Reminiscent of Civil War historian Shelby Foote, Jones’ writing style is narrative and as such we are right there in the jungles, in the villages, in the White House as we learn of all the Byzantine events, both in combat and politics, that took place in those years. Not the stuff of dry and tedious historical narrative, this book is intensely intimate in the incidents, the emotions and entanglements it describes
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We meet a wide cast of characters, Theodore Roosevelt, Frederick Funston, Arthur MacArthur, Emilio Aguinaldo, Littleton Waller, Geronimo, William McKinley, Nelson Miles. two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner and Marine Corps officer, Smedley Darlington Butler, and William Jennings Bryan, just to name a few.

The United States, at the time this book describes, was a rising international power and wanted to flex its muscles and help spread democracy. (Sound somewhat familiar to certain events following 9/11?) The USA boasted a robust burst of growth and enlightenment and felt it imperative to share the benefits of American Democracy with the world, especially the downtrodden and enchained people of the old Spanish Empire: Guam, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

In Jones’ narrative, we learn that the population majority of the Philippines thought we were coming to throw the Spanish out so they could create their own form of government. They wanted us to come in, defeat the Spaniards and then leave. I think I recall hearing something similar to this when we went into Iraq. They wanted us to go in, get rid of Saddam Hussein, and then leave. And herein resides one of the most important notions (in my opinion) about Honor in the Dust: History, as Santayana and Hegel believed, tends to repeat itself.

In 1898, we didn’t leave the Philippines as soon as we defeated the Spanish. We became involved in a protracted guerilla war with a well organized Philippine resistance generaled by then president of the short-lived Philippine Republic, Emilio Aguinaldo. Jones’ renditions of the grueling grind of the war, the weather and terrain, the personalities of the people involved, puts the reader ringside, so to speak, to torture, murder, pillage, misery, misunderstanding and no-holds-barred politics.

By the end of the insurrection and the surrender of the Philippine rebels, America’s dreams of Imperial might were battered, tattered and for the short term abandoned. Brave and famous Marine and Army officers were tried and in several cases convicted of what were basically charges of torture. President Theodore Roosevelt, a champion of American involvement in the affairs of countries cast far and wide over this planet was chastened by what he learned about the necessities of subduing a large country with determined resistance in a hostile environment.

But we weren’t chastened long (and here, again, I venture into my own opinions). After (and before) our experience in World War I, we sent the Marines into Haiti, Nicaragua and any number of other tropical destinations to put down Insurrectos.

Major General Smedley Butler, the above referenced two-time Congressional Medal of Honor awardee, had the following to say about his service in these various wars:

“I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.”

In Vietnam, my war, we also fought a protracted conflict with charges leveled against American warriors of torture, murder, and pillage, some of which, as in the case of the My Lai massacre, resulted in officers of the United States Army being court martialed and convicted of crimes.

For example, in Iraq we had events at Abu Ghraib and in Afghanistan we had Marines urinating on corpses and alleged murders of families by Army personnel, all symptoms, I think, of our military’s frustrations with the difficulties of fighting in guerilla-type conflicts. And in the cases of Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan, I see parallels with Gregg Jones’ story of the war in the Philippines. Young men are sent to far off countries that we think we are helping, only to become part of a protracted, vicious, guerilla war.

In war, bad things happen, innocent people get killed. What domestic and international politics require, the battle cannot produce. Often the combatants are reduced to involvement in internecine fights that are degraded to the lowest common denominators of horror, viciousness and torture. Not to say that the opposite doesn’t happen, too, because it does. In war, (and I speak here from my own experience) the best about humanity also comes out.

Yet, whether in the Philippines, Vietnam or Afghanistan, the horror that happens on the ground seems to repeat itself. And I wonder if we ever learn anything from the past.

As Hegel said, history repeats itself and as Santayana says, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” But why? The 19th Century American philosopher and thinker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, may have figured out why: “The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience dies with them.”

Again, the book’s title is Honor in the Dust, Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines and the Rise and Fall of America’s Imperial Dream. As you read Gregg Jones’ well-composed prose, I think you will be thinking about the past, the present and future of America’s foreign involvements.

All of this, of course, fuels imagery that erupts from the past: characters, events, some funny, some sad, some unwanted, some I am glad I remembered.

In 1979-1980 I worked for a big corporation in the ag business; cotton, lettuce, ranches, feed lots. I was part of a team who ran a feedlot on the Gila River Indian Reservation at a place called San Tan, southeast of Phoenix.

When somebody from the Phoenix corporate office called and said “Audit,” images of three-piece suits came to mind. Imagine a suit (an auditor) on a cayuse. A twirling lasso cutting the breeze, stirrups, chaps, saddle (an auditor?).

When you work outside at a feed yard you fight manure dust biting the eyes, the ears, the nose. Flies, sweat, cattle wild with fear. Frightened cattle don’t eat. That stops them gaining weight. It costs money when they don’t gain weight.

Not making money…hmmm…the thought of an auditor causing loss of money seems an oxymoron, but a lot about the cattle feeding business is strange. Somewhere the task of providing protein for a hungry world gets caught up with the drive to make a buck. We all understand making a buck, but when keeping track of making bucks hinders the efficiently production of a t-bone steak, it causes a buckaroo to pull off his Stetson and scratch his head.

They’d be out on Saturday morning. That’s what they said. “Saturday.” It was going to be 105 degrees so that meant a dawn start. We’d need to chouse the cattle before they had time to eat.

My cohorts, Robert, the manager, and Ed, the cattle boss, showed up before the sun sliced the eastern horizon. We copied lists and lot numbers and waited for the auditor.

