, and a black lab—were already at the water’s edge, our dogs on their heels, yapping. The big dogs dove into the water, following their masters, who were already bobbing and twirling in the maelstrom. As we shouted at Clara and Lyndon they hung back, knowing better.

The Doberman and the black lab somehow made it through the whirlpools with little effort. But the Husky disappeared, and then the yellow lab. Kitty and I ran to land’s end. The floaters had felt the power of the water and knew something was wrong. They furiously paddled to shore, jumped from their tubes, and called for their animals. Finally, a figure popped out of a whirlpool. It was the yellow lab. After some very scary touch-and-go, the exhausted dog finally paddled into the arms of his mistress.

She stood up and began yelling and sobbing at the water. “Max! Max! Where are you?”
Shielding their eyes from the glare of the sun, the guys edged back into water, trying to see inside it. One of them ventured too far, and had to swim for his life to get back to the grasping hand of his friend, who pulled him from the current.

For a half hour Kitty and I stood on Radish Island watching, and the big dogs and their masters stood on the shore. But Max never appeared. 

Finally, on both sides of the water, we called off the watch. Heads down, everyone went home. Kitty and I plodded up the island, paddled back across the river with Clara and Lyndon, and collapsed into our patio chairs. The dogs curled up next to each other at our feet, and fell into a happy sleep.

In a few minutes the sun drove the river from their coats.

Notes from Dark Acres By Bill Vaughn

Plowed. When we bought Dark Acres in 1990 the price was right, but the place was a mess. A remnant of a ranch that ran cattle and raised hay and grain, it was infested with knapweed and littered with rusting farm implements, nails, tires, and mounds of household garbage. The neighbors told us the previous renter was a poacher who tried to live off the birds and game he killed along the banks of the Clark Fork in and out of season. In the garage we discovered a freezer stained with blood.

Over the years we’ve carted off most of this junk. The last load, however, would prove to be the most obstinate. This included a John Deere sulky plow at least seventy years old that weighed more than 500 pounds.

The thing worked like this: The hayseed parked his butt in the steel seat and watched the ass-end of a mule all day as the blade tore up virgin sod. Looking at the plow made me sad and a little bit angry. I thought of the Dakota prairies and the hardwood forests of the Midwest that had been decimated by farmers and their plows. That these natural worlds were beginning to return in some places was a little bit of justice. But I knew that real justice required that the plow be destroyed.

In fact, the sulky was too heavy for me to heft into the back of my pickup, so it would have to be broken up into pieces. The problem was, the nuts had rusted solid to the bolts, so its reduction would have to take place by other means. I considered a torch cutter, but that would require a trip into town for rented equipment, then a crash course in torch cutting. Instead, I got out my hacksaw.

As I cut off a wheel I felt righteous. And when the John Deere finally lay in a heap of severed parts on the lot of Pacific Recycling, where I hoped it would be reincarnated as something useful and on a higher karmic plane, like a plasma television, I finally felt the catharsis of revenge. Not only that, I had $23.50 in my pocket as payment for the scrap.

Contempt. Did Jim Edwards violate campaign finance disclosure laws? The state of Montana thinks so. Dennis Unsworth, the Commissioner of Political Practices, has turned over the case against the Missoula grocer and subdivider to the County Attorney for possible prosecution.

During the 2006 general election for Missoula County Commissioner the denizens of Dark Acres did our best to re-elect the Democrat, Jean Curtiss, so that her odious Republican opponent, Edwards, got nowhere near the reins of power. The voters saw it our way, giving Curtiss 26,000 votes to 17,000 for Edwards. Part of the reason Edwards got righteously thumped is that he ran a stupid, loud-mouthed campaign. And then there was his proposal to dig gravel pits, batch asphalt and fabricate cement on his 600-acre Trout Meadows Ranch, just upstream from Dark Acres.

Everyone from the Clark Fork Alliance to the Audubon Society to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes opposed this ludicrous scheme, which would have created an environmental nightmare and filled narrow country lanes with dump trucks. Just after the election Curtiss added injury to insult by voting against the zoning change that would allow Edwards to destroy this gorgeous stretch of floodplain on the right bank of the Clark Fork River. The other two Commissioners voted against Edwards, as well, agreeing with more than 2500 people who signed a petition opposing this lunacy.
 
During the campaign we tried to find out who was financing Edwards in order to make this information available to the voters. But he repeatedly missed the deadlines for filing, alternately blaming his “secretary” or the “fax machine” in Helena. So we filed a complaint.

According to Unsworth, Edwards “failed to file pre-general election and a post-general election C-5 finance reports with the office of the Commissioner and with the office of the Missoula County Clerk and Recorder. Despite repeated requests during the investigation of this matter both Edwards and his campaign treasurer failed to provide information requested by the Commissioner’s office.”

We look forward to seeing the consequences of Edwards’ contempt for Montana’s laws.

Update: On June 15 Missoula County Attorney Fred Van Valkenburg returned the case to Unsworth, claiming that although “it may be appropriate to seek the imposition of a civil penalty,” it was his belief that the Commissioner of Political Practices was in a better position to act on the matter because of the research that office had compiled.

In its June 18 issue, a weekly newspaper, the Missoula Independent, reported on the complaint against Edwards and its aftermath. The paper is no friend of Edwards, having gone to court against him in 2006 for his alleged failure to pay for his grocery store's advertising published in the paper. Edwards filed a retaliation lawsuit. A judge threw out both complaints.

Fa la la. On May 28 the Hollywood Reporter noted that an original movie planned for the Lifetime channel’s annual December programming, “Fa La La La Lifetime,”  will have a Montana connection. The romantic comedy, Twelve Men of Christmas, is based on Phillipa Ashley's novel, originally titled Decent Exposure, about a PR exec who brings her media skills to a Montana town. Cast in the role of the exec is Kristin Chenoweth, the tiny and cute-as-a-button actress who was one of the stars of NBC’s big series, Westwing. It’s not known whether the film will be shot in Montana. The Montana Film Office reports that as of May 29 it has not been contacted by Lifetime.

Merry Month. May is the busiest time at Dark Acres. All the residents are in a fever to give birth, get born, pollinate, hatch, blossom, emerge, and set up house for the summer. First, the place swarms with Canada geese that cover the forest between the houses and the Clark Fork River with goose shit, and hiss at the dogs when they try to run them off.

Then the neighborhood’s resident ospreys, Duke and Doreen, returning from their winter in Latin America, drove the geese out of their nest, improved their high home with new branches and grass, and began the watch over their newborn chicks (or it could only be  one chick this year; we don’t have access to a cherry picker that would take us up there to see for ourselves.) They built this nest on a power pole five years ago, but Northwestern Energy, fearing it would catch fire, fry the raptors, and torch the neighborhood, soon moved it at great expense to a pricey pole of its own. Some scientists think the $3400 would have been better spent buying riverside habitat.

Meanwhile, the Great Blue Herons have set up shop again in the crowns of two ancient cottonwoods next to one of our swamps. There are a dozen or so nests up there built years ago by this old colony of birds, which emit a constant racket from April to September as they ready another generation for flight. If you need any visual and auditory proof that birds descended from dinosaurs you don't need to look much farther than these herons. With their crooked necks and monster squawks they look and sound like something from the set of Jurassic Park.

The first morel mushrooms began popping up on May 10, and by May 12 certain places I’m not at liberty to divulge were carpeted with scores of these peculiar and tasty brains-on-a-stick.

The first hummingbirds arrived on May 14 to suck nectar from the baby blossoms of our old Goodland apple tree.

By May 21 our slough and our swamps were flooded by snowmelt in the river, and the first western painted turtle pulled itself up on a log in a waterway we call the Mabel to take the afternoon sun.

Finally, on May 21, after a cold start to a late spring, the river hawthorns began to bloom, in whites and pinks. Hawthorn blossoms, of course, are what the English call the May Flower. These gnarled, hard-wooded trees have become our passion. We eat them (the leaves, flowers and berries) for heart health. And, in the tradition of our Celt ancestors, we tie talismans on the branches of the biggest one ever recorded in Montana, Maeva, in order to praise her in return for good luck in sports and money. When we first moved to Dark Acres we were offended by the odor of putrid meat hawthorn flowers exude. But after we learned that they smell that way in order to attract their own special pollinators, carrion bugs such as flies that are attracted to the smell of dead animals, we began to appreciate how the natural world supplies useful work for everyone, even during a recession.

In 1978 Ron Hauge was a cartoonist struggling to make any sort of living in Missoula, Montana, then a small, working class college town kept semi-alive by its rail yards and timber mills. The left-wing newspaper I'd founded there a few years earlier with Harmon Henkin, a large, bearded Jewish communist from Baltimore who looked like Karl Marx, occasionally paid Hauge a few bills to lampoon local figures. These portraits were balls-on accurate, capturing the essence of the fatuous politician, the rapacious strip mine operator, the small-time huckster. In one cartoon a guy with a tin cup, wearing a sign that says “Blind,” begs for money on a Missoula sidewalk. Across the street is another guy, also holding forth a tin cup. His sign says “Blinder.” We knew when Hauge headed off to New York a couple of years later he’d be a huge success.

In fact, Hauge reinvented himself as a television writer who contributed to Seinfeld and won an Emmy in 1997 for his controversial Simpon’s episode, “Homer’s Phobia,” a play on “homophobia.”

On the occasion of Henkin’s 38th birthday Hauge drew him a present. This cartoon commemorated Henkin’s obsession with fly-fishing, his ascent into the middle reaches of Hollywood screenwriting, and his habit of waiting until the very last minute to make a deadline. 

Twit. Like a lot of writers who enjoy organizing their own parades, journalist Dan Baum is a relentless self-promoter and an annoyingly in-your-face guest at those boozy me-me parties writers like to throw for each other. Briefly a resident of Missoula, Montana, Baum was hired on a year-to-year contract by the New Yorker Magazine, paid $90,000 a year in exchange for publishing 30,000 words, and fired after a couple of years in 2007 by editor David Remnick, whom Baum says didn’t like his work. Now Baum is Twittering about his New Yorker experiences. Twitter is, of course, one of those online social networks, in this case a place where you’re allowed to post no more than 140 characters at a time, sort of a haiku of self-absorption.

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Reports of Mutant Deer in Montana on the Rise
Scientist says that genetically modified corn is changing their DNA.  By Bill Vaughn

MONTANA WILDLIFE OFFICIALS report a growing number of mutant whitetail deer in one of this sprawling state’s urban areas. The deer, observed in the upscale Rattlesnake Valley section of Missoula, exhibit numerous behavioral abnormalities and genetic malformations, including fangs, meat-eating, blue eyes, a parrot-like ability to mimic human speech, snarling and snapping at dogs, knocking on patio doors with their heads, and a refusal to run in front of cars.

Shelby Lumack, Fish, Wildlife and Parks chief game warden for Missoula County, said her office has received at least fifty calls about weird deer since July of 2008. “When the first report came in we thought it was a prank,” Lumack told Dark Acres. But then in August a young homeowner on Lower Lincoln Hills Drive told her a six-point buck had opened a gate into the family’s back yard, eaten every apple on a fruiting tree, defecated in the children’s wading pool, and bayed “Father, what am I?” over and over until it was chased away by the family. The next day a retired attorney reported two young does snoozing in the way-back of his SUV. The attorney told Lumack they appeared to be sleeping off inebriation.

Other reports include deer eating from garbage cans in Pineview Park, snatching lunch bags from schoolchildren on their way to Rattlesnake School, bathing in Rattlesnake Creek, and chasing cats. A group of Audubon Society members recording birdsong in Rattlesnake Park reported coming across a group of deer engaged in what they described as a heated conversation. The animals, according to birder Juniper Ames-Worley, shut up immediately when they sensed the group was eavesdropping.

During the winter of 2008-2009 numerous residents reported seeing whitetails wearing clothes: raincoats and galoshes, hoodies and Crocks, sombreros, serapes and cowboy boots.

Dr. Jason Fogel, University of Montana wildlife biologist, has a theory about the strange sightings. “We have known for some time that certain residents of the Rattlesnake Valley have been feeding the deer. And we have evidence this feed includes genetically modified corn, bought by misguided animal lovers who didn't know what they were doing. Because deer have a high birth rate it was only a matter of time before the altered grain would alter the DNA of the cervine [deer] population.” He said he believes these same individuals, whose names he declined to divulge, have also been clothing the deer during the winter months.

One Boulder, Colorado website offers deer clothing for sale. At www.bambiwear.com consumers can purchase numerous ensembles the company claims make it easier for deer to survive the harsh winters of the Rocky Mountain states.

Wildlife officials have scheduled a community meeting on May 17 at the Rattlesnake School auditorium to present plans for dealing with aggressive mutant deer. According to a spokesman for the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department, this may include a trapping program to transplant the deer to the Rattlesnake Wilderness Area north of Missoula, or concrete block walls to keep the mutant deer away from the rest of the community.

“That’s just horse pucky,” said Mel Grimes, a resident of the Petty Creek area west of Missoula and a member of the National Rifle Association. Grimes produced a petition with more than a thousand names supporting a special assault rifle season for whitetail in the Rattlesnake. “It don’t take a rocket scientist to figure what’s the cure. If it was any place but the damn Valley of the Liberals this would already be case closed, let’s get a brewski.”

