Blue Highways: Kremlin, Montana

Unfolding the Map

We pause for a moment at Kremlin, even as William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) flies through with a short mention, as I reflect on what the word Kremlin meant for me and the world while I was growing up.  Who knew we had appropriated Kremlin in the middle of Montana?!  In Cold War fashion, learn where Kremlin is by targeting it on the map!

Book Quote

"...Kremlin.  Russian settlers, half mad from the vast openness and the sway of prairie grass, thoght they saw the Citadel of Moscow.

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 6

Photo of Kremlin, Montana from the blog Ramblin Reflections. Click on photo to go to host page.

Kremlin, Montana

Kremlin is one of five towns, spots on the map really, that LHM blew through on his way through Montana.  I had thought about grouping them all together in the last post, but really, how can I resist making a special post on Kremlin, and especially the name itself?  If you have any memory about life before the Berlin Wall fell, then the name Kremlin certainly has definite, and often ominous, meanings.

I was born in 1963, just about a month after the events that arguably brought the United States to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis.  I write arguably because there is some scholarship that suggests that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. managed the conflict well and never really were in danger of letting the situation escalate into a full-blown hot war.  Whatever the reason, whether Krushchev was blustering to appease party members back home, and Kennedy understood that, or Krushchev got himself into a situation where he needed to have some to back out and save face is irrelevant to the greater part of the U.S. population who might have been aware of the high-stakes showdown over Cuba.  For many people, the ups and downs of U.S.-Soviet relations were always at least on the edge of awareness and provided a low-grade stress that can be seen throughout U.S. culture from the 1950s until the late 1980s.

As I grew up I gradually began to understand that one war could end everything as we knew it.  In my teens, the news constantly had updates on our direct relations with the Soviet Union, and on the myriad of small conflicts around the world that could have consequences for our relations.  News was often reported from Moscow by reporters who always identified the Kremlin or an official Soviet news agency (i.e. Kremlin-approved) as being the source of much of the information on the Soviet stance toward the world.  "Sources close to the Kremlin..." we would hear Walter Cronkite or other anchors solemnly intone.

Why was this so important?  I know that people not old enough to remember the Cold War find this hard to relate to, but we really lived under a nuclear-tipped Sword of Damocles.  Academics in international relations nowadays write about how the Cold War actually made the world more stable, because both sides realized that war would end them, and neither side wanted to be the one responsible for the downfall of their particular society.  Therefore, the argument goes, each side was very careful to not engage the other in direct hostilities, but instead minimized their direct conflicts and carried out their ideological battles through espionage and through conflicts in developing world client states such as Vietnam, Nicaragua, Angola, and other places.  Even major hostilities such as in Korea did not bring the U.S. and U.S.S.R. into direct conflict.  The theory rests on assumptions of rationality - such as the assumption that each side's leaders like being in power and therefore were risk-averse to nuclear war - and those assumptions held up in this case, thankfully.

Still, the reality of what we lived under was enough to scare me silly at times thinking about what might happen.  I remember seeing a movie with Henry Fonda called Fail-Safe.  The premise was that the United States accidentally sent planes to Russia which nuked Moscow.  Much of the movie was filled with tension - would the U.S. be able to recall the planes, and if not would they be able to help the Russians stop the planes in time. They weren't, and the only recourse left to avert a nuclear war was for the U.S. to nuke it's own city, New York, without warning.  I couldn't get the last scene out of my head for a long time. 

I also had nightmares involving mushroom clouds once in a while.  It was hard to forget that in both the U.S. and U.S.S.R., everyone was a target.  Each side's missiles were permanently aimed at points in each other's country.  If someone launched, within 30 minutes it would be the end of civilization.  My dreams would be filled with hopeless despair - reddening skies and large mushroom clouds popping up - and I would wake up sure that the end had come.

