Nixon Rock Redux

 

Nixon Rock

Red River, Idaho

In the summer of 1980 I was working on a trail crew for the Elk City Ranger District in Central Idaho. After four days out on a hitch we would often travel up the Red River to the hot springs resort for a soak and a beer (or two). The road ran right next to Red River and so, along the way, we would always see Nixon, immortalized by geological forces several million years previous. 

The summer of 1980 was the height of the presidential election season between Carter and Reagan, and "Social Media" had not been invented yet. In fact, televised debates between presidential candidates were still something relatively-new, and so we were still blessed with the innocence of judging politicians on their actual behavior combined with facts...and geology.

Nixon was the worst thing I'd ever seen up to that time. He was a crook. Simple. He was ousted from office because of that. Also simple. And this rock was funny because it reminded us that, although progress was geologically-slow, it was fact-based and...simple. President is caught being a crook. President is ousted. Simple. And solid. Like rocks. Ha ha.

Around August we came in from a hitch in the rolling mountain country behind Elk City that should have been designated wilderness but was left out (and still is), and we sat down in the bunkhouse in the back of the ranger station for a beer and a televised presidential debate. Anyone who has come in from a few days out in the woods, away from cars and other worries, knows that when you "hit the asphalt", your senses are sharpened in proportion to how many days you've spent "out", and you're a bit less prone to the bullshit thrown at you by such things that our hyped-up society loves to throw, like the ubiquitous visual imagery we seem to have grown more and more addicted to over time. It was mere TV in those good old days, the flickering blue light, and I honestly don't remember the substance of the debate, and furthermore refuse to "wikipedia" it up for a synopsis. Let's just agree that it was bad enough. 

What always did stand out in my memory, though, was how bad Reagan's "performance" was. He was a joke, especially compared to Jimmie Carter's even, relatively-honest cadence. Reagan appeared--at least to my wilderness-altered state--to be disjointed and dishonest, and on full display for a nation full of TV heads to see! He was obviously pandering to peoples' base instincts for the sake of power. He was a demagogue, a bigot, and not a very good one at that. He was, unlike most rocks I've come to know, transparent, and I remember thinking distinctly, that there was no problem here. People don't want a crook for a president again. Geology will prevail. People will see right through this guy for what he is, and we will go out for another hitch into the mountains that will someday be declared the wilderness that it deserves to be, with all due protections as per the laws of the the Land, the same laws that we use to oust crooks from office (at least when they've been caught) and at least allow us to get a good night's sleep sometimes. 

After resting up for the weekend, we went out for another four-day hitch, and I didn't think anymore about the news. Why should I? The world I had landed in was beautiful, I was healthy and we slept out on the ground where cares washed off our skin with every breath of a breeze that swayed the tops of lodgepole tracing shadows in the stars. I was duly appreciative. 

Then we came back, hit the blacktop, and what I viscerally remember about our re-entry was the news awaiting us. Reagan had "won" the debate, had in fact, cleaned Carter's clock and was on a roll. This, of course, came from an already-corrupt mass media that would benefit greatly from a divisive president who would simultaneously "sell product" as a direct result of his divisiveness while giving them giant tax cuts, which I kind of knew already, but this was not what I remember thinking when I learned, in my wilderness-altered state, what had occurred in crazy TV world during my brief sojourn into the actual, sane one.

My distinct memory of what I thought is only two words long, and for all you visual-imagery-crazed fellow travelers of mine who are equally wondering WTF is going on in the 21st Century, I will write them down for you here: 

"Uh-oh." 

And I was right.

I took the picture that opens this post with my cell phone when I was passing through the Clearwater country last weekend on a foray to collect some additional insights into my book-in-progress, "What's  Bigger than the Land? The Life and Times of Stewart M. Brandborg". To say that Nixon and Reagan had a huge, negative effect on Brandy and his life's passion of "making democracy work" is a gross understatement. Nixon and Agnew sicced the IRS on Brandy's Wilderness Society (TWS) during their running battle with Brandy over the Alaska Pipeline, and this was ultimately what scared TWS into firing him as executive director in 1976. Brandy saw--and contributed to--the Nixonites getting kicked out of the halls of power--for a bit at least--but he had no such luck with Reagan. After he and his wife, AnnaVee, returned to the Bitterroot Valley in 1986, they fought Reaganism hard and well, mostly in the realm of forest-use and planning issues, but they and their allies were constantly being vilified by the local wing nuts-du-jour, who seemed, like Reagan, less and less attached to facts and more and more attached to hate-enhanced talk-show radio and the ever-more virulent social media pseudo-reality. The Brandborgs never gave up. In fact, they never let it bother them overmuch. It was just part of what you put up with when you stood up and did and said what's right. People have always been...well...people, they believed, and you had to deal with them on that level. Simple.