A dark blue BMW pulled up. Two men, one whom I recognized as the corporate controller and who was wearing fancy orange and gold Nikes, and another whom I had never seen, got out and stomped up to the front door. Both looked rough…hangover rough, pallid skins. A day’s dark whiskers glooming their faces. When the controller walked in, those orange and gold Nike’s cut the dim like the glint of coin in a counting house. I thought to myself, those shoes are a bit brash for knocking around in cow manure.

Robert said, “It’s going to get hot fast. And it’s hard on the cattle. We best be moving now.”

Two cowboys showed up on horseback. Flies began what flies do: eat, lay eggs, die and bother horses, cattle and humans. The sun grew surlier as the day swelled.

As soon as the auditor and Mister Controller picked a pen of cattle (we were trying to see if the actual count matched what the records said) the cowboys drove the lot into an alley between the pens and we’d count. Dust rose with the temperature. The auditor broke an early sweat and Mister Controller complained about everything: the heat, the flies, the dust.

If the count was off, we’d run the lot out into the alley again and count them a second time. The cattle didn’t like it. Once or twice, big hump-backed smoky-gray south Texas steers hurdled the sucker rod fences which dismayed the auditor, messing with his tallies. Ed and the cowboys cackled. Mister Controller spent a lot of time pontificating on cattle, especially south Texas, half wild smoky-gray hump backs. It sounded like a bunch of…how should I best say it?…like a bunch of manure.

We had eight or ten lots to tally and were keeping pretty close on our counts which made Robert happy…less chousing the cattle. It was hard to tell what the auditor thought. He looked to me like he needed a cool place to vomit up his hung-over guts. Mister Controller kept babbling about cattle this and cattle that.

On the last lot, we drove the steers out into the alley and threaded them back in. In the middle of the pen, a big wet spot about ten feet across marked the tan dust a dark brown. All of us, the cowboys, Robert, Ed and me, avoided that spot. There was a leaky water line down below the four or five feet of dried manure.

Robert and Ed told everyone to stay clear of the wet spot. As we finished the count, Mister Controller crossed the pen, wiping his hands like he’d just finished a big chore.

He yelled at the auditor, “What’s the count look like?” as he stepped into the big wet spot. Ed yelled, “Hey, don’t go there.” Mister Controller frowned and said, “I don’t take orders from…” and he began to sink. As if it was all a fantasy, he walked on into the middle of the spot with a look on his face like he couldn’t believe what was happening to him. He sunk past his knees. Robert yelled, “It’s like quicksand.”

Mister Controller stopped and glanced down as he sunk an inch at a time. He stuck out his hand. “Help me.” The auditor looked at me and I shrugged. Mister Controller looked at me, too, but I shook my head. He almost sobbed, “Why?” One of us, I don’t remember, said, “Because you’ll pull us in.”

One of the things a cowboy loves to do more than anything is build a loop and rope something. They will rope anything…a dog, a goat, a horse, a set of horns on top of a saw-horse. I don’t know if one of us suggested it, but before you could slap a blow fly off the side of your face, the two cowboys had their ropes in their hands building loops. Mister Controller sank deeper, his face paralyzed by the realization he was caught in the nefarious grip of cow shit.

One loop, then two, whirled in the hot air. Somebody chuckled, and then laughed as one loop, then two, flopped over the torso of Mister Controller. Drawn tight, trapping his flailing arms. He yelled, “Hey, wait a …” We laughed, even Mister Hung-over Auditor, as the cowboys pulled Mister Controller out.

I don’t know how much weight gain was lost as a result of the audit. But there were other rewards, wastes and squanders. Mister Controller lost one of his fancy orange and gold Nike’s. Sucked right off his foot into that manure sinkhole. I have often wondered what else he lost.

As I think about this new granddaughter, the season is Spring and outside the daffodils are smiling the color of the sun. Down the streets, pear trees’ white blossoms balloon the moods of commuters. Pink and reds and purples emerge. It is a season of birth, re-birth, new growth.

Then I think about the old days and how mothers produced sons and daughters that were cold as stone when they emerged from the womb. Youngsters died of measles, mumps, smallpox, scarlet fever before they had a chance to mate, get drunk, find Jesus, get old. Those were the days of small farms where women and men hoed rows of corn and dug their spuds. Milked cows, sheared sheep, cooked oat cakes over cast iron stoves that threw heat like the halls of hell. Chores galore; stirring dirty clothes in a big cast iron pot full of boiled water and harsh lye soap. Candle making, quilting, sewing; all created a dire need for lots of hands. Lots of children were needed to help out on the farm

In 1971 my father and I took my son, James, to see the movie Man In the Wilderness, set in the Northwest during the early 1800s, with Richard Harris and John Huston. The characters in the film were fur trappers and one of them, the Richard Harris character, voyeured a Native American woman giving birth to a child. Out in the thick woods, she just squatted, without help, as her man kept watch from afar, I suppose to keep grizzlies and wolves from attacking her as she birthed that baby.

At the time, I thought that scene was a little over the top in terms of dramatization. I remember my now-long-deceased friend Richard Madewell scoffing, “That’s all a bunch of BS to sell movie tickets.” I tended to agree. Son James, who was about three years old, seemed more interested in the bear that attacked Harris’s character and didn’t have much to say about the on-screen child birth.

That was back in the honky-tonking days of my youth. I spent spare time down at the bar on Main Street where the skid row drunks sat on the high curb and waited for the sun to come up and the bars to open. My watering hole was a rough location, a bar as old as any of the businesses in town.

Big fans beat the air around the pressed tin ceiling with its fancy curlicues and circles. We listened to Dire Straits and the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, tunes from the Allman Brothers’ Idlewild South.