In that way, the Kremlin was the enemy.  It was like a nasty creature sitting halfway around the world plotting our destruction and doom.  I watched the facial expressions of our presidents on the news when they met with Russian leaders to see if I could read anything.  I remember being very nervous when Reagan met with Gorbachev in Iceland, and came out of the meeting scowling.  The irony of this all, at least to me today, is that I know that I thought that I would be living in a Cold War world for the rest of my life.

Imagine then the astonishment we had when we saw crowds dancing atop the Berlin Wall, the ever-present and seemingly permanently set symbol of the Cold War.  Imagine our amazement as the Soviet Union allowed this to happen and then, unthinkably, allowed itself to break apart relatively peacefully.  I'll admit I had another nervous moment when hard liners in the Soviet army, seeking to stem the tide of democratic forces, launched a coup attempt and the news showed pictures of Russian tanks in the streets.  But then, Russian president Boris Yeltsin, climbing on top of a tank, seemingly saved the day.

Of course I was naive.  The U.S. and Russia still have their nuclear weapons, though they are not pointed at each other.  The seeming order that the Cold War imposed on the world sometimes seems attractive as we deal with the possibility of war between newly nuclear states such as hereditary enemies India and Pakistan, the rising ambitions of nuclear power China, the nuclear goals of Iran, and the ominous spectre of nuclear terrorism.  While countries negotiate arms treaties and non-proliferation pacts, academics struggle to understand this new multi-polar and nuclear-armed world.  Some academics have suggested in the past, in a global mirror of our U.S. Second Amendment debates suggesting that arming citizens will make them more safe, that all countries be allowed to pursue nuclear weapons because proliferation will breed world stability.  Are we seeing this theory put to the test in the world now?

To me this is crazy.  Just as crazy, if not more so, than two ideologically distinct world powers in a dance of Mutually Assured Destruction.  We now have lots of new names, ominously intoned, out there to worry about - Beijing, Tehran, Islamabad, Pyongyang, Al Qaida, Taliban - all with less restraint, it seems, on slinging their arrows of outrageous fortune should they be put under grave threats.  It almost makes me long for that now quaint little old Kremlin, loudly plotting our doom but in reality simply trying to survive.

Musical Interlude

Pop culture was filled with references to nuclear war in movies, TV, and song.  Movies like Dr. Strangelove allowed us to laugh at the insanity of the world, while others like On the Beach dealt more seriously with the end of the world.  In early 1980s, a major TV event called The Day After gave a pretty horrific view of the aftermath of a nuclear war while probably not making it horrific enough.  The Nation magazine recently put on its website the top 10 songs about nuclear war.  The song I'm highlighting in this post is not on that list but is out of that era and I knew it because of the amount of airplay its video received.  Distant Early Warning, by Rush, was yet another commentary on the threat of nuclear war, and the image of the child on the cruise missile both paid homage to Dr. Strangelove and was a striking image in itself.

If you want to know more about Kremlin

Kremlin, Montana History
Russell Country, Montana: Kremlin
Wikipedia: Kremlin

Next up: Somewhere along Highway 2 around mile 465, Montana

Blue Highways: Joplin, Rudyard, Hingham and Gildford, Montana

Unfolding the Map

Merry Christmas everyone!  I hope you've had a wonderful day.  While you were celebrating, we have also been driving along the Hi-Line with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM), through a lot of little small places.  On this Christmas night I reflect on small towns, which we are losing as our population becomes more urbanized.  To see where these four settlements are located, go to the map!

Book Quote

"On that May morning, the wind came strong at my back, and the square stern of Ghost Dancing served as sail; even resting easy on the accelerator.  I blew past clusters of buildings that had got in the way of 2 so they could call themselves towns:  Joplin, Rudyard, Hingham, Gildford..."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 6

Downtown Rudyard, Montana. Photo at Menupix.com. Click on photo to go to host site.

