Blue Highways: Marias Pass, Montana

Unfolding the Map

William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) passes over the Continental Divide at Marias Pass, noting the double duty that monument does as a marker of the geological phenomenon and a monument of Theodore Roosevelt.  Roosevelt has lately reached across the decades to become a brief part of today's political debate.  To see where Marias Pass is located, reach across to the map.

Book Quote

"The highway ascended the west slope of the Continental Divide.  In the middle of the pavement at the top of Marias Pass stood a tall limestone obelisk marking the divide and also commemorating Teddy Roosevelt.  Your basic double-duty monument."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 4

The obelisk to Theodore Roosevelt at Marias Pass, Montana. Photo by kjmoss1 at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host site.

Marias Pass, Montana

Theodore Roosevelt has made a brief but important return to the news lately.  Just the week before I am writing this post, our current president Barack Obama spoke in Osawatamie, Kansas and his speech was said by many commentators to be reminiscent of a speech given there by Roosevelt 101 years before.  Why?  I'll come back to that a little later, but first more about Roosevelt.

Roosevelt was the 26th president of the United States and a myth that is only slightly bigger than the man himself.  A lot of people know the basics of his story.  He was born into a wealthy family, and was a sickly child that gave himself over to strenuous activities in order to compensate.  After college, he became the youngest New York State Assembly member, and aggressively attacked corruption in New York state politics.  Roosevelt's activities in politics included New York City Police Commissioner, head of the Department of the Navy, Governor of New York, Vice-President of the United States, and President.  A Republican, he broke with the party in 1912 and kick-started the Progressive movement into high gear.  He lost the election to Woodrow Wilson but became the only third-party candidate to finish second in an election.

Along the way, Roosevelt became a war hero for his leadership in the charges up Kettle and San Juan Hill.  He was an adventurer and outdoorsman who was an avid conservationist and who set aside the lands that became the U.S.'s first national parks.  As president, he established regulatory standards for foods and medicines.  He was the first U.S. citizen to ever win a Nobel Prize when he claimed the Peace Prize for his efforts in ending the Russo-Japanese War, and his posthumous award of the Medal of Honor for his performance in the Spanish-American War was the only one ever given to a U.S. president.

That's all interesting stuff, but what really interests me is the thing that has led to comparisons between a speech by a current Democratic president and a former Republican president.  Given the polarization in current U.S. politics, I find the comparison intriguing, to say the least.

Roosevelt was not your typical Republican, and politics during his lifetime was little different than it is today.  At the time, the Republican Party's conservatism was tested by the evolution of the U.S. from a rural to an industrial power.  This transformation made strange bedfellows between rural farming and agriculture and industrial interests under the same party.  Increasingly, agricultural interests saw their influence wane in favor of business interests, and there were charges of corruption in government especially as monopolies proliferated in a number of key industries.  Then as now there was a widening gap between rich and poor with the danger that the poorest would be left behind.

Roosevelt stepped into the picture with a vision to move the Republican Party toward Progressivism, which was a popular reaction toward modernization focused on giving the average citizen more political power in democracy, reducing government corruption, regulating large businesses and busting up monopolies.  As president, he realized many progressive ideals but failed to significantly change the Republican Party, which continued to remain allied to big business after the Roosevelt and Taft presidencies.

In Roosevelt's 1910 speech, he lambasts what he describes as "the sinister influence or control of special interests" in government.  These he lays specifically at the door of "the great special business interests" that "too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit."  He argues that "there can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains."  He decries the growth of "a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power," and decries the interests that do not work for the general welfare of all people.  "This, I know," he argues, "implies a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary."

This does not sound like a Republican, and his speech was decried by many, including the New York Times, as being socialist or even communist.  Roosevelt, considering his remarks in the speech, even anticipates such a reaction.