We downed flat draft beer and shots of cheap tequila, Bloody Marys, Spañada, wine coolers, bad Scotch and VO with Seven, not to mention more nefarious substances. We shot nine ball and eight ball, got in fights, in shootouts. We got drunk, and not drunk. Hippies, cowboys, college professors who taught Español, drug salesmen of both the legal and the not legal, ag teachers, baseball glove vendors, miners, cotton farmers, plumbers, sheepherders, butchers, house painters, short order cooks in Mexican food restaurants, wives, daughters, they all made their way to sit on the tall stools at the ancient bar.

Some wild individuals denizened the joint. One pair I recall—it was just around the time I went with father and son James to see Man In the Wilderness—showed up one day and joined right in. They usually arrived for tamales and red beers…that was breakfast. He had long, stringy hair and wore a beard a foot thick. He donned a stained and battered New York Yankee hat and claimed to be from Manhattan but his deep Texas accent belied that. His mate was wild, too, wore fringed buckskin shirts and trousers, blue and red and yellow beaded buckskin moccasins that looked like they were made before Geronimo went to Florida under guard of the United States Army. She claimed she made all her own clothing and I did not doubt that.

For some reason they liked to drink around me and I’d have to be pretty toasted to stand the scent of lard and mesquite-coal smoke that hung all over them. She bragged about cooking over one of those old cast iron stoves my grandmother used back before my mother was born. I didn’t doubt that, either. They rented a falling-down adobe building with rotten wood floors that was about as old as our town. The adobe sat behind Ronquillo’s Radiator Shop…I think I remember this right…at the corner of Sacaton and First. I always knew it as the Prickly Pear House because a prickly pear sat out in front of the old adobe. The cactus had big flat paddles wrinkled like the face of my grandmother and probably as old.
This particular wild bunch would also show up in the afternoon and drink their favorites….shots of Jose Cuervo with draft Coors back. One, two, three.

I always thought it was strange that she drank like that…as well as smoking unfiltered Camels and no telling what else…because she was heavy with their first child. Heavy….hung out like a hot air balloon. But one, two, three, down the hatch, she’d laugh and dance to Dickey Betts’ guitar riffs in “Memory of Elizabeth Reed.” Awkward and scruffy, she shuffled and puffed on her smoking Camel.

One hot August afternoon under the cooling click of the ceiling fans, a few of my friends and I sat and sucked down cold glasses of draft as the two of them, both of this wild pair, pirouetted and wheeled to the tunes blaring out of the juke box.

She suddenly stopped and yelled, “Honey, it’s time.”

Without another word they stomped out the front door. A moment later his thick-bearded face showed back in the doorway as he yelled, “Be right back.”

The barkeep chuckled and mumbled, “Right. She’ll be lucky if she and that kid survive, as much poison as she puts in her body.”

Two hours later they were back. That hot air balloon was suddenly gone and the leather blouse with the fringe on the seams looked almost big enough for two of her. She held a red, wrinkled baby in an old wool blanket. Her man began handing out cheap stogies with a cigar band that announced, “It’s a Girl.”

I said, “They let you out of the hospital that fast?”

She twanged, “Didn’t need no hospital. Done it myself.”

We all looked to her man. He grinned and nodded, “I watched, but that was all. She just squatted and spurted that young’un out.” He grinned and hugged her. “She’s one hell of a woman.”

The baby squalled and the mother giggled. The father let out a roar, “Barkeep. For my lady-love, a Jose Cuervo and cold Coors back”

He spun around, his long hair whirling like a jigging woman’s skirt. He yelled, “I’m a daddy.”

I sure hope Sarah and Baruch experience a different kind of delivery.

And yesterday the wind blew, and last week, most of the week except for one or two golden days where the rays made us think of planting spinach and snap peas; but then, here it rolled in again, the blustery breath of early spring, stirred up by differences in barometric pressure. Wind is air movement pushed out of high pressure areas into low pressure areas. Winds create havoc in hurricanes and typhoons, can lift the land off the top of Wyoming and haul it all the way to the bottom of the Atlantic. It carves, cuts and makes you crazy.

Once Betty and I stood above the Palais de Papes in Avignon, Provence, admiring a late spring view of the Rhone, the hills, the old town, when a blast of hot air known locally as the Mistral almost knocked us over. I recall reading somewhere about that wind, and Gauguin and Van Gogh and how the Mistral helped drive Van Gogh crazy.

When I lived in southern Arizona, the wind got up in the spring and blew a layer of dust for days, stinging eyes, skin, the leaves of newly planted pansies, testing your ability to stay focused on the business of getting by. In the summer, great hullabaloos formed up over Tucson and harangued our way, as if to furiously eradicate the city of Phoenix and everything in between.

I lived in that desert in early the seventies, not too long back from the war and metaphorically speaking, walking backwards into a stiff gale. In 1972 I recall standing outside my house and watching one of those brief and violent late afternoon holocausts rear up and try to exterminate everything in its way. Spiny Sonoran Desert mountain ranges over four thousand feet up were dwarfed by the chocolate brown fury. It roiled and rolled, like a flood rush of muddy water. When it attacked us, the sky turned black, trailer houses moved twenty feet to the northwest, telephone poles snapped like match sticks, privet bushes lost half their leaves. Everything and everywhere owned a coat of fine brown clay.