Yeah, we were all young once, and Nixon was bad enough, but he's just a rock in a river now and so will all of them be someday. Yes, Reagan was worse, trump is over the cliff and five decades is long enough to be stumbling around in the Dark Ages waiting for things to get bad enough for enough people to rise up. In a sane world snake oil salesmen would go broke, and so, by definition, it's not a sane world yet. But Nixon Rock is still funny, just on the face of what's been possible in the past and will be possible again soon. Brandy and AnnaVee would be tickled to see all the kids who have had the truth thrust upon them and, far from shrinking from it, are willing to act. 

And that truth? Without democracy, and all its associated righteous corollaries, we will perish from the Earth.

Simple.

On Buffalo and Non-Linear Western Reality Challenges

“What’s all this nostalgia about bison?” Gilles Stockton of the Montana Cattle Association opined recently in response to public outrage over the slaughter of one out of every four wild buffalo still existing on the planet within the unnaturally linear boundaries of their high-elevation (read: no grass in winter), Yellowstone Park Res. “I find the advocates for that to be incredibly selfish. They want somebody else to raise these bison in order to fulfill their fantasy. If you love the bison, go buy some land and raise some bison.”

.......O......kay.....then.....what's all this nostalgia about cowboys? I find the advocates for that to be incredibly selfish....too ....right?.........

Your welcome.

CorporateSpeak

Let’s think on our feet here. This is the real world and we need a level playing field. We have a track record and can't be distracted with bumps in the road. We need bargaining chips to pad our portfolios so let’s roll up our sleeves and look at the big picture. At the end of the day, everyone at the table is a stakeholder and we can make this a win-win situation if we just get everybody on board. We have to make being a team player a plus because consumers consume, which means there's no silver bullet in the free market of ideas other than being on the same page. So heads up! Meaningful dialogue is our target market.

Environmentalist

 

Selway Bitterroot Wilderness, Idaho             

If I were to define myself with a six-syllable insult to the English language, I would not choose a word invented fifty years ago by some well-meaning activists who didn't consider the fact that people are story-based critters who hate to be be bored with long, silly words. This modern noun: "Environmentalist". It was born to be misused and abused like those other unfortunates hastily-invented by clever wordsmiths to describe other factoids and truisms. "Politically-correct" and "woke" come to mind. Handy handles to beat people who annoy you over the head with, if you're into that sort of thing. You should know by now that if you're not one of those, there are plenty of people who are and there's nothing left of snaky words like "environmentalist" anymore except for the warm and fuzzy Earth Day banner it has become, whipping north and south like a wet noodle, right or left, whichever way the foundation-money winds happen to be blowing that day.

If I were to choose a six syllable phrase to define my concern for the Land, I'd choose the handle that Montana writer, Rick Bass gave himself. I'd call myself a "human-fucking being".

Olaus Murie and the Brandborgs

 

I've posted this "piece of book" before on this site, but I'm feeling impulsive tonight, wanting to amplify an insight Stewart and Anna Vee Brandborg shared with me about Olaus Murie that may be of interest to any scholars and students of conservation history still out there who have survived the flames of neoliberal scorched-earth corporate revisionism (Whew! Did I just write that?!).

Long before I met the Brandborgs or knew who Olaus was, I had Olaus' "Animal Tracks" imbedded within my favorite, beat-up books. "Life on the Mississippi", "Grapes of Wrath", "Winter Wheat", "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" and the complete works of Edgar Allen Poe. Not bad for a Peterson field guide, I figured, but I never figured out how--or questioned why--such an odd accident of a classic within a meat-and-potatoes publishing scheme could have come about until I was privileged to bear witness to the following. Brandy and Anna Vee were enlightening individuals, simply put an as we march like lemmings off the next cliff of horrible news that seem to confine our choices from bad to worse, it's worth remembering that there were better times not to long ago when transformative policy was not only possible, but achieved.

