insearchofbud

I am on my way to my first day of work at 7 a.m. I drive toward white columns of smoke towering in the distant blue. Fire is burning the field on my right black, right up to the edge of the road where creosote guard rail posts are aflame. In the field about 50 feet away a fence post has burnt all but a 6-inch section hanging by its wire staple on the barb wire. Over the crest of the next hill someone has left a pile of 4 dead horses on the edge of the highway. I wonder if they were killed by the range fire. I have 40 miles to go. I leave the range fire behind me but I am drawing closer to the towering smokes to the east.
I spend that night in a government house, sleeping on the carpet on my sleeping bag, sweating from the August heat. I look outdoors into the darkness. Looks like big flakes of snow beneath the lone streetlight. I plug in an electric fan I find in the basement.
The next day an immense man everyone calls Rabbit cleans a kitchen sink at work. He asks me how I like the town. I reply that I love it, that I think it is beautiful. He does not smile, but looks sideways at me.
“What religion are you,” he asks.

From Wikipedia:

The Alaska Highway (also known as the Alaskan Highway, Alaska-Canadian Highway, or ALCAN Highway) was constructed during World War II for the purpose of connecting the contiguous United States to Alaska through Canada. It begins at the junction with several Canadian highways in Dawson Creek, British Columbia, and runs to Delta Junction, Alaska, via Whitehorse, Yukon. Completed in 1942 at a length of approximately 2,700 kilometres (1,700 mi), as of 2012 it is 2,232 km (1,387 mi) long. The difference in distance is due to constant reconstruction of the highway, which has rerouted and straightened out numerous sections. The highway was opened to the public in 1948. Legendary over many decades for being a rough, challenging drive, the highway is now paved over its entire length.

Motor oil stinks. I spent 3 or 4 days working on the blown engine and installing its replacement for the 3rd time without a shower. The mechanics finally checked it and said it was good. We had a better van than when we started.
We had paid our dues to the road god! It was June and the days were long. I dried my tears. Yes.
Edmonton 1) huge city 2)apparently no underclass 3) had a wonderful grassy camping park with a shower and staying there was cheap.
We set out from E. the next day. Starting the VW meant flipping a light switch to complete a circuit, then touching a button to fire the starter motor. It was an old car! Oh, I had tried installing other switches, toggles, doorbell buttons, but they always burned out. Couldn’t handle the amperage of the 12V battery. The car had originally been a 6V, but I converted it. As well as I could, that is, which meant things sometimes burst into flame. A turn signal burst into flame when I pulled off the road at Liaird hot springs. Clara, age 12, noticed the fire. I simply blew it out like a birthday candle. Everyone else was asleep or staring out a window.
The surprising thing: the road north from Edmonton was long. Days long. We took turns driving and napping in the back where a piece of plywood covered our supplies: tools, clothing, camping gear. Some foam mattresses and sleeping bags on top.
After a day or two the starter wouldn’t work so we had to push the van and let out the clutch. Once when almost to Alaska I woke to cursing and crying. Our son Bob was trying to push the van out of a gas station while Penny let out the clutch. I helped Bob as we pushed forward a couple of dozen yards, then back. Then Penny threw the all important light switch to connect the ignition.

After a week of driving, give or take a few days, we stopped along the highway hundreds of miles from anywhere and we all scrambled out to examine the tundra. Big lumps of sod and grass and low plants. In the far chilly distance the horizon had snowy rocky mountains!

Later at a bridge across the Edith River we left the highway, drove along the bank of the river and camp wherever we wanted. The kids took off all their clothes and waded into the water, ice cold. The weather looked clear, cool and without mosquitoes. This was an adventure! A bit scary!

I felt like a real hippie at last and I wasn’t even 40!

Some ideas: It is snowing. My snow shovel is locked in the crabby next door neighbor’s garage because she had borrowed it. The garage is locked with a padlock. I know how to pick a warded lock with a skeleton key, so I open the lock and slip inside to search for the shovel. While inside I hear the sound of her studded tires crunching on the driveway. She had often accused me of being a thief, so I pull the door shut and hide. She finds her garage door unlocked and, because she always locks it, phones the police while waiting in her car outside her garage. The worst thing: I damage an expensive work of art in her garage when I try to hide. The artwork is entitled, “Buffoon,” and looks much like me. She commissioned a famous professional artist and now she believes I broke in to her garage to damage the piece.
Idea #2: A true story: My nephew phoned me to say that he visited my brother who had terrible chest pain. This story ends a month later with us packing up his things because my brother had died on his kitchen floor. He had lain there perhaps a week, maybe two or three, and his body had decomposed, inflated, deflated. My oldest son scraped his uncle’s remains off the linoleum. Then he phoned and asked us to come.
Idea #3: This one is just plain stupid: The Texas governor is afraid that our President is training Navy Seals to attack him. Wait. That’s not fiction.
Idea #4: A man’s child hits a baseball through a neighbor’s stained-glass window. Fortunately he retained a very good lawyer. The man, not his child. The window’s value is astronomical. The child’s hit was champion quality. It would have been a homer in a professional baseball stadium.
Story idea #5: I move to a strange city to a job as a hospital pharmacy technician. My first day the pharmacy manager brings in a photographer for a publicity shot of new employees. I would pose as a patient so I am given a gown and, after removing my all my clothes except shoes and socks, I am taken down a hall in my backless gown to a vacant patient room and put to bed. In the photograph a newly hired nurse appears to be taking my temp.
After several pictures everyone quickly exits. As I climb out of bed a nurse’s aid enters the room, sees me, and informs me that she had just made the bed and she is furious! Perplexed, I explain that I just had my picture taken, but she only gets more angry. I hold the back of my gown with one hand and walk to the pharmacy window. The pharmacist will not let me into the pharmacy because he doesn’t know me. I am arrested by security for indecent exposure because I am not ill and have no doctor. I have no identification, no telephone, and I cannot remember the address of my new apartment. I am totally panicked.

