Nineteen Years Ago

What is written down and kept brings the past back to life.

I read a lot of books (over 150 in this year that is soon coming to an end), but now and again I look back and read my own words. For instance, on and off in my life I have carried around little dimestore notebooks filled with random jottings. This red-covered one from 2006 that surfaced recently begins with names of people met for the first time in my bookshop and in social settings. Nancy P., Michael H., Angela W. and Dennis S., Trudy C., all of them lasting friends, I first met that year. 

 

A few pages in, however, the jottings change character, because when the Artist and I traveled, I always kept notes, so I see that we left Leland on September 10^th that year, with the odometer reading 176,729. The day was sunny, clear, and cool, morning wet with heavy dew. East and north of Traverse City, it seemed to me that we entered a different world.

 

None of the elements is foreign to our own peninsula, but here they occur in unfamiliar configurations—not the hills, trees, fields we know but strange hills, strange pines, strange oaks, orchards, barns, subdivisions and business development.

 

That would be Antrim, Charlevoix, and Emmet counties going north. The September sunlight, I had written, was 

 

…soft and glaring at the same time, bringing every color forward—asters and goldenrod, the subtle lavender and plum and purple underlying green….

 

When we crossed the Mackinac Bridge, I spotted the firewood drop-off site and vowed to drop off “my worries and frets” at that point in our travels and leave them there. What was worrying me in 2006? Luckily, I don’t recall.

 

Crossing from the lower to the upper peninsula is always significant, but that September we were going farther, crossing into Canada at the Soo (Sault Ste. Marie). We stopped for gas on the U.S. side (12 gallons), and noticed a group of couples on motorcycles going in the same direction we were headed, searching for their passports to have them ready to hand, “so we won’t have to get off the bike,” as one of them put it.

 

In Ontario we stopped at the Visitors’ Centre to change money, then at a gas station to buy bottled water, and already I was “elated, giddy.” Everything was different! We were in a foreign country! I overheard a man at a pay phone speaking in a dialect of French so far from the French I had learned in school that I could hardly pick out a single word. Down the road at Bobber’s Restaurant (Bruce Mines, Ont.) was a trio of Germans conversing in their home language. A foreign country, a different Great Lake—not Michigan or Superior, our home lakes, but north Lake Huron, with pre-Cambrian shores and wild verges of tansy.

 

Next day: 

 

17-East is a road from heaven this morning. Traffic light. Fall color coming on. The bones of the Canadian Shield thrust up through a thin skin of soil. Old wooden fences surround pioneer fields, [and there are] small stone cairns on rock shoulders, glimpses of cool lakes and rivers, signs for trailer camping parks.

 

Sometimes all I write is a list of place names: Spruce Grove Cemetery, Iron Bridge (pop. 900), Iron Bridge Motel, Three Aces Restaurant, Elly’s Diner—“Mom & Pops,” I write. Then—“Mississagi River, big and beautiful, shining on its way.”

 

Finally, this list:

 

      patch of loosestrife

      iron bridge

      old board-and-wooden shingle house

 

with a note to self appended: “Picture these. Souvenez-les.” Remember them.

 

There were people congregated across the river at a rapids, many of them fishing, not many catching. Mississagi First Nation issues permits. And next came Blind River, pop. 3600. A float plane! Helicopter! Mixed yellows of tansy, butter-&-eggs, goldenrod, hawkweed, and coltsfoot.

 

Rocky points jut out, horizon filled with islands, sky with clouds, water with whitecaps and glints of reflected sunlight.

 

Next to the library (I remember the street and picture it today in my mind) was a real estate board listing 1000’ of shoreline, with 10 acres and year-round access, for $49,500. We were only in the market for lunch, though, and happy to find a Chinese restaurant and meet the proprietor, Ivy Chen, 16 years in Canada, over a year in Blind River, Ivy’s family including a husband and two children, 9-year-old boy and 10-year-old girl who sat with us while doing their homework. The soup was turkey broth with pork and pork wontons “and no MSG,” Mrs. Chen assured us. It was beautiful and delicious. I bought four books at the library for $1.25, and we were on our way again. Much later, when we were back in Leelanau County, I sent a couple books they had requested to the Chen children, who would be all grown up now. Looks like Blind River has grown, too, since we were there.

