Missoula News

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Hi, I’m Your Tour Guide! Where Are We?

By Bob Wire, 2-23-11

"And here's a statue of our mascot, made entirely from used chewing gum."

I am either the worst tour guide ever, or the best tour guide ever. Depends on who you ask, and how much they know. If you’re one of the seventh-graders I led on a winding path through the sprawling campus of the University of Montana last week, you probably just feel sorry for me.

Lucky for me one of my favorite things is messing with seventh-graders. I never attended the University of Montana, and my knowledge of its history, its features, and its very geography is next to zilch. Still, I’d volunteered to give this group of ten middle school brainiacs a brief tour after their grueling morning of math competition tests in the University Center ballroom.

First, I proctored one of their tests in the morning, and it did not go well. The main ballroom reeked of brain steam and zit cream, with more than 500 middle- and high-school Poindexters swapping math jokes and nerd gossip. I was assigned to work the four tables in Sector 13. All my kids finished their tests (they should have, I accidentally started them a few minutes before I was supposed to), but I managed to fluster pretty much every one of them with my own ineptitude. I had most of them wrongly affix their ID labels to the test sheets instead of the answer cards, told a couple of them that using calculators was cheating (everyone used a calculator), and ate a lot of the candy that was being distributed by the candy lady.

A few minutes after I told the kids to get started, the administrator in charge spoke into his wireless microphone as he roamed among the ocean of number crunchers. “Okay, we’re just about ready to begin, I think. Is everybody ready?” Several kids in Sector 13 stopped moving their pencils and looked over at me. I just shrugged, and then twirled my finger in the air: Get going! Sector 13 kicks ass!

After lunch with my daughter Speaker and her friend, I met Group 5 on the lower floor of the UC. Our tour was to take us to the Fine Arts Building (“What are we going to see, Group Five?” “Fine art!” “Oh HELL yeah!”), back to the UC to visit the art gallery, then across the Oval to the Native American Studies building to see something else. We had no idea what we were supposed to see at these places, and that’s okay because I wouldn’t know anything about them anyway. So I was determined to bullshit my way through the entire hour and fifteen minutes.

“Okay, Group Five, I’m Mr. Wire, and I’ll be your tour guide, your teacher, and your guru for the next hour. I hope you’re ready to learn, because I’m an expert on the history of the U of M, and I’ll be asking you a lot of trivia questions.” I whipped a meat stick out of my pocket and held it up like a chewy scepter. “I have a Slim Jim for the person who can tell me who won the first Super Bowl.”

“Green Bay Packers,” said Justin R. “Thirty-five ten over the Chiefs. First of three. Vince Lombardi. Best coach of all time. Super Bowl trophy is named after him.”

I gave Justin the Slim Jim. “Packers fan, are ya? Okay, wise guy, what’s the NFL record for longest field goal?”

“Tom Dempsey. New Orleans, 1970. Sixty-three yards.”

“And…?”

“Club foot,” he said, with a smug little nerd smile. I gave him the rest of the Slim Jims.

“Okay then! Let’s roll.” I’d studied my map of the campus the previous evening, but the intricate webbing of sidewalks made it difficult to suss out a direct route to anywhere. After several wrong turns and a couple of shortcuts through the mud, we walked right past the entrance to the Fine Arts building and arrived at the University Theatre. One of the kids pointed out a slab of marble that bore the title “Fine Arts.” Well, this must be it, somehow, I figured.

We entered the theatre lobby, and I told them about the ghost that is purported to inhabit the theatre. It was probably the only real fact I gave them on the tour, and they didn’t believe it. The theatre was empty except for a guy onstage, tuning a grand piano. I put my finger to my lips. “Shh! If you’ve always wanted to watch a grand piano get tuned by a guy in a large theater, here’s your chance!” We tiptoed down toward the stage, and I called out, “Hey, man, how much to come do that for my guitar?” The guy stopped tuning and looked up towards us. An F-sharp note hovered in the air. “Okay, kids,” I said. “Time to go.”

After much grumbling and a couple of outright threats (from the piano tuner), we were back on the hopelessly complex network of sidewalks. “You know,” I told my charges, “when Lewis and Clark first discovered this campus in 1932, during the war, there were no sidewalks at all. They’d brought a concrete mixer with them from St. Louis and hired local natives to come in and pave all the dirt trails as a courtesy to the students.”

A hand shot up. “Was it the Blackfeet?”

“No, obviously not, or they would have used asphalt. Good question, though.”

I saw one kid say to another, “Man, if this guy had been in the Corps of Discovery, we’d all be speaking Salish.”

Undaunted, I pressed on. We walked past the Emma B. Lommasson building (“Inventor of the cupcake pan!”), and found the tiny house that was supposed to be the Native American Studies building. A sign on the door said that Native American Studies had moved to the Native American Center, a building we’d already passed at least four times.

“Looks like the Indians aren’t home,” I said, walking down from the porch. “It’s time to go back to the bus anyway.” I led them across the Oval, and Kyle, the kid I’d appointed to carry my manila envelope of Important Papers, suggested we go through the Main Hall, where they have a scale model of the entire campus. “Is it actual size?” I asked him. “You know, ‘one mile equals one mile’?” Kyle did not laugh.

We entered the building, and sure enough, right there in the middle of the room, was a highly accurate, clearly-labeled model of the campus. All the buildings were numbered and corresponded to an easy-to-read legend. “Well,” I said, “this would sure have come in handy before we started this turd hunt.” I smacked Kyle on the back of the head. “Gimme that envelope. You’re fired.”

I delivered the kids to the bus, thus fulfilling my legal requirement. They all climbed on board, knowing even less about the U of M campus than when they’d arrived, if that’s possible. I was grateful that Speaker had been in someone else’s group, because she would have been shamed in ways that can scar a 13-year-old girl for the rest of her middle school life. There is nothing more heartless, more vicious, more cruelly atavistic than a middle school girl, and her peers would have made her life into Dante’s seventh circle of hell.

I washed my hands and my feet of the whole episode, and hustled back into the UC to make a phone call to the Missoula Downtown Association. I heard they’re looking for a Downtown Ambassador.

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