September 2007 Archives

A fine day!  Sunny, in the mid 70s.  Even with allergy problems, I had the windows open and took an afternoon walk made special.  Seeing zoo creatures is one experience, but seeing wild creatures in my passing is a kind of special magic of the sort Native Americans seem well-versed in but we have lost.  My day is always made special when I see marmosets scurrying along the banks or a handsome fox sniffing his way through corn stubble or an eagle tearing at a fish in its claws.  More specifically, Saturday afternoon from my Papio Trail, I spotted a blue heron on its stilts stalking fish and watched it spear a silvery one and toss it down the way we eat raw oysters.  From having seen dozens over the years--Lake Cunningham had several always--I knew how wary they are and took precautions not to frighten it.  Returning, I presumed it gone, no longer where the side culvert's stream fed in, but then was elated to see it near my bank on a small spillway.  It saw me and backed out of view, but I went ahead far enough to look back and watch it, a stately aristocrat, cross the rapids cascading down the cement incline.  Cyclists rarely pay attention to the water, where I've seen blue teal, golden eye, two beavers, a weasel, besides other herons, in past trail walks, but a young woman, noticing my sentinel stance, asked me if I was watching "the crane," and I was happy at least one cyclist also got the gift, like being tapped on the head with Nature's magic wand.

Saturday morning I had watched Vladimir Menshov's 1980 Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, which won our Best Foreign Film Oscar the next year.  I had seen it years ago but wanted to renew acquaintance, happy as I am with Netflix access to all the foreign films I crave.  It's simply a look at three country girls come to the big city at 20 (1958) and then finding out what happened to them when they hit 40 (1978).  The shyest had married well, her capable husband taking her into comfortable wealth, with three sons; the greediest, most scheming had gone through three husbands and still had a blue-collar job, without losing her sassy airs; the most industrious one, a pretty romantic skilled with tools, went from the factory assembly line to the managing directorship while rearing a daughter out of wedlock, finally meeting the man she'd always been looking for at the same time she met her daughter's callous absentee father, the only real complication in the storyline.  My favorite part was a serene metaphorical ballad sung to a guitar during a montage of a countryside picnic of friends, so meaningful that I labored to copy it, starting, stopping, backing up the DVD.  The song has the dialogue, all the questions by the woman, all the answers by the man.  (As usual, I use the virgule / to represent line ends as well as the change of speakers here, because I can't make the verse form work in this format.)

What's happening in the world? / It's just winter. / Just winter, you think? / I do.  I make my way as best I can/Into your homes where you're all tucked in bed. / What will follow of this? / January. / January, you think? / Yes, I do.  I've been reading this little white book since I was young,/The old-fashioned primer with pictures of snow and blizzards. / What'll be the outcome? / April will dawn. / April?  You're sure? / Yes, I'm sure./I definitely heard with my own ears/The sound of a reed pipe out in the meadow. / What's your conclusion? / We must go on living/And make summer dresses from light cotton. / You think we'll get a chance to put them on? / Just make them is what I say./We must be prepared,/For no matter how strong the blizzards,/their bondage is bound to come to an end./So allow me, my lady, to offer my hand/For a dance at the New Year's Ball./The moon is a silver sphere with a candle inside,/And carnival masks are all around./A waltz has begun, so give me your hand,/And 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3.       

The AOL main website, which opens whenever I want to get on the Internet, insulted me today by asking which of the regular TV serials I was going to watch tonight, another of its regular popularity polls mostly about politics or entertainment.  As if I were more interested in Prison Break or How I Met Your Mother or all that pop popcorn rather than Ken Burns' somber documentary treatment of the last just and properly declared war, World War II, which some critics are calling his best yet.  It should be required watching for high school and college history classes, and one would hope more of the public than usual, though democracy has a built-in dumbing-down factor.  I am, however, disgusted with the large popup wrecking the speeded-up credits at the end, a nasty adoption of commercial channel insult.  