 

Serpent River … First Nation Trading Post … what I called “a sea of nothing but cattails in the sun, their seasons short-lived.” Above an outcropping, leaves were red and orange, “echoing the iron-stained color of the ancient rock surface.” Then I noted parenthetically, casting my mind back to the day before,

(Yesterday, somewhere, golden ferns and seedlings of red sumac on the ground looked as if the color had dripped down from the branches above.)

 

In Massy, Ontario (pop. 1,000), where we had stopped on a previous trip to photograph outdoor metal sculptures by Laval Bouchard, we decided to stay overnight at the Mohawk Motel, stopping while it was still afternoon. While the Artist rested from the drive, I sat outdoors with book and notebook, looking forward to exploring nearby Chutes Park and then, the next day, reaching Manitoulin Island, where I had arranged to rent a little cabin on a lake on the island for four nights. We decided we would come back to Massey on Saturday, after our time on Manitoulin, for a big street painting event. 

 

The Mohawk Motel was German-run and had a long list of written rules—quite a long list!—but the room was large and had “everything,” and the Artist loved it. Our cabin on Manitoulin would have no TV, so he was happy to have a movie channel for one night in Massey. Later we walked (1 kilometer) to Chutes Provincial Park and found our way through the campground to the waterfall before a light supper and well-earned sleep. Morning was coffee in our room, a dog walk, TV, then more coffee in the lobby, with toast, fresh muffin, and conversation with the owners, who were looking forward to the second year of their street painting festival. The wife had organized the event, and artists would be coming from Germany, the U.S., and other parts of Canada. Previous year’s attendance had been 10,000. Government funding had helped with a publicity campaign. I wonder if that festival is still going on…. 

 

And that is only a few pages in the beginning of a little notebook that goes on to recount our time on Manitoulin, the return visit to Massey for the festival, and finally a stretch of days in dear, familiar Grand Marais. It was one of our longer September getaways and one I love revisiting now, seeing those scenes once more as I flip the little pages.

 

Do you keep written notes on your travels? Sketchier or more fulsome than mine? Do your notes or diaries help you recall those earlier times?

Happy new year, if I don't write again until NEXT YEAR!

Wandering Through the Canadian Wilderness

Last week: false spring in Leelanau in November

Cinnamon! She opened the little glass jar of powder, held it to her nose, and breathed in the deep, almost ecclesiastical perfume. She was suddenly in her father’s house, in the kitchen, following the old cook around while she worked, sitting on the counter by the sink licking a spatula thinly covered in gingerbread batter. She remembered flour sifted into a wide ceramic bowl in perfect peaks, salt and sugar denting the summit, and finally a tiny spoonful of cinnamon dropped in, a small thrill among the whiteness. 

- Gil Adamson, The Outlander

A reader is many chapters into The Outlander before learning Mary’s name, long after learning — though all this not immediately revealed, either — that she has killed her husband, lost an infant, and is being tracked through forests and over mountains by her husband’s twin brothers. Functionally illiterate but raised in a genteel household with servants, Mary could not have found life easy in her husband’s dark, windowless, isolated log cabin, far off in the Canadian wilderness, away from everything she had ever known. But her grandmother’s object was achieved by the marriage of the young, motherless girl to an older man: the girl was spared the horrors of "spinsterhood."

With a well-worn, familiar Bible but no money and no change of clothes, Mary is running away, seeking to cross a river by ferry, pursued by a pair of red-headed identical twins when first we meet her. She is wearing an oddly put-together costume of black supposed to serve as mourning. Only now that I am halfway through the book, after chapters of the protagonist's stumbling through snowy woods and almost dying of starvation, has she find refuge with a widowed minister in a mining camp. She has a real bed to sleep in again at last.

It looked like March last week, after an early, January-type storm

Along the way, however, she had already been rescued three times, first by an old lady famous for taking in needy strays. When "the widow," as Mary is simply called in the early chapters, flees the old lady’s house, she makes off with a horse, an elaborate pipe, and enough good tobacco to last a while.

