Ed Kemmick | Spinning Yarns in Montana

Hayley and I rode the El downtown today, where we caught up with the anti-NATO protesters on Jackson Boulevard. There were a lot of them gearing up for their march to the place where the NATO folks were meeting, but I expected that. I didn’t expect the huge numbers of cops everywhere downtown. Most intersections had 10 or 15 cops on every corner, sometimes 30 or 40, and at several intersections there were phalanxes of blue-helmeted police in riot gear — including what look like a baseball catcher’s shin guards. It was almost 90 degrees today, with a bit of humidity, and those guys looked hot.

But then, so did many of the protesters, especially the sizable number of them dressed all in black. It seems odd that anarchists would have a uniform, however informal, but I wouldn’t have wanted to march on asphalt for several hours dressed in black jeans. The signs they were carrying touched on a great many themes — NATO out of Afghanistan, fuck the 1 percenters, down with tar sands oil, more for social programs, less for war and the rent is too damn high. OK, the last one was not on a sign, but it could have been. My favorite protester was carry a banner or flag consisting of a clear sheet of plastic. Was he for nothing? Everything? Transparency? I’m guessing it was transparency, but I don’t really know.

After a bit of gawking, we walked down to the Chicago River, ate some tubular meat and then rented bicycles, which turned out to be a great idea. We biked over to Navy Pier for a look-see, then down the lakeshore toward where the protesters had been headed. Hayley was thrilled. All kinds of major streets, including Michigan Avenue, were closed to vehicle traffic, affording us a kind of ghost-town tour of the great metropolis. It was like “The Walking Dead” or “28 Days Later” — just biking down these great deserted thoroughfares. At one point, we ran into a line of many dozens of snow plows parked plow to bumper up and down one side of a major street, to close everything north of the line to vehicles. But they let us through, and down another deserted road we rambled. It was glorious, though I felt a little guilty drawing such small pleasures from the great protests down the way.

As we neared the epicenter of the protests, we increasingly ran into streets the cops would not let us onto. Apparently if you weren’t part of the protest, if you hadn’t already signed on to the possibility of getting your head thumped, you could go no further. The city had made a big show of training their cops (and cops from many surrounding cities, including Milwaukee) to be kind and forbearing, the idea being that no one wanted a repeat of the police riot of 1968, and from what we saw the cops were quite patient, often downright bored. However, they did not seem to feel obliged to explain the details of restricted access to particular streets in answer to questions from a goddamned tourist riding a rental bike. I could dig that, and didn’t hold it against them.

We headed back, having seen not much but eager to make our two-hour deadline, then had a fine walk back to the El, stopping off to look at the city from the Wabasha Bridge, Hayley’s favorite vantage point. Then we found ourselves walking past a curious stone building whose walls are adorned with embedded remnants of other famous buildings, places and battlefields, including a chunk of sandstone, apparently, from the Little Bighorn Battlefield, shown below. And then Hayley noticed an inscription: WGN. That’s where Anna Roberts, my old Gazette colleague, works. We had talked earlier in the day, thinking we might see each other at the protests, which she was covering. We didn’t see her, but expect to catch up with her in a day or two. And WGN is in the Chicago Tribune building, one of the most magnificent in Chicago, and which I had somehow never seen on past visits. But those were flying visits, and most of what I saw was through a haze of boozy adventures. This trip is supposed to partly remedy the deficiencies of those former visits. Still on the list: a nighttime visit to Chinatown and Greek Town, and definitely a tour of the Field Museum and its current Genghis Khan exhibit. And then to the top of the Sears Tower. We feel we have to do it.

Lastly this: I had brought along some rather ponderous books to read because sometimes on vacation I like a ponderous read. But not this time, thank you. My man-of-leisure schedule can’t accommodate ponderous. So tonight I went to the Myopic bookstore and bought Patrick O’Brian’s first novel, “Testimonies”; “Hit on the House” by Jon Jackson, who happens to live in Montana and might be the best detective novelist working that field; and “Deadwood” by Pete Dexter, because two of my last three reads were Dexter novels and there isn’t anything I’m in the mood for right now than more Pete Dexter. Avanti!

Just before I left on vacation, I received a nice surprise in the mail. An old colleague from the Montana Standard, Jeff Gibson, had mailed me a copy of his self-published novel, “Last Rites of Passage, which I finished a couple of days ago.