Anyway, besides its music mostly of the 1940's mellow ballads and big band tunes I grew up with, far preferable to the whining and whinging adenoidal or adolescent noise on the airwaves now, World War II definitely reverberates in my head despite my being a mere child in that decade.  We had at least two men, veterans, in Center who would go off and isolate themselves on the Fourth of July.  Exploding fireworks terrified them, reducing them to tears and irrationality, and sympathetic whispers explained that they were shell-shocked.  Other veterans refused pointblank to talk about their war experiences, at least one of whom saw the Nazi concentration camps.  Some of the accounts in Burns' documentary bluntly tell why, as with the Japanese atrocities, one of which I have heard about in other wars, notably Vietnam, an apparently standard contemptuous and contemptible warfare butchery of decapitation, then stuffing the severed genitals in the head's mouth.  We had movies about the infamous Bataan death march, the terrors of the unusually brutal prison camps, and I remember that we were forbidden to sing "Roll Out the Barrel," because allegedly the Japanese put GIs in barrels, set them afire, and sent them rolling down inclines.  (Oddly, one of the movies I immediately think of besides The Bridge on the River Kwai is a far more recent one with Christian Bale when he was very young, the 1987 Empire of the Sun, about an English boy caught in a WWII Japanese concentration camp, heartbreaking when his parents finally recover him.)

None of that Japanese brutality, partially based on cultural differences, excuses one of the war's most infamous wrongs with the Presidential executive order 9066, which allowed the internment of our Japanese American citizens in our own ugly concentration camps, all their properties confiscated, despite their unquestionable loyalties and birthrights.  Just last week was the excellent Nebraska-made PBS documentary about Ben Kuroki, a Nebraska farm boy from Hershey who fought to fight, insisting on his citizen loyalty, assigned mostly then to the European theater of war, becoming our first Japanese American war hero, later speaking out against the internment of the Pacific Coast Nisei, and ultimately insisting on participating in the bombing of Japan.  What a splendid American!  I heartily recommend that documentary, about downhome patriotism and the kind of virulent racism most of us associate with black history. 

That decade was a time of strident propaganda, a large portion of our movies about "the dirty Japs" or "the dirty Nazis," filled with crass racial stereotypes and fiercely courageous GIs, who often died for our ideals onscreen as they actually did.  I should add that German families also came under suspicion, though never so persecuted as our Japanese Americans, since we still had some farm families who spoke German at home just as with other languages like Czech or Swedish.  We have always been a nation of immigrants.

Homes had the little red-white-and-blue banner in a window by or on the door, signifying a family member in the armed forces.  As the documentary notes, when the blue star on the little white pennon with the red edge turned gold, that was poignant sacrifice, for it meant the death of that person.  Learning that, I would watch carefully for those little markers, that sad change.  I recall a funeral in Plainview for a distant Luckert relative, killed at an airfield in England.

While the documentary makes a point that cities like Boston and New York refused to black out to demonstrate their fearless defiance, we had regular blackouts in little Center.  Those in charge of the defense committee, or whatever it was called, would notify everyone that we would have a drill, and we were then required to make sure the windows were covered, with no lights but a flashlight or a candle during that specified period.  We had cardboard covers for the single windows, blankets over the large front windows.  The air-raid wardens went around town, checking for compliance.  The street lights were shut off, the total town in darkness.  At least a few times we were gathered in the Knox County Courthouse, considered the strongest structure in town,  the windows all covered with shades except three very long ones on the east side stair landing, where we watched, hushed, on the stairs, waiting for the planes to fly over.  These were very exciting occasions for me, a very imaginative little boy.  

The Depression was getting over when I was born, but, as the documentary notes, it prepared the nation for the tremendous efforts and supplies that went entirely toward the war effort and making us the most powerful manufacturing and military nation on earth, a time of astonishing transformation, as women became part of the work force (as in the 1984 movie, Swing Shift), as the rural areas poured into the cities' factories, new urban congestion, as the blacks surged northward, all kinds of socioeconomic transformations and cultural dislocations.

What that meant for Center and Knox County was stamps and rationing.  All the major staples went largely to our armed forces, while we were given variously colored stamps in thin little booklets to buy coffee, sugar, tea, butter, gas, tires, nylons, even clothes and meat.  Going into a store required one's ration book, and those stamps certainly controlled our very limited buying.  The stamps were dated and scarce enough that I recall just generally having to do without anything rationed.  I have a cookbook of the time with all sorts of recipes, for instance, for cakes without eggs or sugar or butter.  Honey was the main substitute for sugar, which I didn't like then.  Coffee grounds were re-used, as was tea.  Chicory was used as a substitute.  Driving was out of necessity; fortunately, tires at that time were repaired by mechanics like Dad because they had inner tubes which could be patched and repatched.  Also fortunately we already were in the habit of growing our own gardens (now saving our own seeds) and canning or drying foodstuffs, as I've written about.  Besides my farming grandparents, other farmers would barter with Dad, as they did ever after, trading meat or eggs or cream for repairs.  