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Wish List  
On April 28 lawmakers headed home after finishing business at the 2009 Montana Legislature. But they didn't give me anything I wanted. By Bill Vaughn

Gravel Train. Because they’re hazardous substances, gravel, asphalt and cement should only be transported from their source by heavy rail. Gravel is hazardous? I’m referring to the fact that some rural Montana neighborhoods have been ruined by open-cut mining, and others are threatened. By compelling contractors to build insanely expensive rail lines through exurban areas the plundering of these communities would no longer be an issue.

But we need gravel! Although I would also like to see a moratorium on new streets and roads in Montana, some existing infrastructure is in disrepair. In Missoula County, for example, the gravel necessary for this remedial construction lies in abundance on large tracts of isolated flood plain owned by Smurfitt-Stone, whose paper mill west of the city has long been an environmental sacrifice area, and is served by a very efficient rail line.

Glory Train. Existing track and old right-of-ways are already in place to facilitate commuter rail service from bedroom communities to the cities. Fun Rail would include railroad cars onto which you could drive your pickup, full casino gambling, dining cars, bars, legalized prostitution, and maybe a strip joint. Can you think of a better way to spend your commute from Darby, for example, to Missoula, or from Laurel to Billings, or from Fort Benton to Great Falls? (Although I can understand why someone would want to go to Fort Benton, it’s hard for me to imagine why anyone would want to go to Great Falls. But I guess there’s no argument in matters of taste.)

Air Train. Light passenger vessels powered by the wind that sail on railroad tracks during the times when the gravel trains and the glory trains aren’t operating. These would be privately owned rail boats purchased from a made-in-Montana factory whose start-up costs would be covered by the state. Although most of western Montana doesn’t get enough wind to make this sort of transportation feasible, the rest of Montana has abundant hot air.

Happy Dogs. Ban commercial trapping on public land. Dog lovers have lost enough of their pets in the traps of the rednecks who supply the shameless fur industry with raw product so rich bitches can have fashion accessories when they go clubbing. But what will trappers do to make a living? These yahoos don’t make a living killing wild animals. They could supplement their poaching and illegal firewood sales with some other traditional way to make extra cash, like selling their sisters.  

Community Power. Montana should buy Northwestern Energy and the other power suppliers in the state and convert them to state-owned, community-controlled utilities whose purpose is to supply electricity to all consumers regardless of their ability to pay. Isn’t this socialism? Yes. However, I’m not advocating state ownership of paper mills or fly rod factories, but community control of something that’s essential to all of us. I’m a big fan of consumer goods, especially booze and electronics, and wouldn’t want to see the government fuck these things up.

Buffalo Commons. Montana should gradually phase out cattle ranching and replace the state’s red meat industry with one based on bison. This would be accomplished by tax incentives and disincentives. And our Washington delegation should be encouraged by a joint resolution in Helena to compel the Department of Agriculture to direct subsidies away from the stupid exotic monsters that don’t belong here and towards our native buffalo.

Full Disclosure. On Casual Fridays lawmakers will wear their Tell-All Suits. These are garments, similar to the jump suits NASCAR drivers wear, bearing the logos of the organizations that gave the wearer campaign finance money. This way voters will know who runs him. For example, House District 100 Representative Bill Nooney's jacket would display industry logos for wood products, gravel, petroleum, real estate, and automobile sales, among many other special interests. (Thanks to Robin Williams in the film Man of the Century for this idea.)

More Better Full Disclosure. The details and dollar figures of all residential and commercial real estate transactions must be made public.

Moratorium. No new subdivisions until the counties are compelled by state mandate to enact county-wide zoning.

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Notes from the Squalor Zone By Bill Vaughn

Blondie and Dagwood. The ospreys return, the first pitch is thrown, and the happy sound of rackets smacking tennis balls echoes from court to shining court. At Dark Acres, April is also the month when horses are born. Last year we decided it was time for Scarlett, the big palomino in the banner above and the cell phone photo at right, to be a mamma. Sixteen years old, her clock has been ticking louder. So we bought a $1000 dose of frozen semen supplied by a Montana Quarter Horse named Raren To Dash, and when it arrived by Fedex our vet made sure it ended up in the right place.

At dinnertime on April 25, eleven months later, we happened to glance out the window and saw Scarlett lying on her side in her pen, shuddering. Racing out, we discovered that the baby was being born a week early whether we were ready for it or not. And suddenly there he was, shivering and shaking, Dagwood Is Dashing, a beautiful lineback dun with black points. He was a little skinny and his legs were wobblier than most foals, but after we coaxed him to his feet he got the hang of it and was soon busy trying to find something to eat. When he worked out the logistics of his mother’s anatomy and got his first taste of milk he looked at us, danced a shuffling little dance, and whinnied his joy at being in the world at last.

Arrest the Usurers. We’ve used Discover credit cards for years and have never been late with a payment. So, like a lot of card-holders in the last few weeks, we were shocked to get a letter from Discover Financial Services (DFS) informing us that the company intended to raise its already usurious interest rate from 10.99 percent to 15.99 percent. If we didn’t like it, the letter implied, we could just fuck off. We promptly paid off our balances, and won’t use our cards again until the company’s officers have been fired. Of course, we’d like to see them in jail, but we realize that happy, value-added outcome is unlikely.

The reason we have the standing to demand heads on a platter is because we own DFS. That is, all Americans own a portion of the company. On March 13 DFS accepted $1.2 billion from the federal government in Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds after it converted its business status to that of a bank holding company so it would be eligible for the dole. In exchange for the corporate welfare taxpayers got 1.2 million preferred shares and a 10-year warrant to purchase 20.5 million common shares at an exercise price of $8.96 a share.

Because the bailout was intended to free up the retail credit market DFS should have lowered its interest rates and raised its credit ceiling to consumers. In some countries its managers would have been taken out and shot for a high crime such as theirs. Extreme, maybe, but if you’d like to drop these thieving bastards a nasty note (Discover Financial Services, P.O. Box 30943, Salt Lake City, UT 84130-0943), here they are: David W. Nelms, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Roger C. Hochschild, President and Chief Operating Officer; Roy A. Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer; and Kathryn McNamara Corley, Executive Vice President, Cardmember Services and Consumer Banking.

Honk if you hate ospreys. When the ospreys at Dark Acres returned on Earth Day from their annual winter migration to Latin America they found a pair of fat geese squatting in their pricey nest, which Northwestern Energy built for them four years ago. We love to watch ospreys and admire everything about them, including their habit of raining down great plumes of shit on traffic passing along the county road beneath their pole. Our opinion of geese is that they go best with a dark, red wine (might we suggest the dry cherry from our advertiser, Ten Spoon?)

The ospreys, five of them, circled the intruders all day, crying in that high-pitched osprey way, showing the geese their formidable talons and their acrobatic dives. Finally, the honkers had seen enough, and flew the coop. We were relieved. And we’re eager to follow Duke and Doreen, the parents, as they raise another fine family in that high perch.

Lee Enterprises has laid off a reporter who was shot in the line of duty. Todd Smith, the online editor for the Suburban Journals—sister newspaper of Lee's St. Louis Post-Dispatch—was covering the Kirkwood, Missouri, city council meeting on Feb. 7, 2008 when a madman named Charles “Cookie” Thornton stormed into the room and opened fire with a .44 magnum pistol.

Five people were instantly killed, and the mayor later died of gunshot wounds, as well. Thorton shot his own self dead. Smith, 37, was hit in the hand. He immediately called the offices of his paper on his cell phone and told his editors they needed to get another reporter on the scene because he'd been wounded. “My family is obviously really not happy that I took a bullet for a business,” Smith told the Post-Dispatch, which won a Sigma Delta Chi Award for online reporting of the melee. “But I guess in these economic times that isn't enough to save you.”

Lee owns five daily newspapers in Montana. The financially troubled corporation, second largest newspaper chain in the U.S., has seen its common stock drop in the last 12 months from $8.29 to 39 cents and is facing delisting by the New York Stock Exchange if it can't raise it share price above a dollar. Analysts blame its collapse on factors ranging from its loss of classified advertising revenue to online sites such as Craigslist, to the bloated price it paid for the Post-Dispatch in 2005.

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A Fan’s Notes
Philadelphia's Harry Kalas and Whitey Ashburn had the best chemistry
in baseball. By James Greenfield

THE LOCAL CROP, the foremost agricultural product of Philadelphia, is characters. They sprout from the macadam, imbued with the peculiar slant of distinctive ethnocentric neighborhoods, chow on cheesesteaks, soft pretzels and Tastykakes, shoulder the almost obligatory, self-effacing chip of a city whose excuses to bask in adulation, whose championship parades, have been rare.

If we don’t grow them, we import and mold them. If they are susceptible, it is because they get it, they get us—our fanatical, heart-on-sleeve loyalty and lay-it-on-the-line approach.

The talk-show carping, frequently misinterpreted as disparagement, merely reflects devotion to the cause of improvement. Yeah, we kill too many of our brethren, our infrastructure is inadequate and crumbling, our government is crippled by pols who grab for themselves, our teams lapse easily into decades of mind-numbing mediocrity. Stuff is broken, but most of us (amateur managers all) have opinions on how to fix it. We can be tough on those we love, almost as tough as we are on those we don’t. And when we win, we revel like no one else.

We cringed when Ed Rendell’s mayoral administration adopted the PR slogan “the city that loves you back.” Trite, touchy-feely, daisy-in-the-gun-barrel horseshit, right? But you know what? It’s true.

Consider Pat Burrell, the leftfielder on the ’08 World Series champion Phillies (just can’t get enough of that phrase in print). As a player, he was a frustrating bundle of inconsistency: marvelous bursts of mashing, productive power, followed by endless, fathomless slumps in which grandma’s curve would have baffled him. But once it became less important to him to be seen around the city at night, he applied himself more diligently to his craft, and he even became a marginally passable fielder with a strong, accurate arm, though you would never have risked your credibility by placing his name in the same paragraph as “cheetah.” Although Pat made contributions—including a key seventh-inning double that set up the winning run in the clinching fifth game of the Series against the Rays—he was not a star on a team that included Cole Hamels, Brad Lidge, Chase Utley, Ryan Howard and Jimmy Rollins. And when the Phils didn’t make him an offer to stay, he signed with the Rays in the offseason.

Why, then, did Pat get one of the biggest ovations from the crowd when the champs got their rings on April 8? Because he had loudly and continuously proclaimed his love for the city and his desire to stay here. Burrell years ago became one of the city’s foremost ambassadors. He told anyone who would listen how much he enjoyed living downtown and playing for the Phils. Even when he was jeered for his play, he never bad-mouthed the fans. For the obverse side of this coin, review the files of Rolen, Scott (begged to be traded so he could leave town), and Drew, J. D. (chose to play in a beer league instead of sign with the Phils when they drafted him). Fans fill the ballpark to greet those guys in the style they deserve: BOOOOOOO!

IN THE LAST 60 YEARS, two characters—risen, incongruously, from the understated, earnest clay of the Midwest—migrated to Philadelphia and became, arguably, the most distinctive broadcasting tandem in sports history. When Harry Kalas died in the booth a couple of hours before the April 13 game at Washington, 11-1/2 years after his best pal Rich (Whitey) Ashburn was found dead in his New York hotel room during a late-season Phillies road trip, an extraordinary era ended. [read more]

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Saving The Books
How the internet destroyed our library. By Bill Vaughn

AFTER WE SCAVENGED enough down payment to buy a place in the country we invited friends over for Martinis, lit a bonfire, and torched all the ragged old titles we’d been dragging around from one rent house to another for years.

Among them were Steal This Book, a journalism school text called Headlines and Deadlines, the 1988 Rotisserie Baseball Handbook, and How To Buy Your First House. As the embers died we decided that the only books we’d collect henceforth would be hardbound first editions of American fiction. It was the purity of this plan that appealed to us, and its appearance as an investment. We built bookshelves from local pine, vowed to never dog-ear another page, and promised that when the shelves were full we’d sell the entire collection, and start over fresh.

That day came 15 years later. When I finished Richard Ford’s real estate novel, The Lay of the Land, I took it straight to the library and tried to insert it between Wildlife, one of Ford’s other novels, set in my home town, and The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen. But the “F” shelf couldn’t accommodate another 500-page blockbuster, and all the other shelves were jammed tight, as well.

As I packed the books into boxes I recalled some of the pleasures they’d given me—a long, soporific afternoon in the hammock with Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, lying in the tall grass on the banks of our Montana river with Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, sprawled in my rocking chair by the fire with Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend.

The only book I changed my mind about and decided to keep was Mockingbird, Walter Tevis’ dystopic story about the end of literacy, and with it homo sapien.

When the shelves were empty and the boxes full I added up the numbers. There were 893 hardbound books weighing 1336 pounds for which we’d paid $19,438, or $14.54 a pound, the going price for a Cosco salami. Although the books had suffered through a grease fire that erupted after I forgot about a pan of peanut oil left on a hot burner, they were in excellent condition, thanks to the crew sent by our insurance company to repair the smoke damage and rebuild the kitchen. One man had meticulously cleaned every book by hand, a task that took him five days. When I asked him to return them to the shelves in alphabetical order, by author, he was not amused.