When Betty and I lived in the high mountains of southern New Mexico, the wind blew from late February through May. Steady. Brisk. The moan and whine of old spruce trees as they rubbed up against each other and the wood in your back porch deck. The gales, gusts, and breezes that hauled Arizona’s surface over the Gila massif, the Black Range, the San Andres, finally picking up the white gypsum sand outside of Alamogordo. Plastering it on the sides of mountain top Ponderosa pine and red fir so that it looked like snow. The season of creaks and cracks and listening to the trees complain in the middle of the night. Worrying about the hood of your car. The roof over your bed.

In Cloudcroft, NM, the bars bustled that time of the year. Men stormed in and threatened each other with big Bowie-type knives, .357 magnums, fists, snow shovels. The schnapps and cheap whiskey spilled all over the bar tops. Boot heels up in the air. Old woodstoves smoking where the melting snow leaked in and dripped dripped dripped.

Everyone seemed on edge. That was the time of boredom, before planting, before moving the cattle, often too muddy to go into the woods to work. Just time to drink and dream and stew. That’s when the Apaches would come to town and irritate half the white folk. I don’t know if it was all on purpose, the back and forth between the white folk and the natives. But it bubbled up everywhere: in the mercantile, the gas station, the Western Bar. Barkeep Frieda used to get after the young Apache men as they taunted her over their glasses of draft Budweiser. She’d call the law. They’d laugh. The law would show up. Sometimes a fight ensued.

Once a young Apache man came to town and ran out of gas in his pickup. The wind blew that day, too. I recall the fluttering skirts and scarves of women bustling on the boardwalk, the American and New Mexican flags slapped straight out from the flag pole.

That young Apache man went around and begged for change to buy a couple of gallons of gas. I sat in the Western Cafe and drank hot coffee and watched. He tried at the gas station. They threw him out of the bank. He walked up to the door of the bar, but thought better. I don’t know, maybe he’d been kicked out of there before when he wasn’t so needy.

He went from store to business to store down the length of Burro Street. Out of sight I wondered about all the animosity between whites and browns, whites and yellows, black and brown, yellow and red, hell, anything that makes one different is enough to start the process, like a little breeze that gets up in the afternoon, then steadies into a wind that gusts with particular fury. Sometimes it’s a typhoon and blows the world down onto its knees.

After finishing my coffee, I walked down to the post office to get the mail. The wind forced me to tilt my back into it. People in the street leaned this way and that, any way they could to fight the power of what they could not stop.

After I checked my mail box, I saw that young Apache standing at the door, hitting everyone up for change. He wasn’t having any luck and I wondered how I could slip by him and out into the wind. I didn’t want to get caught and have to say, “No.”

For a moment, a gaggle of women dammed up against the entrance…purple pant suits and the quilted outers of down jackets. L. L. Bean boots. I saw my chance to escape but by the time I arrived at the door he was standing forlorn and single. I figured if I didn’t look him in the eye, he’d leave me be, but for some reason I looked him in the eye. What I saw was nothing to fear.

He said, “Hey, man, I ran out of gas and I…”

I already knew his story. It’s as old as mankind. For some reason, against my will, I stuffed my right hand in my Levi pocket and pulled out a lump of dollar bills, quarters, pennies, dimes.

I shoved it at him, “That’s all I got.”

I swear some tears rose in his eyes and I doubt it was from the wind. He started to pull off a silver and turquoise ring the size of my thumb, and said, “Here, man,” but I threw out my clenched fist and said, “Naw, ain’t necessary.”

He began to say something else, but I didn’t stick around, just had to get out into that wind.

Sometime around 1952 or 1953, at 111 Beech Street in Casa Grande, Arizona, I sat on the big oval hooked rug made from tatters of denim and other disregarded material that kept the chill off me from the concrete floor beneath. Towheaded, with my gapped front teeth already making their statement about the image I would become, I was watching KPHO TV Channel Five when the 1939 version of Of Mice and Men came on the tube.

My mother was in the kitchen baking chocolate chip cookies, and between visiting on the phone with friends, her mother, her brother’s snarly wife, she sang Mormon hymns. She must have heard the announcer presenting the day’s morning feature film—it was Saturday—because, and I distinctly remember her saying this, she told me, “Kenny, I don’t think you should watch that movie.”

I must have said, “Why?” because right now I recall the conversation definitely going on, the words flitting back and forth, my mother’s words coming out of the kitchen along with snippets of the tune “Give, Said the Little Stream,” and the scent of those sweet cookies.

What I probably sent back to her in response to her signals were mostly smart-assed mental messages. I probably made some faces, too, scrunching up my lips beneath the end of my nose, shaking my head and body as I silently mimicked, “Kenny, I don’t think you should watch that movie.”

She kept saying it, she kept saying it. She kept saying it. Even at that age, five or six years old, I already understood how my mother operated. If she really hadn’t wanted me to watch Of Mice and Men she’d have stomped into the front room and turned off the TV and if necessary she would have switched my butt with the flyswatter. Sometimes I forced that . . . the switching with the fly swatter.

But she didn’t switch my butt, she just kept sending me sweet-worded warnings along with the lyrics to a song.

I don’t remember many of the details of that 1939 version except hating the Bob Steele character, Curley, and loving the Lon Chaney, Jr., character Lenny (who suffered from what we now call a developmental disability). Because of how the story was structured, I was supposed to hate Curley and love Lenny.

In the end, Lon’s character, Lenny, kills Curley’s wife, not maliciously, but regardless, ends her life and so he must pay. Lenny’s best friend and protector, George, instead of allowing Lenny to be ripped apart and murdered by a mob (and probably also to save himself), shoots Lenny in the back of the head while telling Lenny about the wonderful farm they are going to own sometime down the road.

Until the sound and image of that murder, I really liked George, too, but instantly, besides being confused, I loathed George, and loathed something much larger which I could not reasonably articulate but certainly felt in my gut and bone marrow. I suspect that something larger and my loathing of it was what my mother was subtly warning me about.