Joplin, Rudyard, Hingham and Gildford, Montana

We seem to have a lot of small towns in far-away places in the United States.  They aren't quite gone, but they aren't quite there either.  They seem to fade in and out of reality, almost like fantasy places that we don't really notice except when they flash into our conscious as we blast by or through them, or perhaps even stop for a moment to gas up or get a drink and a candy bar.

I have often passed through many of them with nary a thought about them.  Most of the time it's easy to justify.  I have to get from one place to another and have neither the time nor inclination to stop.  Frankly, most of them aren't even considered "towns" but instead are called "census-designated places."  They don't meet the standards for towns.  They are not legally incorporated.  They simply have some sort of concentration of people.  At night, you might notice passing momentarily by a larger cluster of lights than before.  In the daytime, you might notice a gathering of buildings before you travel back into the sparse population.

I grew up on the Northern California coast, and we had little places like this.  These are places that appear around a bend on the Coast Highway, or suddenly materialize in the fog.  Many times, such places might have one lonely business - a store or a restaurant or a gas station - that gives one a potential reason to stop.

Perhaps if you did stop, you might learn some interesting tidbit.  For instance, you might learn that Rudyard, Montana might be named for the writer Rudyard Kipling.  It is hard for me to imagine the author that embodied imperial Britain in the late 1800s and early 1900s (and who wrote some wonderful childrens stories in The Jungle Book, many of which were turned into a Disney movie) having much to do with Montana, but apparently he did make an early trip through the United States and Canada and might have passed through the area.  He also lived for a time in Vermont, which he is said to have loved.  You might also find that Rudyard is the only place in the United States whose direct opposite point on the far side of the earth is upon land.

You might also find that Hingham, Montana was once a thriving business center, built around a square, which had twenty enterprises in the early 1900s, indicating that instead of throwing its buildings at US 2 to be considered a town, to paraphrase LHM, it actually gave US 2 an initial reason to go there.

In fact, this area known as the Hi-Line has a history full of people who settled there on what was essentially a dare - get title to 160 acres if you build a house, raise a crop and keep yourself going for five years.  The people came, and literally fought a war, as one resident puts it in a National Geographic magazine article about the region, against the often inhospitable weather and climate.  And, many of those pioneers were women, who came out and made a go on farms alone.  These were the type of people who settled the Hi-Line and their descendents, the people trying to scrape out a living there today, are deeply rooted to the place..

My fear is that such places will gradually disappear and take with them all of their secrets.  I was reading another article in the National Geographic recently which argued that the best way to house the growing population of the planet to build up.  In other words, people are going to continue to flock to cities because cities are where opportunities for employment and other activities are located.  As people continue to stream into the urban areas, the solution is to build higher and higher to maximize the limited space.  Whole communities can be housed in high rise buildings, and we are seeing this type of building happening in some cities in Asia.  This will leave rural "green belt" areas for recreation and and farming to feed the the world's population.

But as the urban areas build up, we will lose something.  The United States was founded as a rural, agricultural nation that became more and more industrialized over time.  However, our country still has an idealized vision of its rural past.  We consider farmers to be "the salt of the earth," never mind that there are few family farms left in the country.  We extol the virtues of hard work, based on the idea that hard-working men and women roll up their sleeves and get to the land.  After all, it's hard to justify the super-industrious person with the corporate executives trading derivatives from his high-rise office as the pillar of American culture, even though this idea is more true today than that of the homesteading farmer.

What will we lose?  We'll lose a way of life that is part of the American self-image.  We'll lose the iconic image of self-sustainability on the land.  We'll lose the idea of down-to-earth men and women stoically planting and harvesting, hewing and clearing, and building new lives on the frontier.  Perhaps that is as it is meant to be.  Often the price of progress means leaving old things behind.  The price of progress may mean that towns like Joplin, Rudyard, Hingham and Gildford, Montana, once the rule in America, are now the exception and becoming more exceptional each day.  And while most of the younger generation won't necessarily miss them, people like me who grew up in the rural areas will always feel a wisp of nostalgia for what is gone.

