Notes from the Squalor Zone


My Pony is Gray. Brian Schweitzer was painted in the Oct. 8 New York Times Magazine as a fun-loving, gun-toting populist who favors the death penalty, tight-fisted budget policies and tough laws protecting the environment. Because of his bipartisan popularity and his refusal to articulate an ideology, the Democratic governor of Montana is being touted as a bright new star by a party desperate for a fresh face on the national political stage.

Aw, shucks, drawls the Gov, I’m just a science wank who’s spent more time in the saddle than in the governor’s mansion.

Because we grew up riding, and still ride every day, we decided to grade Schweitzer on how he sits a horse.

1. His head is up, and that’s good, although his head and eyes should be on a line running from between the horse’s ears, not off to the side.

2. His posture is good, but his butt should be tucked under him more. It could be that the saddle is too small for the rider.

3. He’s climbed into a saddle that’s way too far forward, so much so that the back cinch is crowding the front cinch.

4. He’s chosen a poor mount for this photo opp. The horse has a hay belly and withered hindquarters, indicating that it’s badly out of shape, like a lot of the pasture ornaments westerners like to put out for show.

5. He’s adjusted the stirrups so they’re too short. His heel is up, when it should be down, thus throwing his sizable weight uncomfortably forward. Plus, he’s wearing high-water jeans—they’re just too short.

6. Although his rein hand is forward, which is good, and he’s not yanking on the rein like most dudes, the hand is up, when it should be closer to the animal. Plus, he’s neck-reining the horse, a passé and archaic practice. Accomplished riders always employ a direct rein.

Final grade: C+

Schweitzer, which in German means “guy from Switzerland,” may get high marks from the Democratic Party but he needs to work more on his riding skills if he wants to pass himself off as a real horseman. [10/13/06]

Easter Bird Show. Duke and Doreen are ospreys who built a big nest a few years ago in the wrong place. Instead of staying at the top of a wind-sheared Ponderosa at Dark Acres next to the Clark Fork River, they decided to move to a power pole on our dead-end lane. They may have decided to rebuild because their tree was infested with bugs. Or maybe they were worried that the river would undercut the pine’s roots, and the nest would hit the drink (the tree, however, is still intact, although a big melt this spring will probably topple it).

One day in May soon after the move, a crew from Northwestern Energy showed up with a cherry picker. The birds can’t stay in the power pole, their foreman told us, because when the nest gets wet it will short out the lines and the whole thing will explode in flames.

The crew planted a new pole, higher then the first, mounted with a round platform made from the wooden cable spool of the sort hippies and poor students once used for their living room tables. Then, while Duke and Doreen soared overhead screeching hysterically, a biologist went up in the cherry picker and plucked two scrawny chicks from the nest. These were Sonny and Sissy, about six weeks old. The scientist put them in a cardboard box lined with a cotton shirt, and brought them to earth. Then two guys went up in the cherry picker and moved the osprey nest to the platform atop the new pole. The chicks were carefully returned to their home, Doreen returned to sit with them, and Duke flew off in a huff to fish.

In the fall all four birds flapped away, one by one, to Central America, or maybe even northern South America, where they would spend the winter in separate locales. Although ospreys mate for life, they don’t vacation together. Duke and Doreen have returned three times to raise six more chicks in that nest.

On Easter Sunday Duke suddenly appeared. But there was something wrong with the nest. It was full of trespassers. A pair of Canada geese, looking for a place to lay their eggs, had staged a home invasion. Duke was furious. All afternoon he flew at the geese, talons extended, yelling and swearing, plunging straight down at them, slapping at them with his wings. They muttered and shifted position, but they didn’t budge. Exhausted, Duke finally gave up. Doing what he always does when he’s upset, he went off to the river to fish. Soon he’d returned to his usual perch on a nearby telephone pole, bearing a medium-sized sucker. He took his time eating it. And then he disappeared.

Late in the afternoon on March 9 Duke showed up again to see if the damn geese had left. They hadn't. On April 10 the standoff continues as Duke waits for the arrival of Doreen, who will be majorly pissed about the intruders in her nest. [4/8/2007]

Easter Dog Show. Possum, our neighbor’s one-dog puppy mill, has littered again, her fourth in two years. This time there are seven little yappers, all of them black and white and adorable, ready for adoption. All day on Easter Sunday cars drove up to the trailer across from Dark Acres, and soon left with a new addition or two to someone’s family.

Possum is a bouncy and cheerful Heinz 57 Variety mutt whose precise breeding could only be determined by a canine DNA specialist. She’s has a longish yellowish coat, the small, fluffy ears of a bear, the wrinkled face of a blood hound, the docked tail of a Corgi and the square nose of a Sharpee.

We call her Possum because it’s easy to say and understand. Her real name, which we learned later from her mistress, a Sioux who grew up on the Fort Peck Reservation in northeastern Montana, is Bayzhah, a Nakota word that means wrinkled. Possum-Bayzhah’s favorite sports are hunting gophers in the fields of a ranch called Trout Meadows, running with our dogs when we go on horse rides, and chasing cars on our dead-end county lane (the reason she’s survived is because she’s the fastest dog we’ve ever seen). Our little Corgi, Lyndon Baines Johnson, likes to chomp down on the loose flesh of Possum’s face and pull at it. Possum thinks this is hilarious.

Oh, plus, of course, she likes to have puppies. Lots of puppies. The father of these litters is a crazed and persistent blue heeler/beagle/boxer we named Boner.

After her owners gave away first one of her latest litter, and then the pup’s brother, Bayhzhah took the remaining four weanlings to our forest and hid them. We rounded them up and returned them to the trailer, but Bayzhah promptly took them again to the woods. We heard them back there once in a while, crying for mama, who eventually showed up to tend to them.

We figured they would end up as feral dogs that lived by stealing eggs and ransacking garbage cans and would eventually get eaten by coyotes or mountain lions. But one daughter, Ryley, lives in a junked car next to the trailer with her brother, a strange-looking beast named Slow-Moving Joe, who has three normal legs and one that functions more like a flipper. [4/8/2007]



Culture of death. On Jan. 29 the U.S. Mint in Denver released the Montana Quarter, the 41st in a series of coins honoring the 50 states.

In a frenzy of democracy reminiscent of the gangsters who stuffed ballot boxes in Chicago on behalf of John F. Kennedy in 1960, Montanans “voted” last year to engrave one of four competing designs on 500 million of these quarters devoted to the Treasure State. While the quarter lauding Wisconsin features corn, Georgia’s shows a peach, and the Statue of Liberty graces New York’s, Montana’s coin will show a dead bison’s skull. More than 10,000 rednecks and other yahoos cast their ballot for this design, which garnered 34 percent of the total, and beat out images featuring an elk, the sun rising over the mountains and the plains, and a river running from the mountains to the plains.

Images that didn’t make it into this short list included a Pork Chop John Sandwich, invented in Butte, Montana, and a three-wheeler tearing up a ridge.

While some would say, hey, man, lighten up, it’s only two-bits, others argue that symbols can have life and death implications. For example, although the swastika is a common mark representing the sun in traditional Indian cultures of the American Southwest, it’s not an image most of us would care to have embroidered on our baseball caps.

Montana’s most famous artist, Charles M. Russell, incorporated a bison skull into the signature he put in the corner of his paintings. Most of his work depicts the cowboys and Indians of the Sun River country, where there are hundred of ancient buffalo jumps, such as the Ulm Pishkun, used by Plains Indians to drive whole herds of bison to slaughter. (During World War II farmers bulldozed more than thirteen feet of bison bones accumulated at the base of this cliff to fertilize their Victory Gardens.)

The bison skull is also a reminder of the fact that the U.S. government tried to destroy native cultures by slaughtering the herds that gave Indians their power. By 1900 the 65 million bison thriving in North America a century earlier had been reduced to a mere thousand animals. Yellowstone Park was created partly to give this beleaguered species a sanctuary.

Speaking of Yellowstone, the skull also represents one of Montana’s worst public relations disasters, ranking just below the election of Senator Conrad Burns. In recent years bison that wander out of the boundaries of the Park have been shot by hunters given permits by a state government under the control of the cattle industry, which is afraid its beeves will become infected with brucellosis, a bison-borne disease that causes heifers to abort. To date, however, not a single case of a Montana cow infected with bison-borne brucellosis has been documented. This is the same ranching community that was paid in the late nineteenth century by the Feds to supply beef to starving Indians herded onto reservations.

On the other hand, some tribal leaders are trying to reintroduce bison into the diet of Indians who have grown fat and diabetic eating America’s ghastly concoctions of junk food. And now that the wholesale price of bison is competitive with that of beef some institutions such as the University of Montana are featuring it in their food services.

In our home there’s always some bison meat in the freezer. Low-fat, nutritious without the hormones that taint beef, and full of fiber, to my way of thinking it’s the King of Meats. Paradoxically, the more popular bison becomes as food the more bison there will be. The animal, which weighs a ton and runs faster than a quarter horse, is a perfect symbol for Montana. But for my money I’d prefer the image of a live animal instead of a dead one. Say a big bull trampling some little French tourist, with Old Faithful blowing off steam in the background. [2/2/07]

Da Bears. On Sunday, Feb. 4, Dark Acres will be cheering for Da Bears. We’ve always been fans of the Monsters of the Midway because we sympathize with people who have to live in Chicago, the coldest, blowiest burg on earth. We remember the May morning when our driver never showed up to take us to the airport. While we were trying to walk from the hotel at dawn to find an intersection where we could hail a cab a gust of wind ripped our camera bag out of our hands and sent it flying down the street. We’re also huge Cubs fans, and we even like the White Sox.

