Rural Americans increased their adoption of broadband Internet technology at a rapid rate over the last year, according to a report released last week by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, but rural communities still lag far behind urban regions in the spread of fast Internet connections.
The percentage of rural residents with broadband connections increased from 38 percent in 2008 to 46 percent this year, a 21 percent increase in just one year. In 2006, just 25 percent of those living in rural America had home broadband.
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New West Book Review
Disappearing Act: Candida Lawrence’s “Vanishing”
Vanishing
by Candida Lawrence
275 pages, $23.95
Candida Lawrence's new Vanishing is a collection of incisive, chronologically arranged personal essays that plunge the reader into vivid moments of her past, beginning in 1942 when Candida is in college at Berkeley and is a reporter for the Daily Cal, and extending into recent times, when she is coping with aging and adjusting to a changed world. Like Mary Gordon, Lawrence writes with great candor, wit, and intelligence about her family. Lawrence lives in Mill Valley, California, and is the author of three previous memoirs. As she reveals in one of the most arresting pieces in the book, "Vanishing: 1965," Lawrence spent years hiding out under an assumed identity after she took off with her children in the wake of a messy divorce which had left her with very limited visitation rights. This is perhaps why, as revelatory as these essays are, they still bear an air of mystery.
Lawrence writes bracing prose, mainly in present tense, replete with precise detail; the effect of this approach is that the reader feels as though sitting right beside her in 1965 when she flies to San Diego with $500 for an abortion in Mexico. "We rent a 1965 Ford Sedan, blue with a white interior, AM-FM radio, and a clock that works," she writes. "I sit primly on the dazzling vinyl and feel small." In Tijuana, they wait in a parking lot for a station wagon that comes to take women to a clinic. Lawrence's descriptions of the people with her on that ride provide a cross section of women in the same situation:
"To my right is Black Woman, calm, dignified. Next to Black Woman is a young girl…dressed in faded jeans…Her eyes are red from recent weeping and seem about to spill over again. Facing Young Girl on the bench opposite, is an older woman in a light-blue pants suit…I would have guessed her to be too old for this trip, but perhaps she has similar thoughts about me."
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HOW TO ENJOY BICYCLING CITY STREETS
Practical Tips for Making Bicycle Commuting Safer and Easier
More and more people are making the big move to bicycle commuting and finding out it isn't that difficult or dangerous to make it to work or school or coffee shop or grocery store, but even more haven't make the move. Having talked about this issue with many who haven't, I made a list of practical tips and advice that address many of the common concerns I've heard.
I've been commuting around town on my bicycle for thirty years without a single accident involving a motor vehcile, and for a long time, I couldn't understand why people didn't do it, but now, I get it.
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A Victory for Libby
Long Time Coming: EPA Declares Public Health Emergency in Libby
Nearly 10 years after government cleanup crews first arrived to deal with asbestos contamination that has killed hundreds of people, the EPA has announced that a public health emergency exists in Libby, Montana.
The declaration -- the first of its kind -- was made today by EPA administrator Lisa Jackson at a joint press conference with Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Montana Sens. Max Baucus and Jon Tester.
The announcement acknowledges the dire medical needs of Libby area residents, who are suffering an epidemic of asbestos-related diseases. Libby residents die from asbestosis, a scarring of the lungs, at a rate 40 to 80 times normal, according to government studies.
The public health emergency declaration paves the way for medical assistance money to arrive in Lincoln County for Libby and nearby Troy. The EPA, in connection with the Department of Health and Human Services, announced it will provide a short-term grant to the area to help provide asbestos-related medical assistance for screening, diagnostic and treatment services.
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Bankruptcy Court, or Divorce Court?
Yellowstone Club Chronicles: Edra Forced to Liquidate, Tim Launches PR Campaign
The scene in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Butte on Tuesday, where a hearing was held on former Yellowstone Club owner Edra Blixseth's last-ditch effort to keep control of her disastrous financial situation, was more poignant than dramatic. Edra, looking downtrodden, spent most of the day in the witness chair, trying to explain how and why she had messed up her bankruptcy case by failing to maintain insurance on her assets and filing important court documents late and incomplete.
Meanwhile, in the back corner of the Beaux Arts courtroom - which was packed during the Yellowstone Club bankruptcy proceedings but on this day was mostly empty - sat her ex-husband Tim, accompanied by his son Beau and his new wife Jessica, ready to drive more nails into Edra's coffin.
In the event, Tim Blixseth's presence, and the colorful but harsh 26-page affidavit he filed last week outlining his ex's alleged bad behavior, were academic, at least for this proceeding. The court had already converted Edra's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, in which she would get the chance to reorganize her own affairs, into a Chapter 7, a forced liquidation overseen by a U.S. Trustee. Tuesday's hearing (which I was able to attend only briefly) was her chance to argue that the decision should be reversed. But it seemed like a long shot, and indeed U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Ralph B. Kirscher denied the motion, setting the stage for a fire-sale of the Porcupine Creek estate and Edra's numerous other properties at the Yellowstone Club and elsewhere.
Tim Blixseth's court filing, though, was about more than his ex-wife's bankruptcy. The Yellowstone Club founder argues that the whole financial debacle that enveloped the club last year, and resulted in the club's bankruptcy filing and the eventual sale of the property to CrossHarbor Capital Partners, was Edra's fault. He's now hired a public relations firm to help him make the case - which, as we'll see in a minute, remains a very high-stakes affair.
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From WyoFile
Freudenthal: Wyoming Should Review Federal Mineral Royalties
Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal says the state should review Wyoming’s participation in a federal minerals royalty program that has come under increasing Congressional scrutiny.
