Richard Hugo Tour

Back in 1992, I  had one of the best summers of my life.

First of all, in about March, 1992, I finally faced the fact that I didn't have what it takes to write a doctoral dissertation.  I don't think I lacked insight into my subject, goodness in the plays of Shakespeare, but I did lack whatever it takes to approach this subject in an academic and scholarly way.

I wanted to learn about goodness and try to live better, not learn about goodness and write about it in scholarly language.  I just couldn't do the scholarly project. 

Being free of the weight of my dissertation energized me to read for enjoyment, for its own sake, and I launched into the most hungry several months of reading I have ever known.  Among other writers, I read Robertson Davies, Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh, and, best of all, I became obsessed with P. G. Wodehouse.  I wasn't reading to prepare for class.  I wasn't reading to understand some field of literature.  I was hungry.  That was why I read, keeping my concentration by chewing Skoal and deepening my pleasure by listening to a wide array of classical music.

Better yet, I was alone.

Even though I was married, my now ex-wife was working on a project in Palau, Micronesia, and I loved having all this time to myself and I was a renter and the landlord took care of the yard and so all I had to do was go to the library, load up, keep the cats fed, keep supplied with Skoal, and remember to eat.

In 1992, I was twenty years out of high school.  Our class had a twenty year reunion planned and I was ecstatic to attend.  In 1992, I was in the midst of an eleven year abstinence from alcohol, so I knew I was going to be better behaved at this reunion than I had been in 1982.

Ha!  The night before  my ten year reunion I jumped up on the bowling machine at Dirty Ernie's and mimed surfing when the Beach Boys' "Ride the Wild Surf" came over the sound system; with Don Knott, I rode from Dirty Ernie's to the Kopper Keg on the trunk of Terry Turner's car, drinking a bottle of Oly and waving to imaginary crowds watching us in the annual Elks Roundup Parade; when police officer Dan Schierman passed us going the other way, as we headed down Depot Hill, we fired our beer bottles against the retaining wall at the foot of John George's big house and we got pulled over in the Safeway parking lot at the bottom of the hill, across from the Kopper Keg.  Officer Dan told us to go clean up the broken glass and get home and he'd let things go.  After all, it was our reunion weekend. When Officer Dan left, we climbed into Terry's car, cried out, "Fuck you" in unison and went back to Dirtie Ernie's for some more beers, even though the bar was closed.

 I got home about 3 a.m. and I was drinking beer again with breakfast at the Shoshone Golf Club at 9 a.m. on the day of the reunion, getting ready for eighteen holes of beer and golf and the reunion itself.  I didn't quit partying until 5 a.m. Sunday morning.  I put in a double and a half shift:  twenty hours.

But that was 1982 and this was 1992.  I decided to travel to Kellogg for this reunion the long way.  I decided to drive from Eugene to Burns and stay there a couple of nights and then drive to and spend a night in Salmon, Idaho, putting me in striking distance of Richard Hugo country.

I was going to go on Richard Hugo tour.

I visited, not in this order, Wisdom, Phillipsburg, Butte, Walkerville, Polson, St. Regis, Milltown, St. Ignatius, Hot Springs, Plains, Kicking Horse Resevoir, Missoula, Drummond, Belgrade and tried to see the world Richard Hugo wrote about through his eyes through his poems.

Part of me wanted to come away from this experience with something smart to write about it.  Part of me wanted to write some kind of an essay that would bring landscape and poem together and would somehow vault me into the thin air of Richard Hugo literary experts.

But, that's not me.

 In fact, it's been twenty-one years since I made that tour and I haven't written a word about it.  My only record of what I experienced are some vague notes scrawled in the margins of poems set in these different towns.

The three Montana poems that mean the most to me are "Letter to Levertov from Butte", "Degrees of Gray from Phillipsburg" (here's a video), and "Letter to Kathy from Wisdom".

I decided to go back and look at the notes I took on these three poems.  I took these notes while sitting in the '86 Honda Civic Hatchback I was driving then.  I always had Making Certain it Goes On:  The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo on the front seat with a pen and was read to make observations.

So what did I observe?  Let's look, for now, at what I wrote while in Butte.  I'll put my notes in italics.