I loaded the boxes into the back of my pickup and drove them to a bookstore in town that smells of cats, but sells a lot of previously read fiction. The owner said he’d get back to me in a few days with a quote.

My assumption that we’d soon be flooded with cash was based on my experience with a bookstore in Los Angeles called Pettler & Lieberman. After Rob Pettler decided in the late 1970s that working as an entertainment lawyer wasn’t very entertaining he moved to New York and sublet a Greenwich Village apartment. He started buying fiction at The Strand, and after six months had literally run out of space for another book. Meanwhile, Victor Lieberman, a Southern California clothing salesman, was equally awash in the flood of books pouring into his Studio City condo. The men met each other through a mutual pal, discovered their shared passion for fiction, and decided to relieve the congestion in their domestic situations by opening a bookstore.

They leased a storefront on Melrose Avenue before that street was trendy, installed shelves, and were soon doing a robust trade. They added vintage magazines, eccentric non-fiction, art books, and memorabilia to their sizable offering of hardbound fiction. Their customers included Robin Williams, Linda Ronstadt, Jerry Brown, Jackson Browne and notables from the film business, including director Paul Bartel and studio exec Roger Birnbaum.

Pettler became the day-to-day manager, and Lieberman looked for deals on books as he traveled around the country selling business attire. At a Waldenbooks in Dallas, for example, he found a dozen remaindered mint copies of Endless Love, by Scott Spencer, and bought them for a dollar each. Back on Melrose they fetched $7.50 apiece.

When I clerked there one afternoon as a temp I sold fourteen copies of The Last Good Kiss, signed by the author, the late James Crumley, for $25 apiece, even though Random House had printed $8.95 clearly on the dust jacket. The market was eagerly bearing this price because Hollywood figured Crumley’s career as a screenwriter would eventually land him on the A List, the book is considered by some critics one of the best hard-boiled detective tales ever told, and Crumley had cultivated a heavy-drinking, coked-out, redneck persona movie people found compelling.

Plus, Lieberman owned every mint copy of the book ever printed. He’d bought the entire stock of some 4000 remainders for 17 cents apiece from the publisher, whose marketing department, for some reason, had given up on the title. The UPS guy who delivered them on shrink-wrapped pallets was not amused.

Meanwhile, Pettler, then Lieberman, got married. The houses they moved into with their brides were way bigger than their apartments, and their personal libraries began to grow again. When the Liebermans moved to a ranch-style in San Juan Capistrano they spent $20,000 building bookcases, then the same amount installing their library into an Ozzie-and-Harriet on Bainbridge Island, Washington, and $25,000 when they moved back south to a Mission-style in Carlsbad, California.

I began fantasizing about the money we were going to get. Well, no, we didn’t have anything like Lieberman’s crown jewel, a nearly flawless, first issue, first printing of Catcher in the Rye with a photograph of J. D. Salinger on the back panel, a rare edition worth at least $15,000. But I thought we had some nice items, nearly mint copies of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, a dozen other first editions signed by the authors, and one of only 200 copies of a limited-edition title, The Muddy Fork, autographed by James Crumley.I didn’t want to guess what price our collection might command, knowing it was unlikely we’d turn a profit, but I looked forward to filling our empty library again with that new-book smell.

When the buyer finally called with a quote I thought there’d been a malfunction in my cell phone. I shook the thing savagely, and asked the guy to say it again. But, alas, I’d heard him correctly the first time. Fifty dollars.

After I reminded him that I’d purchased dozens of these books from him for between $8 and $15 apiece he was apologetic, but wouldn’t budge. He didn’t want most of our titles because he said he couldn’t resell them for more than a buck each. However, he’d set aside one box of titles he thought he could unload for a small profit. And at least he had the courtesy to tell me The Muddy Fork might fetch $250 at auction on E-bay. When I asked him what in the hell happened to the market there was silence on the other end.

The internet, he finally mumbled, in the tones you’d announce an attack by flesh-eating bacteria. Once I started surfing book sites on the Web I saw why he was distressed. And I was embarrassed that I had assumed the book market would remain stable in a capitalist economy where the value of every other commodity is in constant flux. Before the Web, collections like ours typically made their way into the insignificant used market only after the owners died and their heirs pried the books from their cold, dead fingers. We were obviously not paying attention, but by 2001, when Amazon began turning a profit, the physical love of Americans for their books had died. Nowadays the moment a publisher launches a new novel you can buy a copy of it for a fraction of the cover price from a host of internet merchants who themselves buy direct from the publishers and book wholesalers. Some of these entrepreneurs, presumably working out of their parents’ basements, are “penny sellers” who make their money from shipping and handling fees.

So why pay retail? Apparently, most readers don’t. And now we won’t either. After Christmas we bought enough hardbound novels for a dollar apiece to get us through the winter, caring not one whit whether a title was a first edition or a fifteenth (we still won’t buy paperbacks—you just don’t know where they’ve been).  If one of them reeks of cheap perfume or mildew we cook the stink out of it in the microwave. We dog-ear the pages, scribble notes in the margins, put our coffee cups and soup bowls on them. When we finish one we throw it in the fireplace. As for our collection, whenever we’re invited to a party or dinner we don’t take wine, we take books.

Later this year we’re going to stop buying books altogether. At least the ones made of paper. Although we probably won’t fall in love with our shiny new Kindle, it won’t break our hearts.

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Notes From Dark Acres By Bill Vaughn

Converted. When we decided to give up satellite television so we could buy vodka and food, our only remaining viewing options were the local stations broadcasting for free from Missoula, Montana. Because they’ve been compelled by Federal law to upgrade from an analog to a digital format we had to get an outdoor antenna and a converter box so we could watch their stuff on our old  television. A floor model bought on the cheap twenty years ago, it recently decided to show programs only in black and white. But as soon as we got our $40 coupon from the Department of Commerce, which came in the form of a debit card, we headed straight off to Best Buy.
 
When we got there we were disgusted to find that there was only one model of converter for sale. Worse, it was made in China, a country whose products we try to avoid. This boycott has been a challenge, since most every product we stupid Americans seem to need is made poorly by this grotesque mutant born from the unholy coupling of capitalism and communism. However, with our coupon the little piece of junk cost less than $10. The “instructions” were written in Pidgin: “This step only need to perform once after connection and it is only require if you did not scan the local channel before—scan analog channels by following the instruction of your TV."

The antenna set us back about $100. However, unlike the converter box, it made us happy. For two reasons: First, it was manufactured in Eureka, Missouri. Second, it came with fun instructions such as these: “Warning: Do not attempt to install if drunk, pregnant or both. Do not throw antenna at spouse.”





Nekkers. Montanans who trap and kill wild animals for their fur, so rich bitches in the cities can accessorize their club ensembles, are being challenged by Footloose Montana, which is waging an information campaign against these redneck morons and their cynical, ignorant customers.

Footloose argues that the suffering caused wild animals, and to the hundreds of pets injured or killed by traps along Montana's streams, far outweighs any considerations about the heritage of living off the land parroted by trappers. In fact, most of the dolts who trap have real jobs, and don't make any significant cash from their blood sport.

Meanwhile, a national print ad campaign against this cruel and archaic practice has been mounted by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). In the ads tasty celebrities photographed nekkers and semi-nekkers say “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur” in an attempt to convince consumers to stop buying and wearing fur.

Shown above, for example is Khloe Kardashian, a reality television star and socialite.


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Being There First
Accidents of history have placed us in the elite ranks
of Montana's most venerable Gaelic families. By Bill Vaughn

BECAUSE I WAS RAISED in a building that previously sheltered turkeys, the news that I was actually a blueblood came as quite a shock. No, I can’t trace my people to the Bourbons, the House of Tudor, the Kennedy’s or even the Osmonds.

But it is a fact that in 1866 my great-grandfather, trembling with greed, joined a rush of equally foul-smelling fools who galloped off in the dead of winter from Last Chance Gulch in what is now Helena to the Sun River Country—where Charles M. Russell would set his paintings of cowboys and Indians—after some frontier wit spread a bogus rumor of gold. The date of the Sun River Stampede is important because it establishes that old Thomas Moran had set up housekeeping before 1869 in what would become the Treasure State. And that accident of history qualified me to join our premier organization of vintage names—the Sons and Daughters of Montana Pioneers.

As the date of my induction in Helena approached I got a little bit jumpy. First, would the other Sons and Daughters be snooty? After all, although Thomas Moran possessed determination and courage, he wasn’t exactly a fine gentleman. Before he made his way to Montana he had fled his family's miserable shack in County Waterford, Ireland, was rejected for service in the Civil War, and sailed off in a snit to San Francisco. The only work he could in the Bay Area was milking cows, a task that compelled him to soak his hands at night in pails of cold water. Finally, he decided to ride a horse to Montana.

But Kitty Herrin, my wife, reminded me that most of the citizens who founded this high, wide and handsome place were also scum. In fact, she and her four sisters, who had likewise been accepted into the Pioneers, claimed as their legacy a thief who built a minor fortune stealing cattle from his employers, and who lost it because he couldn’t stop getting married.

But my other anxiety was more vexing. The keynote speaker would be Stephen Ambrose, the best-selling author of Band of Brothers and Undaunted Courage, a history of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. I had just published an article in a magazine about a long journey of my own, playing golf and drinking vodka along the Lewis and Clark Trail from Great Falls to St. Charles, Missouri. To say that my account was not an academic treatment would be kind. In it, for example, I had described the explorers as carnivorous, murderous barbarians, and deduced that Meriweather Lewis was a homosexual who’d been having an affair with Peter Cruzatte, one of his men, both of whom were deeply into leather. I had further hypothesized that when Cruzatte shot Lewis in the butt during an elk hunt in North Dakota the assault had been intentional, the result of a lovers’ spat, and not accidental, as Lewis had claimed.

Still, I couldn’t be certain that Ambrose had read this hare-brained literature. But when we got to the dinner and saw the distinguished historian in bifocals and an angry red tie poring over his notes at the head table, my stomach sank. I began to imagine the vocabulary with which he would roast my eccentric scholarship, and how the Pioneers would rise, fingers pointing me to the door, eyes burning like those of Red Sox fans the night Bill Buckner let that grounder hop between his legs. Kitty patted my hand and ordered a beer. A gang of bushy-faced men in buckskin and fur filed through the door to honor the explorers with a loud rendition of a song from the period called The Lowering Day. Then they sat down at a table together to gorge themselves on beef.  

Two hours later, long after the dessert plates were cleared, the officers of the Pioneers were still giving each other awards and eulogizing dead comrades. Ambrose looked like he’d been trapped in night court. The speaker began announcing the organization’s 70 new members. As she called out my name I slouched in my chair and pretended that the program was the most riveting prose I’d ever read.

When he was finally introduced Ambrose stared right at me and launched into a story in a gruff, overused voice about how a twenty-something T-shirt clerk in the mall where he had signed copies of his book that day asked him who Lewis and Clark were.

“‘You graduated from high school in Montana and you don’t know Lewis and Clark?’” Ambrose growled, a mimic of himself.

“‘Well, I’ve, you know, heard the names?” he warbled in falsetto. “But, like, when were they?’”

I pushed myself lower in my chair. At the next table one of the senior Pioneers, head down, hands on his glutinous American belly, was already nodding off. He dropped into a deep coma when Ambrose began describing two chapters of the book his publisher had axed. They dealt with the tribes who helped the Corps of Discovery through its first winter and over the Rockies.

“Without the Mandans and the Nez Perce Lewis and Clark might never have seen the Pacific,” he said, looking out at us. There was not, of course, a single Indian face looking back. “The Canadians would have armed the Blackfeet. And none of you would be here.”

It was a terrific speech. The applause even woke up our dozing Pioneer. But I wasn’t about to give Ambrose another chance to nail me in front of this partisan crowd. When the applause died and a blonde got up to sing God Bless America, accompanied by a boombox instrumental in what sounded like a whole other key, I took Kitty by the elbow. Clutching our little blue Montana Pioneer ribbons, we slipped out into the hot, starless night and went looking for a martini. 

[On a related note here's information about the Irish sobriety test]  

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More Notes From Dark Acres By Bill Vaughn

The P-I is dead. Long live the P-I. The last newsprint edition of the venerable Seattle Post-Intelligencer, born in 1863, was published on St. Patrick's Day. But the Web version of the paper soldiers on.

Numerous reporters and editors have announced that they turned down management's offer to join the new enterprise. These include David McCumber, managing editor, who was once the editor of Montana's Big Sky Journal, or, as freelancers dubbed it, the Big Guy Journal. The 100,000-circulation P-I is the first major U.S. paper to go all-digital.

Two of the newspaper's more famous employees over the years included novelist Tom Robbins, author of Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, and Frank Herbert, who wrote Dune.