Musical Interlude

Beef is one of the main agricultural industries of Montana.  Though I love Aaron Copland's classical music, the beef industry somehow appropriated Copland's Hoedown from his ballet Rodeo in their "Beef.  It's What's For Dinner" campaign.  Since this song is so synonymous with beef nowadays, I am including it as the meat of your musical interlude for this post.

I'm writing this on Christmas Day, so here's your little extra Christmas present.  Don't get spoiled!  It's from The Jungle Book, the Disney movie.  The singing orangutan is the great Louis Prima!

If you want to know more about Joplin, Rudyard, Hingham and Gildford, Montana

Montana's Russell Country: Gildford
Montana's Russell Country: Hingham
Montana's Russell Country: Rudyard
Wikipedia: Gildford
Wikipedia: Hingham
Wikipedia: Joplin
Wikipedia: Rudyard

Next up: Kremlin, Montana

Blue Highways: Shelby, Montana

Unfolding the Map

We pull up with LHM into the town of Shelby, Montana.  Looks like there's trouble brewing in the Oil City Bar.  Bear with me for a moment while I write a little about fights and fighting and the near scrapes that I've been in (though nothing very serious).  Oh, and fight your way over to the map to place Shelby.

Book Quote

"I was out looking around to see how the old Wild West was doing when I came across the Oil City Bar....

"A woman of sharp face, pretty ten years ago, kept watching me.  She had managed to pack her hips into what she hoped was a pair of mean jeans; a cigarette was never out of her mouth, and, after every deep draw, her exhalations were smokeless.  She was trying for trouble but I minded my own business.  More or less.  The man with her, Lonnie, walked up to me.  He looked as if he were made out of whipcord.  'Like that lady?' he said....

"'Without my glasses, I can't distinguish a man from a woman.'  That was a lie.

"'The lady said you were distinguishing her pretty good.'

"Well boys, there you have it.  Some fading face trying to make herself the center of men's anger, proving she could still push men to their limits....

"He pressed up close.  Trouble coming."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 5

Downtown Shelby, Montana. Photo by J. Stephen Conn at Flickr. Click on photo to go to site.Shelby, Montana

How might LHM get to the brink of a bar fight?  Well, in this chapter he sets up Shelby as being a bit of a rough town.  He describes a written account of the town from the 1930s, where a writer from the Montana Federal Writers' Project says Shelby is:

the sort of town that producers of western movies have ever since been trying to reproduce in papier-mache....The town playboys were featured in the Police Gazette after holding up an opera troupe passing through on a railroad train....The men shot out the engine headlight, the car windows, and the red signal lights, and forced the conductor to execute a clog dance.

I have never been in a bar fight.  I've haven't actually been in a real fight either, unless you count my sixth grade playground scuffle with a kid named Eric where I think I got one good punch at the eye.  Or maybe when the principal in 5th grade pulled me and Calvin out of class because Calvin had been picking on me and gave us boxing gloves and had us go at it.

I've come close.  In ninth grade, I almost got in a fight with Mike Crutcher, which is really kind of strange because Mike is a really nice guy.  But somehow we got into it and one of us, I can't remember who, challenged the other one to a fight behind the junior high.  Of course, word went around the school and there was a big crowd to watch us fight.  But we didn't.  We kind of looked at each other and then we didn't, and we both walked away sort of sheepish as the disappointed masses of pre-teens milled about in confusion.