Although Superbowl XLI will be only the second time Da Bears will have appeared in the Big Circus we always watch the spectacle. We like everything about the game, the cheerleaders, the ridiculous, over-the-top halftime acts, the hype. And, of course, the ads.

But this year we’re going to boycott the sponsors.

That’s because of the way the NFL and the National Football League Players Association treat former players. According to the producers of an episode of HBO’s Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel that aired on Jan. 22, no matter how much you’re suffering from damage done to you on the professional gridiron, if you can still breathe you’re probably not going to get disability payments. Plus, the pension the NFL pays to former players is $24,000 a year or less. Compare this to the $175,000  pension paid to former NBA players. They shoot horses, don’t they?

One of the players Real Sports interviewed was Conrad Dobler, a former offensive lineman with the Saints and the Bills. Although Dobler, a Chicago native, has been called the dirtiest player in NFL history, he was also one of the most entertaining. But these days the 56-year-old is a wreck who needs canes to get around his own house, and can’t afford the sort of medical care that might repair his ruined knees.

Bryant Gumbel has been a constant critic of Gene Upshaw, the head of the players’ union. Gumbel charges that the union is in bed with management.

Because neither the NFL nor the union sent a representative to counter Gumbel’s claims, and because they haven’t publicly responded, here’s the list of sponsors whose products we will not buy until the issues of disability compensation and pensions have been addressed: Doritos, Garmin, Anheuser-Busch, Nationwide insurance, Paramount Pictures, Coca-Cola, and first-time Super Bowl advertiser InfoUSA. Although General Motors is also throwing up some ads we can’t boycott them because we’re still paying off one of their excellent trucks.

While we understand that these companies could give a flying fuck about whether a couple of yahoos up in Montana are boycotting their products, we’ll watch the Superbowl this year with an added sense of purpose. And not just because of Da Bears.

Luddite. John VanSall ittrydonck, the publisher of the Missoula, Montana Missoulian is still thinking inside his box, or his cage. Or c his sky kennel. His bush-league daily, owned by Lee Enterprises, continues to undermine Missoulian.com, its lame online edition, by posting teasers for a few of the stories in the print edition, and ordering readers to buy a subscription if they want to read the whole story. (Not that there’s anything wrong with bush-league periodicals, as long as they devote the entirety of their news holes to very local news).  

Meanwhile, James O’Shea, the editor of the Los Angeles Times, decreed on Jan. 24 that the huge metropolitan daily will completely integrate its print and online newsrooms. His plan, outlined in detail at LATimes.com, is intended to increase traffic to, and revenue from, the Web site in the face of increasingly dreary economic weather for newspaper publishers.

"We can't hide from the fact that smart competitors such as Google and Craigslist are stealing readers and advertisers from us through innovative strategies that are undermining the business model we've relied on for decades," Shea said.

He urged Times journalists to think of the online edition as the newspaper's primary vehicle for news. "Currently we have a newspaper staff and an LATimes.com staff. No more. From now on, there are no two staffs, there is just one. And we will function as one.”  

He said that LATimes.com would become the paper's "primary vehicle for breaking news 24 hours a day." [1/28/06]

Rising star. Only five years out of journalism school, Courtney Lowery is in the air. Most every day we read her work at newwest.net, a regional online magazine that covers the West. Last week we were driving our horses to an arena and heard her read a news report at The Trail, 103.3 on your FM dial. We’ve also been following the progress of the online newspaper she’s developing in her home town of Dutton, Montana. Her hope is that the Dutton Country Courier, written by the villagers themselves, will supply the local news that disappeared when the Dutton Dispatch, a printed weekly, folded shop a few years ago.

Then on Jan. 19 we watched an interview with Lowery on the evening news, in which she described her symptoms from a bout with the Norovirus over the holidays. Also known as the Norwalk virus, the intestinal sickness causes explosive diarrhea and copious projectile vomiting.

“Besides the dehydration concern and infectiousness of the disease,” she wrote at newwest, “the virus isn’t too worrisome. It’s relatively short (but excruciating)-lived and as I mentioned before carries no long-term complications other than having to have your boyfriend’s Mom inspect your stool. But, since you’re not really able to garner the energy embarrassment would take, it’s not that big of a deal. And, long-term, I guess it means I just really am officially part of the family now. Once you’ve puked in someone’s pressure-cooker pot (my boyfriend couldn’t find anything else at midnight in his parents’ kitchen), you’re pretty much bonded for life.” [1/20/07]

Dead Pool. Only a couple days after the deadline of our contest the first of the celebrities picked to croak by our contestants has indeed croaked. Writer and humorist Art Buchwald died Jan. 17 of kidney failure. In a video recorded last summer and now posted on The New York Times Web site the satirist begins an interview by saying with a grin: "Hi, I'm Art Buchwald and I just died." [1/19/07]

Cruel jokes. On January 10 Montana Senator Max Baucus told fellow solons that he regrets supporting George W. Bush’s adventures in Iraq. “If we knew then what we know now, I would not have voted for the war,” Baucus said in a speech on the floor of the Senate. Iraq is a mistake, he said. “The premise was wrong.”

Baucus said that no weapons of mass destruction were found and that it’s now clear there was no link between Iraq and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The notion that America could establish democracy in the region by invading Iraq has proven “a cruel joke,” he added, blaming the Bush administration for duping him.

The level of hypocrisy and cynicism in the Senator Baucus’ statements is breathtaking. He knew Bush and his henchmen were lying. How could he not? The White House and its corporate sponsors lied about Korea, and it lied about Vietnam. As rogue journalist I.F. Stone said, “All governments lie.”

South Korea was the aggressor against the north in 1950, a fact the Truman administration concealed with fabrications about communist aggression. The consequence was more than two million North Koreans slaughtered by American planes dropping bombs and napalm. There is evidence the U.S. even engaged in biological and chemical warfare.

Lyndon Johnson confected the Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which he claimed that two American warships had been attacked by North Vietnamese naval forces. The United States supported a dictator in South Korea, and it supported a dictator in South Vietnam. At one time it supported a dictator in Iraq, Saddam Hussein.

Still, at Dark Acres, we like Max as a person. We remember the night we saw him and the woman who would become his first wife, a journalist named Ann Geracimos, jumping up and down in front of the high front windows of what is now the Food Farm on Orange Street in Missoula, Montana, apparently trying to see into the store. Were they looking for someone, we wondered? Or just having fun?

A Christmas Miracle. Once a year most of the the big supermarkets close their doors to give their employees Christmas Day off. That was the case a few years ago when the manager of the Albertsons in Missoula's Eastgate Shopping Center wished his cashiers and stockers a happy holiday, then turned off the store lights as the last of them got in their cars and headed home to spend some time with their families.

But no one remembered to lock the door. This happy fact was discovered the next morning by one of the homeless bums who haunt the riverfront area around the Van Buren Street Bridge. He immediately made his way to the beer and wine section, cracked open a box of Chardonnay, and drank his fill. Then, feeling that special holiday buzz, he left the store and brought back some of his acquaintances from Zooland's street person underclass.

This festive group soon had a nice toasty fire going in a Weber barbecue grill, and had eaten their way through the deli. They proceeded to get roaring drunk. Then they started singing at the top of their lungs. A passer-by, looking for whipped cream for a holiday pie and forgetting that the store would be closed on Christmas, walked in on the party. She quickly retreated.

And soon it was cops all over, shooing the drunks out the door, putting out the fire, and calling the manager. The drunks didn't care. They had been touched by the mircale of Christmas, and moved the party to an abandoned house. [12/25/06]

Forward motion. Last week I reported to the Main Street Barber Shop in Missoula for my bi-monthly trim. Although the crop of hair on my head dwindles every year, there’s still enough to cut. And if it’s not cut military short it looks like I’m trying to cultivate a comb-over.

Along with gin, the Main Street Barber Shop is one of the few reasons I ever leave Dark Acres. I like sitting in the chair talking with Ken, my barber, and Jim, the other barber, who happens to be Ken’s Dad. And I like watching the swirl of humanity on the sidewalk.

Yesterday morning, Jim explained, for some reason the heavy guy in the shop next door forgot that there’s a small step from the sidewalk to the stoop his store shares with the barber shop. When he stepped down he fell forward, and his attempt to catch up with his own momentum failed. Jim went out and struggled to help the man to his feet, but he was cast, like turtle who’s been turned over on its back.

This story brought another story about a large Santa last week strapped to small oxygen tank who fell off the very same step. Like some cartoon character Santa tried to make his legs shuffle fast enough to keep up with his forward motion. But like the other fat man, he went down as well.