The newspaper's parent corporation, Hearst, failed to find a buyer for the struggling daily, which has been leaking money for years. The old P-I, which wouldn't give me a job in 1974 when I needed one, forcing me to paste up grocery ads for the Queen Anne News, employed 181 people. The Web version will employ 20 editorial workers and 20 people in sales.

No call zone. If you want to combat telemarketers call 1-888-382-1222 and register your sell fone number with the national Do Not Call List. U.S. numbers will be made public within 31 days. If one of these scumbags calls you after your number has been registered you can file a complaint by contacting the Federal Trade Commission.

Another blank screen. For the second time in three weeks a Missoula, Montana television station has suddenly gone off the air. As we settled in the morning of March 14 to watch Memphis play Tulsa for the Conference USA title, Channels 7 and 8, which are owned by KPAX, went mute and blind. It wasn't until a couple hours later that an announcement appeared advising viewers not to call the station about the problem, it was being fixed. And after a while it was fixed, but we didn't get to see Memphis destroy Tulsa 64-39.

On Feb. 22 KTMF went off the air an hour into its broadcast of the Academy Awards. We assume these problems have something to do with the new HDTV technology, and not with some evil troll lodged in our tube waiting for us to gather for one of our beloved live events. But the thought did occur to us that someone might be watching us watch them. If so, knock it off.

Plus ça change. Every once in a while a student or a teacher at the University of Montana expresses something that deeply offends another member of the academic community, and the shit hits the fan. That’s partly because UM is funded largely by the tax dollars of Montanans, whose worst elements tend to be politically and socially conservative backward, ignorant and provincial buffoons, and the offendees have a long history of trying to press their case in the court of public opinion, and failing.

In the most recent of the First Amendment issues on Missoula’s visually stunning old campus, a senior journalism student named Bess Davis has penned seven weekly columns called “Bess Sex” in the Montana Kaimin, the student body’s excellent four-times-a-week newspaper. The columns have deeply offended Kristen Juras, an appropriately named assistant professor of law specializing in property and business transactions. Juras doesn’t like the transactions portrayed in Davis’ column, and has complained to the Kaimin editor in writing and in person. The column is “embarrassingly unprofessional,” Juras said. “It affects my reputation as a member of the faculty.”

Davis admits she’s not a trained sexologist but likes sex and has “been at this for awhile now.” Her frank, funny and unashamed columns have explored sex toys and virginity and sexual positions. “You start out in a standard missionary position,” she advises, “then Top sits upright on his knees, placing one of Bottom’s legs on his shoulder. Top then leans down enough for Bottom to wrap the other leg around Top’s back and lift her hips off the bed. In this position, depending on the flexibility and stamina of both partners, either can thrust their hips and even kiss the other’s lips from the position.”

Davis concludes by writing “I’m not sure if this position has a name, but my boyfriend calls it That Thing You Did That One Time And It Was Awesome.”

Although the Kaimin doesn’t receive direct funds from the state of Montana, and its office was provided by a private donor, it’s housed in a state-owned building on state-owned land and uses state-owned equipment to produce the tabloid. The paper’s operating expenses come from advertising sales and from a recycling fee charged to students.

Juras, whose son is enrolled at UM, says that if the Kaimin editor will not squelch Davis' column she will bring the matter to the University’s Publication Board. Failing to get her way there she vows to go to the Montana Board of Regents and the Legislature, one member of which she claims to have already contacted.

As Harry Truman said, the only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.

In 1967 a non-tenured English instructor named Denny Blouin assigned a controversial book to his freshman UM English class. The Student as Nigger, a collection of essays and stories, was written by Jerry Farber, who’s now 73 and teaches at the University of California in San Diego. The title essay compares college kids to slaves, professors to slave-owners, and the university to the plantation. These dubious comparisons aside, what happened next was the stuff of, first, farce—then even more farce.

One of Blouin’s students brought the book home with her, and it was discovered by her father, Lt. Colonel Keith Angwin, a University of Montana ROTC “professor.” Here’s some of what the colonel read: “School is where you let the dying society put its trip on you. Our schools may seem useful: to make children into doctors, sociologists, engineers—to discover things. But they’re poisonous as well. They exploit and enslave students; they petrify society; they make democracy unlikely. And it’s not what you’re taught that does the harm but how you’re taught. Our schools teach you by pushing you around, by stealing your will and your sense of power, by making timid square apathetic slaves out of you—authority addicts.”

But that wasn’t what blew Angwin’s gaskets. As Farber would recall: “He sent faculty members copies of the essay, in which he had underlined all the objectionable words—all the way down to such modest vulgarities as ‘rat’s ass.’ To my surprise the colonel even underlined ‘provo’ (I suppose that, not knowing what it meant, he didn’t want to take any chances). Interestingly enough, though the colonel’s delicate sensibilities required him to underline ‘student-faculty lovemaking’ and ‘goddamn school,’ it never occurred to him to underline ‘nigger.’ Before long the article became a major issue in a state-wide campaign to defeat a higher-education tax levy referendum. Thousands of copies were mailed to voters. Accompanying material urged citizens to vote down the referendum in protest and referred to ‘The Student As Nigger’ as a ‘dirty, filthy source of moral poison,’ ‘degenerate writing’ and ‘obscene pornographic smut’ (the three biggies here in one memorable phrase).”

However, the referendum narrowly passed and the University’s funding was ensured. Blouin, however, left Montana a couple of years later after the school refused to renew his contract.

As for Col. Angwin, an enterprising reporter for the Kaimin, T. J. Gilles, who now teaches Spanish and writes a column for the Billings Outpost, discovered that Anguin had been arrested in Salt Lake City not long after the tempest surrounding Farber’s manifesto. The charges? Soliciting the services of a prostitute. Anguin’s “academic” career ended in 1968, soon after his arrest, and he died a short time later.  

The Anguin comedy was preceded in the early 1960s by controversy surrounding the Kaimin editorials of David Rorvik, whose naughty words and extreme views excited ultra right-wing elements that wanted the University punished for allowing such an outlandish libertarian an official podium. Rorvik went on to establish a distinguished and lucrative career as a journalist, although his 1978 book In His Image, about the alleged cloning of a human being, resulted in a major lawsuit against his publisher, and branded Rorvik as the fabricator of a hoax.

Before that, in the late 1940s, UM Professor Leslie Fiedler, a world-class literary critic and scholar, enraged Montanans by attempting as head of the English Department to hire a black man. The ensuing fracas resulted in the resignation of UM’s president, who opposed the hire, in a campaign orchestrated by Fiedler. Earlier, Fiedler had described in an essay called “Montana, or the End of Jean-Jacques Rousseau," something he called “The Montana Face.” It is a face, he wrote, “full of self-sufficient stupidity; a little later it appeared simply inarticulate, with all the dumb pathos of what cannot declare itself: a face developed not for sociability or feeling, but for facing into the weather.”

Th efforts of Kristen Juras to subvert the First Amendment, like those of her antecedents on the far right, will do nothing but strengthen the First Amendment, a gift from the right-wing lunatic fringe that just keeps on giving.

Doing without. The financial waters at Dark Acres have always been choppy—some years we make a few bucks, other years not so much. While we enjoyed a comparatively bountiful 2008 thanks to a minor insurance settlement and some luck in the horse business, 2009 is looking grim, as it is for most everyone. For example, our modest little pension fund has lost a third of its value in the last year.

So we've decided to trim some of the foam from our lattes. We started this cost-cutting after our glass coffee pot shattered and we discovered that the java tastes better when it's collected in a warmed stainless steel bowl. So we realized we can get through the morning just fine without spending $20 on a new pot. That led us to thinking about other things we could do without until les bon temps roulent encore. Such as:

1. HBO. Although Home Box Office hasn't been able to return to the salad days of The Sopranos, it still offers some terrific series, including Big Love, the Mormon passion play, and Flight of the Conchords, the story of nerdy New Zealand musicians set adrift in Manhattan. But friends gave us a subscription to Netflix for Xmas, so we'll wait until our fave shows are collected there on DVD before sitting down to watch them.

2. Bombay gin. This was a tough decision made a little more palatable by our copious consumption of cheap frozen vodka at Happy Hour instead.

3. Costco deli. Goodbye to dry salami, pork tamales, prosciutto, whole roasted chickens, and those enormous pot pies. This year we'll make our main courses exclusively from local bison, which we'll buy wholesale from White's in Ronan, a quarter of a carcass at a time stored in the freezer. (We've been boycotting beef for years because of the industry's disgraceful attitudes about streamside access and the Yellowstone bison herd).

4. Land-line telephones. Gone. History. Now our telecommmunications will be carried out exclusively on cell phones, and our faxes will arrive as PDFs in our email. (Generation Boomerang knows all about this, but until now we wouldn't listen to them.)

5. New books. We don't mean to give up reading, just buying. It's ridiculous to pay $28 for a shiny new novel from a bookstore when you can order the same title from Amazon, previously read, for a buck or two. And if the thing smells of cats, cheap perfume or mildew we'll cook the stink out of it in the microwave.

6. New clothes. We got a couple of hoodies and sweaters for Xmas, and we'll wear these until they're shredded. Since we only don our go-to-town clothes when we go to town, they'll probably last so long they'll actually become fashionable again.

Disappearing Act. Following the lead of many troubled newspapers, which is most of them, the Feb. 24 issue of the Missoula, Montana Missoulian is a smaller sheet size than the Feb. 23 issue.

While the publisher believes the change will be an effective measure against the growing costs of newsprint the move is like responding to the flesh-eating bacteria chewing off your dick by changing from boxer shorts to jockeys. Or, as Montana journalist Dan Vichorek said about his own life, it's like flying in smaller and smaller circles until one day disappearing up one's own ass.

Mangled metaphors aside, time is running out for America’s daily papers, whose debt is climbing, revenues are descreasing, and costs of circulation and production are out of control. Before they tank completely the industry will be forced to make fundamental changes, not minor mends. Here are my suggestions for the Missoulian:

1. Dump the print edition, and put all your troops on the front lines of the Web. Charge a subscription for this product and issue passwords to subscribers. Build a firewall around your product so Google and Yahoo and all the other content thieves can’t crawl it. Tease potential subscribers with free blogs, headlines and contests that give away neat stuff like Kindles and money. Some readers will complain that they don’t know how to use a computer. Fuck ‘em.

2. Sell your pricey physical plant on the Clark Fork and the presses that are costing you a fortune in business equipment and property taxes. If you can't sell the presses cut them up with a torch and peddle them for scrap.

3. Fire the circulation staff. Hire more reporters and move everyone into cheap cubicles in one of those big hangars in the industrial parks next to the airport.

4. Stop publishing national and international news. We’ve already heard everything on Fox or MSNCB. Get rid of the stock page, the television schedule, and canned shit such as the
“Health” section (Jeez, even lowly AOL offers copious “health” advice, and does it far better). We can find all this alleged information, and in much more depth, elsewhere. Drop the funnies. Local news is far funnier.

Concentrate on the kind of investigative reporting that will reveal the corruption and good-old-boyism rampant in the Missoula business community. You know the guys and gals I’m talking about. Your courts and crime reporting is already terrific and you could do even more. Report bankruptcies and ugly divorces and civil suits in detail. Name names. Publish juicy quotes. Publish the names of Deadbeat Dads (and Moms). Lobby the Legislature to give the press access to real estate transactions. Publish the detailed campaign finance reports compiled by followthemoney.org. Ask scumbags such as House District 100 Representative Bill Nooney why he takes campaign finance money from anti-democratic corporate entities like the Montana Contractors Association.   —Bill Vaughn

And the award for worst picture goes to . . . KTMF in Missoula, Montana. When we watch the Academy Awards we don’t really care who wins the Oscars because we’re too cheap to go to theatres, preferring to wait a year or two for the films to show up on HBO or Netflix. But because we were friends with an actress nominated a couple decades ago for an Oscar we’re interested in the glitz, cheesy as it is, and the parade of glitterati, overdressed and overcoiffed as they are.

So we sat down with Martinis the evening of Feb. 22, saw an hour of the red carpet and a bit of the ceremony, when suddenly the screen went blank. At first we thought there was something wrong with our ancient set (which has decided it will only broadcast in black and white). But when we clicked over to Big Love the Mormons there looked robust, as usual. Then we wondered if there’d been an earthquake in L.A. But, no, Fox and MSNCB were not bringing us breaking news alerts of any disaster.

Then  we remembered that the same blackout occurred on Oscar night in 2007. The culprit then, as now, was our local ABC affiliate, KTMF. Disappointed and half-hammered, we gave up on the Oscars and consoled ourselves with Flight of the Conchords and ESPN. Checking back before we staggered off to bed, we finally saw an announcement on Channel 23 that the station was experiencing technical difficulties.

The next morning we called Linda Gray, the station manager, who explained that the technical problem had something to do with the switch on Feb. 17 from an analog signal to a digital signal. Although we’ve read Electricity for Dummies from cover to cover we didn’t understand much of her explanation about kilowatts, intermittent interference with the signal, Bresnan or the new owner of KTMF’s equipment, which is Sprint. We think she said that Sprint has constructed a tight security firewall around the broadcasting site in Missoula and wouldn’t admit a technician from Media Max, which owns KTMA. Finally, Ms. Gray, apologetic and mindful of the many Oscar parties ruined, said there was a theory that because the equipment is located in a building on Railroad Street the culprit might be the electromagnetic surge generated by trains. Who knew?