New snow a week later, a new storm and new snow

Her second rescuer in the mountains is called by authorities the Ridgerunner. The Ridgerunner is a man who lives by his wits and by stealing food and whatever else he needed from Forest Service cabins. Captured, tried, and acquitted once in a court of law, he returned to his old life and tells Mary with a laugh, “They probably think I’m dead by now.” With William, she discovers laughter and passion, but the Ridgerunner has been alone too long to take her on as a permanent companion, and one day he simply vanishes, taking all his gear with him. The widow is once more on her own.

The third person (second man) who comes to her assistance is Henry, a Crow Indian, and it is Henry who delivers her to the Reverend. Henry’s wife warns Mary that the Reverend Bonnycastle is the only man in the mining camp she should trust, and Mary finds the minister's character to be everything promised. But the red-haired twins have hired a tracker and are close on her heels. 

-- What will happen next? I was happy to reach the pleasant, cozy cinnamon-in-kitchen interlude on Sunday morning at home while enjoying my first cup of coffee with delicious cinnamon bread baked by a friend. Outside a new blizzard raged. We would not be taking to the road as planned....

The calm after earlier wild gusting and blowing

Early chapters of The Outlander, as I’ve indicated, were all set outdoors, and the author’s attention to sensual detail is beautiful and vivid on every page.

She left her belongings and wandered aimlessly. Spider webs brushed her face and she did not wipe them away but let spiders climb to her and ride a while and drop away. The sun came down in beams and shafts, and once, when she looked up, she saw the moon hung high and pale in the blue morning. Tricky thing, pretending to be gone when it wasn’t. She was reduced to an idiot child lost in the woods. It was with an idiot’s glee, then, that she came across the tracks of her horse, and bent to see the deep, scored prints where the animal had run and dodged and dodged again. Other horses had run with it and diverged through the trees, hounded by dogs. Not dogs, she reminded herself. Many wolves, harrying the horses.  

The widow followed the tracks and came across a carcass. It was a big mule deer. The body lay with its hooves toward her. From ten yards away she could see blood pooling in paw prints in the mud, the throat and belly torn away, intestines dragged over the ground. One leg askew.

Hungry wolves want that deer meat, but so does the hungry young woman alone on the mountain!

When a friend and I discussed Moon of the Crusted Snow the other day, she expressed disappointment that the story was so short on detail and left so much to the imagination. I had rather appreciated the author’s spare, light touch, but I understood what my friend was saying, especially when she told me she wanted to know, “What were the women doing?” Ah, yes, good question! The first scene in the Rice novel shows us an Anishnaabe hunter who tracks, kills, and butchers his moose, and he has learned from his father how to tan hides, but we do not see how women transform hides into clothing or harvest rice together or do any of the work that would have been so crucial to survival after the power grid goes dark. Their contributions are referred to only in passing. 

In The Outlander (I’m not sure yet that the title refers to the protagonist; that remains to be seen), we see everything that the woman does. She is the character in focus, and as the year is 1903 and she is fleeing alone on foot through mountain wilderness, survival is of paramount importance in this novel, as well. But “the widow” has no survival skills and would have been dead several times over were it not for the rescuers she meets along her way, so while there is much detail given of her travails and much of the beautiful country she passes through, Mary is hardly a model for ancient knowledge, and this lone white woman is also very much without community.

I enjoyed Moon of the Crusted Snow — devoured it! — and am also fascinated by the Gil Adamson’s Canadian story, The Outlander. I think of how Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River was compared by many reviewers to Huckleberry Finn, Campbell offering a female version of running away downriver. 

Frozen wild grapes

What my friend wants, though, is something different from all of these books, if I have her criticisms right (and maybe she will tell me if I don’t): She wants a story of Anishnaabe post-apocalyptic survival that stresses community aspects and particularly the contributions made by women in the group. What kinds of traditional knowledge of nature would be crucial if the lights went out and there were no more grocery stores? How would clothing be replaced, food prepared, sicknesses treated? Knowing how these aspects of life were carried on in the traditional past would be part of survival into a future if one truly had to live off the land. 

