Cheney For Senate?

Let me start by saying that I am not from Wyoming, though I do go there once in a while during family visits to neighboring Montana. If you add up the number of days I have spent in Wyoming as an adult, you might get to 60. This total would most certainly NOT qualify me for a resident fishing license. According to Wyoming Fish and Game regulations, a person must live in the state for a year to qualify for the lower-cost resident license.

Surprisingly (to her), Liz Cheney also did not qualify for a resident fishing license in Wyoming. When she applied for permission to fish in Wyoming’s trout-filled steams and rivers, she said she had lived in the state for a decade. (Actually, she had only lived in the state for 72 days.) Cheney says the clerk who took her application must have made a mistake. Whoever made the mistake, it was a costly one to Cheney. She ended up posting a $220.00 bond for the high misdemeanor of swearing a false oath. 

It may be the most expensive $220.00 fine ever paid. It may cost Liz Cheney a Senate seat.

Like Montanans, Wyomingites do not cotton to liars. Or carpetbaggers. And Ms. Cheney certainly seems to be both. She and her husband bought a house in Jackson Hole in 2012 and shortly after, she announced that she would run in the Republican Senate primary in 2014. This has struck many observers as an interesting choice. Wyoming already has a Republican Senator in that seat. His name is Mike Enzi. I can certainly understand why Tea Party-types are “primary-ing” Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. They think he is not pure enough in his conservatism. Same for Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire, Susan Collins in Maine, Orrin Hatch in Utah, Lindsay Graham In South Carolina, and Lamar Alexander in Tennessee—all of whom voted to re-open the government after 16 days of self-inflicted economic damage had been done to the country.

But Mike Enzi did not vote to reopen the government, even though Wyoming is home to several amazingly beautiful national parks that had to shut down. In fact, Mike Enzi voted to continue the shutdown, even in the face of looming economic disaster. In his three terms as Republican Senator from Wyoming, Mike Enzi has earned the following ratings and scores from various interest groups:

Rated A+ by NRA
Rated 100% by National Right to Life Committee
Rated 0% by the American Public Health Association
Rated 100% by US Border Control—a private anti-immigration group
Rated 0% by Citizens for Tax Justice

In addition to these ratings, Senator Enzi has shown where he stands by voting no on limiting farm subsidies to those making under $750,000 a year, voting no on extending unemployment benefits from 39 weeks to 59 weeks, voting with the Republican Party well over 90% of the time, and voting no on increasing the tax rate on those earning over $1 million. 

Why on Earth does Liz Cheney feel the need to run against this man? Does she feel the voters of Wyoming need someone more in line with their values? Is Mike Enzi too liberal for Wyoming? I can think of only two reasons why Liz Cheney would move to Wyoming and try to unseat Mike Enzi: ego and love of power. 

The voters of Wyoming are smart enough to see right through Ms. Cheney. By now, she may have earned her resident fishing license, but she surely has not earned the votes of the people of Wyoming.

Driving To Montana

This week I have been driving around Montana.  A lot.  Montana is an enormous state.  If you were to stand in the southeastern corner of Montana you would be closer to Texas than to the northwestern corner of Montana.  In the past few days I have driven 900 miles and not once left the state.  All of this driving has got me thinking back to that first time I drove into Montana in the summer of 1992.

In the summer of 1992 I was supposed to take a group of upper-middle class American teenagers to Kenya to do community service work in a Masai village not far from Masai Mara National Park.  I was thrilled at the idea.  I had only just recently returned from two years teaching in Yemen and I was itching to get back overseas. 

In the summers of 1990 and 1991 I had worked as a staff person for the same non-profit that was setting up the Kenya program.  It was called Visions, International and the people who ran the company were impressive in their sensitive approach to development work as well as their commitment to service learning.  When they called me early in 1992 about possibly leading a trip to Kenya I nearly jumped out of my skin.  I agreed in seconds and then spent the entire spring growing more and more excited.

But during the spring of 1992 Kenya was making a jarring and sometimes-violent switch from single-party rule to multi-party democracy.  When Kenya was in the news in the States it was always accompanied by pictures of sign-carrying, slogan-chanting crowds and soldiers dressed in riot gear.  As you might well imagine, these images were not a very effective recruiting tool for Visions-Kenya.  By the beginning of May it became clear that we would not have enough teenagers signed up to make a Kenya program viable.  The program was cancelled and I was deflated.