On the other hand, kept very hush-hush--people were prosecuted for its illegality--was the black market.  I never understood it except that it was the biggest secret of the time.  I was always strongly warned to keep secret that big bag of sugar (50? 100? pounds) Dad managed to buy once in a blue moon from mysterious connections, a bag we kept hidden in the closet back of the clothes and shared with family, sugar better than gold in those years.  Likewise, the box of nylons, prized by all the women who had to simulate stockings with a kind of tanning lotion--makes me think of calamine, for some reason--and a line carefully drawn down the back of the leg to represent the seam.  (Women became very proficient at this difficult task or asked for help because, of course, the line had to be absolutely straight to be convincing fakery.)  Dad ran a gas station, so I wasn't aware of that severe shortage, but I know we had problems over tires and he did get some, which were hidden in the basement, I think.  It was always a case of someone who knew someone who knew someone, a spur-of-the-moment opportunity, money passed in one direction for the product coming back, and I only know of one name where he went to pick up one of those big bags of sugar.  (I should add that Dad wasn't drafted because of a medical disability but was definitely involved with any patriotic committees, as he later served to help the Army when it flew in supplies for people and livestock during the 1948-1949 blizzards.) 

My toys went from being metal to being wooden, rarely plastic (considered inferior then), and largely war-related.  No, not GI Joe figures, nothing like those yet.  But I had a blue wooden aircraft carrier and a plastic P-38, my favorite plane, with its double tail.  Mostly, we did without toys unless they were homemade, manufacturing efforts back then bent on turning us into the economic giant and war machine we still are.

As Burns makes clear, we started from a negative position, whether in simply knowing how to fight, as with the guerrilla warfare in the Pacific or the desert warfare in North Africa, or in having war materiels, but forcibly went to the positive side in a surprisingly short time with constantly improved military equipped with constantly newer, improved planes, tanks, guns, bombs.  As the Japanese learned even before two atomic bombs (the only ones ever dropped--by us--the Enola Gay carrying Little Boy made here in Omaha at Boeing's Martin Company Plant), Pearl Harbor was one of the greatest military errors ever made.   

While we were wandering among the world's largest collection of geysers, we saw much else besides Old Faithful and Morning Glory Pool.  Scenically, I think the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, with its Upper and Lower Falls visible from Artist Point, proved to be the most breathtaking, a view many artists have painted, including Thomas Moran, whose paintings and drawings are among the best versions of Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon (we have a large Moran of that here in Joslyn), Yosemite.  With the early photos of William Henry Jackson, Moran's art helped popularize our best western sights and persuaded politicians to create that first national park.  I've been thinking perhaps we didn't take pictures because we didn't have color film and our usual custom was to buy scenic postcards, just what I did decades later when I went to Europe.  I can't find any postcards of the 1948 trip scenes, however, as I can of other excursions.

I know we saw the Fishing Bridge with its line of men perpetuating its name, and I'm relatively sure we saw Tower Falls and the Petrified Tree, but the sight that riveted my rock-hunting sense--I would have been extremely happy to be a geologist--was the Obsidian Cliff. its ancient lava petrified into glittering black glass.  I do admit picking up a small chip of it, my most prized souvenir of the trip, about the size of an arrowhead, with the sharp edges the great Mexican civilizations of the Aztec and Maya prized for their best knives for their ritual human sacrifices. 

I saw my first elk herds along the Firehole River, as well as bison grazing in meadows between aspen stands.  This was long before the efforts to restore one of my most revered animals, the wolf, to the area, and so that other extremely intelligent animal, the bear, took the spotlight to such an extent that every time we met a line of cars, we'd nod, "Must've seen a bear."  It happened so often--apparently there was/are a surplus of black bears, as opposed to the dangerous brown/grizzly with its distinctive shoulder hump--that it became a stale joke.

Well, not so stale, for there are four photos of panhandling bears, one of a man trapped outside his car by two small bears (yearlings?), three of an adult bear approaching us from a line of cars, a thematic cluster that demonstrates some definite fascination with them.  And I'm going to assume that I was the one taking the pictures, being the one who could run the fastest.  The last of this photographic trio of the same adult clearly shows the line of the (back) window glass, apparently from my looking out of the car.  At this time these bear beggars were black bears.  Recently I saw a documentary on the Yellowstone grizzlies, restored to such numbers that now the auto gridlocks are for seeing them too up close and personal, creating severe crowd control problems for the rangers, who know all too well the speed and volatility of grizzlies.  I could not believe the stupidity of tourists.  Well, I take that back.  One can never underestimate the stupidity of tourists with cameras.  Later in the entry Zoo Afternoon I juxtapose photos of the grizzly and the American black bear, and those alone tell you why I'm glad we had only black bears.