Jeff was the editorial page editor when I worked in Butte, and he was always good, even when he had to write one of those editorials when his heart wasn’t really in it — and if you’ve spent much time in a newsroom you know how common that situation is. In other words, Jeff could always write well, in a pinch, in a hurry, whatever. The one thing I wasn’t aware of that he could do was be funny in print. But then the powers-that-be at the Standard decided it was time to publish an in-house newsletter — monthly, I think — and Jeff took charge of that. And damn me if he wasn’t funnier than hell, issue after issue. As I recall, it was as a result of that experience that he started writing a collection of short, mostly funny items in place of the Monday editorial, and soon it was the best thing he did all week.

I mention all this by way of saying that it is no surprise that this self-published novel, written by Jeff in his retirement, is so good. It is a short and simple book that alternates between scenes from the narrator’s youth, growing up in Livingston (here called Riverside), and scenes from a disastrous hike into the mountains involving the narrator, now old and rather creaky, and one of his childhood friends. There is love and fighting and jealousy, fishing, gun fire and tragedy — not the least of which is that the old men are deep into their multiple-day hike when they realize they forgot the coffee! The horror! It shivers me as I think of it now.

But the main thing is that there is a clear-eyed honesty and authenticity about everything in the book. If somebody wanted to know what Montana was like 50 or 60 years ago — when “the religion of fly-fishing had not yet descended into zealotry,” as Jeff says — you couldn’t do much better than handing him this book. (And did I mention that it is also available in electronic format?)

I can’t imagine that Gibson would object to my giving you his address, in case you’re interested in buying a real copy of the book: 3322 Keokuk, Butte, Mont., 59701.

My daughter Jessie and her husband Luis and I took in a play last night at the Guthrie Theater. I think the first play I saw at the Guthrie would have been in about 1972, when the theater was not quite 10 years old and was still considered modern and visionary. The play I saw was “Cyrano de Bergerac,” and I think it still ranks as the second-best theater-going experience of my rather limited theater-going career. The best by far was “The Gospel at Colonus,” then new and starring Morgan Freeman as a Pentacostal preacher/narrator and the Blind Boys of Alabama, all five of them, as Oedipus. Standing in for the Greek chorus was a local Baptist choir, all dressed in African robes. It was so good I went with my wife one night and a week later with my sister and brother-in-law.                                                                                                                                                                                   The Guthrie Theater has moved since those days. It is now on the other side of the Mississippi River, overlooking the Falls of St. Anthony, which powered the grain mills that made Minneapolis the city it was. The Guthrie is a huge, nine-story building with spectacular views of the city and the river and no longer has just one but several theaters. We saw “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been…” in the Guthrie’s black-box theater. The play is set in the Harlem apartment of the poet and novelist Langston Hughes, in 1953, on the night before he is to appear before the U.S. Senate’s infamous Committee on un-American Activities, then moves to the Senate committee room for Hughes’ grilling by the esteemed congressmen.

The hearing scene is good, though at this late date there is nothing new to say or think about the cloddish behavior of that supremely un-American committee, but the time spent in Hughes’ Harlem apartment is exhilarating. He alternately broods on what he will say before the committee while working on a poem, slowly, meticulously, while drinking from a bottle of Scotch and thinking back on his life as a poet. Gavin Lawrence is great as Hughes, sometimes whispering his poetry and sometimes belting it out like a bluesman. Hughes has a lot to say about what motivates a person to write, about the almost incomprehensible process by which words move mysteriously from some other plane into the mind and pen of the poet. Or, in Hughes’ case, through his manual typewriter. The typewriter makes for a great device because as Hughes types away, composing drafts of his poem, the words appear behind him on a black screen.

And believe it or not, rush tickets were only $15, three bucks more than a movie here in the metropolis. Why wouldn’t a person go to the Guthrie instead of the movies?

And today was a day of some nostalgia. I hopped on my daughter’s bike and rode around Lake Nokomis, then found myself back in the old neighborhood near Minnehaha Park. I had been thinking earlier of the mousy, bookish gent I met almost 30 years ago and who somehow invited me into his house, which he still shared with his parents, though he was then in his 30s or 40s. The house was stuffed with books, most of them very old. He even had a sizable collection of incunabula — books printed within 50 years of the invention of movable type in 1450. It was an intoxicating experience. I’ve still never seen a collection like it. So there I was, biking along, and I saw, on Minnehaha Parkway, a cinder-block building with a glass-and-steel front, which used to be a wood-working shop. As I got closer I saw that the windows were full of books. There was no sign or anything, just the books, but I pulled over, rang the bell and saw the proprietor come waddling out of the back room.