We can do it again. Don't let 'em tell you different.

Making Democracy Work

 

Summer, 2012

AnnaVee's Kitchen

 

Stewart M. Brandborg, the last true activist to lead The Wilderness Society, maybe the oldest activist still fighting the Wild West’s crazy resource wars, maybe the last old-time activist left in America, was sitting in his motorized wheelchair telling me a story.

It was the mid 1950s, and his friend, the wildlife biologist, Olaus Murie, had come to Washington D.C. on a Greyhound bus from his cabin in Moose, Wyoming to testify before Congress on behalf of some critical conservation issue or other. Olaus was president of The Wilderness Society, a small organization on the cusp of blooming into its name, and the late fifties was the golden age of massive federal projects that were by design and definition bigger and more durable than the pyramids of ancient Egypt. 

Congress, like all dynasties, is a rarified club that attracts vulnerable people who accumulate more power than is healthy for humans to handle, and so become prone to the sufferings of pharaohs. These are diagnosable diseases, a timeless itches that have everlastingly tanked societies grown top-heavy, of would-be gods who worship themselves and the big and durable things they could command to be built in their names and then have those big things named after them. So, although Brandy couldn’t recall the exact nature of his friend’s visit when he picked him up at the bus station that day, it was probably a federal dam that Olaus had come to town to school Congress about. 

A long trip on a bus back then took some wind out of your sails, even if you were young, and especially when you were in your sixties and dealing with health issues, as Olaus was. So when the bus pulled into the station, Olaus, who had logged thousands of miles on foot and dogsled in the mountains of Alaska and Wyoming, took a walk around the block to stretch his legs while waiting for his ride. 

Olaus and Brandy had a lot in common. Both were westerners, uncomfortable in cities and physically-acclimated to living outdoors. Both were wildlife biologists with extensive experience “in the field”. Finally, and maybe most importantly, both came from that pioneer strain of Scandinavian stock that still populates the North-Central Minnesota plains, the farmers and merchants who came to those plains after they were seized from the Dakota people during the violent early years of America’s Civil War. 

It’s ironic that those lands were taken during the watch of no less a politician than Abraham Lincoln, who would seek to secure the blessings of liberty for immigrants fleeing tyrants in Europe and for people from Africa whom those Europeans enslaved, but couldn’t seek the same courtesies for the original inhabitants of the Land. True, there were sentimentalists among the abolitionists who yearned to save the savage with Christianity, none of which were words used by the Dakota people to describe themselves or their predicament. For his part, Lincoln used words that were also alien to the Dakota, to describe what his administration took from them, words like “frontier” and "wilderness". Given the radical strain of Swedes and Norwegians who ended up springing from that virgin sod turned upside-down, that’s a pretty fair definition of irony. But what could late-19^thcentury Scandinavian farmers fleeing decrepit, autocratic monarchies have known about what the Dakota People thought of their dear, beloved Land, or how they described it? 

Not much really, and so the farmers and merchants didn’t think about it much, or at least not at first, and that was the lay of the land when Olaus was born in 1889 along the Red River that defines the boundary between North Dakota and Minnesota, to Norwegian immigrants and, four years later, when Brandy’s father, Guy (Big Brandy in much of this narrative) was born in Ottertail County, the next one over from the Muries, to Swedish stock.

By the mid-1950s, Brandy and Olaus were fellow Wilderness Society board members. Brandy’s day-job was Project Director for the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), whose director, George Callison, saw potential in bringing “westerners” into the simmering national conservation stewpot, a pot that included the NWF as well as The Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club, whose cooks were about to serve up the country’s first watershed, environmental victory against, significantly, a federal dam. The monster was to be located in Dinosaur National Monument at a remote stretch of the Green River called Echo Park and, given the success ratio the Bureau of Reclamation had had with the building of dams in the arid West it seemed like just another slam-dunk for the Bureau. Until the conservationists won, and then started looking for their next tasty recipe, one whose ingredients included an overarching national policy to declare all such remaining intact ecosystems off-limits to human exploitation—and especially to dams—so they wouldn’t have to wage draining battles for each and every one of them—and lose most of them because, after all, there’s never been enough money in the world of kindness to match the wealth of pharaohs. 

