Tag Montana

Entries 23 Total

What It Means To Be Home

Oct 21, ’16 9:51 PM

It’s been about six weeks since I’ve been home in Montana. It’s good to be home, in spite of the fact I’m far far away from my dear one. Being here I feel more grounded and solid than I have for a while but at the same time movement and action feels closer to me. I’m more capable of getting what I need.
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I’m a substitute

I’ve been working in the East Helena public schools. Ilgaz and I worked out there last year with our special Galloping Hand after school program. This year I’m on staff in the after school program working three days a week. Two days as an arts instructor and one day as a STEM instructor for kindergartners. (STEM is an acronym for science, technology, engineering and math.) Apart from getting to brainstorm new projects every week for, as my sister calls them, little-year-olds I’ve been working as a substitute teacher.

The East Helena Public School system is remarkable. It’s three schools, pre-K to first grade at Eastgate, 2-6 at Radley, and the East Valley Middle School. It’s small enough that as a sub I’m a known quantity. I have gotten to know at least a few kids at every school and school staff are on-it and care about the kids. When I subbed for a few months in Helena schools last year I was always in a new school and so always felt a little lost. The best days subbing are days when I know the room.

I’m an office assistant

Apart from that work I’ve been making an effort to learn about the business my parents have run for the past 19 years. There’s a lot about the real estate business that I know already from having to wait around the office, poking around or from going on countless weekend house tours just for the fun of it, getting quizzed by my dad about this and that, working to ball park the value of a place.

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I’m a home remodeler

Then there’s the work on my apartment. I’m trying to pull it together for Ilgaz’s arrival in December. So far checked off the list:
* Refinished wood floors
* New vinyl in the kitchen and bath
* Paint in the bathroom, bedrooms, doors and trim
* New pedestal sink ($20 ReStore)
* Refinished heater covers
* New chimney liner

That plus a hundred little details I distract myself with like scrubbing old door knobs of paint and fixing rattling windows and installing new light fixtures that match the era of the house that I’ve gotten for a song at the ReStore, a second hand shop for building materials.

I was thinking this morning about working on a house. It’s never really finished. The list of little things to be done, here and there is endless. That’s why people call them money pits. But my attitude is that, like a life, a house is never really finished until the day you move out.

I’m a candy man

Alongside all this I’ve got a new and goofy project. My dad and I went in on a cotton candy maker from the old Ton’s of Fun. A defunct batting cages, go carts, laser tag place in Helena.

That’s right. I’ve got a cotton candy maker. Just take a moment and let that sink in. I now have my own professional cotton candy machine and it’s glorious.

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I remember lingering at the cotton candy stand at the carnival one year, standing on a wooden box, peering into the window at the blurred spinning head of a cotton candy machine, asking all kinds of questions to the severely bored and sugar armed young woman pouring pink sugar into the spinner. A beat. Then like magic cotton candy started to appear on the rim of the big bowl, the lady started to roll it around a paper cone.

“How does that work?”
“It melts it.”
“Is it hot when it comes out?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can I touch it?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Look, just buy some if you want it.”

Well, now that I have my own cotton candy maker I have learned that it’s not hot when it comes out. Warm, but not hot. I also learned there is a very good reason not to reach your hand in the bowl, not unless you want to get your hand instantly cocooned in sugar webs. Even so it’s not that bad. So long as there’s a sink near by I don’t think anybody should mind having a sugar mit.

I’m active.

Working on cutting down debt, building up a base again and anticipating Ilgaz getting here in December all feels pretty darn good. Keeping busy and all the while leaving room for the kind of fun stuff I don’t think I will ever be able to give up is good for me.

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Moving Home in 2016

Aug 26, ’16 5:38 PM

People used to move to another country once in a generation if at all. It’s never fun to move. Never easy. And moving overseas is even worse. The tight baggage limits on airplanes make me dream for the days of steamer trunks and make me hate things that are essential but take up too much space. Like winter coats.

But I’ll do what it takes to sort and give and trash and squeeze what’s left into as small a space as possible.

It’s kind of stupid to take anything with me at all. I’ll be moving back to Montana where I already have an attic full of stuff waiting for me since I moved out of my place 5 or so years ago. An apartment’s worth of stuff waiting up there for me, baking in the summers and freezing in the winters. Soon enough I’ll be sorting through it all again seeing how I probably didn’t need to sweat about fitting three sweaters into my luggage when there are four waiting for me at home.

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What’s up in the attic?

  • Books, three shelves worth
  • Some dresser from Common Market
  • I think a table, Sara and Chris gave me
  • A couch? Don’t know
  • Kitchen stuff? I think my juicer is at my parent’s house
  • My old desk I got from a crazy person when I turned 13? I think so, but maybe not.
  • Raccoon skin. For sure.

Ilgaz and I were talking about what kind of things I have in that attic and what we might need when she joins me in Montana in December.

I think I’ll need a couch for instance. But I don’t want to have to think about buying a couch. First of all I don’t really need a couch. Maslow never mentions sofas in his hierarchy of needs. (Food, shelter, belonging, pull out couch bed, self actualization.) Plus most couches look terrible. In catalog photos most are flabby leather monsters surrounded by fake plants or huge ‘L’ shaped sectionals that look too heavy to move.

Of course I know I’m getting ahead of myself by thinking about a couch. But here I am, thinking about a couch anyway.

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“What about Ikea?” Ilgaz innocently asks.

I had to look it up, but the nearest Ikea to Helena is 460 miles away. (That’s 740 kilometers for the metric among us.) I learned in High School reading Fight Club that I’m supposed to hate Ikea because it makes me the same as everyone else. But there is a utility to Ikea stuff that I appreciate. Good dish racks for instance. Good mixing bowls. Good bedside lamps. Good duvets. It’s not that bad but it’s probably out of the question for furnishing a Montana apartment.