As an adult, I think that I've only come close to fisticuffs once.  That happened during a really strange series of events that started out with a softball practice in inner-city Milwaukee, degenerated into a frantic scene where me and my friends faced an enraged mob of inner-city African-American residents, some with baseball bats, and ended with us being shot at by some people in a car.  It happened like this.  We were having a softball practice when some guy barreled around a corner and hit the car of Dan.  The guy left his car and ran, and Dan went to run after him.  David ran after Dan, and I ran after David.  I came around a corner to see Dan on the ground, David getting hit, and then the guy, a tall African-American, looked at me and said "So you want some too?"  He then put up his fists, feinted, and went another way.  By this time Dan was up and walking with him, pleading with him to come back to his car and talk to the police.  However, we didn't know that a rumor was spreading like wildfire through the neighborhood that five white guys with baseball bats were chasing a black guy through the streets.  A mob formed.  Dan had by this time persuaded the guy to come back to his car.  We turned a corner and ran into the mob.  There was a moment of silence, and then a woman broke from the pack and said "I know them!  They are my neighbors.  My son likes them.  They are good people!"  The mob milled for a minute and then started splitting up.  We went back to the cars, the police arrived, and as we were talking with them, we heard a shot and then pellets started raining around us as a car screeched around the corner.  The cops all got in their cars and drove after the fleeing vehicle, leaving us alone on a darkening street.

All turned out okay, and I avoided a fight.  In reality, I have a hard time seeing when I might ever be called to fight.

Oh, I imagine it.  In the new Sherlock Holmes movies, Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes imagines his fights in advance, playing out all the moves and blows until he comes to a conclusion how the fight will ultimately turn out.  I have done the same thing.  I have sat at a bar and imagined what I'd do if someone started messing with me.  Of course, I always end up walking out.  I grab the guy's head when he least expects it and smash his nose into the bar and, before he even realizes his nose is broken I've put the heel of my fist into his solar plexus as he comes up.  I then give him a kick in the side if he's trying to get up, and walk unconcernedly outside.

Fights never look as good as they do in the movies or in my imagination.  Those fights are choreographed so that each move is a perfect complement to the other.  The actual bar or street fights that I have seen look nothing like that.  It's usually just two guys rush at one another, their fist may or may not connect, and they end up in a grapple of some sort.  It's pretty undignified.

In case you're wondering, the trouble LHM feared never materialized.  The guy in the quote, Lonnie, is with the woman all right, but he realizes that she's just playing a game, and he plays along.  He comes over to LHM, and tells him that he will convey LHM's "apology" back to the woman but he tells LHM that he knows he wasn't looking at her and asks him to simply go with the story.  Later, two men do fight outside the bar, but they simply grapple until a cop tells them to go home and they slink away.

I suppose it could happen that someday I am called upon to defend my honor or the honor of someone close to me, but I think the possibility is remote.  After all, what is a fight but a complete breakdown of every other option.  I'd like to think that I can resolve disputes that way, or by simply walking away.  But if I do have to defend myself, I will.  I know nothing about fighting, and may get beat up, but if fighting's anything like I've seen, I think I'd be able to hold my own even while looking ridiculous.

Musical Interlude

In this humorous song about a guy who gets challenged by a gun wielding tough in a bar over a woman, Lynyrd Skynyrd sings a plea to Gimme Three Steps.  It's based on an actual experience by the lead singer, Ronnie Van Zant, and is probably closer to the truth than the well-choreographed fights we've come to expect from our overindulgence in films.

If you want to know more about Shelby

City of Shelby
Shelby Chamber of Commerce
Shelby Promoter (newspaper)
Wikipedia: Shelby

Next up:  Joplin, Rudyard, Hingham and Gildford, Montana

Blue Highways: Cut Bank, Montana

Unfolding the Map

Here we are passing with William Least Heat-Moon through Cut Bank and into the flat plains that make up middle and Eastern Montana.  I went across those plains once, and it causes me to reflect a little on that trip and the experience of being in places that are lonely and flat.  Speaking of which, you can locate Cut Bank on a flat Google map!

The posts might slow down a little for the holidays as I am due to fly to Florida in a couple of days.  I'll bring the computer and see if I can get some posts in as we continue, but I hope that you'll indulge me a little if I'm not as regular over the next week and a half as I have been.