Callison began looking for a western conservationist, one with experience “in the field”, who might like to help him fight a dam or two. It so happened that this was exactly what Brandy was doing at that exact moment in conservation history. He was a young wildlife biologist working for Idaho Fish and Game in central Idaho when Callison's friend, Durward Allen, a renowned biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, came upon him skinning a mountain lion and examining its viscera along the Paradise Road in the Upper Selway of Idaho. Allen had just written his pioneering book “Our Wildlife Legacy” that would define wildlife conservation in this country for generations when he and Brandy met, and they would have some stove-warmed conversations later at the Paradise Guard Station just downriver from the skinning. Allen already knew Brandy as a young,  fellow-wildlife-biologist who had recently published the first detailed study on Mountain Goats, but in the evening at the guard station Allen also got an earful about his inborn belief in democracy (which he inherited from his father) and about how he was using it to rally the local people in fighting two massive dam projects that had been recently proposed to drown out vast swaths of Central Idaho’s primitive areas. Penny Cliffs was on the Middle Fork of the Clearwater and Bruces Eddy (Dworshak Dam) would plug the Clearwater’s North Fork. In an impressive juggling act, Brandy was fighting both of them at once while simultaneously working for a state agency known more for nepotism than for conservation in those days. But Allen quickly deciphered that Brandy was not only thoroughly-grounded on the land he worked within but had been groomed and primed for the task of prompting anachronistic fish and game departments to evolve into something more than jobs programs. Maybe he’d be interested in tackling some bigger fish. Maybe pharaohs. 

Brandy grew up in Grangeville, Idaho, and Hamilton, Montana, small farming and ranching communities perched on opposite edges of the vast, mountainous, heart of Idaho, undeveloped then and now, within which Brandy had hunted and fished as a boy and where Allen met him as an adult. He’d been a Forest Service lookout in his teens, a smoke chaser, timber cruiser and range surveyor. He’d studied mountain goats for several years during and after college. He was at once a wildlife biologist, a conservation activist, and the son of a “social forester” of the Gifford Pinchot mold. Finally, he was a westerner, and so, at some point after Allen got back to D.C., he brought Brandy to Callison’s attention. 

It was a novel idea, this seeking out of those who lived in the “field” and who could speak in eloquent counter-arguments to nominally-elected potentates openly pining for their own monogramed Eighth Wonder. Callison set his sights on enticing the young Brandborg family to come to Washington. 

It wasn’t long after the Brandborgs, Stewart, AnnaVee and their baby, Becky, had settled into the rhythms of D.C. that Howard Zahnizer, executive director of The Wilderness Society, noted similar potential in this big, young, talkative westerner. “Zahnie” took Brandy under his wing, drove him around town in his Cadillac Convertible (which impressed the young Brandborg as “the bee’s knees”) and tapped him to serve as a board member of the Wilderness Society, as a protégé and also as a taxi-driver for fellow conservationists needing rides to and from bus stations. So Brandy was not surprised when he showed up at the bus station and found Olaus waiting for him, holding a leaf. 

“It’s amazing,” he recalled Olaus saying. “How fine-veined they are, how they blow down the sidewalk in the wind as they do. How perfectly designed for their purpose they are.” 

AnnaVee was listening to this story from the open kitchen. She had been tolerating Brandy’s telling of it until he came to the part about the leaf. Then she quietly sidled up, which was how they split the duties of lifelong activism all those years in D.C. and then in Montana--evenly. In addition to being a wildlife rehabilitator and education advocate, she was Brandy’s fact-checker, Brandy taking up the airspace, AnnaVee underlying his narrative with the critical combination of introspection and accurate memory. 

“There are some things that you should know about Olaus, Sigurd Olson and Zahniser” she advised me in her soft voice that was every bit as earnest as Brandy’s louder one. 