I remember, much to my chagrin, breaking out in sobs after George shot Lenny. Sobs weren’t encouraged around our house, so I was flummoxed pretty good to break out the way I did, as if all the gates named reticence were broken down.

My mother took me in her arms and we lay on the couch, her soothing me and yet advising me how she’d not wanted me to watch that film.

Twelve years late, my senior year in high school, I checked Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men out of the library. My tow head had turned sandy brown and my gap teeth were definitely prominent. Reading about Curley and Lenny and George I received a dose of realism in the first degree.

Realism . . . Steinbeck wrote the book during the Depression and he aimed, I surmise, to portray the hard world of labor and poverty and wealth during that era. But he was also writing about the hard world of love and friendship and mutual respect.

George was hard on Lenny all through the story, but he loved Lenny and respected him as a person although in the end he killed him; one, for Lenny putting George in the position of being his protector and thus responsible for Lenny’s actions, and two, to forestall Lenny having to deal with what was to come. Talk about hard stuff . . . George’s realization that the decisions we make to save ourselves might also be the decisions that destroy us and often the decisions cannot be avoided.

Here it is almost sixty years since I first watched Of Mice and Men and the impact of Steinbeck’s tale still lives on in my thoughts. That’s what I call power in a story. We can rant and rail concerning the inequalities, or lack thereof, inherent in humanity’s behavior towards one another and it doesn’t mean much. But drape the issues on the backs of characters like Lenny and George and you can penetrate the human heart.

Steinbeck knew that. Tortilla Flat, East of Eden, and The Grapes of Wrath are some of his other novels that can bash our emotions. Steinbeck wrote about the essence of being human.

I suspect my mother, too, understood the power of story to move us and even though she warned me about Of Mice and Men, she let me watch it, let me get an early lesson about the power of story, and more than that, about humanity.

From http://www.graffquotes.com/

Like a war zone. Coming into Baltimore on Amtrak as the late October sun sneaked over the southern horizon. Barbed wire and concertina on tops of fences. Graffiti. On walls. On railroad cars moored on the spider web of tracks. Hopper cars, gondola cars, tank cars, all paint slashed, zig-zagged, tagged. Bombed with spray cans. Railway passenger cars, too. Busted windows and street art rage spray painted all over the sides.

As we chugged on towards Dover, Delaware, I wondered why the cops failed to halt the property damage. Some of the graffiti was interesting to look at. Some I tried to cipher. I even admitted to myself…some of it was almost…beautiful.

A year later, looking for majoliche ceramiche, Umbrian pottery at Deruta, Italy. Graffiti scraped on a long wall buttressing basketball courts just outside the old gate. Wild and nonsensical. Or so it seemed. A brown wall breached with white and red and black. Overhead sullen thunderheads. I wondered if any place was safe from the vulgarity of graffiti.

We parked the Vauxhall and sauntered up for cappuccini and biscotti. Wandered tight, winding streets, gazed off the top of the hill at the vineyards and groves that marched off in all four directions. We hunted pottery and found it. Back and forth we darted, shop to shop, as thunder boomed to the northwest.

At the little chapel in the middle of the bustle of evening commerce, doors creaked open. A swell of farmers and their dressed-in-black wives, their skin burnt by the Umbrian sun. Then a procession out the gate and past our waiting car.

As we sat in the Vauxhall and pondered the moment, the funeral wound down the hill. And the graffiti slashed on the brown wall, enunciated something. What? About life? About death? I didn’t know. The sullen clouds glowering overhead. Slashes of lightning shattering the black sky.

In search of explanations, Betty and I screened the film Exit Through the Gift Shop in hopes of understanding graffiti as something more than property damage. We wish to understand the phenomenon. But what we viewed was a quirky piece with quirky people who earn fabulous livings off their fame as bombers (graffiti artists.) They market their rebel images through art galleries and sell mass produced paraphernalia like t-shirts and coffee cups that display their famous tagger iconography.

What I saw in Exit Through the Gift Shop wasn’t the graffiti scrawled in the Baltimore battle zones bordering the railways, nor the ragged and tortured art on the wall beneath the sullen Italian thunderheads. The stuff in Exit looked more, and seemed more, like a case of anarchist, populist, angry post-modernist tagging co-opted into the world the artists originally started out to destroy. These taggers became what they set out to annihilate.

After viewing Exit, Betty and I watched the film Bomb It, by the documentary filmmaker, John Reiss. This film was more what I expected, a worldwide look at the phenomenon of tagging, or bombing. What one participant calls the largest art movement in the history of the world. Rage against wealth, restraint, dictatorship, the law…everything from raw and vulgar lingo to sophisticated assessments of culture in the 21st century. Instead of selling their graffiti art through the museum gift shop, these painters brave jail, fines, falling off of moving freight cars, off the sides of buildings, roofs. They leap onto overhanging porches and scramble up drainpipes, their long artistic arms making loops of defiance, the colors of rage.

Bomb It was much more what I wanted. A look at something that is endemic worldwide…Berlin, Rio, Tokyo, Los Angeles…even Boise. Something property hates…how Marxist can we get, trashing private property.

We all thought, when the wall in Berlin came down, that maybe Marxism was defunct, dead, caput; but no, it lives, every day and every place whether the result of petulant rage from the youth of an over-stimulated society of consumers or defiant rage from a stomped-on lower class. Marxism lives, as graffiti art, whether we like it or not.

Now, when I think about that train trip through Baltimore as the sun came up, or watching that funeral procession in Deruta, I understand more why the stuff was up there in all its ugly panorama. The way it glared sullenly, like those thunderheads, the way it menaced me like the barbed wire in Baltimore.