In an interview with WyoFile, the governor said he would ask the director of State Lands and Investments to check into the performance of a federal “Royalty in Kind”program for natural gas launched in the state three years ago.
In 2008, $290 million, or about 53 percent of the state’s share of federal royalties from natural gas on federal land in Wyoming was collected under a “Royalty in Kind” system managed by the federal Department of Interior’s Minerals Management Service.
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'A VERY BIG PLAY'
Report: Oil Shale Offers Promise, Pitfalls
Oil shale has a rocky past in the West and an uncertain future, but the sheer amount of resources available, and dwindling supplies of world oil, could make it a crucial resource.
That’s the conclusion of a report by the University of Colorado’s Center for the American West, which found “serious and significant” environmental challenges related to extracting the fuel, balanced against the “world class proportions” of oil shale believed to be in the ground.
“As the world moves toward a renewable energy future, oil shale may well be the end game of the Fossil Fuel Age,” write authors Patty Limerick, the center’s director, and Jason Hanson, a member of its research faculty. “But it is a very big play.”
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New West Book Review
Birdman: Rachel Dickinson’s “Falconer on the Edge”
Falconer on the Edge: A Man, His Birds, and the Vanishing Landscape of the American West
by Rachel Dickinson
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 220 pages, $24
In Falconer on the Edge, Rachel Dickinson gives readers an in-depth look at a subculture that many people may not be aware existed. Falconers are an intense, passionate, tight-knit group of bird-loving hunters, and they subdivide themselves according to the type of bird they fly, from those who favor hunting sage grouse with gyrfalcon-peregrine hybrids ("an überbird [with] stamina and speed and beauty") to those who fly hawks to catch squirrels and jackrabbits. The falconers Dickinson depicts remind me of a more athletic and outdoorsy version of Trekkies, with their conventions, cliques, private jargon derived from Norman French, and the way they are often misunderstood by outsiders.
Although falconry ("a loose term [that] refers to flying any kind of raptor or bird of prey") originated perhaps 3,500 years ago in the Middle East, spread through Asia and Europe, and didn't catch on in North America until the twentieth century, it seems a pastime tailor-made for the American West, as it requires a lot of open space and abundant game. With all the care and training that a bird of prey demands, not to mention the need for the falconer to be in top condition to run through fields after his bird, it might be the most labor and time-intensive variety of hunting, which is why so few practice it. Dickinson writes, "Today there are approximately forty-five hundred licensed falconers in the United States, and two to three thousand of them belong to [the North American Falconers Association]." Judging from the portraits in Dickinson's book, there are no casual falconers.
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Western Writers
An Interview with Ron Carlson About “The Signal”
Utah native Ron Carlson has been publishing acclaimed novels and short stories for over three decades, and in recent years he's hit a stride, with two novels, Five Skies and the new The Signal back-to-back. Carlson directed the Creative Writing program at Arizona State University for many years and three years ago became the Creative Writing program director at the University of California at Irvine. The Signal, which Carlson wrote at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, is the action-packed tale of a divorced couple who go backpacking in the Wind River Mountains and run into all sorts of trouble, including some unfriendly meth-runners who poach elk on the side. I recently spoke with Carlson about his new novel, which he started because he "wanted to stand up behind [his] goddamn pickup truck again," and about how "camping is essentially about when things go wrong."
New West: Is The Signal just an elaborate way for you to scare other potential campers off of your favorite hiking trail?
Ron Carlson: You know, it has that. I didn't mean to scare everybody.
NW: In the front of the book, you advise people, "If I was going to go into the Wind Rivers today, I would use the Bears Ears trailhead and I would go before September 10." But after reading about all the perils that Mack and Vonnie face, nobody is going to want to go on this trail.
RC: I just wanted to make sure that no one went after then, because you can run into snow.
NW: I think I'd rather run into snow than some of the things that Mack and Vonnie run into.
RC: I don't want anybody to get snowed in the way I did, and I've written about that. What I really wanted to do was have my vicarious experience and write a little love letter to the mountains, which I'm not in enough. I just got on fire for that and wrote this outdoor book.
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Tim vs. Edra
Yellowstone Club Chronicles: The Edra Blixeth Bankruptcy
The Yellowstone Club bankruptcy may be all but over, but lest the lawyers - or the journalists for that matter - worry that they'll be out of work, we now have what might be called Yellowstone Club 2: The Edra Blixseth Bankruptcy.
Like the original Yellowstone Club case, this is anything but a normal bankruptcy proceeding, with Edra Blixseth initially filing a Chapter 11 bankruptcy that showed personal debts of more than $500 million. Earlier this month, Judge Ralph B. Kircher - the same federal bankruptcy judge who heard the Yellowstone Club case - converted her Chapter 11 filing to a Chapter 7 liquidation - a decision Blixseth is now trying to get reversed.
In a court filing late last week, Edra Blixseth outlined how she hoped to reorganize her affairs and get people paid, namely by developing (and then selling) her Porcupine Creek estate in Palm Springs as a residential golf club, reviving her highly controversial software company, Blxware, and pursuing legal claims against her ex-husband Tim and others. (A PDF of her affidavit is here).
On Thursday, Tim Blixseth fired back in spectacular fashion, filing a court declaration that lays out in great detail his argument that his ex-wife's wild spending and "dishonest tactics" were actually the cause of all the problems. (PDF here) The affidavit offers lurid details of Edra's alleged excesses - including a supposed "divorce celebration" party which cost $90,000 and included "invitations in the shape of a parking meter which, when opened, revealed my face and read 'your time has expired'."
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