The life that was

These photos were taken in 1909 in Montana, the same year the Great Northern Railroad came through and ended this still-existing remnant of a life of open-range cattle ranches and the cowboy life of saddle horse, lariat, and branding iron.

One branch of my European ancestral family has been in Montana since beaver trapper and Indian trader days, more than 200 years.  But they really didn't settle down there till the cattle business got going after the Civil War, mainly to supply the gold-mining towns, the army and the Indian reservations.  To sell to markets farther afield, they had to run a trail drive down to Abilene, Kansas, and the Union Pacific railhead there, a mighty long trek.  Once there, they often clashed with the Texas drovers and their tick-infested, disease-ridden longhorns.  The Montanans didn't want the Texicans or their cowbrutes anywhere near their own healthy Angus and Herefords.  

There were longhorns in Montana and some ranchers interbred them with Herefords to try to improve their hardiness, especially to withstand the harsh winter weather.  But my people preferred to concentrate on selectively breeding the hardiest of the Herefords and Angus.  The terrific blizzards in the winter of 1886 wiped out almost all the cattle in the territory and bankrupted many ranchers, but enough of our home-bred cattle survived to keep the ranch not only solvent, but when they sold at premium prices due to the dearth of cattle brought to market, allowed us to buy out a number of distressed ranchers.

When the Great Northern came through it was granted by the federal government great swaths of land on either side of the railroad right-of-way, which it sold to some local Montanans, who built towns to serve the railroad -- water and coaling stations, repair shops and the accompanying hotels, stores, saloons and brothels.  But the railroad also sold land plots to eastern greenhorn farmers, locals called them "honeyockers," who brought their families with them and tried to farm the short-grass prairie and semi-arid land only to fail when the inevitable drought hit.  So we were able to buy up more land for a song.  

Then came World War I and a massive demand from Europe for beef to feed their armies, and also mules and horses to transport them.  Suddenly, cowpokes who had become tough-minded ranchers who feared God and his elements and knew they were always just a bit of bad luck away from disaster became rich.  Rich enough to withstand the price crash and droughts after the war that saw some 60,000 honeyockers abandon their farms and leave the state. Rich enough and careful enough and smart enough to avoid disaster during the long harsh drought of the 1930s that saw dust bowls develop where farming had predominated over ranching.  Then came another world war and the cash avalanched on them again.  But by that time they were using trucks and tractors and short-line railroad spurs, enclosed pastures and feedlots, and the open range had long been split up by barbed-wire fences and the old cowboying days had receded far into the past, already nothing but garbled legends.

Not everybody liked liked the changes.  One old cowhand wrote to one of his old pals in 1913, "You wouldent know the country anymore it's all grass side down now. Wher once you rode circle and I night wrangled, a gopher couldn't graze now. The boosters say it's a better country than it ever was but it looks like hell to me I liked it better when it belonged to God it sure was his country when we knew it."

He would probably cry if he saw it now.  There's a little bit of the old way left, but not much.

How well I do remember, how well I do recall
How we used to round them up, and brand them one and all.
Right on that same old spot where we used to brand the steers,
They're growing big potatoes and them little roasting ears.
I rode up on a pinnacle and pulled off my slouch hat,
Then all that I could see was farm shacks on the flat.
Said the Indian to the cowboy, "You'd better look around,"
"For you're liable to be camping on some other feller's ground."
Now the Indians and the cowboys, they used to live in peace,
Till the damned old dryland farmers came a-creeping from the East.
So we'll ride no more fat horses, and we'll have to sell our twine,
Go and eat that old sow belly cut so close to the rind.
~ Ken Atwood, an old cowpoke long gone roping in the sky

 

Just for the heck of it:

Some of what once was does still exist:

 

True love

This life lives in memory forever.

“It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.”
~ Benito Mussolini  

 "Those who live by the sword die by the sword, and those who don't live by the sword die by smelly diseases."
~ George Orwell

 

Family Trees and nationality

 Isn't it curious that we speak of our family tree, but also of finding our roots, not our leaves or branches?  I think the roots comparison is better, especially if you think of yourself as the apex or convergence of a vast tangled skein of roots disappearing below you down and down into the ever-distant past.  Which individual skein you choose to follow leads you to one identity, but if you choose a different skein, you are led to another.