When I see graffiti on the electrical box, the sidewalk, the sides of apartments, stores, houses, I will have to take notice. Even though I won’t like it, the message that it sends will grab me by the metaphorical lapel. I should listen but I can’t. If I do, I may be forced to renounce what I am—an anti-Marxist.

But then again, I might stop and look closer and say, “Now that’s art!.”

Besides representing Chris, we will be doing some networking with film folk and as always, finding time for Betty to practice her photography.

Sun Valley is a beautiful place, but like many locations that sport ski areas, it seems a little too glitzy for me, so we will take a break or two from the festival and head north (if the weather permits), over Galena Summit into the Stanley Basin and escape to something a bit more real.

Fairfield, on the Road to Sun Valley

The Stanley Basin is a hard country—a beautiful country—but a hard country. The Salmon River and several of its tributaries meander down from the surrounding peaks and form a bowl that holds the heavy air of winter so that the climate in the Basin is some of the coldest in the country. People who endure in the Basin year ‘round are few, they are hardy and they have an arrogance that announces they can make it through the frost, the cold, the wind, the snow, the long, long teeth of winter’s bite.

The valley is rimmed by the Sawtooths on one side and the Boulder-White Clouds on the other. The bottom land is willows and sage and aspen in the cold, wet spots. A favorite recreational area, the Basin draws sportsmen from all over the world as does Sun Valley, but a twain often resides between the kinds of men and women who go after the glitz of Sun Valley and the folks who travel into the Stanley Basin.

Big Wood River, south of Sun Valley

Not to say that I am either a glitzer or a rough-necker, I am neither. I do enjoy the outdoors, but also enjoy the conveniences of the town where I live.

The Stanley Basin is one of those places that is so beautiful in late spring and summer and fall that you just want to rent or buy a cabin and live there away from it all. But according to Stanley Basin dweller and part time native, John Rember, the Basin and its hardies eat up newcomers like premium ice cream.

Last month I heard Rember, an author and educator, talk about writing. He also read one of his short stories. Rember lives in the Basin on the property his father and mother weaned him on when being able to kill a buck, an elk, catch a salmon, really mattered to one’s ability to survive. Not like now, where the state regulates hunting and fishing and we go do it because it’s fun and our friends want to kill something and so do we.

I was so impressed with Rember, I bought two of his books, MFA in a Box (Dream of Things, Downers Grove, Ill, 2010) and Traplines (Vintage Books, New York, NY, 2004).

MFA in a Box is a how-to, a why-to book about creative writing. But more than that it is a journey through literature from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Ernest Hemingway. On the way, we get a little Jung, Dostoevsky, Boccaccio, Borges, Atwood, Camus, Conrad and Bly, to name a few. We also get a look into Rember’s life. Besides being a survey of literature and a how-to book about writing, I think the book is also memoir.

For example, here is a passage from the chapter on “Writing Image.” Rember is writing about a dream he had, about Hemingway (Rember evidently used to run into Hemingway before that author’s suicide in 1961), and other things.

I’m walking along a river. It’s swollen with spring runoff, and as I am wading through flooded riverbank grass I look ahead to a crowd of people clustered at the side of a bridge. I get closer and see that they’re looking at a body wrapped around one of the pilings. When I get to the crowd, I ask who has drowned. Somebody says it’s Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway looks awful. Fish have eaten off his nose and his flesh has the clean translucence of death-by-washing.

When I initially read this passage, I thought it was real because of the quality of the writing. Notice Rember’s prose. Short and gets to the point, and not unlike something Hemingway would have written ninety years ago. Notice how Rember uses imagery in the piece. You can see the setting, the people, the death.

In his book Traplines the author delivers fourteen essays about the Stanley Basin: learning to hunt and fish, making bombs, building fence, and trapping, among other things. In his spare prose, similar to Hemingway’s style in that regard, Rember muses on his days running a string of pack mules in central Idaho; on skiing volcanoes; on shooting rockchucks with his first date, an older girl named Corinna, the sheriff showing up as they are drinking beer, Rember being the age of fourteen; hauling freshly cut and peeled posts in Harrah’s old De Havilland Twin Otter aircraft into a ranch in the back-country.

Along the way, we get insights into how Rember thinks, what is important to him. Educated at Harvard and the University of Montana, having taught creative writing at College of Idaho(among other places), he has a somewhat unique point of view considering the meaning of life.

I have not been into the Sun Valley or Stanley Basin country since I read these two books by John Rember. So when we go over the summit, I will be looking at the country to see if I can identify places he talks about. Along the road looking at the russet branches of willow and the bare limbs of the quakies in the cold places, I will consider what he told me in his books and mesh that with what I think, what I know about life coming from another place—the desert—and having my own stories of hard-bitten life.

And if I see a moose, or not, I will think I’m in the wilderness, even though the glitz is just over the summit.

Betty and I were talking about that last night, fresh asparagus and those yahoo cattle buyers. I got to yarning about seemingly random thoughts that jutted up into the bottom of my skull. The month after the fresh asparagus arrived, the men who delivered hay from the Wellton-Mohawk Valley just east of Yuma hauled in boxes and boxes of fresh cantaloupe. We owned so much cantaloupe we couldn’t give it away.

I remarked to Betty how I used to take half a case to my father. He relished cantaloupe and would cut one in half and cram each natural bowl with vanilla ice cream. Betty remarked that we should buy a fresh cantaloupe and fill each half with vanilla ice cream in memory of him, and then eat it.