If a novel telling such a story were to come out of Peshawbestown, I would read it eagerly! For today, I'm content to be snowed in again, preparing for eventual departure in leisurely fashion. The Artist and I needed a day of rest before beginning our travels.

Book Review: MOON OF THE CRUSTED SNOW

Snow was falling in Northport on Thursday afternoon, sometimes blowing horizontally down Waukazoo Street, with the temperature hovering right around the freezing mark when one of my customers arrived to pick up her special order. The book she had ordered sounded so intriguing that I’d ordered a second copy, and later that afternoon I began reading. 

The central character, Evan Whitesky, up in northern Ontario, is on the trail of a moose.

He had been out since early morning and had been tracking this particular bull since around noon. The fall hunt was drawing to a close, and he still wanted to put more food away. Food from the South was expensive and never so good, or as satisfying, as the meat he could bring in himself.  

- Waubgeshig Rice, Moon of the Crusted Snow

Evan takes pride in providing for his partner and their two young children. An accomplished hunter and fisherman, he has put away enough protein for the winter to have plenty to share with his parents, and when Evan joins his father in cleaning a hide, the two men envision future moccasins. The Whitesky family is better prepared than some others on the reserve for life without hydro power.

A missing satellite signal brings the first hardship: no morning television for the children and no Internet signal for their elders. Electric power lasts a little longer before it too goes out, but people on the remote, isolated reserve have experienced power outages before and know how to cope until the electricity comes back on. They remind each other that the old ones in times past lived without electric lights and television. When there is no signal for their cell phones, some still have landlines — until these, too, fall dead.

It is the beginning of winter, so the Council needs to plan for the future as well as for the immediate situation. Without regular deliveries of fuel and food from the South, they have enough diesel to run a generator until late February, if everyone cooperates in conserving energy, and with foresight they have stockpiled a cache of canned foods for just this sort of emergency, but surviving the immediate emergency is only the first step, and the future is unclear.

Three more cold nights passed. The generator power would only last so long. The chief called another emergency meeting at the band office…. There was still no communication with anyone in the outside world.

The world of the novel is circumscribed from the outset. Its remote backstory is one of displacement — from the Great Lakes region to the south, the people had been forced to the harsher north — the nearer backstory one of dependence on regular deliveries of groceries and fuel. But that was then, and this is now, and the demands of now throw the people back on traditional ways of life and traditional values that some have been practicing all along and others need to learn.

Peshawbestown dancers in Northport

Evan has been going to school, informally, with his elders: learning the people’s language, he and Nicole are teaching it to their children, and, somewhat awkwardly, using the native words he knows interspersed with English, he speaks traditional prayers on the appropriate occasions. His parents’ knowledge of old ways is augmented by stories and lessons given him by the band’s oldest member, a woman in her late eighties. He hunts and shares with those in need, and he is learning to pray.

Aileen brought the flickering orange light under the carefully piled sage in the shell, and the medicine caught fire. She let it burn for a few seconds before blowing it out. Thick grey smoke billowed from the shell….

One-way “contact” with the outside world comes only three times in the novel, in quietly escalating pitch. First, a homecoming: Two young members of the band arrive on snowmobiles, having fled the chaos of the town below, which is also without power or grid infrastructure and where people are panicking and growing violent. Next, an intruder: A large, dangerous-looking white man, Justin Scott, has followed the trail of the returning young men and requests asylum, promising to pull his weight on the hunt. Finally, a while later, four more white refugees turn up and are taken in, nominally by the band, more immediately by Scott. What will the presence of these outsiders, especially the frightening and mysterious Scott, mean in this tight-knit community?

Words and phrases of Anishinaabemowin are a natural fit in Rice’s characters’ speech and are generally translated immediately, so a reader unfamiliar with the language can understand and perhaps learn a little along the way. Dreams are handled naturally, as well, either told by one dreamer to another character or presented without transition but also without confusion. When the legendary windigo enters the story, it does so naturally and quietly at first, without undue drama and literary special effects, so that we are gradually prepared for its full-blown presence.

Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow, like Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel, imagines a world suddenly bereft of electricity, electronic and digital devices, and energy systems we take for granted in our daily lives, but the imagined worlds of the two novels are very different. In the Mandel novel, we roam cities and countryside with groups of wandering Shakespearean players, a “family” brought together by interest and necessity rather than inheritance, and in the end the world as we know it is restored. The people in Rice’s world, many of them related to each other by blood, remain in place. We follow their lives in that place through the first hard winter and leave them in the spring following their second winter, the latter — and the longer-term future — left to our imaginations. 

Both novels, you might say, are stories of post-apocalyptic survival, but Rice’s character Aileen dismisses the apocalyptic notion. She has heard of the notion from young people but puts no credence in it.

“Yes, apocalypse! What a silly word. I can tell you there’s no word like that in Ojibwe. Well, I never heard a word like that from my elders, anyway. 

Evan nodded, giving the elder his full attention. 

“The world isn’t ending,” she went on. “Our world isn’t ending. It already ended. It ended when the Zhaagnaash came into our original home down south on that bay and took it from us. That was our world. When the Zhaagnaash cut down all the trees and fished all the fish and forced us out of there, that’s when our world ended. They made us come all the way up here. This is not our homeland! But we had to adapt and luckily we already knew how to hunt and live on the land. We learned to live here.” 

We’ve always survived, and we always will, Aileen tells Evan. 

An Indigenous People’s History of the United States presents the past of the North American continent from a perspective not taught in schools with curricula set in place by whites, and Moon of the Crusted Snow presents a possible future from a non-white point of view — one possible non-white point of view, of course. That Rice’s compelling story is told in beautiful language with sympathetic characters in a setting not difficult to imagine as the first real snow blows into northern Michigan seared it into my brain, and I recommend it for your winter reading, wherever you live and whatever your ethnic background or connection to the virtual world.

Our reading world is enriched as more voices come to be heard in fiction from different cultural, ethnic, and historical perspectives. 

Recent Reading Serendipity

There as many kinds of readers as there are kinds of people and as many different ways to sort them into groups, too. Today I’m thinking of the preferences readers exhibit when it comes to new vs. old books. Some want only new releases and disdain anything old, while others restrict their reading to works on “classics” list, the older the better, and find nothing worthwhile in current literature. Some seek only books fresh and crisp from publisher or distributor, while others may prefer rich leather-bound volumes or even content themselves with dog-eared paperbacks, as long as they can find a book that has passed through the hands of various owners. Many are the happy approaches to building a personal library!

Personally, I can never rule out a book simply on the basis of its age or even its condition. That beat-up paperback volume of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle that accompanied me across the Great Plains and prairies of the continent on our spring odyssey home to Michigan from the Southwest conveniently broke along its spine into two separate pieces, halving the bulk I needed to carry — first the first half, and then the second as I progressed through the book — in and out of the car and at various stopping places along our route. A large, handsomely bound Voyage would not have suited my traveling needs nearly as well. When at last, home again, I finished with the story, I made the two halves fast together with a rubber band and set the whole aside for a friend, having promised it to her as a hand-me-down. I hope she appreciates its condition suits her as well as it suited me. 

On the other hand, every year sees the advent of wonderful new titles, and I wouldn’t want to miss a treasure simply because it wasn’t available in an old form. It’s always a holiday when Dan the UPS man arrives with a new book order from my distributor. A box of books to open! Though I made out the order myself, when the box arrives I am as excited as if I hadn’t been expecting it. And then, sometimes, a new book comes “over the transom,” as it were. Do you know that expression? Does it bring an image to your mind?

Two recent book discoveries have brightened my reading life, if I can call “discoveries” what it was my good fortune to encounter when not even searching. One was a new book, the other old.