And then there was the buxom woman whose husband was getting his hair cut one hot day last summer. She tripped stepping up from the sidewalk. Because Ken and Jim had left the door open to admit the cooling breeze she fell into the barbershop and sprawled on the floor. Before anyone could help her she got to her feet, told barbers and customers she was fine, and  then looked in the mirrors while she adjusted her very large breasts, which had lost their mooring inside her very large bra.

“I just had them redone,” she explained to Jim, cradling herself with both hands. “How do they look? Are they even?”

”How would I know?” Jim said. “Ask your husband.” [12/20/06]

Dreadlocks. At Dark Acres 2006 was the Year of Close Calls. Normal life ground to a halt this fall when one of our greedy neighbors decided he wanted to ruin his ranch and our entire backwater with a gravel pit, an asphalt plant and a cement factory. Along with scores of other neighbors we spent months fighting this preposterous scheme, which would have polluted the water, smudged the air, and filled the narrow lanes around Dark Acres with a parade of dump trucks. But the work paid off: On Dec. 6 The Missoula County Commissioners voted unanimously to deny the zoning change that would have made this industrial nightmare possible.

And last winter Kitty came a few heartbeats away from dying. While I was in Southern California nannying Satchel and Izzy Lieberman while their parents were in Europe, Kitty was laid low with eosinophilic pneumonia, a form of the disease in which white blood cells go beserk and fill the lungs with fluid. This very rare malady occasionally attacks Gulf War soldiers, children in the tropics infested with blood parasites and, once in a blue moon, middle-aged women with asthma. Kitty’s doctors said it was something they studied in medical school but never expected to see. The cause was idiopathic, which means, as her pulmunologist explained, that we’re idiots because we don’t know what it is.

After I arrived back in Montana she allowed the docs to admit her to the hospital’s intensive care ward. THe next day one of her lungs collapsed. She was put into a drug-induced coma because the nurses had to put a breathing tube down her throat. After massive doses of prednisone she quickly recovered. But it took her two months to get back the weight she’d lost.

To celebrate her relative good health she decided yesterday to stop trimming her own hair and get a real cut in time for Christmas. She made an appointment with a salon in the mall, and drove into town. But when the receptionist pointed out the person who would be doing the do Kitty almost turned around and fled. The stylist was a man, a middle-aged man named Pedro Garza, and he seemed like a man’s barber because he was cutting the gray hair of a very old man.

Kitty suddenly remembered the day when she was five years old. Molly, her mother, had decided that it was time Kitty and her sisters got a haircut. Because these little girls lived like wild animals on their family’s ranch outside Helena, Montana—playing in the brush, riding horses, jumping around in the hayloft—their hair had became a tangle of dreadlocks bound with burrs and twigs and knots that couldn’t be combed out.

So Molly drove them into town and marched them into the barber who cut the hair of Kitty’s Dad. The barber, a middle-aged man who knew nothing about little girls, sheared them like sheep, giving them short cuts that looked like bowls, the kind of haircut you’d inflict on a little boy. On the way back to the ranch Kitty touched her head, turned her face toward the window and wept.

But her experience yesterday with Pedro Garza turned out to be nothing like her first experience with a male barber. As he worked they listened to a woman in the next booth complain about her estranged husband and his drunken lawyer. They listened to Connie Stevens sing Christmas music. An hour after sitting down in the chair Kitty looked in the mirror and saw the best cut she’s had in years.

Her look now is something like that of the luscious Julie Christie in the 1965 movie, Darling. “Now you have style,” Pedro told Kitty. “When you walked in here you had no style.” [12/18/06]

Rodeo. The storms that whipped up on Dark Acres last week have pushed out of Montana, leaving the air scrubbed and the ice on the Mabel polished.

One Saturday morning we turned our three quarter horses into the forest to graze because there wasn’t enough snow to make good footing for a trail ride. Then we skated, knocked around the puck, and went into the shop to watch the cartoonish History of Violence. Just before our nightly Martini and our game of gin we poured a scoop of Strategy into each of the horse’s feed buckets, knocked the ice out of their water tubs, and filled them with fresh water.

This is one of the highpoints of the day for our dogs, the skinny, long-legged Border collie named Clara, and Lyndon Baines Johnson, the stout, stubby-legged Corgi so-named because he has the good political sense to suck up to everyone. Kitty usually walks back to the river with these stock dogs to fetch the horses, which they like to chase back to their pens. (Although Lyndon Baines Johnson is a runt he’s built for speed—he pushes off with both hind legs simultaneously like a galloping horse. He was bred short in order to avoid cow kicks).

But Saturday she tried something new. Instead of doing the work herself she pointed toward the river 400 yards away and told the dogs to go get the horses without her.

They cocked their heads at her, and she repeated the order. Then they understood. To our delight they trotted across the bridge over the Mabel, along a trail canopied with hawthorns, and through a stretch of open parkland. They  found the horses where they like to spend their winter afternoons, on the banks of the Clark Fork, pushing aside the snow to get at the withered grass underneath.

Yapping with excitement, the dogs circled the horses, snapping at their tails, until the beasts finally began plodding back toward their pens. It’s not that these twenty-five pound dogs present much in the way of physical intimidation for a 1200-pound horse. But their mania is a signal that dinner is being served.

Once this troupe passed over the Mabel the rodeo began. Led by Timer, the brood mare, the horses broke into a run, thundered across the lawns, scattering frozen divots, and into the farm yard. Then, like circus horses choreographed to do tricks, they separated. Each horse made a beeline for its own private pen, and we shut the gates behind them.

Panting, the dogs accepted our praise and beamed with pride. Then they got one of their fave knoshes—a perfect dried plum. [12/16/06]

The mighty wind that blew into Montana on Dec. 13 was clocked at 164 miles an hour on Snowslip Mountain next to the Continental Divide. Gusts of 133 miles an hour were recorded in Glacier Park. In Cut Bank an old woman was blown over. At Jill Lane's place outside Fairfield the wind ripped the blanket off one of her horses, tore  shingles from her house and pushed around her massive barbecue. Our friend hasn’t found time yet to use this deluxe grill because she’s been on the road so much, barrel racing and peddling the wares of the pharmaceutical company she represents. Birds have built nests in the barbecue.

Big winds blew across Dark Acres f, but not with the ferocity of the storms in Glacier country. By noon it seemed like the worst was over. When the sun came out we turned our three horses from their pens into our forest, where they like to spend the day foraging under the snow for grass. I put my chain saw in my old Bronco, and fetched the dogs, Clara and Lyndon Baines Johnson, who like to take drives next to me in the front seat. Then I put the Bronco in four wheel drive, and we headed back to the forest to remove some water birches that knocked down a section of barbed wire fence the day before. The horses, grazing in a stand of ponderosa by the river, watched our approach without interest.

From time to time the fast-moving clouds overhead first concealed, then revealed the sun. While the dogs barked furiously at a magpie who was dissing them from a hawthorn, I sliced the birches into four-foot lengths and pulled them away from the fence. Then I lifted the two strands of barbed wire from the ground with a claw hammer, tightened them and nailed them with heavy staples to the thick bark of a cottonwood.

We don’t like to have barbed wire around horses, but this ragtag fence was put up a decade ago by one of our redneck neighbors, incorrectly sited so that it gives Dark Acres at least an acre more of territory than our principality would have if the fence had been built along the true boundary.

I laid the hammer next to the chain saw, grabbed a couple lengths of birch, and dragged them along an overgrown path the hundred yards to the Bronco. Water birch is a hard, dense wood that burns slower and hotter than pine, so it’s perfect for the fireplace. As I made my way back to the fence for another load the storm hit without warning. Suddenly, it was snowing sideways, the wind driving tiny frozen pellets against my face. I called the dogs, and threw open the door of the Bronco. Clara, a Border collie, jumped in immediately. Lyndon Baines Johnson, a tiny Corgi, leaped into my arms so I could lift him into the front seat. The wind hissing through the crowns of the big cottonwoods sounded like a jet coming in for a landing.

As I was heading back to the fence to retrieve my tools one of these hundred-foot cottonwoods suddenly blew over not thirty feet away. The sound this gargantuan made when it hit the frozen ground came up through the earth as much as it traveled through the air. I looked toward the river to check on the horses, and saw that they had wisely moved from the trees to a clearing where nothing could fall on them.

I heard someone yelling. And then, emerging from the storm, was Kitty. She was carrying my saw and my hammer. She had come across them while looking for me along the river, and figured I'd been under the cotonwood when it fell. “Are you crazy?” she yelled.

“Probably,” I said, taking the tools from her. Then, as the wind made the forest look like a mob of lunatics waving to God, we drove back to the safety of our little house.
[12/15/06]

Fry Me a River. Queued behind a blonde with a scarlet flag, we were marching single-file like preschoolers at Pinocchio across a vast, seething lobby, one hand on our neighbor’s shoulder so no one gets lost. I’d never seen so much white hair in one place. Besides me and a woman who works the pari-mutuel windows at Del Mar, there were three dozen retired people from San Diego in our group, and there must have been forty such tours here, everyone snaking to their seats behind ushers bearing flags of many colors.

I felt sort of jumpy and I wished the box of Goo Goo Nuts clutched in my free hand was a nice Martini with a twist instead. But Branson is a Bible Belt town, and despite its many other amusements, you stand as much chance of finding a public drink here as you would a coven meeting at an Osmond show.

