The seven hour drive took about six. The common motif in moving west to east across the great state of Montana is coming across deer smeared across the highway. The mountain ranges I passed included the Tobacco Roots, the Gallatin Range, the Crazies, and the Absaroka-Beartooth. On arriving, I dumped all of my stuff on the floor of my new one bedroom apartment, blew up the air mattress, discovered it had a hole, drove around the town for awhile, went to Green’s Grocery where I purchased tortillas, shredded cheese, an apple and paper plates, and came back. I had no furniture, no silverware, no nothing. So I slept on the floor in quiet despair.
The next night pretty much the same, except I had the foresight to purchase a bottle of wine, and re-upped when it was halfway done with a sixpack of Bud. I wrote a letter to a friend with whom I have very little contact, and sweated out another night sleeping on the floor without a fan.
Then bed, furniture, and stuff in general arrived the next day with parents. Parents stayed for two hours, we ate a late afternoon meal, and they departed back east to the friendly confines of Sioux Fu Coup, SD. I organized the two rooms that comprise my apartment, assembled furniture, put my books in assembled bookcase upon its completion, and ambled down to a bar in town because I was both curious and sick of my own company. And of course I made a friend at the bar, who invited me to go horseback riding today. This didn’t work out. [MORE GENERAL NOTE: Unless I am speaking of a co-worker, or explicitly say that person of whom I speak is white, the assumption that he or she is of the American Indian persuasion is as rock solid as the assumption that your shit stinks. Point being, the new friend is an Indian guy.] The unspoken expectation is that employees refrain from behaviors (drinking, smoking, swearing) that together as a united triumvirate form my Rock of Gibraltar. I do not know if I will modify my behavior, or keep on keeping on until pulled aside by a higher up who suggests I modify my behavior. There is a good chance I’ll be too busy to frequent establishments of ill repute, but one bar has free pool on Thursday nights, and I love pool.
Yesterday, I had a chance to go to a rodeo. I was on my way to Billings to get a few more supplies for the new apartment, when I saw a large line of cars headed down a two-lane. I followed like the dutiful follower I am, and encountered an arena parking lot filled with large diesel trucks and horse trailers. So obviously I put the shopping trip for a few hours. I like rodeos, unabashedly. I like it when old leathery ranchers tip their cowboy hats to women who edge past them on the bleachers and then go all stoneface for the next two hours until another one comes by; I like watching seven year olds make their ponies gallop up and down the warm up areas; I like flashy horses, big bays, long legged paints, a random appaloosa or two, all moving effortlessly across the ground like a choreographed routine to an inaudible soundtrack. I like ropers too – my uncle is a team roper and lost a finger doing it, FYI – but I am not sure if there is much explanation for why I do not blanch when the steer is unceremoniously dumped on its side after running out of rope.
So that was a nice surprise, coming across a rodeo on my way to Billings. Billings makes me nervous – lots of petrochemical type industry plus the kind of feel to it that screams meth, bad gas station coffee, and unrepentant racism juxtaposed with big new boxstores and at least three Applebee’s restaurants in a five-mile radius. The one human moment I had took place after making a wrong turn into a Kmart parking lot. I turned around and came to the stop sign to find a guy holding a sign that said: “Car broke down, family here, no money, looking for work.” I rolled down my window and handed him a $5, and we talked about how hot it was (my car thermometer said 105 after sitting for ten minutes in the sun as I went in to buy peanut butter and canned goods at an Albertsons.) I was about to drive away when the guy came up to the window, half-stuck his head in the car, and insisted that he wasn’t a freeloader. You could tell he wasn’t from first sight, just someone who had bad luck and no options but to stand in a parking lot resigned to other people’s potential generosity. I wasn’t being generous so much as appeasing a need to speak with someone – it had been about two days since I’d had a conversation with a non-parent and/or non-work supervisor. Strange interaction, yes, but worth the price of admission.
But so yeah, in new age lingo, I have begun a new stage. Moving is tortuous, always, but this time I didn’t end up throwing things out at random so I do not have to re-purchase the basic items one needs to have around but rarely ever uses. I have accumulated a lot of tools, oddly enough – tape measures, screw drivers, a Leatherman, two hammers and two sets of ratchets. And I am all thumbs nonetheless; I resorted to using ducktape on the new bookcase to reinforce a very sloppy hammer/nail job. Anyway, the vital statistics.