But then Joanne Pinaire, the director of Visions’ day-to-day operations and all-around amazing woman, called to offer that I direct a newly established program on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana, instead.  It would entail living in a tiny village called Birney in a remote corner of the reservation.  I would take 16 teenagers from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut (mostly) to a place with 25 houses, no store, and no television and together we would build a playground from scratch on a one-acre space in the middle of town.

I had no experience with construction, no knowledge of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, and no previous experience directing programs, so I immediately said “yes” to Joanne’s offer and quickly switched the setting of my daydreams from Kenya to Montana.

 

To get to Montana I first went to Boston to collect the sixteen-passenger vans that we would use to get around the reservation all summer.  Then I helped collect the staffers who would be working with me on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, as well as those staffers who would be working on the other reservation programs in Montana.  In all, there were 24 of us driving in a caravan across the country.  It was my first cross-country drive and it was one heckuva good time.

Once we got to South Dakota the vastness of the West made itself clear to me.  It went on forever in rolling hills and rock outcroppings covered in grasses and sage.  But then we hit Montana and instead of one great undifferentiated expanse, elements of the landscape began to stand out.  The rocks grew red and the land began to speak to me.  It may have been the 70 hours spent in the van, but I don’t think so.  Something in the land of southeastern Montana touched something in me.  Though looking back, “touched” is the wrong word.  “Grabbed” is more accurate.  It somehow felt like I had come home to a place I had never been.

That summer went well, as did the following summers in Montana.  Each time the program ended, I would get back in the van and drive back to Boston.  And each time I did, Montana held onto more and more of what can only be called my soul.  Eventually I realized the stupidity of leaving Montana and when the Visions summer ended, I stayed.  I became a Montanan.

To make a long story short, a few years later I met my wife and our lives took us back to the Northeast—Ithaca and New Haven, specifically--where we have been for more than ten years.

This summer’s trip back to Montana to visit friends and family has made it clear to me that we need to move back here.  The land still talks to me like no other place has.  What brought me to Montana back in 1990s is still here and I am starting to worry that a very important part of who I am resides in Montana and stays here when I go back East.  I don’t want to end up like Lord Voldemort, with my soul split into pieces that live in far-flung places and leave me incomplete.

So, how to get back...?

High Plains Running

I went for the craziest ten-mile run of my life this morning. Six inches of cold, powdery snow fell two days ago and then a steady 25 to 30 miles-per-hour wind started blowing from the West. Sometimes after a storm, the wind comes down the East slope of the Rockies and out into the Plains, sweeping everything not tied down out ahead of it. 

The snow streaks across the roads and freezes into a super-slick layer of black ice or gathers into drifts many-inches deep halfway across the lanes of traffic. On a short drive from Billings to Laurel yesterday we passed at least five cars that had spun off the highway and into the ditches on either side of the road. 

I am signed-up to run a half marathon in New Hampshire on February 15, so I am on a training schedule that had me doing a ten-mile run today. It seemed like a good idea for me to get out into the cold and the wind—(mid-February on the coast of New Hampshire might just be the same)—so I put on my new Secret Santa running shorts from my cousin Nicole and an undershirt beneath my running shirt and out the door I went. I got on First Avenue and headed uphill, slowly running my way out of the valley. 

It was very windy and as the road turned slightly east of north, it struck me that the wind that was whipping me along from behind would soon enough be pummeling me from the front when I turned back for the return five miles. The snow from two days ago was still very light and powdery and the wind was such that the blowing snow never got any higher than six inches off of the ground. It whipped across the fields and across the road in a serpentine motion—looking more like smoke or steam than snow. The look of the blowing snow combined with the way it stung my ankles and lower calves to make me think of malicious spirits. 