Book Quote

"At Cut Bank, the rangeland and wheat fields and oil wells began.  Montanans call U.S. 2, paralleling the Canadian border all the way to Lake Huron, the 'High-line.'  The most desolate of the great east-west routes, it was two lanes of patched, broken, rutted, mind-numbing pavement running from horizon to horizon over the land of god-awful distance."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 4

You gotta love a town like Cut Bank, Montana when it has a giant penguin. Photo by Adam Helman at his website. Click on photo to go to site.

Cut Bank, Montana

LHM is traveling now over land that I've traveled before, briefly, in the late 1980s.  While I was doing volunteer work in Milwaukee, I was asked to be the best man at the wedding of John, a good high school friend.  John lived in north-central Wyoming in a little town called Cowley, where he still lives to this day.  A lifelong Mormon, John got married to his bride Sally in the temple at Salt Lake City, and as a non-Mormon I couldn't attend the actual wedding.  However, I could fulfill my obligation in Cowley at the wedding reception, so I saved out of the $75 a month stipend I received for my volunteer service and took a Greyhound bus from Milwaukee out to Billings, Montana.  John drove the 85 miles or so to Billings to pick me up and take me down to Cowley.

A lot of the bus ride was through Montana.  Though the route traversed through about half of Montana and was on the interstate rather than the "two lanes of patched, broken, rutted, mind-numbing pavement" of US 2, I distinctly remember the land running from horizon to horizon.  Between Bismarck, North Dakota and Billings, I don't think I had ever seen land so flat in my life.

Imagine being on a calm sea.  You look ahead, behind, and side to side and all you see is water and horizon, a flat, smooth surface that runs up to the edge of the curve of the world and then drops off imperceptibly.  If you were able to actually reach the horizon, you'd see that the drop is not perceptible, but from a distance it almost seems like the edge of a yawning precipice, and that you are in the middle of a circle defined by that precipice.

Going through the flat lands of the upper Midwest and West is similar, except that sight is puncuated by natural features such as the occasional tree and human-made features such as houses and buildings.  These serve as initial welcome breaks in the unending flatness, but eventually they get maddening.  They mock you because they offer a whisper of something different, and then you are back to the flat farmland.  Over all, depending on the time of year (I traveled in the late fall) the smell of earth and manure sits, reminding you that you are in farming country.

As I rode the bus that served as our ship on that flat sea of land, day dissolved into night and night back into day and it seemed like nothing changed, like one of those cartoon backgrounds that repeat as the cartoon characters run, passing over and over the same tree, the same house, the same barn, the same clouds.  Perhaps the people of Montana who ride the bus are a subset of society, but they also seemed to absorb the flat affect of the vastness of the landscape.  That flatness seemed to generate no interest in anything around them, after all if they've been running past the same scenery all their life it was nothing new to them.  Therefore, it was great theater when the mother with the screaming children, clearly out of sorts from having suffered some kind of rupture or upheaval in her life, got on the bus.  The ambience in the bus went from something close to hypnosis to mildly annoyed as the noise permeated the boundaries of the other sleeping and disinterested riders.  At one point, a man shushed at one of the kids.  The mother, in a flash, turned on him and said in an aggressive tone "don't you 'shhh' my fucking kid."  After the novelty of this little exchange wore off, people's ears began to mute the sound of the sobbing children, and most drifted back into their hypnosis once again, noticing only briefly when she ushered her children off at a stop farther down the road.

I am probably overdoing my memory of the flatness, because I'm sure that somewhere along that route there must have been a dip or a rise, a low hill in the distance.  But in a part of the United States scraped by ice age glaciers that scoured the land like a giant frozen sander, those features are few and far between.  I can see where a person, in the middle of the unending plane of the unending plain, especially in the dulling light of a setting sun, might find themselves insignificant in the whole even more than if they were in the shadow of a huge mountain or on the shore of an ocean.  Either that, or they might feel themselves in the center of the planet in the midst of the universe as the stars come out and arc from horizon to horizon.  I can't remember how I felt in that bus that seemed to crawl, rather than speed at 70 miles per hour, across the Montana landscape, but I do remember how happy I was to get to Billings, meet my friend, and head into the high desert toward Cowley.