May day began. I woke when the aspirin wore off. I loved the stories I heard despite the ringing in my ears from the aspirin. Had to do with a certain chain. Looked almost like a dog chain, but with smaller, smoother links, I was four, that I dragged around the dogless back yard and then dragged over to the white haired couple who lived in the white stucco with red trim. Or blue. The Bowens always were kind, as long as I didn’t hide in the plants that Mrs. Bowen didn’t want trampled. What mattered was that Mr. Bowen approved of the chain and the light bulb. The one I managed to fit into one of my pants pockets. That’s my good place. I call it my sub par place because I could sort of find light in the bulb by holding it just so, so the sunlight caught in it and sort of lit it up. I checked it repeatedly. Mr. Bowen said I had the “whole kit and caboodle.” And of course, that mattered to me, made me feel a sub par that was two notches better because my father had recently died. A whole generation of dads had vanished by 1949.

April 28, 2015

Returning from landfill I stopped at red light. A 40-year-old-looking couple crossed from my L. I stared, of course. I wondered if they were both bald. No. He was fat, mostly bald except for a horseshoe of hair. Perhaps like Larry of The Three Stooges. Black T-shirt. She — he, it turns out— was also fat but had thick black hair. Neither smiled. It was hot and sunny. Larry looked at my truck, scowled, said [inaudible]. Almost across, Larry looked back and pointed at me with outstretched arm. Green signal, I pulled ahead as black haired man stepped off his corner. He blew a police whistle and held his raised arm toward the traffic.

I made a magazine, The Portable Wall, in 1977 because Wilbur Wood had us do a class project that had to do with journalism. Wilbur had edited the University of Montana student newspaper, the Kaimin, in its golden era, the 1960s.

I did the P.Wall for 10 years, printed the pages on an offset press and the cover on a letterpress. Circulation eventually reached 500. I think we made about 30 issues and a couple of poetry books in cahoots with a bunch of mostly Missoula hippies like Dirk Lee and Dave Thomas. Also Mark Fryberger, Mike Fiedler, Dana Graham and Frank Dugan. Others.
Initially the magazine kept our 1967 Missoula food service cafeteria hippie group in touch. Now we have Facebook.

The number of freshman student hippies in Missoula after the famous 1967 “Summer of Love” was perhaps 2 dozen. I wanted desperately to belong, so I tried to look hip. You know, hair, work boots, cheap army surplus jacket. They let me sit with them at lunch! One even asked if I knew where to buy some pot. (I didn’t, not yet!) Straight students either ignored us or expressed dislike. This caused us to hold together. In my case, I was lonesome without the hippie folk. I had gone to high school in Dillon and Missoula seemed large and impersonal.
Now, for the first time ever, Brenda Fleming Skornogosky and Kim Thompson Irons are creating an opportunity for a person-to-person reunion of our group of hippie friends! I’ve already invited Mark Fryberger. Virginia Baker Ogden wondered about the whereabouts of Linda (Bin) Sheble and Becky Cuffe. I sent an email to Larry D. Felton, but heard nothing. I couldn’t locate Scott Hendryx, Mike Brown, Steve Starr, Skip Reising, or any others. There were certainly others! Steve Spoja, Bill Yenne, Jerry Berner, and John Herman come to mind. Sadly, John Herman is dead. Old hippies eventually die, or they get married or turn into fussy old curmudgeons.

Gutted darkroom for 2 hours. Bad foundation wall. Spoke to sister on phone for 1 hour. She said I might not be an intellectual, and I am good with that. I told her about wanting to be a writer and wanting to be in a group that critiques each other. I don’t remember what she said about that. I told her I thought I had a certain “genius.” Then I changed it to “sub-genius.” She warned me not to get “too cute.” I think being “almost cute” would go well with my current mental state: “almost happy.” Actually she didn’t say any of that.

This afternoon I will take a load to the landfill and put out the recycling. Then rip out more of the darkroom.