I was reminded of Tolkein’s description of Ring Wraiths or the movie depiction of Voldemort in the first Harry Potter film—before He Who Shall Not Be Named has found a body to inhabit. There was one advantage to the relentless wind that I could not have predicted in advance of my run. Wildlife on the sides of the road couldn’t hear me coming until I was right next to them. In this way I managed to get within 20 feet of a bald eagle as it stood in the snow and picked at the frozen carcass of a mule deer. When the bird finally saw me it didn’t lurch or panic at all. It fixed me in its sharp yellow eye, held steady for a long moment, and then simply opened its wings into the strong headwind and with a slight change in the angle of its feathers it rose up and drifted away in a graceful arc to the east, out over a stumpy cornfield.

I watched the bird for a long moment and then continued my run. By the time I had gone another quarter mile up the road the eagle had circled back around and was once again tearing chunks off of the roadkill deer. Once I had gone five miles up the road, out of the valley and into the high plains, I had gotten into a rhythm and felt the impulse to just keep running and running and running. 

The land is so big and the sky so open and the morning so extreme that part of me wanted to be extreme, too. What would happen if I just kept going? How far could I go? My body felt like a machine and the motion was hypnotizing. What I really wanted was to be that eagle and be carried on the wind for as long as it would blow. I felt myself disappearing into the landscape—a tiny dot in the vast sage and scrub landscape. 

I had no sense of struggle, no awareness of the cold. I was simply moving and wanted to keep moving. Eventually I turned around, into the wind, and the run became work again. A friendly woman driving by stopped and asked if I wanted a ride back to town. She was apparently moved to pity by the crust of ice coating my lower legs and my beard and mustache. I politely declined her offer and made it back to Grandpa Andy’s house, glad I had made myself go out and sure that my half marathon would be better because of it. I am also glad that I have my memory of that eagle and of the feeling of self-erasure that running can sometimes bring.

Tomato Love

“Look what I found on my pillow,” squealed my daughter through a grin as wide as a number 10 can of Italian peeled tomatoes. What she found on her pillow was, in fact, a number 10 can of Italian peeled tomatoes—(that is how I knew how wide her grin was.) I smiled as well, because I had just found a smaller can of tomato paste on my dresser.

I should explain. The story may take a while and even after you hear it, it might not make any sense. The tomato can has become a tradition in my little family and, like bunnies delivering candy or children placing used teeth under pillows, it might not be at all logical to an outsider. But, here goes:

Back in 1992 I was on the Flathead Indian Reservation in northwestern Montana, working for a summer program for teens. In a Tom Sawyer-ish deal, kids from fairly wealthy families would pay thousands of dollars to come and do community service work and outdoor adventure activities in a stunningly beautiful place. The non-profit company running the program was called Visions, and they were the ones who hired me to work the Flathead program that particular summer.

I grew up in the endless suburbs of the East Coast megalopolis and that summer was my first time in Montana. My experiences there changed me as much, or maybe even more, than they changed the kids. And as that summer came to an end, I felt very close to those teenagers and they to me. Our last night in the Salish-Kootenai College Daycare Center (where we slept) was happy and teary and emotional in the overtired, hyper way summer programs can be by their raggedy ends.

We gave the kids some space to say their goodbyes while as a staff we packed up the outdoor equipment, kitchen utensils, and leftover foodstuffs. Before the kids could break off into their picture taking, address collecting, and card playing, they had to show us that they were packed and ready to go in the morning. One girl from New Jersey had brought a duffle bag large enough to fit a full-sized United States Marine. She dragged it out of the girls’ sleeping area and left it in the pile with all the other bags.

Being something of a fan of the ridiculous, I waited until she walked away and then I promptly unzipped her bag, took a number-ten can of ketchup, hid it among her clothes, and rezipped the bag. Her bag, sans ketchup, already weighed at least 80 pounds. With the ketchup it was pushing 90. (This was in the day when airlines didn’t charge extra for heavy bags.) Within ten minutes I forgot I had even done it.

Flash forward five days. The kids had flown home via Newark Airport from Missoula. I had driven home to Delaware via Madison, Wisconsin and Boston, Massachusetts. I got to my parents’ house in Wilmington and my mom gave me a message. It was from the girl with the duffle bag and all it said was, “very funny.” I was flattered that she knew it was me who had put the ketchup in her bag. I called her back.