Anyway, if you want to file a complaint with the FCC against KTMF here’s the link: http://esupport.fcc.gov/complaints.htm. If you want to tell the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences one reason why ratings for their Big Show have plummeted in Missoula, Montana their fax is (310) 859-9619 and their telephone is (310) 247-3000.

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Sport Feuding
It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood. By Bill Vaughn

AS THE DROUGHT OF 2000 ground on forever like the invader in some perpetual Eurasian tank war, the forests of the West burned to ash, the broasted air filled with smoke, and everywhere was the growl of bombers flying off to heave slurry at the fires. Tensions, as the anchorpersons say, escalated, both those that spring from reality and those confected by delusion. In late July, when 300 Hell’s Angels roared into Missoula, Montana, to party hardy at their annual bash, the chief of police countered with 170 reinforcements. Such is the nature of this hip college burg that one sweltering night after the bikers retired from the bars to the ski hill they’d rented, a quadrille of cops in body armor attacked a noisy crowd of civilians gathered in the smoky streets to protest all the cops, and blasted everyone in sight with pepper spray. South of the city a minister’s son, a father of five, was charged with beating to death an older neighbor who had brandished a .32 revolver to illustrate a point about the younger man’s incessantly howling redbone hounds.

For me, these dramas were simply atmosphere, no more than scrim, I admit, for my own private passion play—the simmering feuds with the rednecks we’d lived among since 1990, squabbles petty and not so petty that were finally coming to a boil under the weary ocher skies. But such is the nature of what I call the Squalor Zone—the rural backwater surrounding Mis­soula but fifty years removed from its liberal sensibilities—that folks just naturally like to get in your face. The topics of debate are standard: “Resolved: Whereas your dog (mule, horse, cow, child, fence, hunting ethics, resource management practices, respect for private property) could stand improvement, sir, mine is above reproach. You fucking asshole.”

Even my wife, Kitty, and I had begun to annoy one another by skulking around on tiptoes and checking over our shoulders. As the temperatures rose all summer, baking the soil to dust, we fretted about fire, of course. The forest at Dark Acres—our little slice of Shangri-la on the river a three-hour float from the heart of town—was so littered with wind-sheared timber that any combustion in this parched jungle could erupt into a firestorm that would consume our house and shop and corrals as well. We stopped riding back there or putting out our horses to graze because their steel shoes might strike a rock and throw a lethal spark. But since our insurance was top-notch, and the flames would win whether we fought them or not, we prepared an evacuation plan based on unconditional surrender: We’d turn out the horses into the stubblefields of the ranch next door, sweep up our computers, and flee in our trucks to the Holiday Inn, where we’d holed up when the Clark Fork River flooded in 1997 because management allows dogs in the rooms, and because the bartender made a nice Martini.

We were also paranoid about our heavily armed neighbors. Although the borders between fiefdoms all up and down the river had been sealed in reaction to the latest escalation in the quarrels, we couldn’t feel completely secure. Dark Acres had been fired on before, and there was no force preventing us from being fired on again. Some of the gunplay had been intentional, and some of it was the result of breathtaking stupidity. Our No Trespassing

signs had all been blown to smithereens with birdshot from a twelve-gauge. And in a parody of the trapped citizens of Sarajevo whose days were haunted by snipers, we had cowered helplessly more than once at the demoralizing whistle of aimless volleys fired by half-wits from the cliffs across the river just for the festive sounds they made.

Because we’d been banned from riding our horses or even walking across the acreages of our downstream neighbors, who built prickly new fences and sowed the woods with Stay Out signs to keep the world away, I felt compelled to respond by enforcing an embargo around Dark Acres as well. First, we replaced a section of corroded barbed wire with a proper post-and-rail fence. Instead of extending this expensive barrier into a portion of the frontier that was at the mercy of runoffs in the spring, we built a wall of debris—timbers and branches woven around tripods lashed with nylon, a hedgerow that would disintegrate across our nearest neighbor’s pasture when the next flood crashed into it. What fun!

Then I posted myself to sentry duty. Every afternoon I shimmied up the angled trunk of a ponderosa, which had been killed by bark beetles and toppled against a pair of cottonwoods by the wind, to hide in the foliage. I issued myself a walkie-talkie, a Wrist-Rocket slingshot, and a bag of inch-wide stones from the river. At the first sign of fire I would call Kitty, who was working back at the shop on one of the books she designs for publishers, so she could deal with the horses before they had a chance to panic. Or, if I got into a skirmish with a trespasser, she could call the sheriff. The slingshot, I told myself, was there for protection.

After the first shift, in late July, I wandered back to the house, thoroughly bored. So the second day I took along the Audubon Society’s Field Guide to North American Birds. By then the temperatures were topping 100 and the smoke from the forest fires had stifled the lifeless air, compelling most creatures to lay low and take it easy. However, I did spot a hummingbird, a crazed pileated woodpecker and a dissolute northern pygmy owl, which huddled in the hole a red-shafted flicker had bored into a dead cottonwood while looking for bugs. And then, on the fourth or fifth day of my vigil, my eyes watering from the smoke, I spied a larger smudge of movement in a stand of hawthorns.

“Kitty, come in,” I said softly.

“Yeah?” she answered as if she were talking to herself.

“There’s someone here.”

“Who’s here?”

 “Stay tuned.”

After a moment Kitty came back on. “Honey?”

“What?”

“You’re not turning into your father, are you?”

Ouch.

I wondered if I was. Anyway, what had spooked me was only a Bambi, which had emerged from the brush behind his mamma after drinking from the river. I lowered my slingshot, rubbed my eyes, and decided that I’d logged enough reconnaissance time for one day.

That night we lay in our big bed with Clara the Border collie and Radish the red heeler, sweating in 100-degree heat, listening to the incessant yowl of the hounds a moron up the road confined year-round in cages except for a single trip to the woods on a mountain lion hunt. Suddenly, the pitch in their chorus jumped an octave, as if they’d been kicked in the nuts. Our horses snorted and stamped, and the cattle on the ranch began bawling. Then every cur in earshot was barking. When Clara and Radish leapt from our bed and rushed to the door I followed, yelling at Kitty to brace herself for the earthquake I believed was ready to rumble. But there was no earthquake, of course. The next morning we learned that a ranch hand had spotted a mountain lion in the stubblefields stalking prey, whether calves or Bambis no one would ever know.

The milky red sun that rose on July 31 looked like an infected puncture wound. As the morning wore on the occluded glow it cast on the Squalor Zone turned a lovely and toxic shade of salmon. By noon, with the temperature at ninety-three degrees and the humidity at 9 percent, the sun disappeared completely behind the smoke, and the visibility fell to 400 yards. And then a hot wind from the west began to blow. Within two hours the mountains that ring the Squalor Zone revealed themselves for the first time in days, the Garnets to the east, the Sapphires to the south, the Missions to the north, and the Bitterroots everywhere in between. What we saw among these familiar heights were towering columns of white smoke, a scene chillingly reminiscent of those apocalyptic flicks that showed America after it had been greeted with a thermonuclear surprise.

Midmorning I was catnapping in my hammock, trying to muster the energy to return to the woods for sentry duty, when all the shouting began. My first groggy notion was that someone was challenging me to come out and fight. But it wasn’t some feudist causing all the ruckus, it was a fire. You could feel its deep-throated roar as much as hear it. An angry funnel of greasy black smoke had already climbed into the air. But it wasn’t our forest that was burning; the fire was devouring a cluttered acreage across the road we called the Rent Trailer. 

“Bring more!” Kitty yelled as she ran down our drive toward this inferno, dragging a pair of garden hoses behind her.

A disorganized crew of frantic Zoners had gathered by the time I arrived. Because the electricity in the rusted mobile home failed after the wind had frayed a wire, which had shorted out in an explosion of sparks that sprayed an outbuilding filled with firewood, the strategy was to bring a hose line from a house farther on down the lane in order to get some water on the flames. But in the confusion we kept hooking up to its own self whatever hose came to hand, male part to female, as the fire roared out of control. The trailer itself was still unscathed, but the fire had leveled the outbuilding, destroyed an old tractor and was feasting on mounds of the sort of junk you always find in netherlands like these. The threat of these flames jumping to the properties around it was what had brought the neighborhood together for this rare collective effort. (However, when our kitchen caught on fire in the winter of 1999 only one neighbor, an affable Christian man, rushed to help us put it out.)

The occupants of the Rent Trailer had escaped unsinged. Mom herded her three kids and a pair of vicious Rottweilers into the family van while Dad tried to save the chickens. A big-voiced four-year-old named Chantile, whose singing you could hear during happier times from a great distance, hung her head and wept as framed photos inside the trailer began to pop from the heat. We backed away, utterly defeated.

I looked across the sooted crowd and caught the eye of Junior Dugan, a diesel mechanic with whom I had exchanged not one civil word in seven years, not since our bout over zoning featured him in one corner, building himself yet another house on the eleven acres I called Dugania, facing off against me, a happy meddler from the property next door, lobbying the county to shut him down. He was sporting his trademark buzz-cut and one of his hundreds of vintage white T-shirts, still gleaming despite the burning mess. In the distance the wail of sirens began to grow.

Kitty and I stared at the parade of midweek gawkers idling by in their pickups on the county lane. Would Emmitt Hooper show up, I wondered, the retired postal worker with whom our conflict about water rights had nearly come to blows? What about C. R. Copeland, a lumber mill worker who had enraged everyone by erecting a barbed wire Berlin Wall around a delectable parcel of open range in order to keep his cattle in and the world out? And where was the neighborhood’s loosest cannon, Jay Zank, a chronically underemployed road construction go-fer who trespassed at will by cutting fences, encouraged his bony equines to graze on other people’s pastures, and shotgunned the No Trespassing signs we threw up in defense? (I have changed the names of the feudists in this chronicle).

Why is it, I wondered, that people living in pastoral outbacks like this, where the chief form of exercise is jumping to conclusions, seem to quarrel all the time? After all, each of us has clear title to our corner of the garden that has become the American Dream yet again after the rush to the cities and the suburbs that began after World War II, the small land holdings Thomas Jefferson figured would make even the most loutish wastrel a citizen. Is there something about that most counterfeit of vanities—the pride of land ownership itself—that makes us so imperious? Are we insanely jealous of these bits of real estate because the larceny that delivered them to us, the brutalization of the tribes by our great-grandfathers, is still fresh, reminding us of how tenuous is our grasp of this land? Is it because working class people in the sticks are accustomed to warfare on a daily basis and just enjoy conflict as a sport? Are we all just so confused about the law that the line between acceptable and unacceptable has washed away like our fences in the floods? Or could it be that the core of the problems I’ve had here wasn’t about other people at all—it was about me?

CLASS CONFLICT might be the engine that drives history, but it’s the feud we remember. Jew v. Arab, Catholic v. Protestant, black v. white, in the end it’s always about land. When it comes to feuding in America, however, it’s often unclear where the battle lines are drawn. Sometimes it’s a matter of one against all and all against one. Take the violent dance that unwound in the hollows of Greene County, Virginia, during Prohibition. The players in this running skirmish were from the Shiflett and the Morris clans, families that had intermarried so often during their two centuries of troubled coexistence in the Blue Ridge Mountains that their surnames were simply formalities. No one knew the origin of the warfare, which was born from “The Code of the Hills,” a body of unwritten rules about vengeance, vigilantes, and hillbilly conduct holding that, for example, if you knock up my sister, I’ll burn down your house. But at its most bellicose it indeed seemed to have revolved around moonshining.  [read more]
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Empire of the Sun
Our star injects our teeth and bones with Vitamin D, and it feels good when it shines on us. But if we're not vigilant it will eat us alive. By Bill Vaughn

AMERICANS have always believed that if a little bit is good a whole lot must be better; and if a whole lot is bad, any must be awful. Take sunshine, for example. A century ago polite society fled from it. Pale was chic because proles were tan. But as the working class moved indoors bronze replaced peaches-and-cream as the bourgeoisie’s skin color of choice. By the time Beach Blanket Bingo hit the drive-ins sun worship had enslaved white America. The results of that rapture were forty-year-olds with sixty-year-old skin, a doubling of the skin cancer rates, and now a whole new class of solarphobes who would no more lay out in a chaise lounge than Dracula.

What makes sunshine dangerous is ultraviolet radiation. Shortwave UV-B rays are the main cause of sunburn and at least two of the three skin cancers inflicted on humans. UV-B also contributes to the breakdown of collagens and elastins, the proteins that make skin tight. Longwave UV-A radiation tans and is responsible for snow blindness, which brings up the issue of using sunscreens in the winter. Use them. Just because it’s cold outside doesn’t mean the sun has stopped burning.

Medically, there’s nothing beneficial about tanning. Skin darkened by exposure to the sun is skin that’s trying to defend itself from even more abuse. UV-A triggers a response in which the brownish-black pigment called melanin rises to the surface to prevent radiation from penetrating any deeper. The surface of black skin contains a lot of melanin. Although very dark skin, whose owner’s ancestors evolved under the African sky, is protected from the sun, it can still get darker and even burned by extreme exposure. The skin of albinos contains no melanin.