In my case, of those ancestors I am aware of, depending on which skein I trace, I could claim to be English, German, Dutch, Welsh, Swiss, Norman, Cheyenne or...-- well, who knows what?  Like a typical old stock American, I just identify as American.  If I want to get more specific than that, I name my home state.  It is quite as natural for an American to say he is a New Yorker or a Minnesotan or a Texan (or, using nicknames, a Hoosier, Tarheel or Okie) as it is for a European to say he is Czech or Italian.  Incidentally, I bristle if someone refers to me as a European-American.  I am American!  Period. 

It's a pet peeve of mine to dislike naturalized U.S. citizens who claim to be Americans and refer to "our" country.  No!  You are not an American; a citizen, yes, but your ethnicity is Foreignese or whatever.  Those who insist they are as American as me and you are really saying that there is no such thing as an American nationality, let alone an American ethnicity.  Anybody who shows up here, takes a test a lobotomized rhesus monkey could pass and hangs around for a few years is an "American."  Phooey kablooey!   They can't tell me they like moon pies and RC Cola just as much as you do.  Or that they like to eat charcoal seared chili cheese dogs, baked beans and potato salad while sitting at a picnic table under a maple tree swatting away mosquitos just as much as I do. Or as a kid having your favorite lunch be a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich with Fritos and a glass of chocolate milk. I bet!  Nor can they believably tell me that they love the smell of a freshly mown lawn on long-lingering summer evening as much as we do.  Or going to the Dairy Queen to get banana splits and hot fudge sundaes.  And they sure can't say that they really like root beer.  Hah!

A thing I've noticed is that green-carders or naturalized citizens who don't insist that they are Americans -- at least the East Asian ones I am most familiar with -- when they say "American" really mean Whites.  Blacks are blacks and various assorted others are identified by original nationality:  Mexican, (dot) Indian, Chinese. etc.  But if in some far foreign land, an infantry squad of white, black and hispanc soldiers of the US Army was interacting with the locals, those locals would identify every one of those soldiers as Americans and nothing but Americans. No qualifiers; well, other than the expletive-deleted type.

Apropos of nothing, I've always gotten a chuckle out of this old meme:

The most popular American song ever written, and if you are an American you have sung this song since you were a little kid and know the words, well, most of them, and doubtless have made up lyrics of your own to the tune:

 I bet you know all the words to this little ditty, my fellow American, and sing it in the shower:

A salute to the old America that is dying away before our eyes and will be most deeply and profoundly missed by those of us with roots in this land going back centuries, but I suppose only by us, as the newcomers will have never had any acquaintance with it and, if they know of it at all, regard it with with indifference, if not disdain.

 

 

Just for fun!

 A Saturday night dance party always cheers me up.  Invite some good friends -- no political junkies or religious nuts; no nerds, spergs or dweebs.  Serve some yummy finger food and happy juice for those who indulge and play a bunch of goofy old tunes, especially the ones with a good beat that you can dance to, and then cut loose and dance, fool, DANCE!

The book of life

“For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened -- then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.”
~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

 "Night kept coming and there was nothing I could do."
~ Charles Bukowski

 My head is so crowded with ghosts I sometimes think it will burst.
My dreams flame with horror.
My memories are gray with ash.
I am a survivor.
~ Jack Eisner

 "Reason writes on the wall the appalling judgements that there is no God; that the universe is only matter in spontaneous motion; and, most grievous word of all, that what men call their souls die with the death of the body, as music dies when the strings are broken."
~ Diderot

"Now that I have toiled and strayed so far over the world, am I to sleep, and let the earth cover my head forever? Let my eyes see the sun until they are dazzled with looking. Although I am no better than a dead man, still let me see the light of the sun."
~ Gilgamesh

"All living creatures born of the flesh shall sit at last in the boat of the West, and when it sinks, they are gone."
~ Gilgamesh

Wet in the windy counties of the dawn
The lone crow skirls his draggled passage home:
And God (whose sparrows fall aslant his gaze,
Like grace or confetti) blinks and he is gone.
~ Thomas McGrath

 

 

Sunlight in the Forest

Deep in the gloom of a northern rain forest
a shaft of sunlight illuminates a moss-covered tree trunk and ferns.

I need to go on a vision quest...