As we sat down, my new friends, a woman who waltzed away her youth in Detroit ballrooms and a lady whose father invented the teletype machine, were laughing at my story about the billiard table in the pissoir upstairs where I watched gentlemen gather that very afternoon for sport under portraits of Lincoln and Lee, and where a brazen, screeching housewife from our own group was escorted bodily from that male sanctum by a bouncer in a tux.

Finally, the house went black. Something crashed and a synthesizer crescendoed as lasers sliced through banks of fog clouding the theater’s chilled air. Then there he was, backed by a chorus line and canned strings, one of Branson’s main draws, Shoji Tabuchi, a Japaneseémigré  resplendent in white tails winking with sequins and gold, his violin singing as he glided across the stage.

Tabuchi did his Dixieland number, then “Jail House Rock,” then his polka, his classical number and his Big Band reprise, and from atop a spotlighted shack, a halting and surreal version of “Tradition” from Fiddler on the Roof. Then he played his favorite song, the theme from Ice Castles starring the enigmatic Robby Benson, followed by what to my Irish ears is a rather funereal rendition of “Danny Boy.” By the time he launched into “The Orange Blossom Special,” whose performance is required by law in fourteen states whenever a fiddler steps before an audience, the faces around me are glowing.

There’s a kind of hush while he told the Shoji Tabuchi Story, which goes something like this: As a wunderkind in Japan studying music by the Suzuki method—miniature violins, mass recitals, education by imitation—the seven-year-old Shoji is taken by mom to see a concert featuring the Smokey Mountain Boys. When the Boys play “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” Hank Williams’ lovely and melancholy song of lost love, Shoji is captured by American music for life. “It knocked me down,” he admits. As soon as he can, he says goodbye to all those jarring Japanese drums and gongs and banjos called shamisens and flees the home islands forever. Arriving in the States with $500 in his pocket he works at whatever, while mastering the violin.

Now here he was, apparent living proof of the American theory that anyone who stretches high enough can snatch the key to the city. For this audience Shoji’s heavily accented homage to their own heartland was a sweet sound indeed. While the glitz and excitement of more live entertainment than you can possibly see in a week is why Branson ranks with Yellowstone, the Lincoln Memorial and the Disneys as the biggest tourist draws in the Republic, people come back to the place because of its shameless Americanism and its family-oriented atmosphere unsullied by the legalized gambling that infests other resort destinations.

As for the Branson Sound, much of what I heard was emotionally inert, like the theme song from Jeopardy. Oh, it was all competent and sometimes even first-rate technically, but too much of it was as predictable as a metronome and as bland as chili that’s only been shown the Tabasco. Still, people don’t flock here for avant garde jazz featuring three glockenspiels and a soprano. They want to hear a little country and, as Lawrence Welk discovered long before Branson, they want a lot of old favorites. Most of Branson’s entertainers serve up this safe fare twice a day, seven days a week, straight through from March to January.

Just as I was feeling all smug and knowing about this in that snotty Yankee way, Shoji lowered his violin. Then he sang “His Eye is on the Sparrow.” Something about his accent and less-than-polished singing voice made this old gospel tune a strangely touching and fervent experience. When he finished I have to admit that I could feel something of what he meant about the power of American music.

Part Two. After the matinee I decided to skip the ride across town to our motel, and walked instead. It was a shiny autumn day in the seventies, the Ozark Mountain air perfumed with hickory smoke, and out there in all those pretty south Missouri hollows were shouts of color as the first hardwoods began to turn. This is the second of Branson’s two seasons, the first being the spring-summer session when the place is full of families, not retirees as it was when we showed up. The best time to visit, our bus driver told me, is in midsummer when the heat keeps the crowds down “and there aren’t any buses.” Off I went in shorts, shades and a sweatshirt feeling slightly overdressed—after all, this is a town where bib overalls make a bold statement, and men wearing ties draw stares.

“Old” Branson is a fishing hole village that grew up on a dammed portion of the White River called Lake Taneycomo. In 1967 this one-horse Mayberry was transformed forever when the Presley family (not related) opened a small theater in the style of the Grand Ol’ Opry for vacationers out on Highway 76 west of town. Now 76 Country Boulevard is a five-mile strip of some 40 theaters offering 1000 to 3000 seats at an average ticket price of $40. Most bear the imprimatur of Big Names, such as Glen Campbell, Roy Clark and Charley Pride, stars who perform in their own venues at least part of the season. It would be fun to say that performers never die they just build a theater in Branson. Between the theaters is a city planner’s nightmare of go cart tracks, miniature golf courses, fast food franchises, and water slides. As I strolled down 76, whose four lanes were clogged as usual with traffic that barely moves, I passed by some of the houses where we took in shows the last few days.

Although vaudeville is one of those things I’ll never see, people in our group said Jim Stafford came as close to their memory of the experience as you can get. I found his show oddly charming—traditional stage lighting as opposed to the computer opticals of Tabuchi’s theater, acoustic guitars and banjos rather than electrified instruments and pre-recorded backups, and a celebration of down home life that seemed closer to what Southern evenings were like before the triumph of television than anything else I saw in Branson. Stafford, whose big hit in the Sixties was “Spiders and Snakes,” sings and yarns in the low-keyed manner of a cracker Garrison Keillor. Before he came on I went up to the stage where a pair of six-year-olds recruited locally were crafting balloon animals for the audience.  When I asked for a squid the green-eyed girl said I’d be better off with a poodle dog, which she promptly tied.

When he came out Stafford made the three sections of his packed 1100-seat theater race each other by passing huge bags of balloons over their heads to the back and up front again, told moldy cracks like “He’s so old he saw the Dead Sea when it was only sick,” and “I bought this harmonica because my doctor told me to play 18 holes,” strummed a guitar made from the muffler of a ‘69 Thunderbird, heaved foam rubber cow pies into the crowd, danced with a chorus line of children in chicken costumes, turned off the house lights so figures dressed in black could run around with flashlights scaring people, explained that Branson means “bumper to bumper” (although the traffic problem could be solved if the Osmonds wouldn’t all go to work at the same time), and sang in a mellow, soporific voice that almost calmed me down.

Over at the Osmond’s we watched three generations of the world’s most famous Mormons put on a contemporary, high-energy production heavy on harmonies, choreography, and patriotic images such as waving flags, Martin Luther King speechifying and scenes from the Gulf War projected on big screens as a swarm of Donnies and Maries sang “This Land Is Your Land” and the like. They even did a rendition of “The Way Things Used to Be,” the monster Boyz 2 Men hit that would be the closest I came the week I was in town to seeing any black people.

Part Three. At the Moon River Theater Andy Williams floated out on stage singing in that humongous voice. Three people in our group whispered “He’s so short!” Williams had the best band I heard all week, and his show featured a couple who did a wildly gymnastic comedic dance act. But when he started “Moon River” I tried to bury myself in my seat, afraid that if he sang this thing even once more he might explode.

The Ozarks traditionally lured two kinds of outsiders—those looking for fun, and those hiding from the law. After the Civil War local farmers were terrorized by bands of vigilantes-turned-gangsters called Baldknobbers, named after the dry, treeless glades on top of these bulbous hills. The era was melodramatized in Harold Bell Wright’s huge 1907 best-seller, The Shepherd of the Hills, made into a 1941 movie starring John Wayne. In the deeply commercial manner of all things Branson, Wright’s homestead west of town is now a hillbilly theme park featuring a fiery reenactment of scenes from the book, a frenetic ride on an open-air tram pulled by a deranged hayseed in a jeep, a demonstration at a steam-powered grist mill showing how corn was chopped to make redeye, and a visit to a “still” where a “moonshiner” explodes from his shack and orders “you damn revenuers” off the trams with a six-shooter.

And so on. But most of the attractions outside the theaters offer live music as well, even at the Branson Mall, where a country singer with a karaoke boombox serenaded people on lawn chairs near the Plus Size department. Outside the Shepherd of the Hills a trio playing mountain songs recruited a woman from our group named Ruth, who carried a bag of harmonicas everywhere she went, to play with them as they rolled through sixty-two verses of “She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain.” This sort of interplay with the audience is a Branson hallmark. The Osmonds brought right up on stage a bunch who had driven straight through from Utah just to see them in the flesh. Entertainers wander around the parking lots after the shows shaking people’s hands. Although videotaping is verboten customers are encouraged to walk up the aisle during a performance and take snapshots.

After some knick-knack shopping, I crossed my fingers and ordered brisket to go from a barbecue joint, figuring it couldn’t be too bad. After all, Kansas City—the Mecca of barbecue with its culinary legends like Arthur Bryant’s—where I had recently feasted on a delectable pig sandwich—was only two hours north. In Baby, Would I Lie? a Donald Westlake murder mystery set in Bransopn, a country crooner sums up the town’s cuisine when he sings “If it ain’t fried, it ain’t food!” Indeed, at a typical buffet you can get you some fried chicken, fried hushpuppies, fried taters, fried okra, chicken-fried steak, and for dessert, some fried, sugared dough called funnel bread. The only good meal that didn’t build a dam at the entrance to my heart was at Mickey Gilley’s Texas Cafe, where I was assured that if I wanted Tabasco they’d run get some from the kitchen.