Sunscreens mimic melanin by absorbing and deflecting UV radiation. The first commercial screens contained para-aminobenzoic acid, or PABA, an organic compound similar chemically to some vitamins. Since PABA is water-soluble and tends to stain garments, most products these days employ PABA derivatives, cinnamates or other screens. Although they're more water-resistant that PABA you should always reapply them after a dip in the surf or heavy sweating.

Manufacturers rate the defensive abilities of their products with a “Sun Protection Factor” that ranged from SPF 2 to SPF 70. If your skin starts burning after thirty minutes in the sun, the application of an SPF 2 screen will let you stay out for an hour; four hours with a screen rated SPF 8. An SPF 15 screen, at least in the latitudes of North America, is essentially a complete sun black that does invisibly what gobs of zinc oxide used to do. Some dermatologists recommend we use an SPF 15 all the times, citing the fact that over the course of an individual’s life sun damage is cumulative. If you’re middle-aged and you begin to notice liver spots popping up on the back of your hands or your forehead you can thank sun damage for these marks of abuse (after the age of forty the skin of most people begins to lose its natural defenses).  

If you’re one of the 15 percent of the Republic who always burn and never tan—some Micks and Russkies are among this group—an SPF is a necessity if you ever intend to leave your apartment. And you should probably be using something stronger, although when you start buying expensive SPF products of 45 or higher dermatologists question how much block for your buck you’re getting.

Areas often overlooked when applying screens are the neck and the ears, where the skin is thin and sensitive, and the lips, which contain no melanin. For the lips, there are all sorts of screen in stick form, and many cosmetics have SPF ratings.

Once outside, you can run from the sun, but you just can’t hide. Up to 80 percent of the insidious UV rays in sunlight can penetrate a layer of clouds. Twenty to thirty percent can stream through light clothing. Fifty percent can find you under a beach umbrella, since sand reflects light effectively (so does snow). And even if you’re up to your neck in water, up to fifty percent will strike the part of you that’s submerged.

If you do screw up and overexpose your skin there are as many remedies for sunburn as there are hangover cures. Some actually help. Aloe, Vitamin E and hydrocortisone ointments are good. Take a couple of aspirin and draw yourself a cool bath with a touch of baking soda and a mild bath oil. The relief from pain will be instant. Products such as Solarcaine and Bactine deaden the nerve endings, but they can irritate your skin, as well. Old Tropic Dogs swear by Mennon after-shave lotion.

Although most of the news about sunshine seems to be filmed exclusively in Doomerama, our star does supply teeth and bones with Vitamin D, and it does feel good. In the end, if you still believe unshakably that the weathered look is the only way to advertise yourself as Someone Who Has Seen Some Things, at least remember that there is no product on the market that will tan you faster than sunlight.

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Notes from Dark Acres By Bill Vaughn

Drug Capital? Forbes.com reports that the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration's most recent survey reveals that in 2004, 2005 and 2006 13.8 percent of households polled in the Missoula, Montana region admitted using illicit drugs.

However, the article neglects to mention that the “Missoula Region” is considered by the Federal government's substance abuse bureaucrats to include the counties of Flathead, Lake, Lincoln, Mineral, Ravalli, and Sanders, as well as Missoula County. This shabby reporting, which fails to distinguish the city of Missoula from a vast area of western Montana crawling with drug fiends, prompted criticism of the article's author by Missoula County Sheriff Mike McMeekin. “It's just plain sloppy work,” he told KPAX television.

On the larger front, Montana has been battling a methamphetamine epidemic that accounts for 50 percent of the state's adult incarcerations, says the Montana Meth Project, a Missoula-based nonprofit group founded by billionaire Thomas Siebel.

Fridge Thieves Foiled. If you share a refrigerator at work or at home you've probably been the victim of food robbers. Just when you're ready to chomp down on that lucious free-range chicken salad sandwich you spent an hour making last night you discover that some selfish bastard has ripped you off.

But thanks to a new product designed to foil fridge thieves no one will ever want your lunch again. These are individual sandwich bags printed with greenish colored ink that looks like mold. The bags come 25 to a pack and are reusable and recyclable. Plus, 5 percent of each purchase goes to Freedom from Hunger, which says it helps poor women in the Third World. Check it out at thinkofthe.com.

Luxury Too Expensive. Adding to the woes of rich investors who were fleeced by financier Bernie Madoff, comes news, alas, that their coffee tables will be sporting one less glossy show-off magazine.

Forbes Media has shut down the Aspen, Colorado offices of Mountain Time Magazine, a “lifestyle” publication for the super-affluent who own second or third (or fourth) homes in western ski resorts. In an email to staffers, editor Philip Armour opined that “The credit collapse and poor ad sales have led the Forbes family to lose the stomach for enduring the necessary losses that could eventually get the magazine into the black.”

Mountain Time featured articles about recreation and “adventure” á la Outside magazine, and also stuff like the inevitable profile of Robert Redford, reports on high-end cuisine and upscale architecture, and cover shots of rich pretties riding around in horse-drawn sleighs. With a circulation of only 150,000, the mag was distributed in places such as Montana’s Big Sky, Vail, Telluride, Park City, Jackson, Sun Valley and Lake Tahoe, among other destination ski resorts.

Finally, a Good Gravel Bill. Legislation intended to protect Montana’s rural neighborhoods from the gravel Nazis in the construction industry is scheduled for a hearing in the House Natural Resources Committee at 3 pm on Feb. 9. House Bill 313, sponsored by J.P. Pomnichowski of Bozeman, would reinforce the power of county commissioners to site and regulate opencut gravel mines. These operations have ruined rural neighborhoods in Missoula, Gallatin and Flathead Counties, and destroyed the equity homeowners near the mines had built up in their properties. A grave/asphalt/cement scheme that would have destroyed Dark Acres and the wildlife sanctuary that surrounds it was nixed by the Missoula County Commissioners in 2006.

During the last legislative session a bill that would strip counties of the power to protect our neighborhoods was narrowly defeated by a Senate committee. Thugs such as Cary Hegreberg of the Montana Contractor’s Association (MCA) have vowed to bully through laws that will let the industry do whatever it wants without considering the property rights of the neighbors. Hegreberg’s whores in this effort are Sen. Gary Perry of Manhattan (Montana), Rep. Bill Nooney of Missoula and Sen. Bruce Tutvedt of Kalispell.

HB313 would mitigate the damage caused by opencut mines by requiring operators to post bonds and demanding that they obey rules intended to preserve natural resources, aid in the protection of wildlife and aquatic resources, safeguard and reclaim agricultural, recreational, home, and industrial sites affected by gravel mining, protect and perpetuate the taxable value of property through reclamation, protect scenic, scientific, historic, or other unique areas, and promote the health, safety, and general welfare of Montanans.

Vandals Strike. Missoula, Montana, police report that scores of vehicle windows were shot and destroyed with what appears to be a BB gun or guns between the hours of 6 am Feb. 7 and 6 am Feb. 8. Most of these reports of criminal mischief came from the area around Dearborn Avenue in that section of the city near the University of Montana golf course and west of there.

According to MPD Sergeant Ed McClean, one woman whose car was damaged on Feb. 7 was given a rent car by the shop where she took the vehicle to be repaired, only to find the windows of this loaner shot out the next day. There were 82 reports of vehicles and possibly a structure shot during the period (see the police reports below). Police are asking you to call them at 523-4777 if you have any information about these incidents.

First Darwin Award of 2009. On Feb. 7 hundreds of fishermen on Lake Erie decided they wanted to fish deeper water, so they threw wooden pallets across a crack in the ice and began walking. Although the ice was two-feet thick, thanks to recent frigid temperatures, the wind came up, gusted to 35 miles an hour, broke off an enormous slab of ice defined by the crack, and sent it drifting away, stranding the herd of anglers more than a half mile offshore. “We get people out here who don't know how to read the ice," Ottawa County Sheriff Bob Bratton told the Associated Press.  "What happened here today was just idiotic. I don't know how else to put it.” 

Before 134 of these bozos were saved in an expensive rescue effort, one of them fell in the icy drink and died of a heart attack. The good news is, he’ll be thanked by future generations for removing himself from the gene pool.

Six Degrees. Although Kevin Bacon’s prodigious career inspired a trivia game, Six Degrees of Bacon, an actor who grew up in Missoula, Montana and attended the University of Montana has appeared in more movies than Bacon and has appeared with more actors.

J. K. (Jonathan Kimble) Simmons, 54, began his career as a cop in the 1994 film, Popeye Doyle, and has appeared or will soon appear, in at least 83 theatrical films and televisions shows or series. Most recently Simmons played the Dad in Juno, an Academy Award winner, and a CIA bigwig in the peculiar Coen Brothers film, Burn After Reading. Simmons is widely known to fans of cop shows as the police psychiatrist, Emile Skoda, in Law & Order, and the psychopathic inmate, Vernon Schillinger, in Oz. Simmons is the also voice of the yellow M&M in that product’s television ads. 

Simmons’ parents, who still live in Missoula, are retired University of Montana professor Don Simmons, and arts administrator Patricia Kimble Simmons. Every Friday for years Missoula drivers saw them protesting the war in Iraq by holding up a sign on the Higgins Avenue bridge.

Kevin Bacon bragged in 1994 that he was the most connected actor in Hollywood because he’d either worked with every other actor or worked with actors who’d worked with the actors he hadn’t worked with. While the implications of this statement have never been clear, his eponymous party trivia game became all the rage after it was allegedly invented by three students at Albright College. The game assumes that every actor in Hollywood is no more than six people away from Bacon. For example, because Bacon played Chip Diller in the 1978 frat movie, Animal House, and Peter Riegert was in that film as well, you can connect, through two degrees of Bacon, Amy Irving, who played opposite Riegert in Crossing Delancy. And so on, to an undefined conclusion.

Dances With Wolves. On Feb. 5 a New York bankruptcy court released a 163-page list of the 14,000 “customers” who were fleeced by financier Bernie Madoff. While Sandy Koufax, Kevin Bacon, John Malkovich and Kyra Sedgewick are among the notables who lost money to Madoff's $50 billion Ponzi scheme, there are also four Montana entities, at least one of which is an investment counseling business whose clients presumably lost money, as well. They are:

• Dancing LLC (limited liability company), an investment firm with 5 employees located at 1309 S 3rd Ave. in Bozeman. The company’s administrator is Narayan Eric Waldman, who is a licensed investment adviser.
• Eugenia and Gabriel Bellante, listed as principals for Rabin Bellante TIC, 3400 Wagonwheel Road in Bozeman.
• Sandra Carrol, listed as the principal for Walter Davis J/T WROS (Joint Tenancy With Rights Of Survivorship) in Big Timber.
• John and Byrnece Sherman, apparently a living trust, whose principals are listed as Anita D. Moss and M. Garth Sherman, 3980 Parkhill Drive #309 in Billings.

According to its website, a nonprofit foundation called the Oneness Project has been the recipient the last few years of a portion of the earnings from Waldman’s firm. The foundation says it’s dedicated to something called the “Dances of Universal Peace,” created by a Sufi mystic called Samuel L. Lewis, which involves the reading of religious texts, guitar music, and dancing. “Murshid Sam,” the website says, was a disciple of an Indian Sufi teacher called Hazrat Inayat Khan, who was also a Zen roshi and a student of Jewish and Christian mysticism. “Murshid Sam” was a “spiritual mentor” in the San Francisco Bay area at the height of the Haight-Ashbury phenomenon in the late 1960s.

In August 2004 the Oneness Project bought a property in western Montana’s Bitterroot Valley that serves as a retreat center. The organization says the buildings also offer “community space for such activities as yoga, tai chi, presentations in the arts, healing, and spirituality.” The foundation’s motto is “Eat, dance, and pray together.”

Lynne Egan, chief of Montana securities examinations and licensing, told the Associated Press in December that an investment adviser contacted her to report the losses incurred by himself and his clients, including his 94-year-old mother, 95-year-old aunt and his brother and sister. She said he told her that he and at least 32 other Montana investors lost at least $18 million to Madoff. Egan declined to name the adviser, and she declined again on Feb. 5 when contacted by Dark Acres, citing the ongoing investigation Montana is conducting into the matter. Egan said the advisor and his clients “are wiped out, and he is devastated.”



[PHOTO BY STAN HEALY]

Finding Land for Farmers. Feb. 2 marks the launch of Land Link Montana, a nonprofit organization based in Missoula whose goal is to keep agricultural land agricultural. Their mission is to match farmers who want to sell their land and would like to see it kept agricultural instead of yet another subdivision to people who want to farm but can't find the right land at the right price.

Although no one's going to get rich planting anything but marijuana these days, the economics of small, intensive spreads that grow specialty or boutique stuff like berries and mint make it possible for the prudent and focussed hayseed to make a reasonable living.