Flesh and Stones: Field Notes From a Finite World, by Jan Shoemaker, came to me as an inscribed gift from the author after she visited my bookstore for the first time. Ms. Shoemaker (coincidentally, the same last name as a writer friend I have known for several years now) writes personal essays, and as essays are a favorite genre of mine, and as the book came to me as an unexpected gift, I was eager to begin reading, and her book, I’m happy to say, pleasantly exceeded my hopes and expectations. Many of the the writer’s experiences will be familiar to other women in our general age range, but she brings a depth of reflection and a writerly sensibility such that every piece is gracefully and thoughtfully achieved. A trip to shop for bras with and for her aging mother, who in need of constant care due to Alzheimer’s, offers Shoemaker a startling vision:

I glimpsed the web of my future in the straps and clasps of that impossible bra. Who is less capable than I am of working any apparatus? I have never walked, by my own wits, through a turnstile in any city subway. Where does the token go? I can’t replace an ink cartridge, hang a picture evenly, or reset the clock in my car to daylight saving time. I can just barely manage a bra myself. All those loops and hooks — it’s like playing cat’s cradle just getting dressed. It was no wonder I was crabby when my mom asked where her parents were, why I winced when she whispered, “Am I an orphan?” 

- Jan Shoemaker, Flesh and Stones: Field Notes From a Finite World

Will you be surprised to learn that I ordered copies of Flesh and Stones for my bookstore? Icing on the cake: Shoemaker lives in Okemos, so she’s another Michigan writer I can happily support.

On one of my bookshelves at home I found a slim little paperback I’d apparently begun long ago and set aside during a busy season, so long ago that I had no memory of the pages leading up to my bookmark. So it was fortuitous, this second coming into my life of Where Nests the Water Hen, by the Canadian writer Gabrielle Roy, the author’s charming story of the Tousignants, a large, happy French Canadian family residing on an island in northern Manitoba. The mother is a particularly engaging personality. Here is Luzina coming home from a trip she makes away from home roughly once a year, happy with the success of her journey and grateful to the driver carrying her toward home:

When they were tired of talking, they rested by reflecting on the pleasant things that had been said. Her life, at the only times when she could give it much thought, while she was jolting along on her travels, seemed truly wonderful…. 

Abe Zlutkin [her driver] took advantage of an interval when the road was a trifle less slippery to show her a photo of his wife. It portrayed a plump young Jewish woman of dark complexion. Abe bethought himself that he loved her dearly. For a moment the business he was in such a hurry to transact ceased tormenting him. Such was Luzina’s power. She disposed people to become aware that they had reasons for being happy. 

- Gabrielle Roy, Where Nests the Water Hen

It is not at all irrelevant to my delight in these two books that both authors describe settings in detail, Shoemaker her natural surroundings wherever she travels as well as at home, Roy the familiar habitat of her native Manitoba. That means a lot to me in much of my reading for pleasure. 

Here is another snippet from Jan Shoemaker:

…If you climb behind Olson Waterfall in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, you hear the brash staccato of water vaulting before your glistening face into a big half-kettle hollowed from shelves of sandstone. Later, retracing your steps below fifty-foot ledges of mossy rock, you pick up the slippery vowels of its creek, chuckling over pebbles and fallen limbs.

And from the wilds of northern Manitoba, in the words of Gabrielle Roy:

Hippolyte … went off to take a stroll along the shore of the Big Water Hen. At its middle the river ran free; outside the current it was encumbered with sedges. They spread everywhere, gaining ground from year to year, just as did the crops elsewhere, the tilth, the forest — a country really made for the birds. Each year they came from the depths of Florida, two thousand miles as a bird flies, hastening and following a cunning course in order to reach this sure asylum! Perhaps more than two thousand miles! The mother birds must have remembered the water which came halfway up the length of the rushes. Here were the finest hiding-places in the world in which to have their ducklings when they first began to swim….

Two very different books -- one fiction, one nonfiction -- set in two different north American countries, one in Manitoba’s remote North, the other in Michigan’s most populated corner. Both beautifully written by women with a strong sense of character and of place, and it was only by serendipity that their paths crossed as they came into my early summer reading life this year. 

May you have similar good reading fortune! And remember that the best way to find these surprises is to put yourself in a promising environment....

The 'Wild West' in Movies (and Books)

Sample of cowboy selection at the Mustang Mall

Out here on the range, most nights the Artist and I watch a movie before we fall asleep — or before a read-aloud session before going to sleep. Usually we stay awake until movie’s end, thus making time for reading aloud. We see more Westerns on TV and DVDs out here than we would at home in Michigan, but we don’t find all Westerns equally satisfying, and I’ve been thinking about the variety in these films over the decades.