“Zahnie was somebody that you just immediately loved. You just felt good in his presence. The same was true for Sig. You were glad to be there, and glad to have him with you. 

“Olaus was a little different sort of person. To me, sitting with him was like sitting next to Christ.”

 

#

 

Mark David Chapman, You've Done a Terrible Thing

I wrote this song 42 years ago, Dec. 8th, 1980, in a cabin up Nine Mile back when Nine Mile was still out there, a good hour away from Missoula when the weather was good, another continent when it was bad. 

I never sang or recorded it. I figured it was such a bummer song that no one at my relatively un-serious gigs (gig-lets, gig-gles) would want to hear it, but I've always liked it. 

A friend of mine, Addison Double, wrote one at the same time, too, in Missoula, and I remember coming into town soon after the tragedy and sharing our musical heartaches in that old house on Stoddard Street just below what's now the Toole Street bridge spanning the railroad tracks. Stoddard was a dead-end then, only the White Pine and Sash mill yard across what passed for a street and no Toole St. bridge to hop you across the tracks to the happening part of town.

I remember Burlington Northern making trains in the hump yard just south of the house. There'd be a tremendous chugging of the diesel engine as it pushed the linked mix-matched cars heading to different parts of the country backwards and up the "hump" where, once every car was ready to roll down the the other side of the hump it would be uncoupled (maybe they already were) and you'd hear big steel wheels rolling on big steel rails for a few seconds as the loose car picked up speed and was channeled by the yard crew at the fork in the tracks that sent it to its proper train and then "BOOM!!" when the car hit the train on the make. Like a cannon. You'd sit straight up in bed out of a dead sleep. That was the old North Side. I loved it.

I imagine Addison and I swapping our Lennon tunes on a dark winter night (no streetlights then) to the sound of booming trains, or cannons, whichever your imagination preferred.

After so many years I don't remember all the words to Addison's songs, only the chorus:

"You can kill the singer

But you cannot kill the song

Unless you can kill everyone

Who wants to sing along."

I'll record my song soon and post it here, but in the meantime, here's to peace.

Mark David Chapman, You've Done a Terrible Thing

by Bill LaCroix

The news is out, it’s in all the papers

The killer stalks, and he’ll never get caught.

If you ever turned your back on a shadow

You might get shot, you just might get shot.

I used to listen to his songs when I was a kid

And I never got caught, and I liked them a lot.

I’d sit in my room and play them for hours

He helped shape my thought, yeah he helped shape my thought.

Chorus 1:

Then Mark David Chapman, he bought him a handgun

For two hundred bucks, for two hundred bucks.

He hid in the shadows and on Lennon’s back

He tried his luck, he tried his luck.

Guitar break

Chorus 2:

He was famous as Christ, sometimes he was careless

But you know that he tried, yeah you know that he tried.

He wrote some good songs about this world’s unfairness

And that’s how he died, y’know that’s how he died.

As the news of his death was splashed in the papers

I read the same message I heard in his songs.

It said look at this thing that’s happenin’ to people

Something’s wrong, yeah something’s wrong.

All those lonely people

Where do they all belong?

Thought for the Day After Election Day, 2022

OK guys, here's the deal...

 

We had an election where the Talking Heads and the brains behind them (Ew...ww..!?) tried to convince us that forcing women to be incubators for unwanted pregnancies was not as big a deal as inflation. Turned out they were wrong but still, we should give those (not) poor pundits credit where it's due. They were unspecific about what kind of inflation women should be more worried about than full-metal, fascist speculums with body cams (??!!??). 

 

In other words, there was no "red wave", because people--predominantly women and predominantly young ones--who felt they should have more say about their bodily functions than, say, a state legislature full of local wing nuts in the pockets of billionaire oil sheiks (Hello, Montana!) showed up and spoke American. "Go to hell," they said to the bastards, and here's what I say--in American--to all the guys (and pundits) who put Choice on the back burner this election cycle cuz (just cuz....) Shame on ya. If you couldn't see how your rights are just as tanked as the rights of women over such a basic, biological, moral issue, then you deserve the neutered, technicolor Disney-fantasy-land where you never get laid that you apparently live in (Jeez, did I just write that?)