Fast forward 100 years.  Obama, speaking in the very same city, repeats many of these arguments.  The inequality that has reached "a level that we haven't seen since the Great Depression," says Obama, "...gives an outsized voice to the few who can afford high-priced lobbyists and unlimited campaign contributions, and it runs the risk of selling out our democracy to the highest bidder."  Obama aims to fix it through a combination of things.  Increased government spending to offset the decline in business investment and to increase employment.  Cutting taxes to the middle class while raising taxes on the wealthy.  This is very similar to what Roosevelt proposed - a graduated income tax where the wealthy would pay more, and a tax on the inheritance of big fortunes.

Perhaps this comparison is overblown, as a recent commentary at National Public Radio's website suggests.  But I find it interesting that in this era of polarization where Republicans and Democrats cannot reach across the aisle to compromise and come up with meaningful solutions to fix our financial and economic mess, we can look to a Democrat and a Republican shaking hands across an aisle spanning a century in time, and see them addressing almost the same problems with a similar set of solutions.

The obelisk to Theodore Roosevelt in Marias Pass might serve double-duty as a marker of the Continental Divide and as a monument to the president, but it straddles a physical divide that mirrors the barrier between our parties.  These are the people who have been elected to represent us and our interests in government and who should come together in a time of deep uncertainty and fear and make policies that will give us hope for our futures.  I think that Roosevelt - adventurer, soldier, peacemaker, Progressive, conservationist - would urge us to stride into that breach and, as quoted from his Osawatamie speech, "to raise to the highest pitch of honor and usefulness the nation to which [we] all belong."

**********

Note:  Text from Roosevelt's Osawatamie speech taken from this site.  Text from Obama's Osawatamie speech found here.

Musical Interlude

I'm going back to Steve Earle for today's musical interlude.  It just seems to fit, and whoever put the video together tied it in with the theme discussed in today's post.  Enjoy The Revolution Starts Now!

If you want to know more about Marias Pass

Flickr: Photos of Marias Pass
Lewis Overthrust and Marias Pass
Wikipedia: Marias Pass

Next up: Browning, Montana

Blue Highways: Hungry Horse, Montana

Unfolding the Map

We ride near Hungry Horse, Montana where William Least Heat-Moon has to curb his desire to help a disabled boy who struggles with filling a water jug.  That leads me to reflect on the nature of disability, strength and courage.  Why don't you find the strength and courage to check out Hungry Horse on the map?

Book Quote

"The boy was severely handicapped.  Trying to fill a big thermos from a spring spewing out of the mountain east of Kalispell, near Hungry Horse, he laughed as the cold water splattered him, and he burbled something.

"I had no idea what he said.  'Very cold water indeed,' I answered.

"He burbled again, then lost his footing, and fell hard on the wet rocks.  The gush hit the flask and kicked it away.  I went to help him.

"'Leave him alone!' someone shouted over the crash of water.  A man who looked as if he'd swallowed a nail keg came toward us.  'Let him do it.  You'll make him weak if you do it for him.  He's my son.  He understands....'

...."'He'll never survive if he gets turned into a pussy,' the father said."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 4

"Entering Hungry Horse" sign, Hungry Horse, Montana. Photo by Ray Gasnick II at Panoramio. Click on photo to go to host page.

Hungry Horse, Montana

I have a very visceral reaction to the quote above.  I understand what the father is trying to do, and I understand the motive in asking that a stranger leave his disabled son to solve his own problems.  As a person who hasn't had any children, much less had to figure out ways to raise a disabled child, I am not in much of a position to make judgments on parents who are trying to do the best for their children.

And yet, like I wrote above, I have an intense reaction to how the father describes what his son might become if he is offered help.  I have a sense that the father himself doesn't like to accept help and might be putting that expectation on his child.  If you read a little farther into this encounter, you'll read that the father, using the water from the spring along with other ingredients, makes suppositories for hemorrhoids.  He seems like one of those rugged Montana stereotypes, one who makes his own rules and doesn't need help from anyone.  And if so, that is a shame because no matter who we are, disabled or not, we all need to be able to accept help from time to time.