I remarked that, yeah, maybe we should and right now might be a good time because his birthday was somewhere around the 17th of March. She said, “St. Patrick’s Day?” Immediately I knew that wasn’t right because on St. Patrick’s Day, for most of my adult years while my father was alive, I stayed away from him because I usually spent a goodly amount of time at the El Rancho Tavern or Quick Draw’s Saloon or the Western Bar drinking glass after glass of green beer. So if I remember a multitude of cantaloupe and vanilla ice cream birthday bashes, the date must have been other than March 17th.

I told Betty that it couldn’t be the 17th, so I went to look it up and while there discovered the name of one of my mother’s ancestors who was born in England: Abidnigo Clifford (and I don’t know what led me to spend time looking at that), who had a son, Henry Clifford, also born in England, Gloucester to be more exact, where he and his wife Ann (nee Clayfield) begat daughter Mary near Nailsworth, south of Gloucester, and then they immigrated to America. In Utah, Mary Clifford married Merlin Plumb who begat William Lafayette Plumb who married Mary Elsie Riggs who begat Ruth Plumb who married Dale Walter Rodgers who begat me.

In 2009 Betty and I traveled to a Khe Sanh Veterans’ reunion in Denver, Colorado. We drove from Boise and one of the travel nights we spent in Rawlins, Wyoming. After getting settled in at our digs, we drove north towards Independence Rock. Independence Rock was so named because if you were traveling by covered wagon or hand cart west on the Oregon, Mormon or California Trails, you wanted to be at Independence Rock by the Fourth of July or you were headed for weather problems later in the journey.

Independence Rock is a rounded hump that, incidentally, reminds me of the top of my father’s head. He was mostly bald in his later days, and that big rounded-off landmark was reminiscent of Dale Walter’s pate. Maybe at this point in my life I have become sentimental about Dale. We didn’t get along well when I was young. He was mean when he was young, as was his father, and his father’s father, as was I. By the time my father got over being mean, it was late and I was busy and he died.

Maybe I was thinking of his shiny pate as I stood out there in that little valley bounded by humps and bumps of old mountains, not young mountains like Colorado, and Idaho and Utah, or for that matter, some of the ranges in Wyoming. Lightning cracked and a west wind whipped the sage. Mosquitoes attacked my arms and legs. Summer twilight in the north country lasts a long time and we’d arrived at Independence Rock at twilight’s commencement. I stood out on a little bridge that spans the main part of the Oregon, Mormon and California Trails. The literature said you could still see the wagon tracks in parts of the trail and I looked but didn’t see any. Once or twice lightning stabbed close and the thunder rattled off the old mountains and boomed through my bones.

I stood there imagining Henry Clifford and his daughter Mary Clifford in a wagon passing that way towards Salt Lake City sometime in the mid 1850s. They were Mormon folk at that time and would have traveled with lots of other Mormon folk most likely mustered up at Council Bluffs, Iowa for the trip west. I imagined them singing the words from an old Mormon hymn, “Come, come ye saints, no toil or labor fear…”

I imagined all the sour weather, all the toil of just making sure you had something to eat. Out there in that sagebrush plain, what would you burn for cooking fires, and how would you make a new axle for the wagon if the old one broke? How did you fix wheels and keep the supply of water so that everyone had enough for their needs? What about Sioux and Shoshone and Cheyenne warriors? How did you keep the horses, the cattle, the hogs from wandering off? What about wolves? Grizzly bear? What about smallpox and yellow fever?

Lightning cracked and I jumped and it made me laugh at myself for being afraid of the outdoors, but then I thought, I can get in my car, go to a room, sleep out of the rain and the wind. My food comes from the grocery store. There is plenty of that, or so I assume. Not so, 150 years ago on the Mormon Trail.

Looking down the Mormon Trail I thought about all those relatives of mine who made that harsh journey that they thought would lead them to the promised land. I thought about my maternal grandmother, Mary Elsie Riggs, who journeyed from Zion’s Canyon to Mesa , Arizona in a covered wagon in 1882. That lead me to thoughts of my mother and how sometimes I miss her even though she drove me up the wall a lot of the time.

Out there at Independence Rock, tears started to gather at the corners of my eyes. I hate that. I fought it. It didn’t make sense. History is something you cannot control. Neither is the future. Maybe the promised land is whatever stands in front of you right now. Maybe you can control the personal right-now and I did. I stopped that tearing up. As I walked back to the car I mused on my emotions and how my father used to tell me if I needed something to cry about, he’d give it to me.

Nevertheless, on March 13th next, Betty and I are going to buy a cantaloupe and cut it in half and stuff each half full of really good vanilla ice cream.

We have our own route, one we have surveyed in December, January, February and which we will survey in March. It’s about fifty miles in length and basically runs in the country north of Emmett, Idaho and west, bordered by the Payette River on the South and the foothills to the north.

I will probably insult someone here but just for those who don’t know, raptors are birds that hunt other living creatures. Hawks and falcons and eagles are raptors. But ravens are not and we often wonder why ravens are not since they are consummate hunters. Maybe it’s because they are more omnivorous than eagles. They eat bread and crack walnuts by dropping them on the pavement from thirty feet in the air. I doubt the things that differentiate ravens and their corvid relatives from raptors are as simple as diet. In our survey, owls are also raptors, but some of the bird books stick owls off by themselves.

Regardless, we usually get in our Honda and head north out of Boise about dawn and begin our route not long after the sun shows up. All of our route is in rural areas where they farm or raise livestock. There are some tree farms and a small taxidermist and slaughter house facility. There are some rural churches, some feedlots, a rural meeting place and dance hall, a school.

