HOME OFF THE RANGE
West’s Wild Horses Heading East?
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is proposing to move wild horses – for many an iconic image of the wildness of the West – to controlled preserves in the East or Midwest. The plan is intended to tackle the growing environmental problems associated with wild horses and burros as their populations swell on what are often marginal desert landscapes.
“It’s both a humane solution and a fiscally-responsible solution,” said Bob Abbey, director of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management which runs the wild horse program, on Wednesday.
Salazar is asking Congress to create two new preserves to maintain herds of nonproductive horses and burros that are rounded up on public lands each year but are not adopted.
[more]Breaking News
Sen. Barkus Charged With 3 Felonies for Boat Crash That Injured Rehberg, Staffers
Three felony charges were filed against Kalispell state Sen. Greg Barkus Wednesday after his alleged driving of a boat under the influence of alcohol led to an Aug. 27 crash on the shore of Flathead Lake that injured him, his wife, Congressman Denny Rehberg and two of his staff members.
Charging documents revealed a blood test taken one hour and 45 minutes after the accident by Kalispell Regional Medical Center showed Barkus had a blood alcohol content (BAC) of 0.16, twice the legal limit. Four hours after the accident, a test administered by the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks revealed Barkus’ BAC at 0.12.
Flathead County Attorney Ed Corrigan charged Barkus with felony criminal endangerment for knowingly engaging in “conduct that created a substantial risk to of death or serious bodily injury to others,” referring to the passengers on the boat. The charge carries a maximum term in state prison of 10 years and/or a maximum fine of $50,000.
Check back with the Flathead Beacon for updates.
[more]
Saying they were concerned about the rights of white people, five demonstrators gathered in Kalispell Saturday evening on the sidewalk next to Depot Park, with one man waving a flag for the Creativity Movement and others holding hand-lettered signs at the cars passing by, which occasionally honked in support. Though small, the Kalispell rally was in line with what the Montana Human Rights Network has identified as “an upswing in white supremacist activity recently” in the state.
A 20-year-old Kalispell woman who would only identify herself as “Kat,” and who held a sign reading “Affirmative Action = Racism,” said she organized the demonstration to show, “how everyone has their own rights but the whites don’t.”
New West Book Review
Laughing on the Way to Bankruptcy: Jess Walter’s “Financial Lives of the Poets”
The Financial Lives of the Poets
by Jess Walter
Harper, 290 pages, $25.99
In his hilarious and timely new novel, Spokane’s Jess Walter explores the maxim that there’s nothing more dangerous than an unemployed man, even though the primary person in danger may be the man himself, as is the case with protagonist Matt Prior. Several years before The Financial Lives of the Poets begins, Matt was a business reporter for a daily newspaper and he decided to pursue his ill-conceived dream: starting a website that reports business news in poetry form. When Poetfolio.com tanked before it was even launched, something that everyone but Matt could see coming, Matt scurried back to his newspaper job. But because he’d left, he lost his seniority at the paper, and was one of the first to be laid off when the paper downsized.
Matt couldn’t afford to lose his job: he’s got an enormous mortgage on a big house, a car payment, a garage full of supposedly collectible crap that his wife purchased in a compulsive shopping binge on eBay, and two non-Catholic young sons who attend Catholic school because the neighborhood public school reminds Matt of Sing-Sing. One evening when Matt has just received a letter from the mortgage company threatening foreclosure in a week, he is becoming increasingly suspicious of his wife’s Facebook conversations with her old high school boyfriend, and his unemployment benefits are about to run out, Matt heads to a 7-Eleven to buy some milk. “Two tattooed white kids in silk sweat suits step to the line behind me and I tense a little, double-pat my wallet,” Walter writes. As Matt walks outside, one of the guys offers him “a hit on a glass blunt.”
Jess Walter will discuss The Financial Lives of the Poets at Powells Books in Portland, Ore. on October 29, in Missoula at Fact and Fiction on November 5, and at the University Bookstore in Moscow, Idaho on December 3.
[more]NOT FOR THE LIMP-WRISTED AMONG US
Muskie Hunting for Beginners
If you’ve spent your outdoor life with flycasting for trout or chasing elk out here in the New West, you might be asking: What’s a muskie?
Steelheaders might object to this answer, but to me, the muskie could be the ultimate freshwater game fish. It’s sort of like the great white shark of freshwater, a mythical and mysterious apex predator that fascinates us--some of us, at least, those of us with a fishing problem.
Catching a muskie has always been on my life list, and this was the year I decided to do it, but it didn’t quite turn out as I expected.
[more]New West Book Review
Mike Roselle Details Years of Environmental Activism in “Tree Spiker”
Tree Spiker: From Earth First! to Lowbagging: My Struggles in Radical Environmental Action
by Mike Roselle with Josh Mahan
St. Martin’s Press
252 pages, $24.99
Mike Roselle is a co-founder of the San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network, Earth First!, and the Ruckus Society. Tree Spiker details his life as an environmental activist and outsider agitator. In his acknowledgments, Roselle notes that this book doesn’t completely cover the movement or even his memories, but that we should think of it as “a series of campfire tales and late-night bar talk.” And that’s exactly how it reads: like sitting next to a great storyteller and hearing his fascinating experiences.