It took me a moment, but the thought struck me: “Did you use to live near here?” I asked. “Yes,” he said, and he still did, and yes, it was he, the bookish bookman, and he had just opened this little store about a year ago. It contained few marvels, alas, probably because he couldn’t bear to part with them and only opened the store to keep his old house from bursting at the seams. We talked a bit and he mentioned that the building we were in was a grocery story when he was a boy. So, apparently he has lived in that house all his life, collecting books and reading. There were some books I might have wanted, but I was biking, so I left empty-handed. I suppose I should have spoken more with him, but he is as shy as ever he was, disinclined to talk. I may go back. God, I’d love to see that house again.

A few blocks from there, I stopped across the street from our old house on 42nd Street. It was and is an unprepossessing place, God knows, but as I looked at it tears came into my eyes. I pictured my oldest daughter waiting with me at the side door of that house, waiting for the bus that would take her to the first day of kindergarten, spiriting her away from the bosom of her family to the big world beyond. And now that little girl is expecting — that is, expecting to unburden herself of a wee daughter in July. I am getting old, I guess, but then so is my daughter and the bookish old gent and everyone else.

And then I biked over to the park and took a gander at Minnehaha Falls, which go pouring eternally over the lip of a limestone bowl. Eternally? Well, not quite. There is a marker downstream noting that the falls, over the millennia, have retreated upstream as the wearing action of the flowing water gradually eats away at the limestone. I seem to recall that 5,000 years ago or so, the falls were a mile downstream of where they are now. But in my lifetime, the falls look essentially the same, unchanging … eternal. So, yes, we’re all getting older, but there’s still plenty of time.

I should have mentioned this earlier, but I plumb forgot to: Marga Lincoln, an entertainment writer for the Helena Independent-Record, covered my book reading at the Montana Historical Society Saturday afternoon and wrote a fine story for Sunday’s paper. I’m just glad she and the other folks in attendance turned out at all, seeing as it was a near-perfect spring day in Helena. Especially in contrast with Sunday, when we woke up to lead-gray skies and snow on the ground.

Anyway, it was a pleasure meeting Marga, though it is still strange and somewhat uncomfortable to be on the other side of an interview after all these years. She even spelled the name of my hometown correctly, no small feat.

In my column this Sunday, I wrote about a couple of minor transgressions I committed as a young reporter. A story I wanted to tell, but couldn’t squeeze into the column, came from “Newspaper Days,” the second volume in H.L. Mencken’s three-volume memoirs.

Writing about his days on the Baltimore Sun, Mencken said that when he was appointed Sunday editor back in 1901, he soon discovered , “as every young city editor must find, that Sunday night brings the zero hour of the week. There is, ordinarily, very little news stirring, and that little tends to be a great deal less than exhilarating.”

He spoke of one “red-letter Sunday” when “a wild man was reported loose in the woods over Baltimore’s northern city-line, with every dog barking for miles around, and all women and children locked up.” He said the police  responded zealously, rounding up “at least a dozen poor bums” who were “put through very stiff workouts in the back room.”

Though the wild man was never found and soon forgotten, Mencken said, “I got special delight out of the wild man, for I had invented him myself.”

Now you know why I consider my little caper a minor one. It was a bad thing Mencken did, but I’ve worked a lot of slow Sundays myself, as both and editor and reporter, and I almost regret not having followed his lead.

I’ve got another book to recommend, this one a Montana memoir by Ruth McLaughlin. The book is “Bound Like Grass,” which was published in 2010 and won that year’s Montana Book Award. I met Ruth at my second book event last summer — the Sunrise Festival in Sidney. I liked her and I liked the looks of her book, so I bought a copy from her and finally got round to reading it last week.

