Three Beautiful Things 06/30/10: Kellogg History, It's Not a Happening Place, Easy Weather

1. I spent most of the day reading Kellogg history, with particular focus on Katherine G. Aiken's Idaho's Bunker Hill. Reading this book again is again unsettling, especially the ongoing company/labor conflict, the violence, no matter what form it took, no matter which decade. I'm reminded of what Richard Hugo wrote in "Letter to Levertov from Butte": "This is the town where you choose sides/to die on, company or man, and both are losers." I don't think he means "losers" in the sense of worthless. I think he means that, in the end, no one wins. In the end, in Kellogg, company didn't win. Neither did labor.

2. I hadn't eaten at Ye Olde Pancake House for years. The Deke and Patrick and I ate there once back 1997 and I'm not sure I've been back. I enjoyed my breakfast. I enjoyed the atmosphere more. Like GJ's, it's a place where people come to eat and visit. It's not a happening place, thank God.

3. I keep enjoying these overcast, cool early summer days. No glare. No heat. It's easy on my eyes, my skin, my mood, and on the yard and garden.

Sibling Assignment #123: The Ghosts of My Richard Hugo Road Trip

The next four sibling assignments will center around the topic of happiness. InlandEmpireGirl originated this idea, and here's what she asked us all to write about first:

Think of a destination you have traveled to that brought you happiness. Describe the place/trip and why this particular place brought you happiness.

InlandEmpireGirl remembered a spring break trip to Steamboat Rock, here, and I'll post a link to Silver Valley Girl's piece as soon as she posts it.


I've never really been able to explain it.

I've been told I should write an article about it.

An editor for a small journal in western Oregon said he'd be interested in publishing it.

But I could never explain it.

Now, eighteen years later, I still can't really.

I took a trip in late July and early August of 1992. I was on my way home for my 20th high school reunion.

I decided I'd take a really long route from Eugene to Kellogg and go out to Burns, on to Boise, on to Sun Valley to Stanley to Salmon and then go on a Richard Hugo tour of Montana.

It's the Richard Hugo tour of Montana that leaves me wordless.

It was simple.

I drove throughout western Montana, to Wisdom, Big Hole National Battle Ground, Butte, Walkerville, Hot Springs, Kicking Horse Reservoir, Philipsburg, Drummond and other Hugo landmarks. At the places I drove to I stopped, walked the streets (or the battlefield), found a private place, often the car, and read Hugo's poem about that place aloud.

Then came the ghosts.

I welcomed them.

Some of the ghosts Hugo created. Kathy. The family in Walkerville. The slender, red-haired girl who serves your food. Failed dreams. Cures that never work. Failed love.

My ghosts visited me, too. Ghosts from Kellogg. Failed love. Unrealized dreams. Kids I knew who suffered beatings, poverty, probably worse. They came back to me. So did Jim McLeod. He introduced me to Richard Hugo and wanted to ride with me, wanted to leave I-90 at Drummond and follow Highway 1 to Philipsburg and make our way to Anaconda.

Bruce's ghost hopped in the Honda, too. Bruce hadn't been dead very long, killed in a motorcycle accident near Kellogg. Bruce and I read Richard Hugo aloud to each other at North Idaho College. We loved to say over and over and over and over to each other, "and without salvation, Smelterville".

Hugo peered deep into the Silver Valley. He saw what was broken down. He saw the Cd'A River, "a stream so slate with crap its name pollutes the world."

Bruce and I loved Richard Hugo for knowing the valley we grew up in.

I drove Montana. Never had my Honda "found this forward a gear".

I drove forward to the past, the past I don't have words for, the almost prehistoric past of my eternal soul that Richard Hugo speaks to.

I drove forward to the present, too. To Kellogg. To my 20th high school reunion. To the weekend in my life when I fell in love with Kellogg all over again after a few years of separation.

My friends from high school inspired me to fall in love with Kellogg again.

So did Richard Hugo's ghost and the ghosts his poems invited to visit me.

I can't explain it.

I can only say it brought me a happiness that continues to grow.

Three Beautiful Things 01/18/10: Swapping Out Dog Doo, Breakfast at Brails, Hugo on Film

1. Randy stopped by to see if we might go see The Pink Floyd Experience and he swapped out his plastic bag full of Willy's droppings for a couple of empty dog crap bags.

2. I relaxed over corned beef hash and eggs and hash browns and English muffin at Brails. The food was terrific, the coffee is superbly non-premium, and my mind floated, wandered, eavesdropped, and pondered.

3. I watched the 1976 film portrayal of Richard Hugo: "Kicking the Loose Gravel Home". I have had this film in my possession since mid-May and haven't been able to bring myself to watch it. I know why. I have memories of Richard Hugo, memories of him reading, and I was afraid that my memories and what I've written about Hugo would be undermined by the documentary truth. It didn't happen. I remembered him really well and, in fact, he's even more of a common man than I remembered and his Silver Valley look is even more pronounced than I have described in papers and lectures.