In the very earliest time
when both people and animals lived together on earth,
a person could become an animal if she wanted to
and an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people
and sometimes animals
and there was no difference.
All spoke the same language.
That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance
might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive
and what people wanted to happen could happen--
all you had to do was say it.
Nobody could explain this:
That was the way it was.
--Nalungiaq

There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object she looked upon, that object she became...
--Walt Whitman

the Light in the Grass,
the Wind on the Hill,
are in my head,
the world cannot be heard
Leaves obliterate
my heart...
--Adrienne Riche

There in the middle of the forest is the cave
And there, curled up inside it, is the fox.
She stands looking at it.
Around her the fields are sleeping: the fields dream.
At night there are no more farmers, no more farms.
At night the fields dream they are the long-gone forest.
The girl stands looking at the fox
As if, if she looked long enough...
She looks at it--
Or is it the fox looking at the girl?
The trees can't tell the two of them apart.
--Randall Jarrell

A vague mist hanging 'round half the pages:
Sometimes how strange and clear to the soul,
That all these solid things are indeed but apparitions, concepts,
non-realities.

--Walt Whitman

 

We should only care about our own

Looking out at an alien world of murder and horror that has nothing to do with me.

In this article, writer Linh Dinh is interviewed about, among other things, how Americans' views of the Viet Nam War are shaped by movies that show Vietnamese as merely "faceless ciphers."  I'd go beyond that and say that Americans, the few who ever think about the Viet Nam War anymore -- after all, it ended almost half a century ago -- view the Vietnamese as NPCs in modern parlance:  Non-Player Characters without will or agency, merely fulfilling a programed role.

Do you care, really?

But then, I think that for the Vietnamese, we were the faceless ciphers, the NPCs, inexplicably thundering into their world with fire and fury, wealth and power, and then, just as inexplicably, leaving.

 In each case, why should the one care about the other?  And what would caring consist of?  Stopping the war?  That would be best, but certainly we ordinary people can't

He's lucky.  He got to a hospital.

do that.  The politicians couldn't, even if they started it.  My mother cared by returning to Viet Nam after her Army nurse service ended and volunteering to help war-injured  children with the burn unit of Children's Medical Relief International, but against the overwhelming flood of wounded children any effort she made, any effort CMRI made, was all but useless.  Her caring for foreigners, people unrelated to her and with no connection to her, was pointless.  More than pointless because it left her with unresolvable emotional

Two lucky saved.  Thousands unsaved.

trauma that has haunted her all of her life.  The little good she may have accomplished for those strangers is no compensation for the anguish she has suffered.  She would have been better off to have forgotten all about Viet Nam once her tour was over.  And so would her husband and children, who had to experience, at least to some degree, and at second hand, that anguish themselves in a thousand little episodes that baffled, confused, and sometimes frightened us.  If you know about real PTSD then you know what I'm talking about.  If you don't; well, I'm not talking to you.  Sorry about that.

These are my guys. I care about them.

Afghanistan is dying and I suppose I should have some emotional reaction.  All those years of effort, all the deaths, all the horrific injuries...all for nothing.

My father was furious when the North Vietnamese conquered South Viet Nam in a massive conventional land invasion.  Had US air power been unleashed, the destruction wrought on the NVA would have been orders of magnitude greater than that inflicted on the Germans in the Falaise Pocket.  He paced the deck of his carrier waiting for orders to attack that never came.  "Pilots, man your planes!"  All right!  Smash those mother-fuckers once and for all!  It was not to be.  He's still upset about it.  He doesn't say so.  But I can tell.

These guys I don't care about at all,  nor they me.

My mother...I think she was just relieved it was finally all over and what difference did it make who "won"?  Just end it. End it!

I guess I am with my mother when it comes to what's happening in Afghanistan.  Just end it.  Let whatever is to happen there happen.  They are not us.  None of them are.  They never liked us or wanted us there.  Those that pretended they did may have hoped for a better homeland to come from our intervention, but I think most simply endured our presence, being courteous to the foreigners with guns and bombs.  Others merely glomed on to the money machine we represented.  And still others, many others, did not bother to hide their hatred for we alien infidels who had inexplicably invaded their homeland.  

Well, I'm rambling.  I have a lot of half-formed thoughts that I'm not going to bother writing down.  Maybe I will in 30 or 40 years.  But probably not.  I guess all I really want to say is that we, as a country, should stick to our knitting, mind our own business, not go abroad seeking monsters to slay.  Just take care of our own and let the rest of the world do the same.