She told me that she was so spent by her summer in Pablo, Montana that when she got home she slept for almost twenty-four hours. As she slept, her mother opened her bag and began pulling out all the dirty clothes in order to begin making them wearable again. When mom got to the enormous can of ketchup, she could not figure out any possible scenario under which it would be reasonable for her daughter to travel 2000 miles with a year’s worth of ketchup in her already-heavy bag. So, she woke up her daughter and asked...

Flash forward again to 1995. I was back in Montana, only this time I lived there. I had recently met my wife-to-be and we were in the throes of early love. We traded stories. I liked what I heard and she liked what she heard. We traded more stories, allowing more of our real selves to come through. And still we liked what we were hearing. One of the stories Erica heard during those falling-in-love-months was about the well-traveled #10 can of ketchup.

We met in late January of 1995 and by April we were already talking about marriage. When June came I left for a summer in Browning, on the Blackfeet Reservation near Glacier National Park in northwest Montana. It was to be another summer with Visions kids, doing community service work and hiking in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. We slept on the floor of the basketball court at Browning High School. When we got there I set up my little corner of the staff room and unpacked my clothes for the six-week program. There at the bottom of my suitcase, under my wool socks and raingear, I found a small can of tomato paste.

And ever since then, any canned tomato product in any unexpected place has become shorthand for, “Hey Baby. I love you very much and I am thinking about you and I want you to know it even though I can’t be with you right now.”

Our just-born romance survived that early separation and we were engaged shortly after I returned to Billings in August. In the thirteen years since, we have continued with the strategic placement of tinned tomatoes in their many and varied forms. When our daughter, Isabel, was born we pulled her into the tradition. In fact, she had no idea there was even anything odd about the practice until lately.

Now that she knows how it all started, I think she likes the fact that it is just us who do this odd thing. The grin on her face as she held that can of tomatoes told me that, even though Erica is in Chicago for a conference this weekend, my daughter got the message loud and clear—she is loved. And not just a little bit, either.

Montana Photos

We got back from Montana last night around 11 p.m. and I miss it already. There were ripe cherry tomatoes and a riot of flowers in the front garden to ease the transition, but I thought posting a few of my favorite pictures from the trip might help me keep my mind in Montana for just a little while longer.

Erica snapped this picture as we walked back from Woodbine Falls near the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness. It was a beautiful morning for a hike and the falls were raging due to a snowy winter and a late melt. Below is just one small arc of the view from the falls. We were looking up the Stillwater Valley toward Cathedral Mountain and Yellowstone Park.

More of Cathedral Mountain:


A section Of Woodbine Falls:


Some random shots from another early morning walk near Beehive Rock in the Stillwater Valley (near Absarokee):



Below are two pictures of the Stillwater River leaving the canyon and heading out into flatter land. Some of the water in these shots was snow up in Yellowstone Park less than 24 hours before. The meltoff has been later than usual this year, so the river is still very high, as you can see. The trail through the canyon runs right next to the river for a good mile and during high water it can be a little scary.

High Water

I can’t say that I am a good flyfisherman. The most I am willing to say is that I sometimes catch fish. My technique tends to the sidearm, and my fly selection leaves lots of room for improvement. I like to think my deficits are the result of flyfishing only four or five times a year, but it might just be that I am not any good.
To be fully honest, I don’t really care all that much if I catch fish or not. Of course I would rather come back to the cabin with a couple of fifteen-inch rainbows in my creel, but if I come back empty-creeled, it’s no big deal to me. I feel about flyfishing the way I did about playing football in high school. I was on the team, but I wasn’t a starter. I liked the practices, I loved the games, and I did my best. But if I dropped a pass or if we lost a game, it didn’t crush me the way it did some of my teammates.
On a good morning here at the cabin I’ll wake up before everyone else, microwave whatever is left in the pot from yesterday, add cream and sugar to make it potable, and then go out to the shed to put on the waders, vest, and net that transform me from a teacher on vacation into a flyfisherman. I’ll chug the coffee as I get dressed and then walk down the road a quarter-mile to the Stafford’s bridge, where I’ll step into the river. The first time each year is always a little awkward—it feels like I am moving too fast with the river—like I should take some time to get to know it again, maybe buy it a drink and chat a little first.
My steps are uncertain and my body is not yet used to the constant push of water feeling gravity’s pull past my thighs on into the Plains. My first few casts are invariably tentative. But pretty soon I get my sea legs and my Kent Tekulve-cast figures itself out and I am on my way.
Before I ever even learned to cast a fly, one of my favorite books was a novel by David James Duncan called The River Why. It is a funny book that contains several passages extolling the pleasure to be had from laying out a well-cast fly in a sublimely beautiful setting. I understand just what Duncan was writing about.
I generally have an excellent sense of time. I can usually tell what time it is to within ten minutes no matter what. The only exception is when I am out on the river. When I am fishing the Stillwater with dry flies, time does all kinds of strange things. It mostly gets caught in an eddy and spins there in place so that when I get out of the river after six hours of tossing a fake bug through the air it feels like I have been in the river for just an hour or two.
Excuse my metephysicality, but my self just goes away for a long stretch of time when I am waist deep in the river, trying to think like a fish and gauge the wind and the current. Losing my self for such a long period of time is better than sleep. It clears my head and leaves me feeling relaxed, both in the world and in my head.
Alas, it is too windy and the river is still too high to go out this morning. Instead I’ll have another cup of coffee and sit out on the back deck to read before anybody else wakes up.

