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Blog: Missoula Notebook

The question is whether we have any good way to prevent gun sales to the stupid at the policy level, as opposed to, say, harshly punishing the Smails of the world. If gun sales were to become illegal tomorrow, there would of course quickly be even more of a flourishing illegal market in the things than there is right now (and it’s already pretty flourishing). I’d refer you to, say, the market in illegal drugs, and point out that a lot of people who would like to see a prohibition on gun sales might be open, on the other hand, to a decriminalization of some forms of currently illegal drugs. Of course there are huge distinctions to be made (pot never killed anyone, but handguns — not so much), and I’m not saying that holding the two views makes anyone a hypocrite, but I do think it would be foolish to ignore the apparently powerful desire of vast numbers of people in this country to own guns, and to fail to consider the evidence from the “drug war” that a lot of people are quite willing to disobey laws they consider unjust. [more]

Missoula Notebook

At various points in my life, I have resolved to remember that statements like this one are suspect at best and great huge red flags of warning most of the time. “Unsinkable”; “what’s the worst that could happen?”; “she’s never done that before”; etc. The problem is that every time I relearn this lesson, I start to fly right for a while, which means I get used to nothing going wrong, which means I start to let my guard down. Especially in situations where the stakes seem low, which they certainly did as we looked at the two simple circles on the ranger’s map, one green, one blue. [more]

Missoula Notebook

It’s not that I was expecting a brilliant, transcendent viewing experience (which turned out to be smart of me), but rather that Stand By Me has long been on an informal mental of list of mine containing various movies and television series that were popular while I was growing up but that I missed seeing for an assortment of reasons, including (1) parents who actually paid attention to MPAA-rating age limits, (2) lack of a television in the house when I was between the ages of 4 and 8 (and relatively restricted viewing thereafter), and (3) a sort of general pop-cultural tone-deafness resulting from the interaction of these and other factors. [more]

big sky documentary film festival

A few years ago my mother gave me a photograph of my grandfather, taken in about 1953. He is sitting with several fellow miners in the rock-walled tunnel of a copper mine, their black metal lunch boxes at their feet and the ore-cart tracks curving into the darkness beyond. I keep this photograph above my desk to remind myself what hard work is really all about when I’m whining over a deadline or wondering how to cut down a word count, but I never understood what that hard work consisted of until Thursday’s screening of Butte, America, the kickoff film of this weekend’s fifth annual Big Sky Documentary Film Festival.

Producer and director Pam Roberts and associate producer and co-writer Edwin Dobb tell the story of Butte not only with epic historical sweep (as befits a place where mere humans have wrought such immense changes to the surface of the earth) but also at a very personal level, foregrounding and respecting the reminiscences of the men and women who lived through the booms and busts of Montana’s legendary mining town. [more]

Missoula Notebook

I see it like this: if Montana weren’t the kind of state where avalanche risk can close highways, it also wouldn’t be the kind of state where my wife and I can drive an hour from our house and snowshoe around on top of a hundred inches of snow so fresh and smooth and untouched it looks like some giant has arranged immense scoops of vanilla ice cream all the way to the horizon, which is the best way I can think of to describe the conditions we enjoyed up at Lolo last weekend.
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Missoula Notebook

So, just to help me relax, we’re buying a house. We put in a bid two weeks ago, and, after a few anxiety-inducing days, we heard the news: we’re under contract, all set to take possession of our own little piece of Missoula on March 3rd. Yesterday was the inspection, and if those aren’t good for the nerves, I don’t know what is. This is only our second purchased house, so Amy and I are not hugely familiar with What Can Go Wrong. Going into the inspection, we were just hoping to hear that the roof won’t need replacing this year (it won’t), the foundation looks sound (it does), and there’s nothing about the furnace/gas-line setup to suggest that the house is imminent danger of launching itself into low-earth orbit (it isn’t). But in what seems like a perfect metaphor for the very nature of anxiety itself, there are these little things, below the surface, that might or not be a problem. [more]

Missoula Notebook

I’ve heard Romney supporters described as “the Kool Aid drinkers”, which is to say that some observers feel that Romney has positioned himself as the candidate for anyone who thinks Bush has done nothing wrong. But I have to admit that no one in attendance was actually drooling red. In fact, they all looked like regular folks — plaid shirts, some Filson vests, nice neat haircuts. I took a seat next to a middle-aged man with the intense, inquisitive expression of someone Still Making Up His Mind and a legal pad balanced on one knee, as if he were waiting for Mitt's son to finally clear up a few things about American politics for him. When I sat down, he was reading a handout that quoted Romney as calling for “a strong military, strong economy, and strong families,” the kind of political rallying cry that seems designed to say more about your opponents’ positions than yours. [more]

Missoula Notebook

Two weeks ago Monday, a white-haired woman in jeans and a flannel shirt was carrying paint-flecked boxes from her car into a curiously shaped building tucked among the trees in downtown Missoula’s Caras Park. Inside, in the still-dark, still-chilly vaulted space, she laid out the day’s supplies on three folding tables: cans of paint, tiny brushes, pencils, empty baby-food jars, toothbrushes, rags, sponges, sandpaper, toothpicks, Q-tips, popsicle sticks, plastic spoons and two binders entitled Paint the Ponies: How to Paint Historic Wooden Carousels. The day had dawned bright and cold, with the temperature not yet above twenty degrees and a winter storm warning announced for that night. Weather like this makes Maggie Caraway wonder if she did the right thing by moving back to her native Montana from Arizona eight years ago, but if she had never come back she never would have gotten involved with A Carousel for Missoula, where she’s been volunteering almost ever since. [more]

Missoula Notebook

Any passersby ducking into the Montana Natural History Center last Saturday at around 11:30 a.m. couldn’t have been blamed for thinking that they had stumbled onto some sort of Twister master class. In the main exhibition room, under the attentive eyes of about a dozen humans and the somewhat glassier eyes of various stuffed and mounted animals — bears, a moose, a wolverine, a bison, etc. — a thin, blond-haired man with a full beard was bent at the waist, both his hands and his feet planted on the small Persian rug that had been spread out as padding on the concrete floor. [more]

Missoula Notebook

I’ve always been interested in what the community has to say about items in the news; the newspaper letters page has always been one of my favorite sections. And letters pages here in Missoula are, in some ways, even more interesting than in larger-market papers, such as the Baltimore Sun, my former hometown paper. The difference, for me, is the ongoing conversation made possible by the relatively smaller readership and proportion of letters coming in. I really enjoy the back and forth that is possible as a result, not to mention the off-topic announcements and statements that appear from time to time as well. [more]

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