Land Link will operate in Flathead, Granite, Lake, Missoula, Powell, Ravalli, and Sanders Counties. According to its coordinator, Paul Hubbard, “The program will also connect landowners and farmers to resources that can assist with financing, business planning, land transfer arrangements, local marketing, and legal issues.” Maybe programs such as Land Link will make that old joke about working the land obsolete, you know, the one where the guy wins the lottery and is asked what he's going to do with all the cash. “I'm going to keep on farming,” he said, “until the money's gone.”

Your own private winery. If you've ever fantasized about chucking it all and escaping to South America to become a vintner now's your chance, sort of. For $5,000 you, or you and your pals, can buy a wine barrel from Algodon Wine Estates in Argentina, which costs in the neighborhood of $5,000. Then you choose grapes from a list of varietals—malbec, syrah, cab sav, merlot, bonarda, and chardonnay. The gauchos at Algodon make the wine, and put it in bottles sporting your own custom label. For example, mine would be “Big Bill's Bottle of Belt” (showing a Boy Scout drinking from a brown paper bag).

As with any responsible winemaker you'll want to taste-test your product. Algodon makes that possible by laying on a complimentary two-night stay at a nearby resort in the western Argentine state of Mendoza Province, that country's Napa Valley.

Frozen. Executives at  Lee Enterprises, a media empire that owns five small daily newspapers in Montana, has ordered a freeze on salary increases across all levels of the company and has suspended the corporation’s matching contributions to its employees’ retirement plans.

In addition to these drastic cost-cutting measures Lee is directing publishers to decide on an individual basis whether to enforce mandatory unpaid furloughs to further lower costs. According to the Associated Press, the corporation’s flagship, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, has already implemented furloughs. One of Lee’s biggest problems, in addition to static or declining circulation and sharply reduced revenue from advertising, espcially classifieds, is its debt load. In 2006 it bought the Pulitzer chain for $306 million. Payments on that note would have been past due albeit for the corporation’s lenders, who have extended the deadline to Feb. 6, according to RTT News.

On Feb. 4 Lee's stock dropped to 29 cents, its lowest point in history. On Feb. 6 it was trading at 31 cents.

Suspended. Trading in shares of Smurfit-Stone Container Corporation on the NASDAQ Exchange will be suspended at the beginning of the session on Feb. 4. The paper-manufacturing behemoth, which owns a huge and profitable mill in Missoula County, Montana, is drowning in debt and severely reduced demand for its products, especially the kraft linerboard the Missoula mill manufacturers. It has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and NASDAQ has notified its executives, who were awarded bonues recently, that its stock will be delisted.

In Braveheart everyone saw Mel Gibson and his merry band of Scot warriors lift their kilts and wag their parts at Edward I’s murderous English invaders. William Wallace and other 14th Century Scotties apparently enjoyed that free and easy feeling.

But what do modern Scots wear under their traditional wool kilts? As one of them wrote: “Me wears the scotty-skirt and I can assure you that correctly there is nowt unner it.”

However, while it’s not acceptable to don underwear, sometimes when the Highlands wind is blowing up your yazoo you’re allowed to wrap the tails of your blouse around your nether regions. All of this leads to two old jokes. First, a proper American lady asks a Scot whether anything's worn under the skirt. “No, madam,” he replies, “I can assure you it's all in perfect condition.” Second, why do Scots wear kilts? Because sheep can hear zippers.

[read more Notes From Dark Acres]

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Planes, trains and automobiles
Our granny sets forth on a holiday odyssey to the Reservation. By Bill Vaughn

THE 83-YEAR-OLD MATRIARCH of our far-flung clan, Molly Herrin, decided that she’d spend Christmas with the youngest of her five daughters, who lives on the remote Fort Peck Indian Reservation town of Wolf Point. Molly was once able to fly the 400 miles from her home in Helena to the rez, connecting in Billings with one of those little puddle-jumpers. But the airline discontinued service in early 2008. And the December weather was turning so nasty driving her truck across Montana was out of the question. But rather than surrendering to geography she began looking at other ways to travel.

After all, this was a woman who, when she was in her late 60s, found herself in downtown Helena eight miles from her 21 exurban acres in possession of both her vehicles, the converted green Forest Service Suburban she’d driven to work that morning at the library, and the Dodge diesel the mechanic had just repaired. How to get them both home?

Drive one a mile down Last Chance Gulch, park, then jog back up the street to get the other one, which she then drove a mile beyond the first. And so on, into the night.

Anyway, to get back to Christmas, she’d take a taxi to the Greyhound station. Then she’d take the dog to Missoula, and another one to Whitefish, where she’d jump aboard the east-bound Amtrak across the Hi Line. Although this route would double the distance, she’d be able to leave the driving to others. And she figured the trip, despite including a night in Missoula, and a night in Whitefish, would compel her to spend only 20 hours on one conveyance or another.

But just before the holiday a brutal Arctic storm roared into Montana with heavy snow, howling winds and temperatures of twenty and even thirty below zero. The state's transportation grid was strained to the limit. The bus to Missoula waited hours in Butte for other connections. But Molly didn’t care because she was on the road, and found people to talk with when she wasn’t eating the hors d’oeuvres Greyhound laid on, or watching football on the two big-screen televisions in the Butte terminal. The bus finally rolled into Missoula at midnight, and she was up at dawn the next morning to catch another one to Whitefish, which was also hours late. She took a shuttle from the bus station in Whitefish to the Holiday Inn Express, and the next day waited in the train station, which also doubles as the bus station. The train, of course, was hours late.

Although she has a cell phone she prefers not to leave it on (so she doesn’t have to screen her calls, she says), compelling her daughters to call each other repeatedly to see if they had news about the wandering granny, because they had no way of knowing where she was. They called Amtrak to ask if she’d gotten on the train, but Amtrak doesn’t record the names of those who get on or off, only the names of those who buy a ticket.

But finally, the train rolled into Wolf Point, a town where almost all the faces on the streets are Sioux or Assiniboine, and was greeted by her relieved daughter and her family. She had Christmas dinner, exchanged presents, and after a couple of days headed home the same way she arrived. And because the storm had not let up the long waits were exactly the same, as well. In all she spent 40 hours in forward motion or waiting for motion instead of 20. And when she got back to Helena she learned that the pipes in her house had frozen. Her neighbor had kindly come over to thaw them out so her horses wouldn’t die of thirst.

We were reminded of the lyrics to Patty Griffin’s song, “Stay on the Ride.”

Little old man staring down the road.
Waiting on a bus. It’s getting kind of cold.
Bus finally gets there. He’s got nowhere to sit down.
And the driver says stand right here behind me. And wait for the next one to come around.
And the old man says, I might look like a little old man to you, but I’ve been riding this bus for years and years. Don’t even know where it’s going to.
And the driver says you don’t know where this bus is going to?
And the old man says, no I don’t. Do you?
I just want to stay on the ride. It’s going to take me somewhere.

When Molly was a girl she was moved all over the country by her father, who was a construction engineer, and understands that it’s about the journey, not the destination. Her advice to travelers facing long ordeals on trains and buses? “Dye your hair white. People will be nicer to you.”
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Mean Streets
Where Missoula’s cops were sent in the last six months, and what they did there.

BEFORE WAVES of affluent immigrants transformed Missoula, Montana, into a gentrified hipopolis, it was a tough little logging and railroad town, heavily armed. Although new piss-elegant subdevelopments sporting million-dollar McPonderosas and faux-townhouses have sprung up on all sides of Zooland the last thirty years, the core of the community hasn’t changed much in generations.

Just ask the cops. They still spend much of their work days visiting the same mean streets Missoula cops visited fifty years ago. And, because every generation is infected with the stupid, the ignorant, the unlucky, the oppressed, the alcoholic, the drug-addicted and people who are just downright vicious, cops are always dealing with the same situations.

Take the last half of 2008, for example. They were called at least 216 times to Cooley Street in that working class district just west of downtown you could call A Freight Train Runs Through It. More than 40 of these visits were made to Skyview Trailer Court at 1600 Cooley. In an incident emblematic of the neighborhood, Missoula’s Finest were called there at 5 pm on Dec. 21 to break up an argument between an older couple and their trailer guests, the man’s nephew and the woman’s daughter. Police were called again at 6:30 pm by the older man, who informed them that he had shot and wounded his nephew with a small-caliber handgun. And so it goes.

During the last half of 2008 the cops were called to Sherwood Street a few blocks south of Cooley at least 166 times, and went 128 times to nearby Cooper Street.

Meanwhile, Missoula’s fine old dives figured prominently in the period’s police reports, as well. City police were called to the Oxford on Higgins Avenue 139 times, where they made numerous arrests for bar fighting and public drunkenness, and dealt with two-dozen situations involving what they call a “person to be removed.” The Stockman’s on Front Street received 102 cop visits. Rhinos and Red’s Bar on Ryman Street received 72 visits and 62 visits, respectively.

While gunplay is rare but not uncommon in Missoula most police work involves dealing with abandoned vehicles, serving court papers, making sure sex offenders are living where they were registered to live, and ticketing speeders. During the six-month period just passed they also responded to more than 600 complaints about loud parties, investigated more than 400 suspected drunk drivers, arresting many of them, rousted 250 people for camping in the city, checked out almost 350 assaults involving the hands or the feet as weapons, and dealt with at least 125 domestic smack-downs. They also handled at least 56 reports of people smoking dope in a city whose voters mandated that the authorities must regard the possession of small quantities of marijuana as a low-priority.

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Independent Invention
My bold device gave hope at last to one-legged men in butt-kicking fights. But then I found out I wasn’t the first guy—nor the last—to invent it. By Bill Vaughn

THE MAY 4, 2004 edition of MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” led with the unfolding prisoner-abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, followed by the woman who was fired by Maytag Aircraft Corporation after she published her photos of 20 flag-draped coffins containing the bodies of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. Then there was an interview with Joseph Wilson, former ambassador to Gabon, whose wife, Valerie Plame, was outed by White House officials as a CIA operative in retaliation for an op-ed piece Wilson wrote in the New York Times attacking the Bush Administration for “exaggerating the Iraqi threat” in order to convince Americans of the need for war.

Delivered in the relentlessly sardonic manner of the incurable smart-ass, these stories were all compelling enough to keep me mildly amused. But when Olbermann got to Countdown Story Number One I fell out of my chair. And not just because of the plus-size Martini I’d just finished.

This piece was about an engineer in Nampa, Idaho, one J. Reese Levitt, whose firm had designed something called the “the manually self-operated butt-kicking machine.” This is a chair with a hole in the seat fitted with a lever on which is mounted a sneaker, all operated by the seat's occupant.

“It came out of a brainstorming meeting that we had when we were talking about employee productivity,” Levitt told a Boise television station.

I suddenly regretted the fact that I had never applied for a patent on my own butt-kicking machine. But then Olbermann floored me again. In 2001, he reported, a guy from Tennessee named Joe Armstrong was granted Patent No. 6,293,874 for a “user operated amusement apparatus for kicking the user‘s buttocks.”

I started digging around. And discovered that three generations ago one Tom Haywood had built an ass-kicking machine and displayed it outside his store in the backwater village of Burnt Chimney, Virginia. This device was a wheel fitted with four spokes onto which were affixed shoes or boots. The user turned his backside to the invention, and operated a crank to give himself a righteous whuppin. Visitors confirmed Haywood’s claim that his butt-kicker could deliver 100 punishments per hour. The device was still in use as late as 1999, when it fell into disrepair.

One pundit claimed that it wasn’t a butt-kicker at all, but a shoe-polisher.

When the idea for a butt-kicking machine first struck me twenty years ago, after losing patience with the indolent world-class slacker who is my nephew, I suggested to my wife, Kitty, that I might be made of super stuff. I was convinced of it when I soon came up with the idea for a camera mounted in my baseball cap that recorded my every waking moment and allowed me to find lost things like the truck keys simply by saying the word “keys” and letting the video search back through the tape for them.

But I see now that there’s probably nothing original about me, after all. And maybe there’s nothing original about anyone. Consider Einstein’s famous brainstorm about the relationship of energy to matter, E=mc2.  Four centuries earlier Isaac Newton suggested that energy and matter are simply different versions of the same substance. Consider the bisbegotten lawsuit lodged against Julia Child by a Montana professor who claimed the famed chef stole his “idea” for slicing zuchinni.

Sigh. Maybe Harry Truman was right. “The only thing new in this world,” he said, “is the history that you don't know.”
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Gizmos
Some recent applications to the U.S. Patent Office

IT'S INEVITABLE that when you think of the U.S. inventors who apply by the thousands every year for patents you think of young Albert Einstein walking in a cloud of thought about the nature of the universe from his apartment every morning to labor in the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. We wonder, what would Mr. Relativity think about these recently proposed gizmos?

Artificial smoke cigarette. This is basically a small hookah that employs an ultrasonic or pneumatic nebulizer in a fog chamber to create an aerosol mist. The mist could contain pharmaceutical agents, or clove oil, or most anything. The point of the device, which would look like a cigarette, is to supply the nicotine addict who’s trying to kick the habit with the illusion of smoking. This would be accomplished, the inventors maintain, by simulating the flow of smoke into the lungs, presumably satiating some potion of the brain that's willing to be fooled by a hit of mint or a rush of eucalyptus.