I got back to the motel just as everyone was boarding the bus for the Mel Tillis show. An insurrection broke out led by a testy cadre who didn’t want anything to do with the tour of a bass boat factory scheduled for our last day here. Instead, they wanted to take in Yakov Smirnoff, the Russian comedian who forged a career ridiculing communists and the Soviet Union’s “Department of Jokes.” I put my Boxcar Willie mug and my list of Elvis sightings aside and peeked into the styrofoam at my dinner. It was a hunk of fried lunch meat squatting in liquid smoke. Someone pushed a pen and the Smirnoff petition under my nose.
“To hell with the boats,” he rasped. “We want the Russian. Right?”

I could only smile. What a country. [12/13/06]

Back to the barricades. He was hardly the working class hero I expected, this new light of the American Left. Standing in a press of local politicians, Joel Rogers was wearing a collarless white linen shirt and a long scarf of navy silk draped around his neck in an attitude of weary urbanity that made the rest of us at the reception look like we were rehearsing Hee Haw.

I hoped my professional jealousy didn’t show. During my tenure as a subversive a quarter century earlier I had lived on a hundred dollars a month in a shack by the tracks; Rogers had been awarded a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, and had probably invested the $270,000 in amazon.com or Yahoo!

Still, I thought it would be amusing to speak to him, in the manner of one devotee of the obscure to another, like John Hughes fans who have memorized the dialogue from Ferris Buehler’s Day Off. I was also curious to see if the meeting would dredge up any regrets I might harbor about turning my back on the Left—and on my political and social responsibilities, as well—simply to free up my life for a good time. My game plan during the middle years of my life was so ideologically ultra, so deeply anarchist, that it didn’t even allow me to read about American politics, electoral or otherwise.

And I certainly made no time for pointless but self-congratulatory Norman Rockwell gestures such as voting or serving on a jury, which to me are simply affirmations of a system that victimizes the poor.
             
But as it turned out, the New Party, whose ideological framework Rogers constructed in the early 1990s, wasn’t obscure or ultra at all, at least not in the twelve states where its card-carrying members were pounding on doors. In Missoula, Montana, it had captured five of twelve seats on the city council.

Rogers’ strategy called for a methodical building of local political machines by appealing to hourly workers, the denizens of trailer courts and other poor neighborhoods, and assorted marginalized elements such as Indians, with an agenda that headlined affordable housing, national health care, and jobs that paid enough to make them worth the trouble of doing. The New Party wouldn’t waste energy fielding token candidates in campaigns they couldn’t win. As for higher office, that would have to wait until these latter-day “democratic socialists” had enough muscle to triumph. AT one time in my life it would have sounded so promising.
           
But I couldn’t have cared less. My belief that the Left had a future in the U.S. evaporated one shiny afternoon in 1980 while I was playing tennis, soon after I married Kitty, the love of my life. Maybe because the day was so perfect and my game was improving with every shot it suddenly struck me that only when America’s vast economy lay in ruins would the powerless finally have a real shot at wresting control from the wealthy. Yet no person or movement could hasten that day. Because I had wasted so much time publishing a radical newspaper in the 1970s and promoting doomed causes I felt as if I’d been slapped out of a spell.
           
“I thought you might be interested in this,” I told Rogers when our hostess introduced us. His hand was fluttery and his eyes refused to make contact. I offered him a brochure from 1974 announcing the formation of the Montana New Socialist Party. In order to get a foot in the door, we Treasure State southpaws had hit the streets in order to collect enough signature to get on the ballot an initiative that would convert Montana Power into a state-owned utility. This new socialized entity would be democratically controlled and locally administered in order to lower rates and halt the strip-mining of coal in the eastern part of the state. But we never gathered enough signatures to get this issue on the ballot. When we were interviewed by a Great Falls radio station the only person who called in to chat with us was a guy from the John Birch Society. The Party evaporated soon after.

“Sound familiar?” I asked.
           
Rogers grabbed the brochure and turned away.
           
You little prick, I thought, wondering how long it would take me to strangle him with his own scarf.
           
Following Rogers’ tired speech about the need for a democratic revolution, the return of power to the masses, and his belief in the moral equality of people, I raised my hand. “In the Thirties American leftists used the model of the Bolsheviks as their inspiration and in the Sixties they used the Cubans. Who does the New Party model itself on?”
           
“We don’t like labels,” a city councilman answered. “They put people off.”
           
I raised my hand again. “If the New Party gains control of the City Council what would you do about Sun Mountain Sports?” I asked, referring to a golf bag company that had been given tax incentives to locate in Missoula, but had farmed out some of its work to cheaper labor in the Third World.
           
“Oh, what would you do?” Rogers shot back, looking not at me but a gorgeous young woman standing next to me, an estimator for a welding company.
           
“Hey, you’re the guy with the genius grant,” I said. There was a chorus of groans. I grabbed a beer and went outside.
           
Meanwhile, Kitty had been drinking martinis in the kitchen with a novelist.
           
“What do you make of Joel Rogers?” the novelist asked, as the meeting out in the living room broke up.
           
“He looks like a guy,” Kitty said, nibbling on an olive, “who needs a good fuck.”
           
As if on cue, Rogers appeared before her, pretending to look for a drink but abandoning that ploy to make the sort of contact that says I see your soul.
           
Kitty began telling him about her great uncle, Edward R. Burke, the senator from Nebraska who wrote the selective service law in 1940—the one establishing the war-time draft. Kitty always tells politicos about her great uncle, and she tells academics about her Ivy League sister who’s a semi-famous expert on eating disorders. A shy person, Kitty uses these stories to touch base with people who don’t share her true passion, which is quarter horses.

Rogers listened politely. “You know something? You are over-the-top beautiful.”
           
“Don’t you have a wife back home?” Kitty asked. “Wisconsin? Wherever?”
           
The novelist giggled as the crowd swept into the kitchen for snacks and drinks. A county commissioner was telling a bureaucrat that what this goddamn country needed was a goddamn revolution.
           
I went out to the Bronco, which was parked across the street from the compound belonging to our hostess high up in Missoula’s Valley of the Liberals. I could hear her ducks in the back yard quarreling over a crust of bread. I yelled into the night for Kitty, who was still on the porch schmoozing. Rogers was circling her like a cattle dog. When she finally said goodnight and began making her way down the long driveway next to the house I heard him shout. “Wait! You are over-the-top beautiful!”
           
He would never catch her, not because she was running away, but because his forward motion was impeded by a woman who had clutched him around the waist and wouldn’t let go, forcing him to drag her through the gravel. This woman, I saw when yard lamp illuminated her, was a cheerfully wanton and slutty acquaintance of ours from the days when we played softball in a league, then went to a bar and got hammered. She was one of those charming but maladroit Montana hicks with an afghan hairdo and incorrect ideas about how much fun people in the big cities must be having all the time.
           
Kitty stopped, and yelled something raucous and good-natured back into the dark at Rogers, something that sounded like “Get a horse!” Then she was inside the truck, drunk as a skunk.
           
“Did you have a good time tonight?” I asked, totally in love with her.
           
She smiled and put her hands against the ceiling of the truck. “The best!”    

Safe Haven. We put on our skates early last Thursday, one skate at a time, of course, and went down to the Mabel with our hockey sticks to knock the puck around. The red dogwoods, hawthorns, water birches and wild roses lining the banks drooped with frost, and a chilled fog rolled in from the Clark Fork River. While we usually try to avoid Hallmark Greeting Card expressions like “winter wonderland,” that’s what we saw. Our workout was especially fun today because yesterday our slough was saved from a corporation that would have turned this sweet water into an industrial cesspool.

Riverside Contracting, a road-construction company with annual revenues of $40 million, wanted to build an asphalt plant at the source of the Mabel, on a beautiful old cattle spread called the Trout Meadows Ranch along a coil of the luscious Clark Fork River in western Montana. The company also wanted to dig 48 acres of gravel pits, bring in a rock crusher and put up a cement factory. All this mayhem, plus a grotesque parade of dump trucks clogging small country lanes, would have rattled and poisoned the working class neighborhoods around the ranch for at least a decade, and threatened the river itself. The Salish Indians were worried about the scheme because Council Groves State Park, a quiet and austere piece of ground the tribes consider sacred, lies adjacent to the ranch.

In order to get its way Riverside had to convince the three Missoula County Commissioners to change the zoning of a 160-acre portion of the ranch so that “resource extraction” could be accommodated.

The ranch’s neighbors organized to fight. Their group, Grass Valley Against Gravel, or GAG, went to work accumulating the findings of fact that would be necessary to counter Riverside’s pricey lawyers, who tried to convince the Commissioners of the plentitude of benefits to the community of citing an enormous industrial facility in a rural and suburban backwater. GAG didn’t think they could beat Riverside at the rezoning game because the Commissioners have traditionally been gung ho about development, and generally approve every subdevelopment and rezoning bid that lands of their desks. But GAG figured there were enough irate property owners in the district to overturn the Commissioners on petition.

