Chapter 1
The Crazies: Roots
Big Timber: 1937-42


Plenty Coup, chief of the Crows, sought visions from an early age. When he was ten, he came to the Crazy Mountains with two friends and climbed to a high lake at the baseof the highest peak, where downed trees fell across each other and bleached white in the few hours of sun that penetrated the deep valleys.  Peering between the trees he saw the gray slab of the mountain rising sheer from the blue lake to the lighter blue of the sky. He had gone without food or water for four days until his tongue was thick, but the spirits would not speak. Placing his finger upon a log, he cut through it, so was ever after  shorter, and when it would not bleed, he stabbed it repeatedly into that same log until it did.

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BIG TIMBER

I could see the Crazies clearly from the back porch of our home in Big Timber where I lived until I was five. The Crazies rise up from a flat meadows north of Big Timber, Montana. You could draw a circle around them with a radius of less than 50 miles. The next mountains in any direction are the Absorakas, 150 miles away. Because of their isolation, the Crazies seem particularly dramatic. No one seems to know how they got their name. A roadside marker suggests a woman was found wandering there stark out of her mind but fails to supply any detail. The Crazies are snow-covered through much of the summer: remote, pristine. Beckoning and forbidding at the same time, as all mountains are.

Our house was at the bottom of a low hill on the north side of town across the railroad tracks. It had a concrete porch running its length, with a railing and pillars made of native stone, At the top of the hill were low matching pillars, also of native stone, on either side of the road that led down, so the whole place had an estate-like feel, though I have been back to it many times and can see it is quite modest.

I could watch people walking down the hill to visit. One figure that came down that road changed my life forever. He was one of my mother’s students, graduated and gone off the join the Navy. He came to see his old teacher, wearing his dress whites. He must have somehow become an officer for I remember the short-visored hat and lots of brass buttons. To my eyes, he could have been a Greek god, descending from Olympus, resplendent in the sun. I grew to love the sea, read my way steadily through the Hornblower novels, spent three years at sea in the Navy, and to this day, weep when I finally have to turn inland after a visit to the ocean. It is hard to think that would have all happened if that young man had not dressed up and come to visit his old Latin teacher who lived at the bottom of the hill.

The house seemed huge to me then as all houses inevitably do to small children. I remember candling eggs in the bathroom because it was the room that could be most conveniently darkened, holding each one up to a light and looking for the tell-tale veins that would signal life and make the egg useless for market purposes. I can be sure that my mother read to me, because she always did: The Little Engine that Could when I was five, Treasure Island when I was 9. It may have dwindled down after that but in the 8th grade, she stayed up half the night reading me Julius Caesar to distract me from my pain when I smashed my thumb in a car door.

The property included some out-buildings for the horses my father always had, including Patsy, an even tempered black mare that I rode until I was 15. There was an old sleigh, and once my father hooked Patsy up to it and took me for a ride down the snow-banked streets of Big Timber. Suddenly the sleigh ran up on the snow bank and tipped gently over on its side. I thought it was great fun, but when I enthusiastically told my mother about it, I saw her face darken and my father look crestfallen, I understood that somehow I had come between them, which is nearly as terrible a feeling as a child can have. Sometimes on a weekend, I would come with my father to the school where he taught and down in the great cavernous shop which could be accessed by a concrete drive way that sloped down from street level. Once when I was there, he let some boys roller skate down it, and another time, my mother and I went to the school to see an octopus floating in a galvanized wash tub. How the octopus got there, and whether it was alive or dead I never knew, but I knew that fathers had access to great mysteries.

FATHERS AND SONS

My whole vision of the Crazies was complicated by the nearly complete identification of them with my father. My father was what we now call a voc-ag teacher, but he referred to himself as Smith-Hughes teacher, He taught rural students farm skills, from welding to basic animal doctoring, skills he himself had learned growing up on farms near Great Falls, or in earning a degree in agriculture, or that he had taught himself, for he was a clever man. The Smith-Hughes act had been passed in 1917. In the words of the act itself, it was to train people "who have entered upon or who are preparing to enter upon the work of the farm." Along with the Morrill Act that set up Land Grant colleges in 1892 and the 1914 Smith-Lever act that established County Extension agents in 1914, the Smith-Hughes act was an attempt to bring knowledge to the farm, to marry the knowledge found in books to the knowledge of the soil—which became my appointed task as well, however badly done, however reluctantly.

That is what he was doing when he met my mother who had come from Chicago with her classics degree to teach English and Latin. As good wives did in those days, she quit her job when she became pregnant and so my early memories are of long slow days with my mother--stacking blocks, or candling eggs, or in conversation about what happened to toe-nail clippings, or painting with food-color paints on the concrete floor of the porch. and then sharing the results with my father when he drove between the rock pillars and down the road to our house. Then he would admire my art work on the concrete floor or show me how to build block towers higher and higher by offsetting successive blocks slightly in a direction opposite to the way the tower was tending to topple (a principle I have used often in my life, but not always successfully).

Every summer he would take a group of his students on a pack-trip into the Crazies. His absence was hard on me and I suspect my mother may have felt the same way though she was not much given to sharing her feelings and I was not much given to soliciting them from her even then. I have many pictures of my father on those trips, dressed in riding boots and pants, standing slightly akimbo to compensate for his gimp leg, which had been withered and shortened four inches by polio when he was six.  Every morning I would stand in our yard and look at the mountains, white and blue, and imagine that I could see my father and his students,  riding through the pine forests single file, some of the horses loaded with fat pack saddles and others carrying earnest mountain boys, some of whom would probably go to war before it was over. I knew nothing of the war, nothing of the terrible empires growing in Europe and in the Pacific. I only knew my father was up there somewhere and that someday I would be grown enough to go with him.