Always fresh-tasting coffee. Coffee tends to change flavor after its brewed, and is regarded by those with sensitive palates as totally undrinkable after a half hour. Now the inventor of a process intended to preserve the fresh flavor of java for hours says the problem is carbon dioxide in roasted beans. Most manufacturers remove the gas from freshly roasted beans by aging them because its accretion in a sealed bag or a can would eventually blow up the package. But removing CO2 from a bean means that the java that’s made from it will degrade in flavor. Don’t ask us why. The solution: freeze the fresh-roasted beans for a couple of days and it will retain the gas that preserves the freshness of the coffee made from it.

Lazy man's tee. Every years hundreds of inventors apply for patents that involve the game of golf. Because that’s where the money is. One of the latest of these socially useless devices is a golf ball teeing system which is basically a tray for holding a bunch of golf balls, a teeing mechanism, a means for guiding the golf balls on the golf tray onto the teeing mechanism, and a separate means for moving the golf balls from the tray onto a mat or the ground without going through the teeing mechanism.”  The golf ball teeing machine allows golfers to “cherry pick” the golf balls to suit whichever one of the clubs he or she chooses to hit with. It also allows golfers to easily move balls on the tray to a mat or the turf with the use of their clubs.

No wonder some people, like John McEnroe, rail against golf as a symptom of the physical torpor and laziness of Americans.

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The Darwin Awards
Saluting the improvement of the human genome
by honoring those who accidentally remove themselves from it.

ALTHOUGH NO MONTANANS have been nominated this year for a Darwin, in 2007 Kenneth Ellingson, 37, got my nod when he decided to rob a Missoula craft and hobby store one night by attempting to gain entrance through a cooling duct on the roof. Ellingson, who weighed 280 pounds, and was an enthusiast of radio-controlled toy cars, got stuck. Police said the cause of death was “positional asphyxiation.”

The most nominated Darwinist in 2008 is was 41-year-old Adelir Antonio de Carli, a Brazilian priest who determined to publicize his plan to build a spiritual rest stop for truckers by flying farther than anyone else under a cluster of helium-filled balloons. Although the Catholic holy man took precautions, including a padded chair, a survival suit, a satellite phone, and a GPS device, the winds changed, blowing him out to sea. He called for help, but no one could help him because they couldn’t find him—de Carli had failed to learn how to use the GPS device.

His inspiration for this fatal ascent may have been Hey-soos, or it could have been Larry “Lawn Chair” Walters, who figured in 1982 that when he lashed himself into his Sears lawn chair—dubbed The Inspiration—which was tethered to 45 huge Army-Navy Surplus balloons, he would hover dreamily thirty feet above the back yard of his Southern California home. Instead, Larry suddenly shot straight up 16,000 feet into the air lanes of Los Angeles Airport. Although he survived, he never pissed in the gene pool, and committed suicide a decade later.

In Italy last winter a 46-year-old Englishman and his friends decided in a drunken tizzy one night at a ski resort to strip the padding from the steel safety barriers guarding the end of a groomed slope . They walked back up the slope, jumped on the padding, and took off downhill on their improvised sleds. Did it occur to them that because they had removed the padding the barriers at the bottom of the hill were now lethal? Apparently not. Although his friends survived the crash, the 46-year-old didn’t.

And in Italy again, this time last summer, Ivece Plattner, 68, was stuck in traffic behind a stop light in his beloved Porsche Cayenne sportscar. A classic example of bad European engineering, the light forces vehicles to line up across a rail line. Plattner saw that a train was coming, but decided to forge on anyway as the traffic inched forward. Just as he drove over the tracks the safety bars came down, trapping him in harm’s way. Instead of fleeing the Porsche for safety Plattner jumped out and started running down the tracks toward the train, flapping his arms like Big Bird. Neither Plattner nor his ride survived.

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Write If You Find Work
From Outside's screwup files, a tale of epic miscommunication

Outside Magazine has a history of sending people to the ends of the earth. Sometimes when things go wrong, blame lies with the editors. (Like the time writer Dave Eggers was sent to hang out with New Age seekers at the pyramids of Giza—only there were no New Age seekers to be found.) Or the writer. (Um, no names—let's just say it usually involves self-medication.) Or both. In the granddaddy of all such tales, which played out in 1978-79 during Outside's formative years, four journalists from Montana—Bill Vaughn, William Kittredge, Bryan DiSalvatore, and William Finnegan—unwittingly set in motion a saga that we're still talking about. —KEVIN FEDARKO

VAUGHN: I started working for Outside in its second or third issue, when I was invited to edit an equipment-review column out of my home in Montana, a role that apparently gave some people the notion that I actually had power at the magazine. Which, I think, was how I got in trouble with these two guys, Bryan DiSalvatore and Bill Finnegan.

DISALVATORE: Bill's recollection is essentially true. (I'm so glad he got his meds calibrated.) But I think the culprit in this tale was another writer, Bill Kittredge. Kittredge had been both Finnegan's and my mentor, and he's the one who led us to believe that Vaughn was the emir of Outside.
KITTREDGE: Oh, God, did I do that?

VAUGHN: DiSalvatore and Finnegan were best friends, or something like that, and they decided to take a surfing trip around the world. For some reason—I can't for the life of me remember how—they got it into their heads that I had given them a contract to do this trip and write a story for the magazine.

DISALVATORE: The story we had in mind was a look at sailing yachties who roam the globe. We figured we'd make cash while traveling by selling articles. Vaughn was, according to Kittredge, our, ahem, contact.

VAUGHN: I was?

KITTREDGE: I did what?

FINNEGAN: This is completely wrong. This all happened because Bryan and I hadn't gotten our shit squared away before we left.

DISALVATORE: So off we go—

VAUGHN: So off they go, I can't even remember where . . .

DISALVATORE: Guam, Nauru, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, New Caledonia (or whatever the hell it's called these days), four Australian states, Bali, Java, Sumatra, and then, separately, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Spain, France, England—

VAUGHN: And for the next God-only-knows-how-many months, I get these postcards from all over the world.

DISALVATORE: Basically, we just kept sending him whatever we had at any given point. First it was just ideas. But then we started writing actual paragraphs. Included were "Is this in the right direction?" kinds of queries. Meanwhile, Vaughn's getting this stuff, months late, from two guys he's never even heard of. Kittredge had neglected to tell Vaughn about us.

KITTREDGE: Mmm. That could be true.

VAUGHN: With the arrival of each postcard, I'm increasingly baffled, because I have absolutely no idea what the hell these guys want.

DISALVATORE: Isolation makes you crazy in some ways, one of them being your idealized version of what's been going on stateside: Vaughn screeching with delight at these dispatches, hungry for more; readers all across America clamoring for our next installment; movie offers, sex. Meanwhile, Vaughn was getting this stuff and either putting it aside or just throwing it out.

FINNEGAN: None of this was Vaughn's fault. It's all drunken embroidery.

DISALVATORE: We just kept badgering him. Where's the contract? Where's the dough? Don't send a check, for God's sake—we can't cash it in Padang!

VAUGHN: Anyhow, they're gone for a really long time . . .

DISALVATORE: We were gone for almost four years.

FINNEGAN: I was gone for almost four years. Bryan was with me only for the first 15 months.

VAUGHN: And then one day, I'm putzing around my house when this huge Italian guy shows up on my front porch and he's really, really pissed off. DiSalvatore explains that they were living in a tree house in Borneo, and Finnegan was dying of malaria—

DISALVATORE: The doc in Bangkok, where he came down with it, said Bill's blood was “black with malaria.” He was deranged. Fearful of death. We were broke. We were delusional.

VAUGHN: So this guy goes on to explain that the two of them had made a pact that the first person to get back to the U.S. was going to track me down.

DISALVATORE: We had vowed—

FINNEGAN: We didn't vow anything. Bryan did. I remember being annoyed with Vaughn, but it's not like he gave me malaria. The guy just failed to reply to some mail we sent him.

DISALVATORE: OK, I had vowed—but for Finnegan's sake, as sort of a spur to “get well”—that when I got back to America I would find that double-dealing, duplicitous, careless, thoughtless, heartless beast Vaughn—

VAUGHN: And kill me.

FINNEGAN: Keep in mind, there was a whole group of people in America that Bryan was allegedly going to kill on my behalf.

DISALVATORE: I believe I terrified him . . .

VAUGHN: I told him we needed to step outside, because I didn't want to break up my wife's furniture.

DISALVATORE: But eventually we became friends.

VAUGHN: The next afternoon we were playing on the same softball team.

DISALVATORE: I don't know if it was our fever-driven imaginations or Vaughn's forgetfulness. But basically, Vaughn didn't know what the fuck was going on. For that matter, neither did we.

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Nature Boy
Why Montanans don't like the great outdoors. By Bill Vaughn

FINALLY, WE CLIMBED the only snowless ridge in sight and pitched the tent in a cot of pine. Then I hunkered down in the withered bear grass to smoke a cigarette. At that moment dying of anthrax would have been a pleasure. My clothes were soaked. The temperature was dropping a degree every five minutes. Between gusts of wind enraged insects dived from the brush for my blood.

After an attack of pure vertigo in which I imagined what it would feel like to have my heart injected with chilled kerosene I opened my eyes and peered at the falling dusk. Against my back were the Rockies, and to the south, under sullen April clouds the color of rotten beef, stretched the sulking, malevolent geography of Yellowstone Park.

This wasn’t the Yellowstone of Yogi Bear, of Old Faithful performing against a seamless azure sky for the digital slide shows of New Jersey chiropractors, but the Yellowstone missionaries used as a visual aid in persuading sinless Indians that Hell exists and the devil doesn’t give a rat’s ass about race, sexual preference or national origin. To my way of thinking a perfect setting for a perfectly wasted day.

My companion didn’t see it that way. Chuck was a big, amiable guy built like a farm implement who had wandered north from Missouri a few years earlier to be, as he put it, “a mountain man.” Since dawn we’d been plowing through basin after basin of dirty, waist-deep snow searching for the antlers that bull elk snap off every spring so they can grow a bigger, better pair for their mating battles in the autumn.

Chuck’s mission was to gather as many of these antlers as we could carry back to the Jeep for the purpose of selling them to a certain Taiwanese merchant, who would grind them up and sell them to other Taiwanese merchants who believe the stuff enhances sexual vigor.

My mission was to write about Chuck finding the antlers and selling them. The outdoors magazine that had employed me to do this dubious sort of thing hadn’t offered me much money, but I had accepted their offer because I had no other prospects. I had been trying to figure out all day why the Taiwanese think they need their vigor enhanced. Did they think they could outbreed their mainland brethren and thus take back China through sheer numbers? This, as it turned out, would be a moot point. We would both go home empty-handed because scavengers on snowmobiles had beaten us to the goods.

But Chuck’s high spirits cannot be extinguished. Singing “North to Alaska,” he approached me with a plate of steaming venison chili. I had to admit it was the best part of this long and fruitless day. “Jesus, ain’t that something?” he said, nodding fondly at the heartless landscape. His shining eyes reflected the peace and good will of a man who had just put two and two together and decided he possessed just about all you could want.

“You’re sick,” I said.

“Aw, you’ve just had a big day, little man.”

I cupped my hands and blew into them. “You know something, Charles. Some day, none of this will be yours.”

But the Mountain Man’s eyes had gone out of focus. He was at one with nature, in thrall with the horizon, immune to soured tempers. Eventually he smiled, and dug in. I slapped at something green and white that was trying to insert its stinger into a welt on my wrist that had been caused by an even bigger bug, and lit another cigarette. I was wondering at the gulf separating Chuck’s attitude about the wilderness from mine.

Native Montanans don’t much like nature. Oh, we will beat our chests and shout our love out at the Big Sky if the question is put to us. But deep down is the sure conviction that out-of-staters who cruise our mountains in three-hundred-dollar hiking boots and packs loaded with fifty dollars worth of freeze-dried trail food—demanding from the natural world only that the woods and lakes and beasts simply be there—these are people who have got only one oar in the water.

The distrust and fear of Nature is the result of what most European-type people in Montana have always done for a living. Ever since the first trappers followed Lewis and Clark into this impossible lonely place Montanans have been dependent on what they could coach or filch from the land. Lumbermen, farmers, miners and ranchers, five generations of us have signed a business deal with the natural world right on the dotted line. Our partner has been the harshest mistress of them all, and she’s been screwing us all along.

For us, going out in the woods simply to tramp around, identifying wildflowers and taking snapshots, would be like inviting a crooked associate home to dinner and a game of gin on the porch. We may not have a lick of business sense but we know better than to socialize in the evening with the bitch we see all day during office hours. The dudes and foreigners among us are easily identifiable by their shameless gawking at our vistas. When we set forth into the wild what we’re really looking for dinner.

In describing the “Montana Face,” Leslie Fiedler, world-class literary critic and former University of Montana English professor, touched on our relationship with the natural world. “What I found seemed, at first glance, reticent, sullen, weary—full of self-sufficient stupidity; a little later it speared simply inarticulate, with all the dumb pathos of what cannot declare itself: a face developed not for sociability or feeling, but for facing into the weather.”
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