But surprising everyone, the Commissioners voted unanimously Dec. 6 to deny Riverside’s desires. As the politicians laid out their reasons for opposing the scheme the company’s henchmen, and the owner of the ranch, a grocer named Jim Edwards, looked on with shock and disbelief.

But these men shouldn’t have been surprised. David had beaten Goliath with something as simple as a stone—a better argument. The heart of GAG’s attack was the truth that rezoning Trout Meadows to allow industrial development was in fact spot-zoning, an illegal ploy that benefits one party at the expense of many.

Like a junior college debate club that’s been commanded to argue “Resolved: Adolf Hitler helped the Jews create their own homeland,” Riverside put little energy into countering GAG. One of their witnesses got up and said that Portland, Oregon, had screwed itself out of future growth by building on top of valuable gravel reserves.

After the vote, amid the applause of GAG and its supporters, Riverside’s lawyer left the meeting whistling. And why not? After all, he was working by the billable hour.

As for Jim Edwards, it hasn’t been the best of years. In January he was sued by the Missoula Independent, a weekly newspaper that claimed Edwards owed it thousands of dollars for advertising his grocery store in Missoula, the Pattee Creek Market (he’s counter-sueing). In November he lost his bid to become a County Commissioner, losing in a landslide to the Democratic incumbent, who voted against him yesterday. Then last week he learned that because of a complaint filed by Dark Acres he’s being investigated by the Montana Commissioner of Political Practices for violating campaign laws. Adding insult to injury, as he suffered through the Commissioner’s meeting someone was arrested at his store for shoplifting.

But none of this mattered to us on this morning. We brought the puck up the ice and slammed it home with a nice hard slap shot that echoed off the frozen trees and sent a trio of fat pheasants soaring from one safe haven to another. [12/7/06] 


A rich lawyer is riding in his limo from his office in the city to his country estate. Along the way he spots a man down on all fours in the ditch next to the road. The man seems to be eating grass.

“Pull over, James” the lawyer orders his driver. The car stops and the lawyer rolls down the window.

“What are you doing?” he asks the man.

“I lost my job and used up all my savings,” the man says. “This is all I have to eat.”

“That’s terrible,” the lawyer says. “Listen, why don’t you come home with me and I’ll see that you get a meal.”

The man stands up. “What about my family?” he asks, pointing to a woman and four kids eating grass in a nearby pasture.

The lawyer smiles warmly. “Everyone’s welcome. Get in.”

As the car speeds up the man turns to the lawyer with tears in his eyes. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your generosity.”

The lawyer shrugs. “It’s nothing, sir. You’re going to love my place. My lawn is a foot long.”
[10/15/06]

The saga of Gary the chicken, Part One. The morning after we moved to Dark Acres in 1989 our red heeler crossed the cordon sanitaire separating our new place in the country from the rest of the world, and beat up a chicken. By the time I rushed across this muddylane to the scene of the crime Radish had fled, looking over his shoulder, into a barley field. Although the rooster was lurching around like the survivor of a farm implement demolition derby, it appeared to be functioning—as much as a chicken ever functions.

No one answered my knock on the door of the battered trailer, so I left a note in the mailbox, collected my chagrined and penitent dog, gave him a tongue-lashing, and drove my Bronco twelve miles down the Mullan Road to our office in the city.

When I got home that evening the Backett brothers were waiting at our gate. One of them—Luke, I would soon learn—was cradling the rooster. Rick looked on, skinny arms arcing from greasy muscle shirt as if they’d been deformed by a life of hefting pigs or kegs of beer.

“Yer dawg bit off Gary’s butt hole,” Luke announced. We turned to stare at Radish, who sampled the air apprehensively, and slunk off into a thicket of Russian olives.

“Hey, I’m sorry about this,” I said. “But I had to get to work this morning. The chicken seemed okay.”

Gary made a clucking noise that sounded like a question. 

“What do you mean?” I said. “About the butt hole.”

Luke hoisted the bird so we could examine its business end, which indeed looked gnawed. “He cain’t hold in his turds no more.”

“Is that important to a chicken?”

“It is to this one,” Luke sniffed, a little haughtily, I thought. “This here’s a fightin’ chicken.”

I noticed then that the eyes of the Backetts were of a blue as washed as Windex. And one of Rick’s eyes was wobbling around in a random orbit independent of its mate. Luke was wearing his red flannel K-Mart pajamas backwards and his shoes didn’t match. I found out later through a gossip down the lane that the Backetts were from Arkansas or maybe Missouri, and that they were raising several little boys in that busted trailer without the benefit of a woman’s touch. The children were the get of either two different moms, or one mom with a meth problem who ran off. According to my source, the paternity was equally unclear.

“Well, look,” I said, “if your chicken dies I’ll buy you another.” I deeply regretted this offer as soon as it escaped.

Rick’s face lit up as if he’d found a Mickey Mantle rookie card under his mattress. “We was offert a hunnert dollars.”

Since I’d already lost control of the situation, and it was my first confrontation with neighbors I expected to spend my golden years around, I didn’t argue. I knew Radish had learned his lesson. But I would keep my eye on these yahoos. Just to make sure Gary didn’t have another accident and fall into a stew.

Gary the chicken, Part Two. A week after Radish’s attack on Gary I crossed the chicken line with a six-pack of Mexican beer. I was greeted in the yard by three young boys. Although they’d just disembarked the bus after a long day at school their clothes were impeccably clean and oddly pressed, as if soaked in a vat of starch. They knew who I was.

“I’m Lefty,” the smallest one announced in an oddly deep voice that made him sound like the Captain of the Lollypop Brigade. “You can call me Foghorn.” 

The biggest boy grinned through a sea of freckles. “We like your land!”

Then the Backett brothers emerged from their trailer and we sat down in the yard to drink one while the boys changed clothes and set out on their chores.

After a while Luke belched loudly and put down his beer. “Think it’s true what they say about beaners?”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“That they piss in this stuff before they send it north?”

I drank again and thought for a second. “Yes. How’s Gary?”

“Want to see him?”

I followed them to the lot behind the trailer and there indeed was the famous victim, in a large cage of his own. A dozen or so other fowls pecked at the floor of their cages, as well, or wandered around loose. Although I wouldn’t have a clue about what to look for in a fightin’ chicken, these birds didn’t seem all that tough.

“We been breedin’ for two years now,” Luke explained.

“What are you breeding for?” I asked.

He squinted at me through those washed-out eyes like I was soliciting for the Junior League. “For meanness.”

“Huh. How do you do it?”

“Well, at first we just let ’em all go around and fuck anyone they wanted, but now we’re real see-lective. Only Gary, Cop, and Pecker get to. They’re the meanest.”

I nodded. “You know, I don’t think cock fighting is legal in this state.”

They looked horrified. “It ain’t?”

Gary the chicken, Part Three. One thing I learned growing up in the Squalor Zone: When it comes to the neighbors, don’t get involved. Contrary to Jeffersonian notions about the goodness of provinces dominated by small landowners, a lot of the people in these nether-regions are hiding something or running from something or have been convicted of something. And most everyone is armed. A sizable percentage of the addresses of violent offenders and sex perverts published in the morning paper on Mondays lie within two miles of Dark Acres.

Some of our neighbors have a chip on their shoulder because they’ve been priced out of the real estate market in the city. But most of the rabble in the Squalor Zone wouldn’t live in town even if they had the money, preferring the anonymity and the camouflage of these neglected reaches of the county, where the city is just a dirty yellow glow at the foot of Mt. Sentinel.

But of course I forgot all this as soon as the Backetts approached me one day in August some months after the events surrounding Gary the chicken.

“Lefty and them want to go to the Fair,” Luke said, “But we ain’t got the cash.”

I thought he was asking for work. “Well, we could use help shoveling out our corrals,” I said.

“Okay, sure. But I seen you ain’t got no wood in yet and we got some left over from last year.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward a pile of rounds heaved in front of the trailer.

“Then what would you guys do for heat?”

Rick’s googly eye wandered west while his good eye went to the ridges of the Lolo National Forest above us. “We was getting set to go over and cut us some more. We got a cord or so laid in. And it’s good and dry. You kin have it for forty bucks. We’ll even bring it over.”

“Okay. It sounds like a plan.” In fact, I hadn’t had the time to think about kindling for the fireplace, and this was a bargain, so I went to the jar in the cupboard where we kept cash and brought back two twenties.

The next morning the Backetts, their kids, their ratty trucks, and their kindling had vanished. Gary and his pals had flown the coop as well.  No one on the lane knew where they’d gone. And no one ever saw them again. [10/22/06]

Don’t know nothin’ ‘bout history. As that day in November approaches when Americans ratify a corrupt economic system by voting, it’s getting hard to say which of the two parties in this rigged game sound more cynical. Take the Montana Senate race, for example. The Republican, Conrad “Old Yeller” Burns, claims the White House has a secret plan for winning the war in Iraq. Then the camp of the Democrat, Jon “Three Fingers” Tester, fires back that dark talk of hidden agendas sounds exactly like Richard Nixon discussing the Vietnam War, implying that the Republicans were responsible for the deaths of 58,000 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese.