I have told what happened on one occasion before but repeat it here for whoever missed the anecdote.  Gram ordinarily kept a box of Ritz (preferred) or saltine crackers for snacking between her and me in the back seat, as I have mentioned previously.  We had our windows down, watching some bears and people foolish enough to be out among them.  A loud snuffle as a big furry head came in Gramma's window set off her shriek as she went airborne and landed on the crackers and me, Mom and Grandpa shouting to "Roll up the windows!  Roll up the windows!"  Which I suspect Grampa did under the bear's paws, reaching back from the front seat, Gramma being half on my lap.  Biggest excitement of the whole trip and good mileage for vacation telling back home.

I should add hear that bears and rattlesnakes were the only wild creatures who unsettled me when I was hiking, especially since I was ordinarily by myself.  I got used to registering at the trail stations so that, in case of mishaps, rangers would know I was somewhere on a particular trail.  With its unhappy publicity from rare, fatal bear attacks, Glacier National Park almost stridently warns tourists about grizzlies, extremely intelligent, with volatile tempers, amazing speed (up to 35 mph for miles at a time), and massive claws, teeth, and muscles to be our most fiercesome wild creature.  Any doubters are referred to Doug Peacock's 1990 book, Grizzly Years:  In Search of the American Wilderness, or Werner Herzog's 2005 documentary, Grizzly Man, about the lives and grisly deaths of grizzly bear activists, Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, as disturbingly close a look at spooky grizzlies as one can bear.  (The pun was unintentional, but I'll let it stand.)  I, of course, am all for grizzlies and wolves over men, but I am not for close encounters with either.  I found the bear bells--think sleigh bells on ankle straps on people--that Glacier's rangers want hikers to wear annoying and surefire devices to scare off any other wildlife.  Since I was ordinarily solo, for the required noise, I sang, usually Rodgers & Hart or Cole Porter, until I heard other hikers approaching.  But the possibility of a bear and being the last hiker out on a particular trail off the Many Glacier road one afternoon spooked me back to my car, and I was not particularly happy to find huge tracks and fresh (steaming) scat on the shore of Avalanche Lake, though I was too tired and wet, from falling repeatedly between boulders hidden under alders and other shrubby trees and nasty prickly devil's club near the lake when I lost the trail, that I couldn't have run if I'd wanted.  (I dutifully reported the bear dung and tracks to the rangers back at the highway.)

The final two photos from this trip, not finished yet, are of me in my suspenders and Mom with aspen and conifers in the background, still in Yellowstone.

When I bought manuals for digital photography and blogging the other day, I also bought James Lee Burke's newest, The Tin Roof Blowdown, which takes Dave Robicheaux, his boss and co-workers, and his buddy, Clete Purcel, to post-Katrina New Orleans to try to help restore order in a city full of scenes out of Hieronymus Bosch (for whom Michael Connelly's detective, Harry Bosch, is named, incidentally).  I had gone to my nephew's football game in Lincoln early and sat in my pickup reading until my sister arrived and was so unsettled by the book that I had to stop reading. 

Burke is apparently using eyewitness descriptions, for it is chillingly graphic.  Early on he has Dave lay the blame:  "The levees burst because they were structurally weak and had only a marginal chance of surviving a category 3 storm, much less one of category 5 strength [Katrina].  Every state emergency official knew this.  The Army Corps of Engineers knew this.  The National Hurricane Center in Miami knew this./  But apparently the United States Congress and the current administration in Washington, D.C., did not, since they had dramatically cut funding for repair of the levee system only a few months earlier."  [Page 32.] 

Burke really opens up with the horrifying description, all the wrenching newscasts and news photos of that natural disaster returning: 

"The smell was like none I ever experienced.  The water was chocolate-brown, the surface glistening with a blue-green sheen of oil and industrial chemicals.  Raw feces and used toilet paper issued from broken sewer lines.  The gray, throat-gagging odor of decomposition permeated not only the air but everything we touched. . . . /They drowned in attics and on the second floors of their houses. They drowned along the edges of highway 23 . . . . They drowned in retirement homes and in trees and on car tops while they waved frantically at helicopters flying by overhead.  They died in hospitals and nursing homes of dehydration and heat exhaustion, and they died because an attending nurse could not continue to operate a hand ventilator for hours upon hours without rest./  If by chance you hear a tape of the 911 cell phone calls from those attics, walk away from it as quickly as possible, unless you are willing to live with voices that will come aborning in your sleep for the rest of your life."  [Page 37.] 

