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Show EZEPH YR/ AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 2004 But my haywire urge right now is to sing the joys of putting ourselves, our bodies into action, doing things. Not ona Nautilus. Not in super athleticism. There's a difference here: by doing something, 1 mean making a difference in the outer world. Oh sure, making a difference in our bodies is good, we all ought to exercise and eat right and so on... this is vitally important ... but I'm on another track here, looking for changes, out there in the world, changes wrought by human effort. A little east of Chadron, Nebraska I stopped to renew acquaintance with the Museum of the Fur Trade. It's on the site of the American Fur Company's Bordeaux Trading Post, established in 1837. Five dollars entrance fee. On U.S. 20, northwest Nebraska. I went into the back yard of the museum to take a few photos of two sod-roof log structures built into a south-facing slope. I had admired the tenacity of those logs on previous visits and this time the sun was shining brightly at just the right angle, highlighting the dry and thoroughly weathered dove tail notches that had been shaped one hundred and sixty seven years ago. I was remembering my own dove tail project. It had taken three summers to build our cabin that did double duty as a support for the south end of the ancient woodshed. The first summer was devoted to felling, limbing and barking larch, spruce and fir, then dragging them out of the swamp to a seasoning site. In the next two summers | put the logs together, learning as I went. There was a to hone a good the cabin now, Some of the it was, to drop LOSING SOLITUDE lot to learn, from the way edge on a double-bitted axe to ways of measuring, hewing, levering. I'm in digits on keyboard, looking back to the mistakes I made. notches are not at all perfect, but some are pretty good and what a pleasure one notched log onto another and see and hear the clunk of true fit. The foundation isn't perfect either, there has been a little frost-heaving, but now, after a number of winters the cabin seems to have found a solid footing of its own. By Martin Murie Now, and Then Using the body, all of it, moving, exerting. Not much of that was visible along the highways of this big continent as I urged my faithful 4-cylinder pickup from the north rim of New York state to Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and back. Highways are where you get a dramatic look at the passive nature of our automaniacal lives, people of all ages touching their digits to the faces of machines to make the machines spit out cokes, pepsis, candy, ice, fuel. We press a lever to get coffee. We slip plastic into slots to pay for things or to open heavy metal doors of Super 8s and the other massive structures of that tribe. We put quarters into slots for the daily dose of "news" print or to make a machine give up a small box of detergent to feed a laundromat top-loader. Rotary phones, remember those? You don't punch or push, you get to actually move a piece of the machine, several times, to "dial up" the number you want. If it doesn't deliver you dial Operator. Quite often machines won't behave. They go on strike, they sulk. At a mini-mart an U.S. 20 is a good "Blue Highway." If you're crossing Nebraska this summer, try it. In Merriman, you might want to drop in at the Sand Café. Weak coffee, good pie. And Karen's Kitchen in O'Neill is a modest place on the main drag, but has won an international reputation. Conversation, so-so coffee, excellent chocolate cake. Near Chadron is Fort Robinson, a key cavalry outpost in the nineteenth century. Crazy Horse was killed there. Some of the notches are not at all perfect, but some are pretty good, and what a pleasure it was, to drop one notched log onto another and see and hear the clunk of a true fit. enraged voice made me turn from feeding gas into the pickup. An old guy about my age was asking the world, "What the hell am I supposed to do?" I was pleased. For once I was in a position to deliver digitary advice instead of searching for it. "You have to press "Pay Inside," I told the old-timer, and then we were two old-timers telling each other how the old days made more sense. At another stop for gas and coffee I was buffaloed by the gas dispenser that refused to deliver. I gave up, went inside to complain, but the woman behind the counter gave me a big happy smile. "Let's go take a look," she said as she skipped around the corner of the counter and out the door so fast I had to hustle to keep up. I think her vim and joy came from the chance to get away from the touch-and-slide routine, to move, to move fast, to go! At the dispenser she went through the routine I was pretty sure I'd just gone through three times and ... the damn machine started pumping gas. “I did all that," I said, a bit disgruntled. "Nothing happened." She laughed and skipped away, then stopped, turned, said, “You loosened it.” Driving across Nebraska and Wyoming against a headwind, I had lots of time to spin fantasies about the land and the drought and the bad news that my whonky antenna picked up from time to time. Out of that mish-mash of wind and static and random thoughts came, repeatedly, the simple idea that we are, all of us, crazy. We're forced to adapt to the dumb acts and ideas our "civilization" shoves our way, we have to go a bit haywire, to survive. I mean, how else could we possibly keep going, day after day, while putting up with lies from our leaders, deaths from the wars, Nature making unfriendly returns and millions of us doing nothing about it except hanging out little flags and yellow ribbons and punching machines and hoping they'll do the right thing, or tapping a code into a cell phone for a chance to talk to another human. Isn't crazy the word for this? Museum of the Fur Trade Chadron, Nebraska That double-bitted axe! Bought the blade at a farm auction, hung it, sharpened it. The steel took a good edge, not too soft, not too hard. I was bragging about it to my neighbor, an experienced logger. He said, "You must have got hold of a Black Raven." That's what it was, Black Raven. It comes from the age of wood and steel. We are now in the age of plastic and glop. Is this significant? Sure it is. The consumer nowadays, that's you and me, is a harried person holding down one or more jobs, striving to keep a household going. We don't have time to learn hands-on skills. We pour chemicals, put things together with tape, cover errors with stuff out of a tube. Lots of iron still around, but at the "consumer" level it's apt to be cheap stuff twisted into shape rather than forged or cast, prone to breakage or just too crappy to be of much use. ORDER SIGNED COPIES DIRECT FROM MARTIN MURIE: LOSING SOLITUDE: cowtown....$14.95 Send your order to: MARTIN MURIE Rt. 1 Box 188 North Bangor, NY 12966 A contemporary Western. Developers invade a WINDSWEPT: Birdwatchers & a biker from Montana tangle with corporation extremists in Medicine Bow, Wyoming....$14.95 BURT’ S WAY: Environmentalists labeled ‘terrorists,’ keep a’ chuggin’ on the Quebec/New Y ork border...$1200 RED TREE MOUSE CHRONICLES: Forest animals on assignment: or email at: sagchen@westelcom.com SERIOUSLY INSISTENT: 80 pages of activist critique...$7.00 prin at & ROD aes + Me wh TRIE Plus Postage---§2.20 for the first book, $1.00 for the second. | |