This quote, coming on the heels of Arthur O. Bakke's parting biblical words on how hardships mold a man in the previous chapter, is quite striking.  Hardships may mold a person, but what if the person is facing a disability already?  Does adding hardship onto hardship have the capacity to create an able-bodied human?  Or does piling more hardship on a disabled person simply ask too much?

My interactions with the few disabled people I have known has convinced me that when it comes to meeting hardships with courage and strength, you won't find any parallels.  Imagine that you have cerebral palsy.  The condition contorts your body, makes movement difficult, and renders you hardly understandable.  Just getting around from one place to another, so easy for a able-bodied person, becomes an odyssey of trials every day.  I knew a person like that - a man named Dennis.  He walked with a cane, very slowly and with great lunges as if he had to literally throw his body forward.  He had to struggle to make his words intelligible.  Yet three times a week at least he took the bus or got a ride to an organization in Milwaukee that I worked for in the 1980s, a non-profit agency that organized unemployed people to speak up for their rights, and he volunteered without pay to bring the voice of the disabled unemployed to our discussions.  I was much younger and more naive then, and I marveled at how he could get up and struggle like that every day.  What I forgot was that his life was what he had.  He did what he did because he had to.  He wouldn't have chosen to have cerebral palsy, but that's the hand he was dealt.  He lived with his disability and yet he contributed to society and he did it with a grace and a humor that you don't see often, even among people who aren't disabled.  I came to admire and respect him and to value his opinions on our work.  It was my first experience with a truly disabled person, and it was an experience of personal learning.

Recently, I again saw amazing courage from some disabled people.  I was asked by a friend to be in a play she wrote and was directing.  I'm not a trained actor, but she felt that I would be able to play the part she had written for me as well as mesh with the cast.  I was one of four able-bodied persons in the play.  The rest had a variety of disabilities.  One was bipolar, one had severe spinal curvature, one was autistic (with epilepsy) and one had Down's Syndrome.  The play was about epilepsy, and involved a number of characters in history, such as Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Joan of Arc, who are suspected of having epilepsy or actually had the disorder.  I was Julius, and I had a lot of scenes with Alexander, who was played by Phil, the young man with Down's Syndrome.  I was also matched up at other times in the play with the young woman with autism, named Cynthia.

Phil was very nervous about the play.  He loved to act, but in a previous play, he had to wear headphones and repeat words spoken to him because he had trouble remembering his lines.  He was sure that he wouldn't remember them in this play and was afraid of being embarrassed.  All of us encouraged him, and I helped him memorize his lines when we weren't on stage.  At one point, the stress of it all led him to have an intense emotional breakdown in one practice.  Yet as it became clear that he could remember his lines, and as we adjusted his part for him, and while the cast covered if he did forget on stage, you could see his confidence grow.  By opening night, he was ready to perform, and he nailed his part.  He had the audience laughing and eating out of his hand.  I was very proud of him, not just because he remembered his lines, but because he had the courage to push his boundaries and shatter them.  I felt the same way about the young woman with autism, who also nailed her role despite also having some difficult moments in practices.

Though I've never met her, I am also amazed by the courage of the daughter of a friend.  She was born with cystic fibrosis, and throughout her childhood has had to endure regular hospital stays to remove mucus from her lungs.  Though CF is not technically a disability but an illness, I think there may be certain similarities.  She is an active young woman, yet she must live with a disease that causes disruptions in her life and which entails much uncertainty about her future.  And yet, she lives her life as fully as possible with a loving and supportive family.

These recollections bring me back to the quote.  Is it helpful to people with illnesses and disabilities to throw them into hardships in an attempt to make them stronger - to keep them from becoming dependent and make them better able to handle life?  Or, is it more wise to encourage them to perform to their ability, and even encourage them to push boundaries selectively to help them discover all they are capable of, while offering the help and support they need?  Such an approach might entail both the disabled person and their support, whether it be a parent, partner, or a social worker, to decide what is appropriate and can be accomplished given their level of disability.  Such relationships, based on trust with people willing to help if needed, don't make disabled people "pussies," but are encouraging, challenging and practical all at the same time.  As able-bodied persons, we have it easy.  Disabled people are easily more courageous than us, and stronger in character.  They have to be.