"It was the literal powerlessness of the city that was overwhelming.  The electric grid had been destroyed and the water pressure had died in every faucet in St. Bernard and Orleans parishes.  The pumps that should have forced water out of the storm sewers were flooded themselves and totally useless.  Gas mains burned underwater or sometimes burst flaming from the earth . . . . The entire city, within one night, had been reduced to the technological level of the Middle Ages."  [Page 34.]

He pays proper homage to the Coast Guard and its heroic efforts in rescuing 33,000 and the police who remained loyal (many did not, including one group who set up a looting headquarters).  But the bizarre and monstrous keep the surreal Bosch landscape alive.  Clete remarks, "You think that's bad.  Go inside the Center.  All the plumbing is broken.  There're dead people piled in the corners.  Street rats are shooting guns in there and raping anybody they want."  [Page 36.]

He also says to Dave, "Did you see that big plane that flew over? . . . . It was Air Force One.  After three days the Shrubster did a flyover.  Gee, I feel better now."  [Page 41.]

For once the trite "Read it and weep" is too literal.

Friday was one of those Fridays that give Fridays a bad name.  I bought a printer-copier-scanner at Sam's Club for use here, but it didn't work, and my mouse died in the middle of the screen.  It sat there and smelled, just as real dead mice do, all weekend until this morning, when my Geek repairman came and discovered that I had a returned/used item that didn't work and my wireless mouse was indeed dead.  (It also overheated its rechargeable batteries.)  I had tried repeatedly from Friday through Monday to dynamite that frozen pointer and rescucitate my computer, without success, obviously.  He re-installed the little printer I originally had, put on a new mouse I had bought and tried to install when I couldn't do anything because of the dead pointer, downloaded my first digital camera photos, whizzed through some shortcuts I can't remember, but he couldn't get rid of an annoying error message I've gotten for months.  Expensive morning of a beautiful day.

In the meantime the weather had turned pleasant so that I opened my windows and promptly closed my sinuses because of all that ragweed and other pollens and molds from a lead story in the World-Herald, which is also presently annoying me beyond allergens.  First, it made a big story out of Joslyn's holding outdoor movies against the east side of Sir Norman Foster's blank-walled addition, blah-blah-blahing about "not since outdoor drive-in movie theaters," which were once abundant in the Omaha-Council Bluffs area.   Well, lah-di-dah, we had a sheet on the north side of the bank for our free outdoor drive-in movies on Saturday nights in Center next to Dad's garage in the early 1940s; then later the movies were projected on the south side of the old hall until Wes Mach finally built a large wooden screen he painted white and erected high on two telephone poles by that old hall.  (I have already written that we went inside the hall in wintertime for Saturday night movies.  They were not free but a dime, a quarter, then thirty-five, then fifty cents as we got into the 1950s.)

Of course, the Weird-Horrid, which is when I'm irritated with the World-Herald, has also been annoying me just as I've been defending newspapers and the written word over, say, TV ha-ha newscasts.  The W-H has accelerated its decline into the People pit.  When it pimped its way into publication, People Magazine speeded up the trend of televidiocy with lots of space around small content, more and more pictures.  (We bought Life and Look once for magazines of nothing much beyond photos.)  Don't want to be too literate, after all.  That progression has been so obvious with the National Geographic that every year I seriously consider dropping my subscription, since there's perhaps a fourth of the word content it had when I borrowed the carefully saved copies of many years back in those same decades, the 1940s and 1950s, from Charles Stevenson, who only allowed me to have two at a time.  The National Geographic photography is stunning, however, and I consider photography as most do, another of our fine arts, even as it's become easily manipulated in our technological progress.

In the meantime, the W-H has more and more white space around more and more photos, even photo essays, with less and less words in larger and larger type, artfully arranged, of course, about which I can do nothing but damage my dentures.  There.  Now my verbal emetic has freed up my constipated emotions.  And I can pick up where I left off before these last six days. 

I should repeat what I've mentioned before, that court reporting ruined my life, not only making me antisocial but wrecking my memories.  I calculated once that I had about 15,000 students in my college teaching years; add 25+ years of court reporting, sweeping up the shards of lives of thousands:  Name?  Birthdate?  Where did you go to school?  Are you married?  How many children do you have?  What do you do for a living? On and on into bitter family histories past incest and battles over children and property and dogs to brutal assaults, barroom brawls, rapes, murders.  Consequently I can truthfully say that once I had encyclopedic knowledge of the family because we spent so much time together, and I do recall Aunt Paula's large salt-and-pepper-shaker collection and Darryl's silver belt buckle from Darryl Zanuck, Aunt Audree's rebus letters to me and Aunt Betty's cherry pies, Aunt Myrtle's Randolph apartment, Gramma's aprons, Grampa's South Dakota cousins.  But a great deal has sunk under the accumulated layers of all these other people I've had to cope with occupationally, like geological sediments piling up, which is not an excuse but an explanation why, for instance, I can no longer remember Uncle Forrest's death.  (I'm sure Gram and her other brother and sisters would've attended the funeral.)