Home

I woke up at four o’clock this morning with a cramp in my left calf. As cramps go it was a pretty good one—excellent timing, good form, real staying power. It forced me out of bed and vertical in about two seconds flat. Once I was upright and put my full weight on my left foot, the cramp went away. And I realized I needed to pee. Once I took care of that, I quietly crawled back into bed so as not to wake Erica.
As I lay in bed I realized that beneath the cramp and the full bladder there was another feeling. In the dark at four a.m. I couldn’t identify what it was. I tried for a while, but then the sound of the river flowing by the cabin and down to the Yellowstone and into the Missouri and then on into the Mississippi caught me up in its music and its flow and I fell back into sleep before I could name what I was feeling.
This practice of naming my feelings is a new thing to me. Heck, for many years I hardly even recognized that I HAD feelings, let alone spent time trying to identify them. As a result, the names don’t always come quickly and last night the river music and sleep came first.
Then this morning I went for a run on the unpaved road that follows the Stillwater River wiggle-for-wiggle through this beautiful valley. And as I was running I was able to name the feeling. It was “homesickness.”
I was born in Delaware and lived there into sixth grade. Then we moved to Long Island, where I lived for eight years. I went to college in Pennsylvania, lived for two years in Yemen, and then spent some time in Massachusetts, Delaware again, and Maine. And none of those places ever felt like home—none of them ever touched something inside me directly the way Montana did the first time I saw it.


I spent three summers working on various Indian reservations in Montana before I finally got my act together and moved there for good. At the time everything I owned fit in the back seat and trunk of my 1970 Plymouth Valiant named Fuad and I vowed to just drive on Interstate 90 in Montana until I got tired. Wherever that was, I would stop and start a life.
It was Billings. On my first morning there I found a job and an apartment. In my third year there I met a woman and, within three months of meeting, we knew we would spend our lives together.

But then our lives took us away from Montana in 1997 and since then we have only been able to return for visits a few times a year.

During my run it hit me full-on that no other place in the world feels the way Montana does to me. Montana fits in a way Delaware and New York and Connecticut never have. As a child I drew mountains everywhere, even though I had never seen real mountains. (The highest point in Delaware doesn’t even crack 500 feet above sea level.) The mountains I drew were rocky and jagged and had evergreen trees on the flanks only so high. Often they were snow-capped.
The first time I went to Montana it was to direct a community service project on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in the southeast corner of the state. I flew into Billings and when I exited the airport I had to stop in my tracks, drop my bag, and stare with my mouth open. There, off to the southwest, were the mountains I had been drawing my whole life. They talked to me in a language I could understand because I had seen them before. The feeling I had on my run this morning was my reminder that I need to find a way back here. I need to come home before my connection to Montana has been stretched too far and too thin to hold.

Death Takes a Vacation...in Montana

I pulled over along with the four or five cars in front of our van. It was clear something was very wrong up ahead. There were newspaper pages blowing all over the westbound lanes of the highway. There was part of a horse trailer askew on the highway median. There was a pickup truck up against a fence fifty feet off to the right of the roadway, smoke or steam still billowing out of the front end.