I know.  Dream on.

What's that?  Do I have PTSD?  Um....

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The New American Man of 1954

Sixty-seven years ago, according to this article in Life magazine, a 22-year-old could afford to buy a house, so he must have had a decent job that he didn't need to have a college degree (and accompanying student debt) to get.  He also got married and by age 25 had two children.  Something was going right with the world back then that sure is not happening today.  Oh, and they had that thing called a baby boom.  Second Oh, and the population of the country, according to the Census Bureau, was 89.3 percent White.  No connection, of course.  Just noting it as a data point.

Most popular fast foods of 1954. Yum!

 

 

The No.1 song on the 1954 hit parade. How terribly sexist it is -- I like it!

Just throwing this in; another example of how we used to be as a country. Do you think you could find something like this on the wall of a post office or school today? You could 67 years ago!

Lagniappe

Old Love

 

North Island Naval Air Station, 1940

My grandparents had not one "our song," but two, both by Frank Sinatra.  Both were from when he was with the pre-war Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, "Polka Dots and Moonbeams," (a hit in 1940) and "Oh,  Look at Me Now" (a hit in 1941).
They were popular at the time Gramps and Gran were courting and just married.  Gramps was a young naval officer, an aviator, and Gran was a girl he knew in high

Favorite hang-out, the La Jolla Beach Club

school and ran into working at a cafe when he came back home on leave.
There was nothing special about their romance or their lives, really, though to me it seems the stuff of myth and legend.
They honeymooned at the Hotel del Coronado on a three-day pass Gramps was able to wrangle.
Gran found work at a cafe in San Diego and they rented an off-base apartment. She began attending San Diego County General Hospital Training School for Nurses as a nursing degree student.

Gramps flew F3Fs, then F2As, F4Fs

Sometimes Gramps would buzz the cafe and she would rush out to wave at him.  During breaks from class at school, she used to watch formations of Navy planes fly by and she learned to tell the various types so she could know if they were  the type he flew, and he might be in one.

Lexington at San Diego just before sailing for Pearl,1941

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Gramps went off to fight them and Gran never saw him again till after VJ Day. Where he was or what he was doing she did not know and could not find out.  The newspapers were full of rumors and lies, especially during the first year of the war, and she did not know what  to believe.  Where was the Coral Sea? 

Lexington on fire and sinking at Coral Sea

Why was it important?  Was there really an island called Midway where a titanic naval battle was fought?

Japanese dive bomber shot down while attacking Enterprise

Where was Guadalcanal and why were we fighting the Japs there?
The aircraft carrier Saratoga was torpedoed, the Lexington was sunk, then the Yorktown went down, then Wasp.  We only had five aircraft carriers in the Pacific,  and only Enterprise was left, and then it too was hit.  Fear and dread were shadows walking beside Gran wherever she went, whatever she did.

A division of F4Fs over Guadalcanal

She wrote letters daily to Gramp's FPO address, V-Mail on thin single pages that folded up into their own envelopes. Once in a while, she got a letter from him, printed from a microfilm copy of the original, weeks old, short, uninformative, censored.  But each was a treasure to her.  She knew he was still alive, or at least had been at the date the letter was sent.  She  carried the latest one with her until the next one came.  She read them all over and over until the paper almost wore out.
When the Tommy Dorsey/Frank Sinatra song "Just as Though You Were Here" began playing on the radio in 1942, it made her desperately sad.  In later years, she refused to

Enterprise exploding and burning after hit by Japanese bombers

listen to it.
When she finished school, Gran joined the Navy Nursing Corps.  She thought it might bring her closer to Gramps, maybe allow them to meet.  Instead, it meant his letters always chased her from posting to posting, and hers to him, too.  And his seldom and short leaves never coincided with hers.
She served in New Zealand, Australia, then aboard a hospital ship to the Marianas, including Guam and Saipan, and Okinawa. She ministered to survivors of disasters at sea, shot-down air crew with horrible burns and sailors with lungs full of fuel oil and sea water, marines inconceivably mutilated by the weapons of modern war employed with maddened fury by a foe that neither asked for nor gave quarter.  And each new patient she saw she feared might be Gramps, her beloved, dear husband.