Yesterday at the pharmacy, where I work one day each week, I informed a couple of very intelligent technicians about an actual immaculate conception that really occurred during the American Civil War. Technician Jessica looked at me in the eye and said “bullshit.” I had first heard about the incident from a Tom Waits record, and it was confirmed from another source that I don’t remember. So, here’s what I found out from an actual internet website:

Doctor of medical sciences, Professor Igor Moiseyev comments upon the fantastic fact [my emphasis]: “It is astonishing but incidents of the kind have been already registered in the history of medicine. A “bullet conception” of the same kind was registered in Wiksburg (Mississippi, the US) during the civil war between the South and the North in 1863. The incident is mentioned in the American Weekly Medicine Journal in 1864. A bullet went through a testicle of a man and got into a woman’s stomach; as a result, the woman delivered a boy. A doctor who described the mysterious phenomenon 140 years ago said it was the evidence of the might of the human reproduction system.

Secondly is my good advice to beware of the existence of “chocolate worms” in candy. I looked in Wikipedia, but no article existed yesterday. However, a general Google search yielded photographic evidence–Hershey’s kisses, H.’s chocolate with almonds bars and others—all with worms.

Absolutely true story: When I worked for the infusion pharmacy, “Optioncare,” perhaps 8 years ago, one of the nurses had snatched some Halloween chocolate from a bowl in reimbursement (from a charming woman who once worked for the famous company, “Rounder Records.”) Unwrapping a Hershey’s kiss, taking a bite, and our RN discovered a cream-colored worm, perhaps a quarter-inch long, perhaps a 16th inch thick. I kept the chocolate worm with a fragment of chocolate and some water in a pill bottle, even naming the small beast to honor a psychopath corporate manager. I took the worm to church for a formal blessing, then it died. Not right away, weeks later. The following year the minister complained to a newspaper reporter that someone had brought in a “maggot” to be blessed. That’s when I questioned the sincerity of the ministerial blessing. That minister knew damn good and well it was a chocolate worm, not a maggot.

Hippies were not in fashion in 1968. In fact, one had to stick together with others for safety and for having fun!

A member of the original group of “food service hippies” texted me that one of the founding members of the group, always dominated by citizens from Billings, Montana, was returning to her home town.

I’ll call the one who texted me, “Brenda” and the one returning to her home town, “Kim.” I offered to try to get ahold of a three of the old hippie guys: I’ll call them “Mark,” “Larry,” and “Jerry.”

Here’s the email I sent to “Larry.”

Larry,
Brenda texted me that Kim is coming to Billings May 5-12, so Brenda is driving 200 miles to visit her here. She then said, “I don’t suppose Larry could come. That would be a dream come true, but he’s too far away.”

I responded that I would try to get ahold of you. Do you suppose we could Skype you in or something?

I’m going to try to get ahold of Jerry who lived in 100 miles away last I knew.

I left a message on Mark’s phone. Mark is a fussy old bachelor and worse at getting moving than the late John Herman, who, as you recall, always had to roll “a cigarette just one time.”

Otherwise, send me an email and, at a time whenever everyone is satisfactorily drunk, or something, I’ll clear my throat and read it aloud to your assembled adoring ones.

I’ve always thought a reunion of the UM Lodge Food Service Hippies would be good.

I never have gone to any reunions from high school. Those people were cruel to me then, and I have always been leery of them.

Dan Struckman

Golden wedding anniversary in 1957 of Carl T. and Ellen Bonde in Kalispell

In 1990 I visited a friend in Lame Deer, Montana, whose father-in-law was suffering from a broken neck, so he wore a “halo,” that contraption that looks like a steel cage with his head screwed into the middle, all of it resting on his shoulders. The old man was a grouchy WWII vet who complained of having suffered wounds, boasted of having earned medals. Huh, I thought. My uncle got the only medal that’s important.

I thought of my uncle Carl, killed aboard the SS Leopoldville, Christmas Eve, 1944, and so on and so forth. I’ve told about this so many times. He didn’t get a lot of medals, just the purple heart. I once saw that medal in among my grandmother’s things in Kalispell. She kept all that stuff in a drawer in a desk in the parlor, or living room.

Parlors used to be the place in one’s home where you put dead people before burial. Hence, “funeral parlor.” About the time when bungalows came into style, the front rooms no longer became the places for the dead, but “living rooms.” You probably knew that.

The friend’s name with the ailing father-in-law was Jim Bishoff. He is a physician, or was, before he lost his license. He was accused of murdering Sarah Anthony’s friend’s mother by administering a lethal dose of meperidine at his clinic. To pay for a lawyer, he robbed a bank at gunpoint and is now serving a prison sentence in Deer Lodge at the Montana state penitentiary. That’s how that came out. Bischoff’s wife died in a car wreck around the time of the robbery. Her dad, the one who had the broken neck in Lame Deer, presumably died of something else, by this time.

What gets me about my grandparents’ photo in 1957 is how old they look. I have other photos from the big 50th wedding anniversary in Kalispell. Relatives from far away came, including some very pretty girls that I was thrilled to sit next to, although I had to pretend that I didn’t like them because I was in the 6th grade. I think they were second cousins. I still have those photos somewhere.