In fact, Vietnam, a proxy fight pitting U.S. corporations against Soviet and Chinese Communism, was a bipartisan bloodbath. In 1950 Harry Truman approved $10 million in military assistance for anti-communist schemes in Indochina. In 1955 Ike Eisenhower sent the “Military Assistance Advisory Group” to train the South Vietnamese Army. In 1961 John Kennedy shipped  400 Green Berets to Saigon. The next year JFK signed the Foreign Assistance Act of 1962 which provided “military assistance to countries which are on the rim of the Communist world and under direct attack." Lyndon Johnson escalated American troop strength in Vietnam to 429,000 between 1964 to 1968 after the faked Gulf of Tonkin Incident, in which LBJ claimed that U.S. ships were attacked by the North Vietnamese. The antiwar movement liked to chant a slogan that addressed the Democratic in the White House: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Nixon, of course, added his Republican share to the carnage by ordering the invasion of Cambodia and the bombing of Hanoi and the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

If the White House has a secret plan for Iraq and actually shared it with a Bozo like Burns, it's no doubt the same plan America’s rulers had for Vietnam. That is, hang in there long enough, pound enough money down a bottomless rat hole, demonstrate your willingness to sacrifice thousands of soldiers and civilians, and you will eventually ruin the economy of the enemy (in this case, that of the Muslim world—Iraq’s economy has already been shattered).

Indeed, it could be argued that U.S. corporations won the Vietnam War because they compelled the Soviet Bloc to spend even money on a military it couldn’t afford (although inflation nearly sunk America's economy, as well). In the end, building a tank is an investment that returns no dividends because the tank produces no wealth. Especially after some guy with a home-made bomb blows it up. [10/19/06]

Flying Away. At Dark Acres we’ve been thinking a lot about trees lately. That’s because it’s firewood-gathering time. Plus, it’s the season when the wind tends to knock down the old cottonwoods surrounding our swamps, forcing us to clear a path with the chainsaw for our trail rides. And this fall there’s another reason trees are on our minds: We’re waiting to hear whether a massive black hawthorn growing in a tangled copse of our smaller hawthorns is going to be listed as an American Trophy Tree, the largest of its species in Montana.

Because of all this thinking about trees I wasn’t surprised when an old box elder came to mind, a tree I haven’t considered in years. I remember the day my old man nearly brained himself trying to install a rope swing on the limb of this giant, when I was seven, the summer after my mother died. Unwilling to climb up, he'd elected to weight one end of a thick hemp rope with a claw hammer, which he heaved heavenward in the hope it would sail over the limb. The first couple times he tried this the hammer came back down on a trajectory heading straight towards his noggin, forcing him to duck away like a hitter avoiding a high, tight one.

Finally, to my amazement, it worked. He tied a spent Firestone to the rope with a double square knot, installed me inside, walked the boy-bearing tire to the apex of the slope above the Sand Coulee Creek, and pushed.

"What should I do?" I screamed as I soared out toward a deep hole in the Sand Coulee Creek.

He yelled back in his East Texas cracker twang, rich with mules and chiggers. "Y'all figure it out."

It wasn’t just the wild ride and the plunge into the creek I adored. See, you could apply an infinite amount of torque to the rope by winding up the tire before liftoff, coiling it like a spring. Then, standing on the tire, spinning like a dervish, the test was this: Could I marshal the timing it took to dismount at a point that would deposit me in the water instead of the brush?

In another game, my cousin, Mike Roberts, and I would swallow Fizzies, which were flavored pills that turned water into a sort of carbonated drink. Then we’d wind up the tire, working it like a posthole digger. As the Fizzie began rumbling in our guts, one of us would climb into the tire while the other stood on top. Once airborne and spinning, it was mano a mano until the loser barfed.

But what I liked best about my swing was the compulsive, solitary act of swinging, pumping my legs for hours to keep the tire in motion. It was the best way I could think of to take me out of my life and somewhere else. [10/18/06]

Apocalypto. The 82 small earthquakes that struck Yellowstone Park between Oct. 14 and Oct. 17 weren't connected to the big 6.7 earthquake in Hawaii Oct. 15. Nor is this swarm of tremors an avatar of the Yellowstone supervolcano that’s been building a great chamber of magma under the Park, according to University of Utah seismographic analyst Paul Roberson. The inevitable eruption of the Yellowstone volcano, which occurs every 600,000 years or so, and is now overdue, would end the world as we know it, and probably force the cancellation of the November elections. Hundreds of thousands of square miles would be obliterated by floods of molten rock. Every living thing in the region the lava didn’t vaporize would be killed by horizontal shit-storms of superheated ash and poisonous gasses. During one of these earth-changing events 12 million years ago herds of rhinos and other ungulates in far-off Nebraska were killed and buried by blowing ash.

Earthquake swarms like this one occur every few years, Roberson said, but they don’t indicate the End of Days. “The red flags we look for are changes in geyser activity, and such things as the ground heating up.”  [10/18/06]

Miele Mouth. In one of his sanctimonious weekly columns recently the managing editor of the Kalispell (Montana) Daily Interlake, Frank Miele, wrung his hands over the terrible strains negative campaigning in the U.S. Senate race is placing on the social fabric of the Treasure State. Gosh, Jon “The Farmer” Tester accuses Conrad “Old Yeller” Burns of taking payola from corrupt lobbyists, then Burns calls Tester a “big-spending, cut-and-run liberal.” Such hurtful words!

Miele opines: “This, after all, is Big Sky Country, where there used to be room enough for ideas all across the political spectrum, and where a man used to be respected as much for what he didn’t say as what he did say. But Big Sky Country has been made smaller andmeaner thanks not just to the importance of this election on the future of the U.S. Senate, but thanks also to the tightening web of the Internet and cable news (noose?) on our body politic. The Daily Show and blogs like the Daily Kos have pervaded not just the East and West Coasts with their cynicism, anger and disrespect, but also small-town America.”

Of course, in the golden past of electoral politics everyone was a gentleman and the issues were debated in the spirit of “I respect your opinion deeply, worthy opponent, but I beg to differ.”

For example, Barry Goldwater was slandered by the “Daisy Girl,” ad, which posited that the Senator from Arizona wanted to nuke the planet.

In the newspapers of the era Abe Lincoln was called a “grotesque baboon,” a “third-rate country lawyer who once split rails and now splits the Union,” a “coarse, vulgar joker,” a dictator, an ape, and a buffoon. The Illinois State Register labeled him “the craftiest and most dishonest politician that ever disgraced an office.”

In a speech during the 1884 presidential campaign Dr. Samuel Burchard accused the Democrats of promoting alcoholism and Catholicism and claimed that they started the Civil War. “We are Republicans,” Burchard said, “and don't propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion. We are loyal to our flag.”

The reason Montanans are so sensitive and high-minded, of course, is because the land of oro y plata was founded by fine citizens and scholars such as my great-grandfather (see "Being There First," below). And darn it, it’s a cynical and hateful lie to spin our state’s history by accusing its first white citizens of being Civil War deserters, criminals on the lam, fortune hunters, mercenaries, poachers, and losers who couldn’t make it anywhere else. Shame! [10/17/06]

It Lives! Rumors of Stan Jones' demise have been somewhat exaggerated. While it may be true that for many politicians Montana is a political graveyard, the carcass of the 67-year-old Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate is not moldering in the woods nor, as it turns out, stinking up his house. Jones showed up Monday on the campus of Montana State University in Bozeman to debate Democratic Jon “The Farmer” Tester and Republican Conrad “Old Yeller” Burns. Hewing to what Libertarians consider a hard line drawn by the rich, white, slave-owning framers of the U.S. Constitution, Jones denounced most everything in America as unconstitutional, called for the impeachment of George Bush for attaching unlawful riders to bills passed by Congress, and accused Burns of intellectual property theft when Old Yeller declared that Montanans know how to spend their money better than the Federal government does.

Meanwhile, Burns praised the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq and the alleged barrels of pork he’s shipped back to the Treasure State. Then The Farmer wrung his hands about the cost of college and medical care but, as usual, offered no plans. While Jones has no chance of winning Montana’s Senate seat, in the latest polls the perennial candidate is drawing three percent of the vote, and could turn out to be a factor in what is shaping up to be a close race.

Jones is a colorful figure. Literally. He’s called The Blue Man because, well, his skin is blue. In 1999 he began taking colloidal silver supplements, which crackpots believe is an antibacterial agent, because he feared that chaos sparked by the “millennium bug” might lead to The End of Days, plus a shortage of antibiotics. Eating silver, however, causes a medical dysfunction called argyria that permanently turns the skin of white people a silvery blue. However, at the debate Jones appeared to be glowing with good health. Was it makeup, or the result of some quality time in the old tanning booth? [10/12/06]



















The raptor ate my brain. An apparently retarded Montana lawmaker who believes that the earth is no more than 6,000 years old has attacked the governor of the state for telling schoolchildren that the geological evidence indicates the planet has been swimming in space for hundreds of millons of years. (Note to self: investigate whether “retarded Montana lawmaker” is a registered oxymoron.)

According to the AP, Republican Rep. Roger Koopman called Gov. Brian Schweitzer's statement “incredibly bigoted.” While Koopman said his belief in the Earth's age is not based on his faith, but on his scientific investigations, Schweitzer “insulted many Christian people and other people of faith that arrived at that position other than the way I arrived at it.”