He must have loved his students to have arranged this trip, and perhaps they were part was his restless energy he always had. He also started a boxing club. Neither one were part of his assignment but things he did on his own, as he later took on the leadership of a 4-H Club. I was able to see some of the affection his students had for him much later when I took him to a reunion of Sweetgrass County high school in Big Timber in the early 80’s. My mother was dead by then, but there were speeches honoring them both, and after the banquet his students stood under the streetlamp for an hour reminiscing, no one able to tear themselves away.

Those extra achievements must have cost him much, emotionally as well as financially. Away from his own horizons, his own routines, his own bed, he would grow restless and irritable.  Travel of any kind was hard on him. He did not easily accommodate himself to strange environments, especially if he was not making the rules. It was a rare out-of-state trip when he came to Chicago to marry my mother in 1934, the year of the world’s fair. He came two days before the wedding, left that evening and never went east again. In fact, he hardly ever left the state before or after that. When my mother took us to see her parents on the train, he stayed home. The two trips that he made to see me after I was married were terrible experiences for everyone, especially for my mother who would try desperately to arrange his comfort. As he grew older, even in-state travel was difficult.

I have imagined, on the basis of slim evidence, that my father’s troubles were some of my own and that such troubles might go further back into the family line. After my father’s mother and father had had four children together, his mother left his father and lived the rest of her life with a rich neighbor known to the family as “uncle Jack.” With him, she had two more children who were always introduced to me as another uncle and aunt. This was never discussed in the family when I was present, and my mother told me only years after I had left home. She offered no reason. Their grinding rural poverty could have been reason enough, but I wondered if my grandfather might have suffered under the same dark clouds that I and my father did and if the strain on his spouse might have made greener pastures even greener.

I have wondered if my father and his father before him were not what William James, in The Will to Believe, calls “twice born.” Such personalities are, James says, to be distinguished from ones which are “once born.” The once born are those who, whatever their level of unhappiness on any given day, take for granted their right to exist and their obligation to keep going. They know The Darkness is there, but it is not a continual presence in their lives. Perhaps there are fewer of these than James might think. The twice born are those who are driven to persistently question those basic things. For periods of time, at least, they cannot ever “let go.” They must remind themselves, almost on a daily basis, of their obligation to live and devise intricate strategies to do so. They can live normal lives, but they have to make a deliberate choice to do so, putting on normality every morning as one might put on a suit of armor and then conforming their inner lives—gratefully for the most part—to its shape. Suicide can seem to them a natural option--at times an inevitable one.

However that might be, the impatience and anger that my brother and I came to know so well must have been present then and have served him badly in his teaching. Family lore reports that at one point, he “kicked a student down the stairs.” I gather that this about the same time, my mother lost their first child, a baby girl, born in 1935. Perhaps the two events were connected. I have heard relatives describe him as shattered by the death, and my mother said once he blamed himself for taking my mother on outings in the late stages of her pregnancy and letting her open the gates. My sister only lived a few hours and never received a name. She is buried under a brass plate, marked “Baby Slanger” in the Utermohle plot of the cemetery in Big Timber. Wind and time build up the dirt around the plate so it is covered with sod most of the time, an her grave would be unmarked except that periodically I dig down and expose the brass plate again.

After that episode, or because of its being part of a pattern, my father was given a kind of forced sabbatical to recover. In the depths of the depression, he and my mother cashed in some life insurance and went on a long trek through Southern California. It was a brave act. My mother kept detailed financial records all her life, along with a terse diary, and they had a camera, so the trip is well documented. Evidently part of their purpose was to allow him to try different vocations. He worked for a time in a saddle shop. He was treated at Mayo Clinic, something I learned a little more about later, but only a little. When they came back from the trip, my mother was pregnant with me, and my father got his job back.

REVISITING

Sometimes in the 1980’s, I finally got up into the Crazies myself, in the company of my wife and a friend from College, George Mattson. The mountains were as beautiful up close as they were from a distance. They seemed more compact than any mountain range I’ve hiked. In the Crazies you seldom see a long vistas with mountains at the far end. The grey rocks seem always immediate and the creeks that run between them are exquisite jewels scattered through massive stone boulders. We toiled up the mountains, and made camp in a particularly beautiful site. It was easy to imagine my father might have camped in this same place with his group or at least passed through it on the their way to wider meadow with more room and pasture for the horses.

One does not have to be Hamlet to be haunted by the ghost of his father, asking him why he has not done a better job. The ghost of my father is in those rocks. In the context of other mountain ranges, my father was to set for me obscure and terrible standards that I could not meet. Before I was done, my life became nearly as crazy as that woman they found wanderig about in the meadows at the foot of the mountains that rise into the air above the Sweetgrass River. But in those days there was only the broad lawn in front of stone-pillared porch, and my mother attentive to my every mood and need, keeping me close in the dark bathroom where we held the eggs up one by one to look for signs of life that were not wanted quite yet, waiting for my father to come driving down the hill to listen solemnly while I told him what I had done that day.