todd of tacoma

1. Pride comes before the fall. So does feeling good for a little bit.
2. More often than not, you confuse happiness with relief that you feel less bad than yesterday sometimes.
3. Bananas are an excellent source of potassium but not the highest among fruits and vegetables.
4. Near what is now Manhattan, Montana, where I grew up, there used to be a township called Hamilton, a few miles southwest. After a couple decades operating as Hamilton, it picked up and moved to Manhattan, the whole town, so it could be closer to the Northern Pacific Railway.
5. Let’s have a story:

Young Jim Vandeweghe lived outside one summer. He set up a tent in his backyard and only came in for lunch and dinner or if he had an accident in the night. Every day Dad said Jim would have to quit this camping nonsense and go back to his room soon. But Mom said give him a break, it’s just a phase, let him play explorer, his grandpa just died.

My dad just died, Dad would say.

Jim was seven and a half and fancied himself the reincarnation of Jim Bridger, an explorer he knew of only, in name alone. It was a man’s name and the name of a mountain and the name of a wildlife refuge the Vandeweghes lived by.

Jim woke up one morning that summer to birdsong and a distant coyote yapping and a shadow of a shovel stuck in the ground outside his tentflap. How it got there without him hearing it driven into the hard soil he couldn’t figure out. He’d been listening to the morning sounds for almost two hours before he’d even itched his legs.

It was the shit shovel. With the rusty, dull blade and gray wooden handle. It was the day to pick up dog shit.

Jim did this once a week. Combed the backyard staring at the ground clasping his shit shovel with his chubby hands, and when he’d see a turd he’d slip the blade underneath it and walk it to the fence and fling it into the field just beyond the barbed wire. This year it was barley out there. Next year alfalfa. He could tell by the healthy green and purple growing like weeds along the ground between the barley rows.

Barley rankled Jim’s dad. When that stuff turns it’s gonna bring all the birds from the refuge, he’d say. Get your BB gun ready! Fifty cents a carcass, he’d say. And he’d rub his hands together.

Like this.

6. You don’t get enough conspiracies when you google what happened to Superman’s horse?
7. The Shoshone, Crow, and Nez Perce people once hunted the land where I grew up, around what is now Manhattan, Montana, at one point Hamilton, Montana. Three rivers met just to the west, and buffalo grazed and watered there.
8. In 1864, Bozeman, Montana, was established in the Gallatin Valley, east of what is now Manhattan, once Hamilton, and the U.S. government upped their campaign in the valley to dispossess the Shoshone, Crow, and Nez Perce of the surrounding land, to protect the settlers. The legal phrase they used was “Extinguishing the Indian Title.”
9. Gallatin Valley means “valley of flowers.”
10. Back to Jim:

Jim looked for shit beneath the backyard’s large evergreen canopy, but he wasn’t looking where the shit would be. He was just looking up. Looking for a path up the largest, oldest tree there, up the old sappy trunk to the infinite sky. He’d been meaning to scale that tree all summer, but he kept balking. His back and naked arms bristled at the thought of all the scrapes he’d endure. Its bark was as sharp as sawteeth. Its boughs were brown and ashen, half splintered. How many branches would fall in the next strong wind?

While he was mapping his imaginary route up the tree Jim felt a horrible noise move up his leg.

The noise went through him and everywhere else, too. Like a mangled tuning fork was being held against his heel. It was a squeal or a scream he could taste with the backside of his eyeballs. He would not have been surprised if he’d fallen asleep and woken up under one of the evergreen’s dead branches on his tent, the feeling was that intense.

He looked down.

Beneath his feet was a young bird gasping. That’s all. It was fat, like a stowed away accordion, and fuzzy like a kitten. It was a young starling, wounded, but Jim couldn’t tell where it was wounded. A wing or a leg, he guessed, isn’t that all they have?

It didn’t matter. The only cure Jim knew for wounded birds was the fifty cent cure for the birds from the refuge.

But it was too early in the day for that. He decided just to move the wounded bird, instead. He jiggled his shovel underneath it, careful of its legs, that were hidden in its baby breast feathers, that would probably never molt.

It made no fuss. Too shocked, maybe. Only one small meep as Jim slid it between two rows of barbed wire and tipped the shovel and toppled the bird into the shade of barley and alfalfa cover.

His arms tingled, like they had fallen asleep.

Then he remembered that mama birds abandon their young if they’re moved from the nest. But where was the nest?

He scoured the ground.

Nothing.

He looked up.

Hopeless blue sky.

He went inside to grab the BB gun after all.

He killed the baby bird there in the barley where he’d moved it with two shots in the breast, looking for the heart. Between the two shots the bird yawned soundlessly and Jim momentarily lost blood to his head. He collapsed on the brown pine needles that covered the ground where he was looking for shit.

That night he slept on the couch with his skin crawling like he’d been in ivy. While he tossed and turned he thought about souls. Every soul is unique and infinite. The bible says there is a finite number. Something like forty-thousand, and none of them are for animals. So there are excess living things.

In the morning he awoke to birdsong, as if nothing had died. He wasn’t itchy any longer. He went to the backyard and stuffed his pillow and blanket back inside his tent where they belonged. He didn’t walk beneath the evergreen canopy again, and stopped daydreaming of climbing the tree. He only earned a dollar-fifty from his dad when the barley turned in August.

End of story.

11. In 1871, a party of Native Americans raided Hamilton, Montana, and stole between 250 to 300 horses. I have never seen 250 to 300 horses, not at once, perhaps not even total. The party killed two white men, and later that year, two more Native Americans killed another white man, in his wheat field. Seven months later, the people of Hamilton held an urgent meeting to decide what they should do about the “Indian problem.” They talked about mounting something big, like Bozeman big, or General Custer big, but they ended up not doing much. Just talking and daydreaming.
12. Eleven years later, the Northern Pacific Railway came and Hamilton moved to Manhattan and let the power of industry go to work for them instead. Problem solved.
13. Hamilton didn’t have a saloon, which may be why no one looked back when they left it.
14. One person looked back, actually. A schoolteacher named Evie. She’d forgotten a book of poems and was pretty sure she knew where she’d left it. But when she turned her face back to her schoolhouse she was turned into a salt lick, because God must have told the settlers not to look back like that.
15. In the place where Evie looked back, where she was turned into a salt lick and was licked apart by deer and wild horses and also completely dissolved into the ground by rainwater and snowmelt is now the gate to Meadowview Cemetery, at the end of Meadow View Road.
16. You probably would like for me to tell you there’s a tree or a rare flower growing or renewing where Evie dissolved, or that she seeped into the groundwater and entered nearby Spring Creek and she is doomed to look for her poems eternally in the water and the mud, but I cannot confirm this.
17. For the sake of you or someone you love: Write the words Orson Welles Drunk Commercial on a piece of paper and hide it somewhere to be found and googled later, hopefully months or years or generations from now.
18. Mung beans and potatoes surpass bananas in potassium, but they are harder to eat after a long bike ride or run.
19. You are what you eat has some biblical precedent.
20. When Eve ate the apple she kept the doctor away, but not snakes.