I did find in Graeme Gibson's charming, informative The Bedside Book of Birds:  An Avian Miscellany, this poem's ending from James Reaney's "The Chough":  When I grew older I learned/That the chough, the raven and the crow/That rise like a key signature of black sharps/In the staves and music of a scarlet sunset/Are not to be feared so much/As that carrion bird, within the brain,/Whose name is Devouring Years,/Who gobbles up and rends/All odds and ends/Of memory, good thoughts and recollections/That one has stored up between one's ears/And whose feet come out round either eye."

Yellowstone set a world precedent, one of those gifts of the United States to the rest of the globe we can be proud of (handy when we have an administration of shame), the first of our national parks, also the largest thermal area with the most geysers in the world over one of the world's most colossal supervolcanoes.  Explosions millions of years ago were, apparently, the largest in earth's history, hurling ash from Iowa to California; and the area is still earthquake-prone with mudpots, hot springs, fumaroles (steam vents), and geysers signalling steady activity.  One of the largest calderas on earth is under a great portion of the park, a caldera being the collapsed bowl of a volcano.  (Crater Lake is an extraordinarily beautiful example.)  Americans tend to forget that they breed and live carelessly among and over some of the globe's most volatile geology, whether we're talking of the Cascades with Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Hood, Mt. Shasta, Mt. Ranier, the remains of Mt. Lassen, or Yellowstone, not to mention earthquake fault zones like those making Californians--and people around Yellowstone--occasionally nervous.  In the last several years I've watched a number of documentaries about the worrisome bulging of Yellowstone, as magma presses upward and the park's variety of escape valves isn't sufficient.  (Since I know what a mere pressure cooker can do to a kitchen ceiling and I've been to Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Lassen, that sort of ominous threat of geological havoc, however carefully monitored, means much more than manmade weapons.)  Some websites claim that Yellowstone Lake and the Norris Geyser Basin are closed to the public now, that the areas are hazardous with dying plant life and the fishkill has rendered the lake empty; other sites mention only areas closed for road construction, the park being one of the most heavily trafficked, so much so that it was going to institute a quota system several years ago.

Yellowstone, incidentally, familiar to our Native Americans, was first seen by mountain man John Colter, a geyser area near Cody called "Colter's Hell."  I mention him not because people didn't believe his descriptions of the Yellowstone area nor because he told Captain Clark about several new areas but because his thrilling escape from the Blackfeet, the most ferocious tribe in the western Montana area, was one of my favorite childhood stories.  After killing his trapping companion, who foolishly tried to escape and shot a warrior dead, the Blackfeet debated how to torture Colter to death and finally stripped him utterly and sent him barefooted on a race for his life across miles of prickly pear cactus and other obstacles until he had to confront and kill his closest pursuer and finally hid under a pile-up of driftwood logs in the Madison River.  It then took him 11 days to cover the 250 miles to Manuel Lisa's fort at the mouth of the Big Horn, with no weapons, surviving on Indian/prairie turnips.  What a story to thrill a little boy who grew up with the racist game of Cowboys and Indians!  

In one of those memory quirks, because I haven't ever been back but all around Yellowstone on western trips since, and because I had a black-and-white Yellowstone photo album I cherished that I should still have stuck somewhere, I remember well enough our circle tour.  Can't say whether we came in at West Yellowstone or Gardiner, but we stayed overnight at Old Faithful in a little cabin near the great lodge.  Prices were stiff enough that we prepared our own food; that I know because the warnings about the bears getting into the garbage cans was a bit of a thrill. 

I know that we saw as many geysers as I could talk them into, not only those along the main road but off a ways on side roads.  I specifically remember Steamboat, Castle, Grand, Grotto, Old Faithful, Beehive among the geysers; the cascading terraces of Mammoth Hot Springs. Punch Bowl Spring, the popular (coins thrown in) and beautiful Morning Glory Pool (we had after all morning glories at home on the porch and clothesline), the colorful Grand Prismatic Spring, Emerald Pool; the plopping mudpots like the Artist Paint Pots that for some reason amused me, burping up colored hot muds in a kind of cartoon fantasy.  I recall walking along the boardwalks through the sulfurous fumes that reminded me of the rotten-egg smell of liver of sulphur powder I used for antiquing my tooled copper pictures, and the adults being alarmed if I got too close to the edge of the scalding waters.  I knew nothing then about thermal zones or a supervolcano beneath my wandering among these wonders.