In it, she writes of growing up as part of the third generation on a dryland farm-ranch operation on the desolate plains near Culbertson in Eastern Montana. The place had already shipwrecked the dreams of her Swedish grandparents and her parents, and the reaction of her parents to a life of hardship was to retreat inside a cocoon of stoic determination, of pinched economy and withered emotions. McLaughlin is only a few years older than me, but this reads like a memoir of the Depression. The second chapter, “Hunger,” is an unforgettable chronicle of wretched repasts — of endless potatoes, red frankfurters (one each), Jello with fruit cocktail on Sundays, gravelly cornbread, thin pancakes and then, wonder of wonders, restaurant hamburgers once or twice a year in Williston, N.D.

The best thing about this book is the straightforward attitude and prose of the memoirist. There is not the faintest hint of literary preening about this memoir, no sense of McLaughlin’s having set out to impress the critics or to compose a literary masterpiece. She just seems to have been honestly interested in finding out what made her family tick, what happenstances of history, climate, genetics and geographical location made her parents and grandparents so hesitant to spend a nickel or an ounce of emotion.

If her parents held back emotion, McLaughlin does not. I had tears in my ears more than once, particularly when she writes of her own meanness in regard to her sisters, one born with Down syndrome and the other suffering from a strain of mental illness apparently brought on by birth-related trauma. Both suffered much and died young, and their strangeness made them the target of ridicule and bullying. McLaughlin captures with great poignancy the pain of being a child whose family is looked down on, both for the “odd” girls and for being so different because of the straitened way the children were raised on their isolated ranch.

McLaughlin loves her family, as difficult and demanding as they could be, but she never indulges in false emotions and she never spares herself in examining the family’s dysfunction. She inherited her writing skills, too, it seems. Her ancestors were always writing letters and diaries, and one of her grandmothers, in a turn-of-the-century note she wrote to her husband, summarized all the difficulties of the homesteading life. “Poor bed!” she wrote. “Poor light! Run-down surroundings! Impossible to keep clean! No social contacts! No church! Poor mail service! Absolutely dangerous in case of sickness! No room for personal belongings! Space all occupied!”

Remember that litany next time you hear somebody rhapsodizing about the quaint pleasures of the good old days.

After reading Newt Gingrich’s comments on Ron Paul today, I don’t know if I should feel vindicated or uncomfortable. Basically, Gingrich said Paul has never adequately explained how a newsletter published under his name had a 10-year run of publishing racist, anti-Semitic garbage — of which Paul claims to have been unaware.

When I wrote about the same thing on my old City Lights blog a few years ago, and then in a follow-up after some Paul fanatic posted a link to it seven weeks later, I was inundated with comments from all over the country. Unfortunately, comments posted to the old blog are now lost, but I had hundreds of them, many of them unbelievably rabid. I would see nothing like it until I wrote a column about the Tea Party last year.

And now Gingrich, God love him, is making the same points I made about Paul way back when. I hope he knows what he’s getting into. Here’s the piece I based my original blog post on. And here, also from the New Republic, is a recent compilation of Paul’s “most incendiary newsletters.” Enjoy.

At the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula last fall, I bought a copy of “The Man Who Never Died” by William Adler. It’s a biography of Joe Hill, the labor martyr and Wobbly songwriter who was killed by a Salt Lake City firing squad in 1915.

I put the book on a shelf, planning to get around to it someday, then more or less forgot about it. But then I finally got around to reading “Go By Go,” Jon Jackson’s fictional account of the murder of Frank Little in Butte in 1917. Little was also a Wobbly, a passionate speaker and organizer and a veteran of the free speech fight in Missoula. I was already a big fan of Jackson’s superb mystery novels, but for some reason I hadn’t gotten around to “Go By Go.”

It was as good or better than his purely fictional works, but doubly interesting to me because of all the familiar Butte scenes. Even more interesting is that the Pinkerton detective who narrates the book is modeled after Dashiell Hammett, the mystery-thriller writer who was long thought to have been involved in the brutal murder of Little by thugs in the employ of the Anaconda Company. Among Hammett’s books is “Red Harvest,” set in Butte (called Poisonville in the book) in the ’20s. It may be the most cold-blooded, amoral detective story ever written, so in a way, Jackson, who lives in Montana, was exploring one of the most fascinating chapters in the state’s history at the same time he was harking back to one of the masters of the genre he has built a career on. I can’t recommend the book highly enough.

