A THOUSAND WORDS

This doctored photo was posted to accompany comment about tabooed behavior in close quarters.  Recently a very drunk man (how did he get on the plane?) peed without restraint while sitting in a stupor.  Most of us have been on a flight that nauseated everyone with the smell of vomit, triggering those of us who’d been in control until then.  In the early days of my teaching, one student was gaseous beyond everyone else.  We made him sit by the open window even in cold weather.  Everyone wore their coats anyway, as though we might have to flee from the cavalry, not entirely unrealistic for these people. Blackfeet tolerance for what I frankly called farting in those days is a cultural feature since Napi, that bad example, was constantly having conversations with his A-hole.  If everyone more or less lives outside and eats things that are a little marginal, one’s oosie is more an individual problem, esp. if the wind blows as much as it does here.   But modern life with a Eu

When I was a kid, the “outside world” was defined by movie houses.  My folks were from places so rural that they didn’t have movies and, of course, there was no television.  We lived at NE 15th in Portland.  Figure ten blocks is about a mile, so this fancy showhouse was a couple of miles away, a little far to walk until one’s te ens.  Sandy was a farm delivery road that ran diagonally across the grid system of streets out to the fields along the Columbia River, so Hollywood was an invented community of slightly fancier dwellings and a node of specialty shops, a little sub-town.  When a new show premiered, which was treated like a Broadway opening in Manhattan, a searchlight left over from WWII was set up to put a column of blue light into the sky as a beacon. Since my paternal grandparents had homesteaded on the prairie, a strategy which developed late to help the railroads, we had a high consciousness that when whites arrived in Portland, “proving up” was how the first own

This is a Tony Bynum photo at dawn with spring virga dragging through. By the time I was no longer circuit-riding, I was so used to living on wheels — not necessarily in different places every night — that I preferred it.  After  the vans, I converted to a small pickup with a bed that was barely big enough to hold a single mattress.  The cab was easy to heat, unlike a van in a Montana winter, but it was a drawback that I had to get out from my little bedroom to drive off.  I was rather trapped and worried about it, but not much. This was a fav place to spend the night even though I had to pay a bit.  There was an electrical outlet and a nearby pay shower.  (The toilet was free.)  In fact, there was even a laundromat.  This photo is what I could see when I looked up from reading, propped on pillows in the back of my little pickup.  It’s the edge of the arroyo made by the creek that runs along the west side of East Glacier.  There used to be coyotes there, not for a romantic

It was the early Sixties and I had joined Bob Scriver’s life very quickly because he had an infected eye that meant he might go blind.  His sight was saved, but by then we had formed a partnership to make his sculpture famous — him, too, of course.  In those days the women of the partnership were never famous, but they got to go along. In college I had learned to carefully read the Arts section of the NY Times .  Of course, you couldn’t buy that paper in Browning, MT, but you could in Great Falls at Val’s Cigar Store , a tiny emporium where the privileged hung out.  I saw that the pinnacle of cowboy art was — strangely enough — in Manhattan and talked Bob into sending work to the major exhibitions there.  The bronzes were easily accepted and helped make sales because art buyers are snobs and needed reassurance that they were buying valuable art.  I didn’t quite understand that Western bronzes were the tail of French representational  lost-wax bronze casting and closely related to

Even more of an experiment was putting the exciting red “warning” on the front to see who would be deterred, who would be attracted.  Those looking for sex and porn have to be disappointed because even when I talk about those aspects of life, I don’t take an arousing tack.  (By the way, that’s not about something sharp — it’s a term from boating.  Check out wikipedia and YouTube.) The number of hits went from several hundred (or even several thousand if the subject is a movie star) to single digits and little more.  Suits me.  I don’t care.  At least one friend confided that she was afraid to open the blog.  I suppose it gets you on a list somewhere, but it is hardly criminal and print is unlikely to make you a degenerate.  (Well, it could, if you tried, but pictures are quicker.) But what makes this prairiemarytoday blog “adult” is that the subjects may be adult subjects like money, violence, physiology at deep levels, and other stuff like that.  So be warned.

Most of the advice about writing is based on selling fiction, often thinly disguised autobiography.  This is a description of how I write nonfiction, which might be helpful and might not.  The subject is how the east slope of the Rocky Mountains supplies the area with water, only needing to be channeled.  This is something recurring around the planet and was particularly useful in South America, where it now appears that irrigation allowed the raising of food in amounts that could support cities of considerable size.  Their ruins and pyramids are hidden in the Amazon jungle.  These cities did have writing, though we’re not good at translating it yet, and a religion of terrifying ferocity, worse even than the depiction of crucifixion.   No one became immortal, so far as we can tell, but we think the amount of blood shed was meant to keep the water coming.  When drought prevented crops, the starvation was more deadly than greedy Spaniards, though the latter did their best. My fi

Two boxes of class notes, photos, correspondence, and so on that I saved from the early Sixties are now in my pickup.  They are destined for the faculty archives at Northwestern University in Evanston, just north of Chicago.  They’ve been boxed up since fall, are now addressed and sealed, one box is even prepaid by the archives people, and getting them into the hands of UPS has taken up half of today.   The day started early since the phone rang at 7AM.  But it only rang once and no one was there.  It may have been a wrong number.  Mine is close to two other numbers, an older woman at the Hutterite colony who likes to check her friends when she gets up, and the station where truck drivers get permits for crossing into Canada.   Anyway, I used the extra time of being “up” to look in the phone book for UPS.  The closest one is in Cut Bank (30 miles) and brings me my cat food.  They were not in the phone book.  I called information and got a number.  It announced it was disconnec

My mother has been dead for almost twenty years.  She made this life possible by willing me enough money to buy the house.  “House” equals mother in one of those core life-metaphors we build language around. My mother didn’t like housework.  She was an outdoor farm girl.  On Saturday she took the dust mop to the farthest bedroom, pushed out everything that was on the floor, did the same in the other bedroom and the bathroom, until there was a heap in the hallway, then pushed it all down the stairs and across the front room to the fireplace where she used a big kitchen match to burn it all, mostly under-bed mice of fuzz and paper.  She mopped the kitchen floor.  No dusting anywhere — bookshelves on every wall — but not much need since it was a wet climate where dust fell to the floor. I’m into order but no particular cleanliness.  That is, I want things in their places so I can find them, but I don’t care about handprints on the door handles.  All my bookshelves are in the fron