On duty

After  what seemed lifetime after lifetime, the war ended and Gran and Gramps found each other again.  They had to become re-acquainted, it had been so long.  They were tentative with each other, yet constantly looking at each other and smiling.  You're here!  You're safe!  Where have you been?  What have you done?  Tell me everything!  Oh, but you can't.  Maybe sometime later you can.  Maybe you never can. That's all right.  It was all a bad dream.  It's over now.  Let's get on with our lives.  Let's have a family.  Let's have children and live a normal life of peace and quiet.
And so they did.

Finding a Box of Family Letters

By Dana Gioia 

The dead say little in their letters
they haven't said before.
We find no secrets, and yet
how different every sentence sounds
heard across the years.

My father breaks my heart
simply by being so young and handsome.
He's half my age, with jet-black hair.
Look at him in his navy uniform
grinning beside his dive bomber.

Come back, Dad! I want to shout.
He says he misses all of us
(though I haven't yet been born).
He writes from places I never knew he saw,
and everyone he mentions now is dead.

There is a large, long photograph
curled like a diploma—a banquet sixty years ago.
My parents sit uncomfortably
among tables of dark-suited strangers.
The mildewed paper reeks of regret.

I wonder what song the band was playing,
just out of frame, as the photographer
arranged your smiles. A waltz? A foxtrot?
Get out there on the floor and dance!
You don't have forever.

What does it cost to send a postcard
to the underworld? I'll buy
a penny stamp from World War II
and mail it downtown at the old post office
just as the courthouse clock strikes twelve.

Surely the ghost of some postal worker
still makes his nightly rounds, his routine
too tedious for him to notice when it ended.
He works so slowly he moves back in time
carrying our dead letters to their lost addresses.

It's silly to get sentimental.
The dead have moved on. So should we.
But isn't it equally simpleminded to miss
the special expertise of the departed
in clarifying our long-term plans?

They never let us forget that the line
between them and us is only temporary.
Get out there and dance! the letters shout
adding, Love always. Can't wait to get home!
And soon we will be. See you there.
   

 

 

 

Little Things

 

By-gone days

I used to post entries at the 43 Things website, once considered the best social networking service but now long gone.  I don't fool with social media any more, being too busy and too jaded, but once in a while I look back at all that old stuff, and sometimes come across things that make me think that maybe I'm not, or once was not, a total waste of oxygen.

 

Regret never dies

My father told me once
that when he was about twenty
he had a new girlfriend, and once
they stopped by the house on the way
to somewhere, just a quick stop
to pick something up,
and my grandfather, who wasn’t well—
it turned out he had TB and would die
at fifty-two—was sitting in a chair
in the small back yard. My father
knew he was out there, and it crossed
his mind that he should take his girlfriend
out back to meet him, but he
didn’t, whether from embarrassment
at the sick, fading man
or just because he was in a hurry
to be off on his date, he didn’t
say, but he told the little,
uneventful story anyway, and said
that he had always regretted
not doing that simple, courteous
thing, the sick man sitting in
the sun in the back yard would
have enjoyed meeting her, but
instead he sat out there alone
as they came and left, young
lovers going on a date. He
always regretted it, he said.

~ Howard Nelson, from The Nap by the Waterfall

 

I understand. Don't you?

This happened before I met your mother:
I took Jennie Johanson to a summer dance,
and she sent me a letter, a love letter,
I guess, even if the word love wasn’t in it.
She wrote that she had a good time
and didn’t want the night to end.
At home, she lay down on her bed
but stayed awake, listening to the songs
of morning birds outside her window.
I read that letter a hundred times
and kept it in a cigar box
with useless things I had saved:
a pocket knife with an imitation pearl handle
and a broken blade,
a harmonica I never learned to play,
one cuff link, an empty rifle shell.
When your mother and I got married,
I threw the letter away—
if I had kept it, she might wonder.
But I wanted to keep it
and even thought about hiding places,
maybe in the barn or the tool shed;
but what if it were ever found?
I knew of no way to explain why
I would keep such letter, much less
why I would take the trouble to hide it.
Jennie had gone to California
not long after that dance.
I pretty much got over
wanting to see her just once more,
but I wish I could have kept the letter,
even though I know it by heart.
 by Leo Dangel

Words, words, words!