Musical Interlude

I found this song in an article by a disabled guy, Anthony Tusler, who put together a list of tunes for a dance at the Society of Disability Studies.  I think Tom Waits can be very profound, and this song, Kentucky Avenue, is about the dream of one able-bodied kid to help his disabled friend free himself of his disability.  You have to hear it to the end.

If you want to know more about Hungry Horse

Hungry Horse News (newspaper)
MontanaPictures.net: Hungry Horse
Visit Montana: Hungry Horse Dam
Wikipedia: Hungry Horse
Wikipedia: Hungry Horse Dam

Next up: Marias Pass, Montana

Blue Highways: Kalispell, Montana

Unfolding the Map

We drop off Arthur O. Bakke in Kalispell, leaving him to go where his Lord takes him.  We're about to cross the Rockies and then head into the endless plains of the Northern United States.  As we head into a state where the concept of freedom is hotly defended and where the wide-open spaces make it seem almost tangible, I'll reflect a little, based on William Least Heat-Moon's quote below, on freedom and its effects generally and on me personally.  To locate Kalispell, exercise your freedom to look at the map!

Book Quote

"We rode on in silence to Kalispell, and Bakke dozed off again.....

"....the word he carried to me wasn't of the City of God; it was of simplicity, spareness, courage, directness, trust and 'charity' in Paul's sense.  He lived clean: mind, body, way of life.  Hegel believed that freedom is knowledge of one's necessity, and Arthur O. Bakke, I.M.V., was a free man hindered only by his love and conviction.  And that was just as he wanted it.  I don't know whether he had been chosen to beat the highways and hedges, but clearly he had chosen to.  Despite doctrinal differences, he reminded me of a Trappist monk or a Hopi shaman.  I liked Arthur.  I liked him very much."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 3

Downtown Kalispell. Photo by Flathead Convention and Visitors Bureau and seen at the Tripadvisor website. Clidk on photo to go to site.

Kalispell, Montana

In my last post, I wrote about my search for and need for simplicity, and also how I find it so difficult to implement in my life.  This post is not very well-thought out, but I'm going to throw and idea encompassing all kinds of different things that I've been thinking about past you.

In America, we pride ourselves on being "the land of the free."  The American Constitution takes great pains to lay out certain freedoms that are guaranteed to all citizens, enshrined in our Bill of Rights.  Some are defined as liberties, or those freedoms that existed prior to the advent of governments.  Freedom of speech, religion, assembly and the press are such liberties that according to our constitution cannot be taken away from us.  Others are considered rights, which are granted us by government but once instilled, must be protected.  Such rights are the rights to bear arms, and to due process.

Over the centuries, what constitutes the boundaries of freedoms and rights have been debated.  These arguments are still at the base of almost all political disputes today.  U.S. citizens demand and expect freedoms and rights, but nobody can truly be completely free to exercise their freedoms and rights.  Why?  Because an excess of freedom for some people has the potential to trample on the rights of others, and on the ability of governments to maintain societal order.  In order to minimize these difficulties, governments create laws which are, in effect, a relinquishment of freedom by the citizenry in exchange for order.  In the U.S., we consent to giving up some freedom in order that we can live relatively safely and securely.

An example is fitting.  We have laws against murder.  The act of murder, freely by one person, is the ultimate denial of another's freedom and rights through the taking of that person's life.  It is also a violation of public order.  The laws state that we are not free to murder, and if we do, we will lose even more of our rights and freedoms by going to jail, or in many cases, losing our life through execution.

However, in the late 20th century and the early 21st century, the idea of freedom is being pushed to the brink.  In particular, excess economic freedom has been touted and is being justified politically.  Economic freedom can be as benign as allowing people the right and freedom to exchange goods and services.  This freedom to interact economically allows for individuals to build up capital and property.  Government, to maintain public order, is tasked with defending the property we gain through our economic freedoms.  However, if we keep in mind that more freedoms impinge on an ability to maintain order, then it is easy to see that the accumulation of property (I'm using the general sense of the term here: property is stuff, whether it be little knicknacks one buys to the ownership of large tracts of land) can impede on all types of freedoms.