ENVIRONS
Extreme isolation. Billings is 120 miles away. The nearest town of at least 1000 people is Colstrip, which comes in at 2000 population and 45 miles distance. The land here integrates the Black Hills with the Badlands. Almost all ponderosa pine, gentle ridges, the burned out brown of late August everywhere you look, except for the bare buttes the color and texture of chalk with occasional pinkish coloration that reminds me of the dehydrated NASA ice cream that I received as a gift from family friends who visited Cape Canaveral. The Tongue River sits about 150 yards from my front door, but is so mercury-laden from decades of mining upstream that I would neither fish it nor swim in it.
I live in staff housing, referred to as the village, which is a few hundred yards away from canvas. The apartment complex is ground level, four units, all one bedrooms, occupied by other self-exiled twenty somethings: one other teacher, a dorm assistant (it’s a boarding school for a sizeable portion of the student population), and another guy I haven’t met yet. Two nine year olds have treat the sidewalk adjacent to my windows as their own personal scooter territory. Seth and Shanlan, both 100% boy – they name each other using variations of words combined with “butt” – e.g. poopy butt, fat butt, stupid butt, etc. they have the odd habit of simulating crashes by stepping off of their scooters and slamming them to the ground which I find just utterly endearing.
The village is swimming with young children, dogs, and a pet rabbit across the street that is scarily large. Other staff I’ve met are nice, and tend to either be in the early 30s with young kids or have put in at least a decade at the school.
THE REZ
As noted in a previous post, the rez is a different kind of place. Small houses on large lots with six or seven gutted out cars somewhere nearby and four or five horses nibbling on the grass in what would qualify as the front lawn elsewhere. Other common sights: kids riding double on bikes or those 125cc motorbikes that max out at like 35 mph. Dogs living independent lives, with occasional visits to former owners in rough times (I am guessing about the visits). Lots of homemade signs, protesting acts of depravity or urging you to vote for Joe Knowsthegun in the upcoming tribal elections. I worry that the picture I describe comes off as unsavory, whereas I find it appealing. Again, don’t know why. Every driveway has a cattle guard, many houses have a tepee or two hanging out somewhere nearby, and the odd decorative touches – a Christmas tree of hubcaps affixed to the side of a house, an impressionistic mural of a bull elk coming out of a strand of lodgepole pine painted on another – make for interesting driving.
The one thing I can say to try to clarify my reaction to this tableau is that money and material things are not the driving force that distinguishes between the sacred and the profane. There are no ostentatious houses on hilltops, no middle class burghs with block after block of neutral tone two floor ranch-style homes – there is a strange mix of poverty combined with vitality, a basic material formula that is not much combined with an outlook that makes the most of what there is in distinctly individuating fashion. I am not being as lucid as I would like, but I guess you’ll just have to visit to see what I mean.
THE SCHOOL
The school has a history, and the further back one goes the more schizophrenic it gets. Founded in 1884 by four nuns, it has evolved with each stage of the government-tribal relationship. Kids were forced to cut their hair, forbidden to speak their language, and in the grand old tradition of Catholic education inundated with guilt and self-reprobating tendencies. It is now, methinks, a very good school, one that tries to integrate a Roman Catholic institution component with a native cultural component. I am impressed with the steps that are taken to celebrate and incarnate American Indian culture in a traditional educational format. But, being neither RC nor NA, I suppose I will have to roll with the punches.
I’m sure I’ll fall on my face a few times in the classroom; that is to be expected. My general curricular outlook is to throw a bunch of short poems at the kids, pick out a some short stories that blend traditional storytelling with some formally advanced stuff, and nag the hell out of them about grammar, construction of an argument, vocabulary, and the basic building blocks of reading/writing/opinionating.
Winter could be rough. I need an inside hobby, and refuse to countenance knitting or other crafts-oriented praxis. So be on the lookout for rambling entries to this here emblem of narcissism and neurosis. I expect that much clicking and clacking of keys will ensue in the time to come. Be well, be merry. I’m out.