Because I simply sit down and write these entries, I often forget something or make errors which need correction.  (I still need to go back and put Cingular in for the Vonage I cited in the commercial with sound gaps.)  I have been learning some strange aspects of memory while putting down what I can for cousins of the family history, given that I'm the oldest grandchild on the Koftan-Peters side and I don't expect to be around that much longer.  I need to restart reading my Proust all over again, THE author of memory.

I failed to add that I don't know anything about [Great] Uncle Forrest's wife other than the duplicates of, I presumed, their wedding photo.  When I knew him, he was either a widower or a divorcee and had no children.  He died 14 April 1952, but I remember nothing about that, nor do I know where he is buried.  I tried to look that up on the Internet without subscribing to some genealogical service and saw only an entry in Washington state for a Forrest L. Peters in 1952.  I was remiss in not looking up the cemeteries around Deer Lodge when I deliberately stopped there on one of my last trips to Montana, for I made special efforts for other relatives and such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Virgil Thomson.  I do know where all the Peters are buried otherwise.  Our great grandparents, Ed and Mary, are in the Catholic cemetery at Randolph, Nebraska, right behind [Great] Uncle Glen and his second wife, Paula;   [Great] Aunt Myrtle is buried in the Protestant cemetery at Randolph, closer to Highway 20.  (The Catholic cemetery is hidden over the hill but down the same road northeast of town.)  [Great] Aunt Nellie and Uncle John Feddersen are buried in Bassett and easy to find.  Of course, Grandma and Grandpa are in Bloomfield's cemetery next to my parents, also where both sets of my paternal grandparents are buried.

Anyway, Uncle Forrest was solitary and a bit brusque, independent, as I knew him and got along better with Gram, his baby sister, than with the rest of the family.  I think he showed us where he worked, but I've already admitted to remembering nothing but his very dark bachelor's house.

From Deer Lodge we circled up over the mountains to Helena merely to see the capitol.  On a later trip I was surprised to see its setting, against the foothills on the edge of a large, high plateau like a giant meadow tilting down from the city.  I made a special side trip to see the nearby Gates of the Mountains of Lewis & Clark history, a narrow gorge passage on the Missouri between towering grey cliffs, the entrance like a set of giant limestone doors ajar.  But I was too stingy with time and money to take the ferry trip through. 

Dealing with infection, the U.S. Open, and the end of a sizzling summer, my energy has been minus.  I tried to learn more about my new digital camera, but mastering that will be a large accomplishment, or I now would be posting pictures with these entries.

To continue the trip with my grandparents and mother, I should note that motels then weren't at all like modern franchises but usually mom-and-pop affairs with separate small cabins, huts, often with cooking facilities, often with only the bathroom a room unto itself.  I was surprised--happily--to discover one of these on the shore of Lake Superior when I made a Minnesota trip in the 1980s, because in my last years of traveling I discovered that families were taking over "worn-out" franchise structures, the reverse of my earlier years.  Sometimes in small towns, these separate cabins can still be seen; some are even still in use but generally rented out by the month for construction workers and the like.  I know Plainview still has a set at the east end of town.  I always made a point of looking for these old-fashioned remnants when I was traveling, much cheaper than Holiday Inn or Best Western, perhaps not modern, but I didn't care as long as they were clean and had air-conditioning of some sort besides open windows.

I might interject here that anyone who sees the 1934 winner of five Oscars, It Happened One Night, with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, will see precisely what I'm talking about, with its one-room motels and shared outdoor toilet/shower facilities.  I just recently rented it through Netflix and was disappointed in this famous comedy, which, in the plotline, centers on a rich spoiled young heiress who smokes too much, is egotistically accustomed to ordering everyone else around, and a journalist who sees a big story in her attempt to run away from her controlling father--too familiar a modern headline for me to comment on further.   

I should also note that traveling with Grampa was like traveling with Dad decades later--well, not quite as bad, because Grampa at least recognized different time zones whereas Dad never changed his watch and we were thus always on Center time, very awkward when we were two time zones west in Page, Arizona, and he's upset because it's 7:00 a.m. already and I'm still not up--when it was merely 5:00 a.m. there with everyone else still soundly sleeping.  I suppose my grandparents were in a sense accustomed to time zone changes because the boundary between Central and Mountain Time Zones ran down the middle of Long Pine's Main Street (Nebraska).  Good family friends, some of the Peacocks, lived there, and it was always a big topic for us when we visited out there, with the town split by an hour's difference.