Older Western movies fall into a couple of general categories, the formulaic and the classic. (Is it easier to see a black-and-white film as a classic? Plenty of formula movies were made in black-and-white, too, but the truth is that even those look better to our eyes than they would now if we saw the same tired story and two-dimensional characters up on the screen in full color with full, top-quality production values.) Old Westerns made on the cheap weren’t trying to be something they weren’t. The aim of the studios was to entertain and audience in order to make money. That simple. So okay, entertain me, if you can, but I’m not a 9-year-old on a Saturday afternoon, and my entertainment is often diminished by what I know about human nature and the history of my country.

Classic Westerns are something else, but what is considered an important Western film these days? “High Noon” comes immediately to my mind, but looking at a “Top 20” list surprised me: 

“Stagecoach,” from 1939, is the oldest in the list that also includes “My Darling Clementine” (1946) and “The Ox-Bow Incident” (1943), “Red River” (1948), “Winchester” (1950), and naturally “High Noon” (1952), but many movies made long after Westerns were weekly theatre fare also made the cut: “The Wild Bunch” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” both from 1969; “Little Big Man” (1970); “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” (1971); “The Outlaw Josie Wales” (1976); “Dances With Wolves” (1990); “Unforgiven” (1992), a remake of “True Grit” from 2010; and “Django Unchained” (2012.

While all the films in the list are set in the West, in Westerns as in horror or gangster films it’s easy to substitute gore for character, plot, and meaningful action. To my mind, how human beings kill (each other) and die (alone) is not that interesting, in and of itself. Notwithstanding the truth that death comes to us all, for me the killing and dying is only interesting within the context of how people live and how and why they make the choices they do. 

Films from the 1990s and later look at the 19th century through 20th- and 21st-century sensibilities, with all the concomitant insights and flaws that implies. In “Dances With Wolves” a director (Kevin Costner, also the film’s star) has removed cultural blinders in his look back at the history of the American West, portraying the Native Americans in his story in their full humanity, and his story means much more to me than all the blood spilled in “The Wild Bunch.”

A recent issue of Cowboys and Indians magazine (picked up for free in the library lobby or laundromat -- I forget which -- and I'm not kidding about the name of the magazine, either) included a short list of what those who compiled it called “Top Modern Westerns.” There are only five films on this list, all of them made since we turned the millennial corner, and I have seen none of them, but “Hell of High Water” (2016) sounds like one I’d give a chance.

In any case, I have my own favorites among the more recent films set in the West, and none of them made the Top 20 list, much less the five Top Moderns. For me, “Broken Trail” is #1 — and not only for some of the best wild horse herd sequences I’ve ever seen on film. Robert Duvall and Thomas Hayden Church play down-to-earth cowboys, looking to make a buck but doing it their way and not so focused on the buck that they have put their humanity on the shelf. Another I like a lot is the almost unknown “Red Rock West,” a quirky noir Western with comic undertones that’s about as far from “Broken Trail” as a movie can be, but I like Nicholas Cage, and much of the movie is set in Willcox, Arizona, my winter stomping grounds, so I recommend it to friends for that reason alone. 

And now I have another to add to that short list. 

Tom Selleck’s “Monte Walsh” is not the most exciting movie, even the most exciting Western, I’ve ever seen. There are stretches where it’s almost dull and a couple of scenes played too hard for effect. But I didn’t mind the slow or overplayed sequences all that much, for the sake of the movie’s depiction of cowboy life, both its appeal and its disadvantages, particularly in an era (end of the 19th century) when everything is changing fast. The range is being fenced in, cowboy jobs fewer and harder to find. (Unemployment has never been unique to cities.) You sense that these characters are real people in the grip of real life dilemmas.

Why do they do it? How long can they hope to do it? What else can they do instead, when “cowboyin’ is all [they] know”?  I can’t remember any other Western film that set out to explore these questions in such detail. And there are exciting parts, too, and beautiful scenes. 