Once I had finished “Go By Go,” I knew I had to read “The Man Who Never Died.” Say what you will about the Industrial Workers of the World. They were radicals, sure enough, men and women who spoke of the destruction of capitalism and embraced a kind of utopian socialism that would make them about as popular today as they were then. But you have to recall that the horrors of Stalin’s Russia were decades in the future, and the world the Wobblies lived in was one in which American industrialists chewed up workers as thoughtlessly as they consumed coal or any other raw material.

Joe Hill, born Joel Hagglund in Sweden in 1879, was shot in Salt Lake in 1915, accused of gunning down an ex-cop-grocer and his son. Apparently most everybody who had examined the case in the past 100 years was reasonably certain that Hill had been railroaded in a grossly unfair trial, but Adler, a hell of a writer and a bulldog of a researcher, reconstructs the whole chain of events leading to the murder of the grocer and his son, and to the ultimate execution of Joe Hill. He not only makes a strong case for the innocence of Joe Hill (strong, but delivered dispassionately and with great fairness), he does a solid job of attempting to identify the actual killer, a frightening man who would have been right at home in the pages of “Red Harvest.” I won’t say more about the details. There are many of them and you’ll want to read them for yourself.

Sidelight: I vaguely knew of Joe Hill, but I didn’t know how big a figure he was in the history of American folk music. Adler became interested in Hill after reading what he described as a “three-page paean” to him in Bob Dylan’s “Chronicles: Volume One.” At the very end of the book, Adler quotes Dylan as saying that Hill was “the forerunner of Woody Guthrie. That’s all I needed to know.”

But I think he was more than a forerunner. I wonder now if Guthrie didn’t model himself after Hill as carefully as Dylan originally modeled himself after Guthrie. Like Guthrie, Hill wrote topical songs based on familiar melodies, wrote letters festooned with extravagant cartoons and larded his conversation and writings with a self-deprecating, devil-may-care wit. Woody was already one of my main heroes. I have now added Hill to the panetheon.

Red Lodgians, please be aware that I will be coming to your fair village Thursday night at 7. I’ll be reading from and signing copies of my book at the Red Lodge Carnegie Library, 3 W. Eighth St.

I can’t guarantee that coffee and cookies will be served, but it would be shocking if a library event of this nature did not include such victuals.

There is one wee bit of bad news, and that is this: At precisely the same time, 7 p.m., Dakota Dave Hull will be performing at the Cafe Regis in Red Lodge. Hull is a hell of a guitar player and singer whom I’ve always wanted to see, and his appearance at the Regis is sponsored by some friends of mine.

But isn’t that the same damned thing that always happens at this time of year — too many things going on? I mention all this by way of saying that if you decide to go see Dave Hull rather than attending my little event at the library, I not only won’t hold it against you, I might applaud your good taste.

But there is one other option — do both! That’s what I’m planning. As soon as the library thing wraps up, I’ll race over and catch the rest of the show at the Regis, which is only a couple of blocks away, after all.

There is also open adult hockey from 7 to 9 p.m. on Thursdays at Red Lodge’s great outdoor rink. In a perfect world I would take that in, too, but that is clearly impossible. Anyway, I hope to see you there — at the library, the Regis, or both.

I’m late in announcing this, but I’ll be hawking books this evening at the Good Earth Market in downtown Billings in conjunction with the store’s Holiday Artwalk events. I’ll be there from 4 p.m. until … I don’t know, around 8 or 9, I guess. The featured artist will be Jon Lodge, one of the coolest cats in Billings, and we’ll have music from David Banuelos, another cool cat and a fine musician.

Then, on Saturday, I’ll be at the Shrine Auditorium, 1125 Broadwater Ave., from noon to 5 p.m. for the Writers Roundup, held in conjunction with the Festival of Trees, a fundraiser for the Family Tree Center.

Other writers on hand will be Craig Lancaster, Blythe Woolston, Jimmie Ashcraft, Holly Beck, Marion Cadwell, Meridith Cox, Rebecca Gahagan, Sid Gustafson, Janet Muirhead Hill, Wally Mading, Lynne Montague, Jim Moore, Florence Ore, Bernie Quetchenbach, Karen Stevens, Alan Tucker, Timothy J. Wilkinson and Jane Wohl.

I should add the event runs from noon to 5. I’m getting low on books, so I’ll be there until they run out.

Finally, I’ll write more about this closer to the date, but I just signed on for a reading and book signing at the Red Lodge Carnegie Library at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 15. That should be a fun one, especially if I can combine that event with a little nighttime hockey.