Koopman apparently “arrived” at his belief that human beings and dinosaurs wandered the earth at the same time by watching Raquel Welch in a skimpy fur two-piece shake her glorious jugs as she cavorted across the set of the Neanderthal epic, One Million Years B.C. Or perhaps he ogled the luscious Barbara Bachman in Caveman and mistook this Ringo Starr vehicle for a news program.

Whatever, Koopman schemed in 2005 to introduce a bill allowing the teaching of  “intelligent design,” and other “alternatives” to evolution, in Montana’s public schools. “Intelligent design” is a successor to the defunct “creationism” notions of Christian crackpots (note to self: investigate whether this phrase is a redundancy). Whatever, in this menagery of wishful thinking it’s posited that God did all the work, and the vast fossil evidence of evolution is just His way of testing sinners. Or something. Anyway, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that creationism is religion and cannot be taught as science in public schools. [10/11/06]

Six Degrees. Last summer, while Oprah Winfrey and pal Gayle King were wandering across America on a 3600-mile road trip, taping segments of their serendipitous big adventure for Winfrey’s syndicated show, they took a wrong turn north of Oklahoma City.

How an entourage of half dozen vehicles could get lost is a mystery. But they finally pulled into the driveway of a small horse ranch outside Perry, Oklahoma, population 5,000. Some local ropers, who were practicing with steers in an arena, rode over to see if this was a lost funeral procession or that theatrical bunch from the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes. Oprah and Gayle were immediately smitten with the guys, Justus Hyatt and Cody Leitner, 27, who owns the place with his wife, Katie. “There’s something about a man on a horse,” Oprah cooed. “A man who knows how to handle a horse is a really cool, sexy thing.”

So smitten was the celeb she invited the boys to appear on her show. The segment aired from Chicago on Oct. 3. Following the footage of their meeting with Oprah the Oklahomans came out on the stage in their cowboy duds swinging around ropes. As it turns out Cody Leitner was the best man at the wedding of our nephew, Colter Dent, of Brookville, Kansas. And coincidentally, sitting in Oprah’s audience this week were two of our best friends, Victor and Marcia Lieberman of Carlsbad, California.
  
Wild Horses. Under a full moon the dogs at Dark Acres howled and the horses trembled and shied Wednesday as a deep, throbbing rumble rose up from Mount Sentinel thirteen milesaway. No, it wasn’t an earthquake or a volcano or a lost jet. The noise was coming from Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, playing their geriatric hearts out for 20,000 crazed fans at Washington-Grizzly Stadium on the campus of the University of Montana. The concert capped a big week for Missoula, Montana. It began with a live taping of Garrison Keeler’s National Public Radio hit program, A Prairie Home Companion. Keillor wrote appealingly about his visit to the Garden City at salon.com yesterday, although he garbled a couple of facts. First, it’s Mount Jumbo, not Mount Jubilee, and you don’t fly over the National Bison Range on your way from Minneapolis to Missoula. Not unless you’ve been hijacked. Still, an amusing and comforting little Keillorish rant. [10/05/06]

Poll Heads. Citing a Reuters' poll taken Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that “Democrat Jon Tester leads Republican Sen. Conrad Burns 46 percent to 42 percent after Burns suffered a series of problems, from returning donations from associates of convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff to comments seen as insensitive to some ethnic groups and to out-of-state firefighters.”

Blue Man. Although perennial Montana libertarian candidate Stan Jones, 67, doesn't answer his phone, and he maintains a dysfunctional website, and he hasn't been seen in a couple of months, he may be the deciding factor in Montana's Senate election race. In the most recent Lee Enterprises poll Stevens garnered 3 points. This sampling of 625 registered voters in the Treasure State was conducted Sept. 25 to 28 and might be as much as plus or minus 4 percentage points. If it turns out that the Blue Man turns up dead would his supporters still vote for him, or would they throw their support to his opponents, notably Conrad "Old Yeller" Burns, who's down 7 points in the polls? By the way, they call Stevens the Blue Man because, well, he's blue. His skin turned a silverly cobalt shade a few years back after he started drinking colloidal silver, a snake oil he believed would act as an antibiotic after the Y2K Bug sparked the End of Days, and the disappearance of pharmacies as we know them.

Political Graveyard. Has anyone seen Stan “The Blue Man” Jones? The name of the 67-year-old Montana Libertarian from Bozeman will appear on the November ballot facing those of Republican Conrad “Boss Hawg” Burns and Democrat Jon “The Farmer” Tester. But Jones in the flesh hasn’t appeared in public since a June 10 debate with The Farmer in Missoula (Boss Hawg chickened out of the photo opp because he believes people in this liberal arts college town think he’s a skuzzball, which is true).

Jones is easy to spot. He's blue. In 1999 he began taking colloidal silver supplements, which crackpots believe is an antibacterial agent, because he believed that chaos sparked by the “millennium bug” might lead to The End of Days, plus a shortage of antibiotics. Eating silver, however, causes a medical dysfunction called argyria that turns the skin of white people a silvery blue, certainly a nice shade for the walls of an upstairs bathroom, but probably not something you’d like to sport at the beach. Anyway, I’ve been calling Jones for days. The phone rings, but no one picks it up, and no message machine comes on to announce that Stan will get back to me just as soon as he can. Plus, the calendar page on his website doesn’t work. Walt Williams, political reporter at the Bozeman Chronicle, told me not to worry,  Jones always flakes out like this during an election. He ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2004. And in the 2002 race against Montana Senator Max Baucus Jones finished third out of four, with a respectable 10,420 votes compared to the 204,853 votes Baucus garnered (the Green party candidate, Bob Kelleher, got 7,653 votes, and might have done better if his skin had been the shade of a twenty-dollar bill).

On the issues, Jones believes that the Federal government should stay out of everything, except making sure women aren’t allowed to get abortions. Roe v Wade, he said, “is a vain and final effort to ‘correct’ the irresponsibility of the woman, and her male partner, in the conduct of her lives.” I wonder, did Jones keel over and is now moldering inside his house, turning an even paler shade of blue? Maybe someone should check.

Tester Gesture.  In Montana supporters of Senate candidate Jon “The Farmer” Tester are beginning to feel the buzz. The latest poll has the Big Sandy pea picker beating the Republican incumbent, Conrad “Boss Hawg” Burns, by 9 points, and Old Yeller's approval ratings, according to SurveyUSA, have been heading in the direction of zero for months. Screeching like howler monkeys, The Farmer’s army, all those well-meaning Testers and Tesses, are now annoying the rest of us by flashing the Tester salute, a vaguely obscene, European gesture made by extending the thumb and pinky, and folding down the other digits. The salute is an homage to the three fingers The Farmer lost to a meat grinder when he was a boy. Surveys taken in the Treasure State, however, are notoriously unreliable, a point proven by Tester’s monster victory over Frank Morrison in the Democratic primary after polls indicated the race was close. Part of the fickleness of Montanans comes from the fact that many of its white people, me included, are descended from deranged trash who were either rejected for service in the Civil War, or who deserted one of the armies.

Although my bet’s on Tester (see “Betting the Farm” below) I won’t be pleased to see him representing my state in Washington. Even if he had plans for the sort of legislation I want—free higher education, free universal health care, and public ownership and control of the utilities—he’ll have zero seniority and very little power. Old pols like Edward Kennedy will bark orders at him, like the seniors did to Flounder, the freshman in Animal House. “Tester! Bring me a coffee! And put some goddamn whiskey in it!” Republicans are trying to convince Montanans that all that yummy bacon Boss Hawg has been sending home from D.C. will be a thing of the past if The Farmer triumphs. Maybe. But maybe that won’t be such a bad thing. Stay tuned here to find out which class under the Big Sky has gotten fat on all those barrels of pork. [9/25/06]

War Mongers. Former President Bill Clinton’s weird, defensive rant September 24 on Fox News underscores the fact that when it comes to wars of imperialism, whether against Vietnamese communists or fascist Muslims, Democrats are just as eager to spill blood as Republicans. Acerbic and sputtering with inarticulate rage, Clinton yelled at Chris Wallace that he had done more to try and kill Osama bin Laden than anyone, and that if he were still President the U.S. would have far more troops in Afghanistan than are on the ground there now. [9/25/06]

Index of Notes

• My Pony is Gray
• Easter Dog and Bird Show
• Montana's new coin
• Da Bears
• Luddites in the Newsroom
• Max Baucus and Cruel Jokes
• Courtney Lowery
• A Christmas Miracle
• Forward Motion
• Dreadlocks
• Rodeo
• A Mighty Wind
• Fry me a river
• Back to the barricades
• Safe haven
• Lawyer Joke
• The saga of Gary the chicken
• Gut feeling about gravel
• The Birds
• Vietnam and Secret Plans
• Flying away on a t ire swing
• Yellowstone earthquakes
• Frank Miele pontificates
• Stan Jones lives!
• Roger Koopman is retarded
• Jim Edwards cuts and runs
• Oprah gets girly
• Blue Man
• Blue Man disappears again
• Rolling Stones rock
• Tester Gesture
• Dog Show
• Bill Clinton, killer
• Gravel pit abomination