I looked up the 2017 Ikea catalog anyway. Just out of curiosity, and found this article Ikea’s 2017 Catalog Is A Terrifying Glimpse Into The Tiny Apartments Of The Future

It’s a commentary on the new catalog, and the ideal apartments Ikea is presenting. Unlike the faux-sophisticated Scandinavian sameness Fight Club criticized, the new ideal is micro living. Not far from the fold away functionality of the YouTube famous tiny houses, or RV/van life, a gerbil cage or a prison cell.

Moving back to my apartment in Montana represents some security for me. Over time I want to build it up into some place comfortable. And that might mean getting a couch. But seeing tiny Ikea apartments idealized then criticized makes me think the most luxurious thing about my apartment might be the open space. Maybe I don’t need a couch after all.

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Wild West Outlaw, Ike Gravelle

Aug 5, ’16 1:29 AM

Here’s an outlaw story about Helena, Montana that I’d never heard before.

This Ike character took on the railroad company and hatched a plan to hold the rail lines around Helena ransom. Pay up or they blow up. Of course the rail companies didn’t pay up. So Ike here started to blast the tracks in random places, trying to be taken seriously. Well, they did take him seriously. But they didn’t ever pay him.

He was a one man operation and so was always going to be near the scene of the crime. The law caught up to him. He was spotted preparing to lay another bomb by a rail worker who followed him home.

IkeGravelle

Upon being detained, the suspect was indignant, insisting that he was an honest rancher named “J.H. Plummer.” The suspect was brought to the Lewis and Clarke County Jail, where he was positively identified as Issac “Ike” Gravelle, a criminal well-known in Helena. Defiant as ever, Gravelle denied his identity even in the face of his former penitentiary warden, a Mr. McTague, who wasn’t one bit fooled.

Someone stashed a gun for him in the courthouse and shot his way out into the street, but he didn’t make it very far. He either killed himself while cornered or he bled out from another man’s bullet.

Either way, it was a violent end to a violent man’s life.

I’m reading so much about violence in the world these days and I find myself moved to outrage by modern tales of horror. Reading about Ike Gravelle made me wonder if through the lens of time, all violence can be transformed into something romantic or quaint. Is violence always a part of a founding mythology of a place? Why do I get excited to read that this happened in my home town? Wild West mythology fascinates me but on its face it’s actually horrible! If this happened last week wouldn’t I feel only fear and outrage?

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Molt Montana’s Postmaster Intrigue

Jul 16, ’16 1:31 AM

I like to follow my hometown’s local news. It’s tonic to the long series of bad news from everywhere else to read small town news. But like the proverbial moth to the flame I do find myself drawn to the darker stories. My favorite is reading the police blotter. It’s a daily record of mystery and tragedy and suspicion and I like it.

But after all the bad news this week, the narrow pages of the IR didn’t satisfy my need for small scale misery so I cruised over to the Billings Gazette and got what I was looking for: Molt Postmaster Admits Stealing Money

Molt is tiny, I had never heard of it. So I looked it up on Wikipedia:

Molt is an unincorporated rural village located in Stillwater County, Montana, and has a post office serving ZIP code, a hardware store, a cafe and several granaries. The elevation is 3,966 feet. Molt appears on the Molt U.S. Geological Survey Map

Don’t think that just because it’s a small town (unincorporated rural village) it’s going to be overlooked, oh no. The post office is listed first so you know it’s important.

From the article:

…agents with the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General audited the Molt Post Office in August 2015. …

The audit found that Reinholz, 59, who was the postmaster, had issued herself 39 money orders between March 2015 and August 2015. She eventually paid for 25 of the money orders, but not the remaining 14 money orders, for a loss totaling $7,879, Sullivan said.

Like I said, this is just what I was looking for. But it’s sad huh? Tiny town, working in the post office with $20,000 in credit card debt. I’m sure she was staring at those money orders for months before she wrote the first one. But that’s just how it goes isn’t it? You let the devil get his foot in the door and before you know it he’s moved in and stinking up the place.

She’ll pay it all back and it doesn’t look like they’ll make her spend any time in jail. Lucky her there’s no jail in Molt. Then again, in a town that small, I’m sure she’ll never live it down.

I wonder what she bought in the first place. Avon? Presents for her kids? Was it worth all that? I doubt it. But then again I never worked in the post office in Molt so who am I to judge?

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Rest Stop Wibaux

Aug 18, ’12 8:10 AM

We rolled through 615 miles this first day, from breakfast at the No Sweat Cafe to the less than succinctly named Best Western Plus Ramkota Hotel Bismark here in North Dakota. Sara, Chris and Bannack are heading home to New York City and I’m along for the ride.

This trip seems like an extension of my recent trip to the Italian consulate in San Francisco. When I count it all together my summer road trip miles will have reached over 4500 when I arrive in New York. That’s 77 hours of car time according to Google Maps. As you can imagine, rest stops are precious.

Bannack and I were both in the same kind of stir-crazy mood when we got to Wibaux, Montana. The empty deck at the brewery wasn’t a perfect playground but it meant running, airplane rides, bull fighting, getting thrown in the air, Tootsie Rolls, and donkey kicking. We visited Wibaux’s real playground too, but it was the empty kind with painful spiky grass, swings that pinch, and those metal horses on springs that look like they should be really fun but still aren’t.

Sunday we’ll be in Chicago for a night or two, Wednesday night we’ll arrive in New York, and I’m looking forward to every rest stop along the way.

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