From the back Isabel said, “Why are we stopping, Daddy?” I told her there was an accident up ahead and I was going to see if I could help. I put the van into Park and got out, nervous about what I might find when I got to the pickup. There were three people already there, but they were strangely inactive. They were standing by different parts of the truck but the first thing I noticed was they were all turned away from the vehicle.

I asked a middle-aged man with a large silver belt buckle if there was anyone hurt in the truck. He said, “Yep—there’s a guy in there, but I don’t think we can help him.” I asked if there were any passengers, but he didn’t know. Their passivity was maddening, so I walked to the driver’s door and saw that the entire front of the truck on the driver’s side was collapsed into the front seat. It looked like a large part of the horse trailer, which had been carrying sales circulars for the Sunday newspaper, had come off and slammed head-on into the pickup and its driver.

Through the driver’s side window I saw no evidence that there even was a driver in the truck. I walked around to the passenger side and looked in and saw that the driver was indeed still in the truck but he had not survived the impact. It was hard to tell since much of the engine block was now in the cab, but it didn’t look like anyone else was in the truck with the poor man. I walked back to our van and before too long traffic started to make its way around the accident scene.

Isabel asked if there was an ambulance coming and I told her there was, leaving out the fact that it didn’t need to hurry.

I was shaken badly by what I saw in that truck, but something that had happened one week earlier helped take some of the horror out of the sight. We had been enjoying a few days up in the foothills of the Beartooth Mountains, at Erica’s Grandfather’s cabin on the Stillwater River. We found some deflated inner tubes in the shed and took them to the gas station in Nye (Population: 9) to inflate.
On our way back we saw a young deer somehow caught up in a barbed wire fence. It front legs were on the ground, but it had gotten one of its rear legs hung up on the fence.

I pulled over, got out, and walked back to see what I could do for the fawn. It freaked out as I got closer and tried to run away, only it couldn’t. Its front hooves were galloping at full speed, but its left rear leg was stuck in a metal loop at the top of the fence. I spoke quietly and (I hoped) soothingly as I looked closely to see how the leg was caught. The fawn eventually held still as I tried to pull open the tight loop of fence wire that had closed around the leg.

The chances of a fawn’s hoof getting stuck in the one open loop of fence wire along the entire fifty yards of fence visible to me must have been immensely small. Yet, it had happened. The deer had been in its painful predicament for no more than thirty minutes, since it hadn’t been there as we passed by on our way to the gas station, yet it had broken the bone clear through and its hoof and the final two inches of leg bone were connected only by a tough strand of sinew.

I did what I had to do to free the deer and it hobbled off into the high grass. Each time we passed that spot over the next few days I scanned the field, looking for evidence that coyotes or wolves had found the fawn before it could get to a safe place. Since I never saw signs of a struggle, I am free to imagine the best. I know that the odds of survival are small for that baby deer, but so were the odds of it lassoing its own foot on the top of a fence to begin with.

It wasn’t freeing the deer or imagining its survival that helped me deal with the horrific images of the man in his pickup truck. Rather, it was something Isabel did after I released the deer.

On one of our hikes earlier in the week we came across a prayer flag on top of a mountain. Isabel was curious, so I told her about the function of prayer flags in the wind in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. The idea must have struck her, because in the evening I went outside after dinner and saw a scrap of red cloth tied onto a bush next to the cabin. I didn’t connect the flag, the deer, and the scrap right away. But then I looked more closely and saw that Isabel had written some words on the red cloth.

It said, “We saw a baby deer that had its leg cot in a fens. Help it.” The words grew instantly blurry as tears welled up into my eyes. Isabel’s trust in the universe was so simple and so profound.

So, when I saw what I saw on the highway outside of Billings, the solace I was able to take was an odd kind of second-hand solace. My faith dried up years ago, but Isabel’s hope and faith were enough to make me think that maybe, just maybe, that three-legged fawn was back with its maternal herd and getting used to life minus one hoof. And maybe the man who died in such a freak accident hadn’t suffered at all. And maybe, even more improbably still, he was in a better place.