Musical Interlude

Whenever I hear of Montana, I think of Frank Zappa's song of the same name.  The lyrics are silly, but the underlying music is amazing and shows the musicianship of a number of accomplished musicians including Frank himself.  It also caught the attention of Tina Turner who volunteered herself and the Ikettes to sing the chorus.  I'm giving you a double shot here again, because there's a studio version and a live version from 1973.  I like them both.  Enjoy!

If you want to know more about Cut Bank

BigSkyFishing.com: Cut Bank
Cut Bank Chamber of Commerce
Cut Bank Pioneer Press (newspaper)
Wikipedia: Cut Bank

Next up: Shelby, Montana

Blue Highways: Browning, Montana

Unfolding the Map

Rolling into Browning, Montana, William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) comments on the number of crosses marking car accidents he sees on the reservation.  If you care to reflect with me a little, I will write a bit on alcohol and alcoholism and its effects - something I'm acquainted with very personally.  Be sure to check out Browning on the map.

Book Quote

"The state of Montana had marked spots of fatal car crashes with small, pole-mounted steel crosses: one cross for every death.  Along the highway, as it traversed the Blackfeet reservation, the little white crosses piled up like tumbleweed: a single, a pair, a triple, a half dozen, a group of nine.  What began as an automobile safety campaign, the blackfoot - once among the best of Indian horsemen - had turned into roadside shrines by wiring on plastic flowers.  Somebody later told me the abundance of crosses around the reservation was 'proof' of chronic alcoholism.

"The reservation town of Browning, unlike Hopi or Navajo settlements, was pure U.S.A.: and old hamburger stand of poured concrete in the shape of a tepee but now replaced by the Whoopie Burger drive-in, the Warbonnet Lodge motel, a Radio Shack, a Tastee-Freez.  East of town I read a historical marker that said the Blackfeet had 'jealously preserved their tribal customs and traditions.'  Render therefore unto Caucasians the things which be Caucasian."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 4

Downtown Browning, Montana. Image by Robinsoncrusoe and seen at Wikipedia. Click on photo to go to host page.

Browning, Montana

One thing that has been apparent to me in the past few years is the proliferation of roadside shrines to those who have died in car-related accidents.  In New Mexico, where I live, you see these shrines all over the place, as lovingly tended by heart-broken family members and friends as grave markers.  Lately, a new type of marker has sprung up in my state - the "Ghost Bicycle."  These representations of bicycles mark a place where a bicyclist was killed by a car.

In New Mexico, we are no strangers to drunk driving.  It is the stuff of horror on the front page of our newspapers when we read about somebody driving while intoxicated, entering a freeway at high speed on the wrong side, and plowing headlong into a car or van or pickup.  It causes us to be angry at the ineffectiveness of our state government and our justice system when we read that a guy with 15 previous arrests for DWI has been picked up yet again after being pulled over by police.

It even serves as the butt of macabre jokes in our state.  Steven Michael Quezada, who is a New Mexico comedian and talk-show host and who also is a regular actor on the hit television series Breaking Bad, told a joke at an event I attended about how jet airplanes, instead of dropping an oxygen mask out of the ceiling in times of crisis, should drop a bottle of tequila instead.  After all, said Quezada, "we're from New Mexico.  We all know it's the drunks who survive the crashes."

One reason that LHM's quote hits home is that I live in a state with many Native Americans who live on pueblos and reservations.  The past history of white relations with natives, the vagaries of biology, and perpetual economic crises in Native areas have teamed up in my state and in others, like Montana, where there are native populations to create a high incidence of alcoholism.  In New Mexico, where there are lots of wide open spaces and where people have to drive long distances, especially on reservations, the chances of choosing not to drive after a longer-than-expected solo trip to the bar are much less than in a city, where one can call a taxi or take public transportation.