Politically, we have arguments about whether, in their accumulation of wealth, corporations should be regulated and taxed and how much.  Giving corporations carte blanch to do whatever they want may allow them to run roughshod over potential freedoms to work, to live in healthy environments, and to guarantee our access to things we need.  We debate, in the current popular terminology, whether the 1% should have so much and continue to gain at the expense of the 99% who seem to be losing more and more.  The freedom of the 1% to continue to accumulate takes away from the freedom of the 99% to move upward economically.

But it's not just these big picture questions that economic freedom touches, but also individual lives.  To use myself as an example, my steadily increasing income over the past three decades may have increased by ability to get the stuff that I like and want, but that stuff has also contributed to the increased disorder in my life.  My wallet may have allowed me to spend anywhere from 6-7 evenings out, but it also took away from my ability to look at big questions of family and stability and led to some decision-making at times that may have not been well thought out.

I don't want it to seem like I'm complaining.  My life as an adult has mostly been happy and full of wonderful things.  But there have been important deficits that are now begging for my attention, brought about by the freedoms I allowed myself in the past.

Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize winning economist, has argued that the concept of freedom has to be expanded beyond life, liberty and property.  Governments that are the most free, he argues, are the ones that guarantee their citizens the freedom, the access and the means to pursue the life that makes them happy.  In that way, his concept of freedom encompasses both the political and the economic.

I am in favor of this, even if it means regulating the freedoms of some to guarantee a decent level of freedoms for all.  But as I apply his argument to all levels of life, I particularly focus on regulation.  Regulation is important.  If an economic market cannot self-regulate and fails, and we've seen signs in the past that sometimes it can't, the outcomes may be dangerous for society as a whole.  I can also see how this works on an individual level.  If a person has no capacity for self-regulation, we consider them at best a "bit off," and at worst dangerous to themselves and others.

My personal quest right now is for more regulation in my own life.  By regulation I mean curtailing some of my personal freedom to accumulate, to consume, and to lose myself in distractions in order to focus more discipline on my desire for personal growth and growth in my relationships.  Regulation, to me, brings about discipline and entails a willingness to give up some freedoms in order to achieve what one wants.  Even as LHM, in his quote above, extols the freedom of Arthur O. Bakke (and this post is the last Bakke will appear in), he writes that even Bakke is limited by his "love and conviction."  In other words, Bakke is free to wander the roads but his faith, mission and purpose regulates his freedom in many other ways.  And that's not a bad thing, especially if it allows him to pursue what he desires, and to strive for that which makes him happy.

*****

Arthur O. Bakke is let off by LHM at Kalispell.  Bakke offers to ride with LHM to North Dakota, but LHM tells him he has to go alone, though he says at times he will miss Bakke's company.  As he lets him out into a strong wind, LHM asks Bakke if he will be okay, and Bakke replies with a biblical verse, Philippians 4:11: "For I have learned, in whatever state I am, to be content."  He adds, "Hardships are good. They prepare a man."  Another lesson I've learned only recently, and which has set my mind toward more positive things for my future.

Musical Interlude

I've been waiting for a reason to play this song.  Jesus Hits Like the Atom Bomb was a gospel song from the 1950s, rendered here by Arnold McCuller (website) with Ry Cooder.  I didn't use the conversion story of Arthur Bakke in these posts, but revelation can literally hit with a huge explosive force on the lives of the individuals that experience it.  Needless to say, it hasn't happened to me.  My insights have always been slow trickles.

If you want to learn more about Kalispell

City of Kalispell
Daily Inter Lake (newspaper)
Flathead Beacon (newspaper)
Flathead Convention and Visitors Bureau
GoNorthwest.com: Kalispell
Kalispell Chamber of Commerce
Wikipedia: Kalispell

Next up: Hungry Horse, Montana