Well, in Butte the first thing I noted was bit of Hugo's poem, "Cataldo Mission":  and without salvation Smelterville.  Right alongside this observation I made kind of a pronouncement, that this poem was For me, Hugo anthem.  Here's father Hugo.

I know what I meant.  First of all, in his many prophetic poems about the quiet despair in towns in Montana and in the Silver ValleyI grew up in, "Letter to Levertov from Butte" was the best.  It was Hugo's anthem to drabness, degradation, and the way poverty wears down the human spirit.

My notes called him my father because like a father, Richard Hugo helped me see. Richard Hugo had helped me, back in 1973, realize that the secret I'd held within myself, because we just didn't talk negatively about our hometown,  about the apocalyptic nature of my hometown and the Silver Valley and had truth in it.  The degradation of the landscape along with the poverty, especially in Smelterville, made it a place without salvation.  Smelterville is, at a deep level, hopeless,and will never get better.  Go to Smelterville today and things look worse than when Hugo wrote his "without salvation" phrase about forty-five years ago.  Drive through Smelterville today and there are houses, a mixture of solid structures and others falling apart.  No kids play in the park.  A few businesses are still going, but there's no bustle.  Wal-Mart has sort of helped, but it's not on the main drag.  The main drag is cracked, structures are sagging, and Smelterville continues to decline.

I jotted this line from "Cataldo Mission" because Butte also seemed without salvation.  The open pit copper mine was shut down and was filling with water.  High levels of unemployment and despair followed.

I noted the sight of a Cane man talking into his watch with multi-colored cap, cane ---->like Lindy Carr.  Lindy Carr was an eccentric woman in Orofino, Idaho who walked from her home beyond Glenwood and beyond Yellow Dog into Orofino's town center every day.  She festooned herself in bright clothes, ribbons, scarves.  She was the closest I'd ever seen to a gypsy.  She also accused our first dog, Nipper, of biting her and we had to have him put down.

A mother saw the Cane man and I noted that I will never forget the mother afraid for her daughter.  In whatever neighborhood I was walking in, children were making an impression on me, largely because in this poem, Hugo observes that in Butte "children/get hurt early.  Degraded by drab houses."  I noted I saw their dusty faces dirt hard yards.  

None of this was literary analysis.  None of it would get me through an college English program.  It was all personal, taking me back to Kellogg and the Silver Valley, helping me feel my hometown more deeply as I made my way back for the reunion.

I only jotted one other note in the margin of "Letter to Levertov from Butte".  It was when I drove to Walkerville, a small mining town.  There's no real geographical gap between Butte and Walkerville.  It sits north of Butte and I wrote down Wardner-like.  Walkerville, like Wardner, is a separate town, but run down.  In 1992, Wardner was more run down than Kellogg and Walkerville was more run down than Butte.  In Walkerville, I couldn't believe my eyes when I wrote this note:  Mine shaft heads in your front yard.  

I now know that these "shaft heads" are called gallus frames. They look like derricks.

 

They aren't derricks.  They were used to lower miners to their underground stations.  And, in Walkerville, these gallus frames, as I remember, were like neighborhood structures, right there among the houses.  I imagined some miners getting up, eating a breakfast, grabbing his lunch bucket, and walking right out the door to the gallus frame outside his house and being lowered into the earth. 

The gallus frames and the rundown houses, though, somehow helped me understand, in Hugo's poem,  the despondent husband sobbing at the kitchen table, his wife turned to the wall, and "the unwashed children taking it in and in and in until they are the wall, the table".  

The notes I took in Butte as I read this poem in Butte were not literary.  They were notes of shared suffering.  I never experienced poverty in the Silver Valley, but many did and if a person's senses were alive, one could see the poverty, hear it in voices, smell it on people's bodies and coming from their clothes, and even touch it or feel it, the rough hands, the coarse shirt, and sometimes the punch in the nose.  

When I went on Richard Hugo tour before my twenty year high school reunion, I didn't really learn anything worth writing up for a literary journal.  No, I got closer to this figurative father of mine who helped me see and helped me feel and helped me know some of the darker aspects of the world the mining world I had grown up in. 

(Note:  I know this piece of writing, if done in a college class, would get hammered because I brought up three poems and only wrote about one.  Tough.  I'll get back to the other poems and the notes I took another time.  I just let this post take on its own life, even if it's poorly structured one!)