So, maintaining farm time, we rolled out early in the morning and, as I noted, rarely had breakfast in a cafe but ate along the roadside after an hour or two traveling at a convenient, preferably scenic spot.  We also always stopped at every historical sign pullout--the Peters family loved history--and Gram had decided we should see all the state capitols we could, though I don't remember our detouring to see Pierre.  It was the only reason we went on to Helena and came back through Cheyenne and swung way around by Lincoln, as that decision guided us.

After leaving Aunt Ella's, we headed into Montana on the way to Uncle Forrest's at Deer Lodge.  Looking at my atlas, I'm surprised, because the highway from Belle Fourche to Billings goes past Custer's Last Stand/Battle of the Little Bighorn, where several decades later I was to spend a whole day and at least ten rolls of film.  But I don't remember anything about it--a slight detour would've taken us to Devil's Tower too--only Pompey's Pillar, which means we came into Billings from the northeast.  Pompey's Pillar, named by Captain William Clark for Sacajewea's little son, whom he had nicknamed Pompy, "Little Chief" in Shoshone, is a circular butte on which Captain Clark inscribed his name in 1806, now protected and a national landmark on the Lewis & Clark Trail.  It obviously made a deep impression because it's the only one I remember of all the historical sites outside the Black Hills and Yellowstone.

We stayed in Billings overnight, at that time probably not Montana's largest city but certainly its smelliest.  The pervasive stench of natural gas from its refineries gave us headaches and a poor night of sleeping.  The only other place I can remember being as unpleasantly malodorous was Artesia on one of my New Mexico trips decades later, also a town of refineries.  Billings since has sprawled far beyond that childhood memory and its shallow bowl and has no odors other than the usual city ones of 100,000 population. 

Oddly, I remember nothing of my first experience of true mountains; having been to Montana so many times since, covering the whole state, must have overwhelmed any memories I had.  Certainly we all would have been awestruck with Montana's rugged beauty, as I have been every trip since, and we surely saw some of the sights, probably the merging of the three rivers--Madison, Gallatin, and Jefferson--forming the Missouri at Three Forks.  I do recall Butte as being an up-and-down place and viewing its great Anaconda open-pit copper mine and the other mining ecological disasters we didn't think about back then.  And I am still struck by the paucity of photos, none at all from Montana.

It seems we arrived in Deer Lodge in the dark, for I remember its being like arriving at Great Grampa Koftan's residence in Clarence, very dark, scary, with only kerosene lamps.  Uncle Forrest LeRoy Peters was the oldest of Edward LeRoy and Mary Jane Maher Peters, born in 1882.  Glen Elmo was born in 1884, Nellie M. in 1888, Myrtle Ida in 1891, and Fern Effie Adelaide in 1895.  The oldest was also considered the family black sheep and certainly left home early to make his own way, working for the railroad in Montana.  We have photos of him, strong-featured, good-looking, as muscular as Uncle Glen was slight, with jaunty hats, bold jaw forward, one  group photo at some kind of tent/work camp, as well as two handsome early black-and-white postcards.  (But in those years family photos were also in postcard format.)  One photo has "You see I still retain my girlish beauty Haw! Haw! F."  One postcard looks across the Kootenai River into Libby, Montana, with "This is a picture of Mane [sic] St  I marked X on the Depot roof," and another of beautiful Kootenai Falls has "This is Kootenai falls 12 miles from Libby we were there twice last summer [sic]."  (We also have photos of him when he visited his baby sister at the Bloomfield farm.)  At some point he was married to a pretty woman Celinda/Linda; we have duplicate wedding (? )photos.

I might add that, were it not one of our most infamous ecological disasters from its asbestos mining and resultant cancer cases, Libby would be the Montana town I would love to live in (so I had to settle for Bozeman or Missoula in my dreams).  And Kootenai Falls is so spectacularly gorgeous, I used my photo of it for a Christmas letter.

I suspect Uncle Forrest was a state penitentiary guard when we were there, because that was one of Deer Lodge's major institutions, and I know he was a prison guard in his later years.  We talked more than toured the place, staying at his house.  On one of my last Montana trips, I deliberately scheduled myself to stay there in memory of Uncle Forrest--and recognized nothing, not the long valley meadow it sits on between mountain ranges, a large mountain just to the west, not the old penitentiary, now a museum along the main highway, and the town seemed small.  Its name is from the Indian for "lodge of the white-tailed deer" and the French trappers' "La Loge Chevreuils."