I don't want to give the impression that it's just native peoples in my state who suffer from the effects of alcohol.  Alcohol cuts across lines of ethnicity, gender and class.  Plenty of people from all walks of life have run into problems with alcohol and driving.  I was just talking to a friend who related the story of a person he knows who made a bad choice of having a couple of wines while on cold medicine and driving home.  She was pulled over and now faces criminal penalties, financial hardship, lawyer fees, higher insurance costs, and probation.  I too have known people who make a bad decision and have paid for it.  Nor do I have any sense of superiority over this issue.  When I was younger, it could have easily happened to me and probably should have on a couple of occasions.

It also hits home to me because I grew up in a family dominated by alcoholism.  My father's habit was to come home from work around 6:00 pm.  On bad nights he had already been to the bar.  My sister recalls watching him drive through our wooden gate as if it wasn't there after having had a few at our local bowling alley.  Once home, he would take a tall glass, put 5-6 ice cubes in it, fill the glass three-quarters of the way to the top with Early Times whiskey, and then top it off with water.  He did this 2-3 times a night.  On good nights for my sisters and I, he would pass out in his chair.  On bad nights, he would try to engage us in conversation.  On really bad nights he would molest me if my mother wasn't home.  I can remember him grabbing his gun to hunt after a few drinks and having to take his gun from him because he was so unsteady I was afraid that he might fall and accidentally shoot himself or me.  I can remember being in his truck as he drove intoxicated and wondering if I would make it home.  I really sometimes wonder how I survived my childhood.

You'd think after dealing with that in my childhood that I'd be a teetotaler.  You'd think that I'd give up alcohol after also learning that my biological father (my father that I write of above was my adoptive father) was an alcoholic whose death was likely caused by years of drinking.  I've weighed these things over in my mind especially wondering if there is a genetic trait.  Yet my own relationship to alcohol has been complicated.  I like a good crafted beer like an IPA with my dinner even as I deplore what alcohol has done to people I know and love.  I love a good glass of wine, especially a meaty red, once in a while.  Occasionally, I'll have a little hard liquor like a good Irish whiskey (my wife's dad's favorite sure to be served this upcoming holiday), a good sipping tequila, or a smooth Kentucky bourbon.  Once in awhile if I'm feeling safe I'll even allow myself to be a little intoxicated. 

I guess I treat alcohol like a partly feral cat, similar to one that I grew up with and which seems to be a metaphor in my life.  This cat, ironically named Sweetie, would rub up against me and purr her invitation to pet and rub her.  She seemed to enjoy the petting, until with no notice she would turn, hiss and slash my arm with her claws and run.  I've decided that it is best to treat anything or anyone that seems so inviting, so enjoyable and promises pleasure and euphoria with a bit of healthy skepticism and take small doses.  If I get too involved and get slashed and hurt, well, I have nobody else to blame because I know full well the consequences.  We all know that such pleasures, like alcohol, can mess you up and make you dependent, addicted and can ultimately ruin your life if you let them.  The key for me, and one that I've normally been very good at, is to be very aware of my limits, and never cross them.

Musical Interlude

I'm going to give you a rare double shot of music, Littourati.  I have a song in my collection by the Barenaked Ladies, Alcohol from their album Stunt, which sounds like a fun, upbeat party song but if you read the lyrics it shows the complication and sadness that comes with alcohol.  The second is a more straight up song that could be about any addiction by Metallica.  While I never completely jumped on the Metallica bandwagon, their brand of heavy metal was very hard driving and very profound which is why they are considered so highly by their fans.  This song I've included is called Sad but True from their album Metallica.

If you want to know more about Browning

Blackfeet Community College
Blackfeet Nation
Browning Chamber of Commerce
Town of Browning
Wikipedia: Browning

Next up: Cut Bank, Montana