One minor character in the film is an aged Civil War veteran. “Monte Walsh” is not the only Western to feature Civil War veterans, and it’s historical fact that many Confederates came west to start new lives after the Civil War. (Many Southerners had come west before the war, too, which is not so well known.) The sad plight of “Fightin’ Joe” — the character goes by the name of his Civil War hero rather than his own name (and there’s a lot about men’s names, their real names vs. what they’re known by) — is that he’s been reduced to “ridin’ fence,” which the movie seems to be telling us is the end of the line for a working cowboy. That piqued my interest, because in what I’ve been reading about ranch life, riding fence is just part of the work — good, honest, hard outdoor work — and in none of the memoirs and reminiscences I’ve read did anyone indicate that it was below a man’s dignity to fence and keep fences in repair. But those were ranchers’ memories, and there was apparently a vast difference between a 19th-century cowboy and a 20th-century rancher. 

No, Monte and his cowboy pals are seeing their West vanish before their eyes: monied corporations, men from the East, are buying up land and fencing it in and sometimes don’t do a damn thing with it! And that poor old man ridin’ fence is all alone. He isn’t part of a working team any more, even his horse less a partner and more mere transportation to the fence line, while those other cowboys, the ones who haven’t yet lost their jobs, they’re still ropin’ and ridin’ and roundin’ up and drivin’ cattle and horses. 

“Monte Walsh,” based on the book by Jack Schaefer,  was filmed in Calgary, Alberta, and while not a perfect film, it’s worth seeing. I decided not to provide any links to reviews in this post, because some of them tell you way too much. Just take a look at the movie for yourself. That’s my advice. 

I haven’t read Jack Schaefer’s book and only learned of it via the movie. Anyone know Monte Walsh the book? Should I be read it? Warning: You’ll have to give a strong sell job, because I’m tempted to skip right to Jack Schaefer’s The Hearts of Horses, in which I read that the cowboy is a girl!

Our just-begun bedtime read-aloud book is Blood Brother, by Elliott Arnold, a fictionalized account of the friendship between Cochise and Tom Jeffords, the story made into a movie we have yet to see, “Broken Arrow.” So stay tuned, because I'll be out here for a while yet....

(Bonus scene here.)

Postscript: 

Since writing this post we have watched “Broken Arrow,” the movie made from Elliott Arnold’s book,Blood Brothers. I don’t know whether to recommend the movie or not. We’re not far along yet in the novel to know how far fiction departed from the account Tom Jeffords made of the meeting in the Stronghold, when he took General Howard to meet Cochise, but I’ll be disappointed if the novel veers into an irrelevant, largely invented love story, as does the movie. That, however, was the Hollywood of the time. 

My biggest disappointment was the movie’s setting, as it was clear from the initial sight of the first tall saguaro and the mountain formations surrounding the desert through which Jimmy Stewart rode (though I’m happy to say he could sit a horse just fine) that we werenotin Cochise County. The screenwriter had assumed that "all exterior scenes will be photographed in the magnificent and neglected section of Arizona, in which the events occurred,” and publiity for the film promised movie-goers that the film had been "shot in the locations where the story actually took place.” Not so! Well, some of the filming took place in northern Arizona — up on the Whitewater Apache reservation — and the rest was shot in California and Utah. Why not Chiricahua? Why not the Dragoon Mountains? All mountains are not the same! Each place is unique, as is its history.

Also, White Buffalo Calf Woman -- is that the tradition that the young female love interest was supposed to represent? And isn't this a Lakota tradition, not Apache? Perhaps the legend migrated? Someone more knowledgeable will have to set me straight on this, if I've got it wrong, but the whole business of "pan-Indians," i.e., taking different peoples from different parts of the continent and creating a composite, is problematic.

On the other hand, Hollywood did a few things right with the story. They followed the lead of both the real Tom Jeffords and also author Elliott Arnold and, finally, made a Western movie that told the Indians' side of that era’s bloody cultural conflict, and it presented the Apaches as human beings with legitimate claims to the land and their way of life, rather than simply as “savages.” Also, while major characters are played by white actors, 375 Apaches were played by actual Apaches — again, I should note, according to Twentieth Century-Fox. 

There’s also an interesting story about the House on Un-American Activities. That background, on script and other choices, can be found here.