Three Beautiful Things 05/13/09: Hugo is Home, Through a Scanner Operative, Slightly Above Mediocre

1. The UPS driver rang the doorbell and handed me a box with Richard Hugo in it. The DVD arrived: "Kicking the Loose Gravel Home" -- a film portrait of Richard Hugo from 1976. I've never seen it and I'm eager to watch it....but today didn't seem like the right time.

2. Sometimes it's the smallest of things that make me happy: like getting my scanner up and running today.

3. I fixed a curry for dinner tonight and even though the spinach curry sauce was a little weak, a bit watery, I learned from a mistake I made and it felt pretty good to cook again.

Sibling Assignment #95: Longing for Richard Hugo

Silver Valley Girl originally assigned a piece asking us to remember Expo '74, but it fizzled out. She replaced that assignment with this one:

Write about a journey, trip, place you would like to visit this summer, and why.

You can read about InlandEmpireGirl's yearning to visit the Olympic rainforest, here and Silver Valley Girl's dream of riding in a boat on the Coeur d'Alene River from the Cataldo Mission to Harrison, here.

As I was writing about the connection I see between Edward Hooper's "Nighthawks" and Richard Hugo's "Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg", here, my memories of the summer of 1992 flooded me.

It was the summer of our twenty year high school reunion. My ex-wife was in Palau. I had decided in April that I wouldn't finish my dissertation. It was my first summer in six years without the thesis weighing on me.

I decided to come to Kellogg for the twenty year reunion via Burns, Oregon, Salmon City, Idaho, Butte and Bozeman and Missoula, Montana and see parts of Oregon, Idaho, and Montana I'd never visited before.

I decided to visit as many of the small Montana towns as I could that provided settings for Richard Hugo poems. For example, I went to Philipsburg and walked

. . . the streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn't last, bars that did. . .

Somehow, walking the streets of Philipsburg and Butte and going to Hot Springs and hiking up to Walkerville, Hugo's collected poems in hand, deepened my experience with the poems. I saw the world of Montana through Hugo's eyes and entered into his imagination and felt an even deeper affinity with his world view.

I'd like to go back on Richard Hugo tour. I'd like to take more time and drive to Drummond, visit Belgrade, return to Wisdom, see if I can find Silver Star, take the poems again, read them aloud, and drink in the landscapes and towns and feel those wondrous places inside myself where my soul and Richard Hugo's merge.

Three Beautiful Things 05/14/08: Hugo, Pedro Paramo, Controlling Snug

1. I wrote a paper/lecture several years ago entitled "On Needing Richard Hugo". It explores my experience growing up in Kellogg and how the poet Richard Hugo has been pivotal in helping me figure things out. I read the paper today to Margaret and my Working Class Lit/Research Writing class and we had a very good discussion about it.

2. I keep digging more deeply into Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo and I'm eager to get to class at 8 a.m. tomorrow and discuss it more with my students. It's a beguiling, confusing, magical, depressing, tragic story, filled with questions and longing.

3. I've decided to seek out help giving Snug more training. He has these occasional outbursts of aggressiveness and I want to see if I can help him stop doing this with professional help. He's a very sweet dog almost all the time, but he is terribly uneasy around dogs he doesn't know and acts out in other isolated situations and he'll be happier and I'll be more relaxed (as will Deke) if I can help him get these outbursts under control.

Three Beautiful Things 05/17/07: Needing Hugo, Sunshine, Vitality

1. In October 2002 I gave a public lecture to commemorate the twenty year anniversary of the death of Montana poet Richard Hugo. I've reworked this lecture several times and presented my newest version of "On Needing Richard Hugo" to our students in Am. Working Class Lit/Research Writing. It went over very well.

2. I also showed the video "You Are My Sunshine", featuring interviews with miner who survived the 1972 Sunshine Mine fire and others. A deep hush came over the room.

3. I loved working with poems exploring what gives life vitality in my Lit of Comedy class tonight. I hope my students are understanding better how poetry works and are losing the idea that poetry requires deciphering and looking for hidden meaning or reading between the lines. I hope they are learning to let the poems work on them rather than always working one the poems.

Three Beautiful Things 05/16/07: Hugo, Never, Flash

1. I gave a written lecture on my indebtedness to the poet Richard Hugo in October, 2002, to mark the twentieth anniversary of his death. I reworked it tonight to deliver to our students in the American Working Class Lit/Research Writing class.

2. Reid claimed he had never written poetry before and presented a most insightful poem to the Shakespeare class today, built around King Lear's utterance of "Never, never, never" as he grieves over his dead daughter, Cordelia.

3. It's a small thing, but it felt really productive and good today to consolidate three flashdrives of files into one. I have a much better sense of where things are!