 

But it wasn't just the punditocracy and some other guys who were wrong about the apparently-mysterious ways of democracy. The Democratic Party was wrong on both their messaging and their strategy. There was an energized base after the Alito leak that I don't think will ever be matched in my lifetime. We all knew the axe was gonna fall as soon as Barrett was shoehorned into the supremes, and we all knew it was coming years before that. Why didn't 50 states have an abortion rights proposal--sponsored and promoted AND FUNDED by Democrats--on all the ballots this fall? This is Politics 101 in a functioning democracy: motivate your base with actual actions that will improve their lives and then turn them out at election time. It would have been a "two-fer", getting people to the polls who knew what fascism looks like even if they couldn't articulate it (Hello, Kansas!) and getting us as a society a long ways towards taking the microphone away from psychopaths. 

I happened to be in DC when the Alito leak hit the headlines and spent several days in front of the Supreme Court protesting. There was one, spontaneous big protest right after the leak but then I was shocked when that tapered down to anywhere from 5-50, ebbing and flowing with no apparent program, just pissed off people like myself. We should have been jamming First Street NE in front of the Supreme Court every single day but we weren't. Why? I asked around to those who were showing up regularly and seemed to be in the know for some clues, and they said the national groups were telling people NOT to show up at the Supreme Porch because they didn't want the "optics" of pros and antis shouting at each other on the news. The national pro-choice groups did organize one huge rally and 10s of thousands, possibly 100,000, showed up. Of course corporate media low-balled it and made sure they sought out the .0001 of the crowd who were wingnuts to give them "equal time". For math geeks, .0001 is 1 in 10,000 which means if 100,000 people showed up to support choice, 10 showed up to support religio-fascism, which was about right. But does the media's baked-in bias mean you don't organize in-the-streets dissent of religio-fascism until nobody can think of anything else? Of course not, and I think this is a big failure of electoral strategy for the Dems, as well as the Pro-Choice movement. The only reason I can think of that keeps them dropping our ball is cuz they're competing for the same billionaire dollars as the Repugs. They made a conscious decision to take "the quiet route" cuz of their relationship with corporate America and more to the point, corporate media. This kind of attitude is almost as infuriating to me as the trumpsters'. We needed real leadership when our actual bodies are on the line and they were AWOL. Just like the Clinton campaign in 2016, they were listening to the same bad birds who whispered in their ear "Just squeak through without rocking the donor boat." (Hello Rahm Emmanuel!!) and--need I say?--she lost to the most horrible head of state in modern times. Nice job, racehorse whisperers. I'm furious. Aren't you?

 

So yes, we missed the bullet the other day, thanks to everyone who turned out to vote but don't forget that dodging bullets isn't our only option. IMHO, it would have been a "blue wave" if the Dems hadn't fumbled the ball with Hobbs. Again, there should have been boilerplate pro-choice initiatives, not just candidates, ready to hit the streets in all 50 states the day after the Alito leak and on the ballot Nov. 8, and there were not. As much as many of us hate to admit it, the Dem are beholden to the same billionaire bucks as the Repugs and we should be just as mad at one as the other. Time and time (and time and time) again since Reagan the Dems have chosen to ride on the backs of everyone who shows up and does the legwork for them--voters especially included--despite the obstacles placed in their way by the corporatists, both Republicans and Democrats. At the very least, Dems should acknowledge the not-rich people who are coming out to vote for them--in spite of what they're not doing for them--with action: Climate Sanity, Universal healthcare, an Equal Rights Amendment, expanding the Supremes, getting rid of the Electoral College and filibuster, tanking "Citizens United", but so far they have not. The Dems, thanks to all of us who pay attention and care, are still playing the electoral game that should have more consequences than they think it does when they flub it. There has to be pro-choice ballot initiatives (or the equivalent) starting up in every possible state for 2024 and there has to be the hot oil of public opinion being poured down the neck of every Democratic candidate every time they show up to a meeting or rally for the next two years to not only support these efforts but to shake their money bushes to fund them. They have not felt our non-violent/ electoral/ moral wrath at letting us down so often for so long yet. They need to or there will be no electoral game for them--or anyone--to play in the very near future. 

"If you cut off my reproductive choices, can I cut off yours?"