Anyone living in the West, or anyone even remotely interested in the environment or environmental groups, should read Tree Spiker. When I looked at the gothic-like cover with spooky trees and horror writing yellow font, I wasn’t sure how much I would like it. In college I read Edward Abbey’s books and found Hayduke’s slovenly sexism and tossing aluminum cans out car windows unattractive, and I figured Roselle would be more of the same. But then I read he spent part of his childhood in Butler County, Kentucky, where a billboard with a picture of three hooded Klansmen burning a cross welcomed people to Klan country. That intrigued me, but Roselle hooked me with:
“I heard a rumor that my father, Stewart Lee, was in town. I hadn’t seen him since my step-grandfather chased him out of our house with a pistol he kept for that purpose. The last time I saw him, he was running down South Eighth Street toward the bars on Magnolia Street.”
Mike Roselle will read from Tree Spiker at Back of Beyond Books in Moab on October 15th (7 p.m.), in Jackson at Valley Book Store on October 20 (5 p.m.), in Missoula at Fact & Fiction on Tuesday, October 27 (3 p.m.) and at a fundraiser at The Badlander (7 p.m.), and in Portland at Julia’s Cafe on October 30 (7 p.m.).
Q&A FOR DRIVERS
Everything Motorists Want to Know about Road Cyclists
Last week, I vented about the incredibly dangerous rage a few motorists have for road cyclists. (You should check out the comment section.)
This week I’m trying to be more constructive and address some of the reasons I think might cause the anger, things many motorists might not understand about cycling and cyclists. Hopefully, this “motorist Q&A” helps explain why cyclists do the things they do and lessen concerns drivers have, which should make it easier for all of us to courteously and safely share the road.
I could, actually, give the same answer for all of these questions--"it’s the safest way to ride"--but I will try to be more helpful.
[more]Property Tax Brouhaha
Exorbitant Property Appraisals Have Homeowners Reeling, Critics Railing
“Oh my God.” That was all artist Lela Autio could think to say when she opened her 2009 assessment notice for a bare-bones Flathead Lake summer cabin—sans an inside toilet or central heating—that’s been in her family for more than 40 years.
In 2002, the Montana Department of Revenue (DOR) calculated that the property was worth $363,000. Now, Autio’s notice said it was worth $1.9 million—more than a five-fold increase.
Welcome to the 2009 Montana property assessment imbroglio, in which shocked property owners in growth areas like Flathead, Lake, Gallatin and Madison counties are receiving assessment letters saying the value of their land and homes has increased by as much as 300 percent or more, meaning their property taxes will skyrocket as well. This, despite the fact that shortly after the reappraisals were completed—in July 2008—the nation’s real estate market went belly up, buyers disappeared and home prices dipped or plummeted.
Western Writers
Helen Thorpe on Immigration and Denver’s Many Layers
Journalist Helen Thorpe brings a unique perspective to her riveting first book, Just Like Us, which follows the lives of four Mexican girls as they graduate from high school and attend college in Denver. Two of them are legal U.S. residents, while the other two, whom Thorpe calls Marisela and Yadira, do not have papers. Thorpe’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Texas Monthly, and 5280. Thorpe’s husband is Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, and this allows Thorpe to portray the city’s many layers, and brings an additional dimension to the story when an illegal immigrant, Raul Gómez García, murders a Denver police officer, and it turns out that Gómez García was employed in a restaurant owned by Hickenlooper. I interviewed Thorpe via email about how she chose and wrote this story, how she convinced the four girls to open up to her, and her trip to a Mexican nightclub.
New West: You’ve said that you were interested in the topic of immigration in part because you grew up in the U.S. as an Irish citizen with a green card. Was there also a more recent event that prompted you to begin work on this book, or did it grow out of topics that had always intrigued you?
Helen Thorpe: Yes there was an additional prompt. It was that I was curious about how Denver was changing, and I started looking at the demographic shifts in the city over recent decades. That actually led me to think about writing about immigration, because the numbers of immigrants coming to the city was so huge.
[more]MYSTERIOUS DEATH
Suspicion Surrounds Colorado Wolf Death
A wolf that wandered from Montana and died in Colorado earlier this year met its end on a hillside about 24 miles north of Rifle, according to government documents obtained by an environmental organization.
Federal wildlife law enforcement officers continue to investigate the death of a Montana wolf that wandered from Montana and died in Colorado, nearly after a year after the wolf’s carcass was collected, raising speculation that the wolf was killed by a human.
“It’s a good question, but I’m not going to answer it,” says George Morrison, Colorado senior wildlife agent for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
[more]