It has been a dry year in Idaho and most of what we have seen is the regulars, red tail hawks and kestrels. Each month it’s a battle between the two to see who is most populous. Red tails are large buteos that are shaped kind of like a football. They like to sit in the tops of trees and then soar and hunt from the air. Kestrels are small falcons that generally sit on telephone wires looking down for something very small to eat, an insect (but probably not in winter) or some small vertebrate. When I see kestrels sitting up there on the wire they remind me of old monks sitting on a stage looking down on their congregation, judging each. Kestrels are beautiful things, russet and blue with masks that are in some form, common on many falcons. Though visually attractive, these small birds are ferocious hunters.

This last go around, in February we saw a number of red tail hawks on or near the nest and even spotted a pair of dark morphs nest-building in a cottonwood tree in a marshy draw loaded with pheasants and quail. It was news to me, but evidently, to see two dark morphs on a single nest is unusual.

We also saw our first eagles of the survey, a golden eagle flying west over the foothills and a bald eagle flying west down river. We also saw a lot of northern harriers. Some people call them marsh hawks, and they do hunt over marshes but they also like to kite and sail and flit low over farm ground and pasture. The males were all out doing a harrier aerial dance, I suppose to impress the females. Not unlike most of the rest of us males in that regard.

I have always had an affinity for raptors and was trying to figure them out long before I got interested in watching birds of a different feather, to steal an overworked metaphor. Other than raptors the only birds I was interested in were the kind I could shoot. Wild turkeys, pheasants, quail, chukkar, dove, wild pigeons.

Although Betty and I began trying to identify individual bird species many years back, I usually pigeon-holed bird watchers in with environmentalists. For years environmentalists were my enemy mostly because I toiled in some aspect of the ag economy and we were often engaged in combat—intellectual, ethical and political—with the early environmental movement. I wouldn’t call myself an environmentalist now, but I do wonder why we need to wipe out large numbers of species so that we aren’t obliged to alter our consumption behavior.

When I reckon on my past, I believe it was early on when I was still submerged in the high times of cattle and sheep that I might have begun to fathom that killing for fun and profit might not always be the best thing for the planet and inevitably for humans.

I was out hunting with my friends and colleagues, Robert and Ed Moser. We had just finished killing our limits of Gambel’s quail out south of Arizona City, Arizona in the Sonoran Desert. The country is flat there, with wide sweeps running up to jagged peaks that erupt out of the plains. There was a lot of mesquite and grease wood and Indian wheat and fillaree and the year had been wet and there had been three hatches of young quail and the hunting was fantastic.

We shared a six-pack of Coors and smoked cigarettes and, flushed with the thrill of the kill, admired the winter sun as it shone its low light across the flats, beaming over the northern shoulder of the Silver Reef Mountains on the Papago Indian Reservation to our west.

As we loaded up our weapons and cleaned up our mess, we spotted a small diamondback rattlesnake lying not far from where we had been killing our quail and killing our Coors. We went over to bother it with a stick. It tried to escape but looked like it had been run over by our, or someone’s, truck tire. For some reason, we did not kill that snake. We let it live. I don’t know if our relenting was caused by some sort of pity because it was damaged. I was always raised that if you saw a rattlesnake, you killed it. So I doubt it was pity. I suspect it was something more akin to an early recognition that everything has a right to live. And it just wasn’t me, it was my hunting buddies who seemed to feel the same way.

Since then, over the years, and there have been thirty-three of them, I have slowly come to understand that varieties of life convey value to our existence. I am not averse to hunting (like raptors and rattlesnakes, we are predators), to ranching, to farming, to energy exploitation, I just think it needs to be done with an eye to something besides money.

As for that maimed snake I didn’t kill. I suspect a blue darter or Harris hawk or some other raptor finished it off and consumed it, so that predator bird could continue on doing what it does.

Betty shared booth space with her photographer and writer friend, Sheila Robertson. This all took place in a larger space with a wild and diverse mix of artists and arts from tattoo to performance art. There was zombie art, nude photography, surrealistic paintings, horror photographs Photoshopped from various other photographs, metal sculpture, jewelry, funny political and pun drawings, found art sculpture, ceramic mosaic and a lot of stuff I don’t know what to call.

The Lineup

There was a lot of what I will call digital art. The man in the booth next to us, portrait photographer Allan Ansel, said to me, “Digital is the new canvas.” I had to think about that for a while. El Greco and Velasquez and Rubens painted on canvas. So did Picasso and Matisse. So did Jackson Pollack. A wide variety of ages, philosophies and methods, but they all painted on canvas. Why can’t modern artists paint on canvas?

I think about El Greco who was painting in Spain four hundred years ago, and how his highly dramatic and expressionist paintings brought consternation to his contemporaries, but we like him a lot now because much of our present work finally caught up with him in the 20th century. I think what I am getting at here is that what seems foreign and new and weird now might be acceptable, even revered down the road. So if digital canvas confounds us now, maybe it won’t later.

El Greco

When I was in Vietnam I remember waking up from a nap hearing Aretha Franklin sing “Respect,” over and over and over and over. While she was singing out of a little battery powered portable record player, a bunch of Marines and Corpsmen were singing along with her, over and over and over and over.

At the time I really liked soul music from singers like Sam Cook and Smokey Robinson, but Aretha was something else again, a wild-bird-flying-up-loop-de-loop voice that sang that song like avian acrobatics. It was different, and they played it, they sang it, over and over and over and over again. I jumped off my cot, groggy, my head banging inside and I screamed for them to “Knock it off.” Lucky they didn’t get all over me and whip my butt for my behavior.

One of the men singing the loudest had come to our company from another battalion that had done some serious damage in the A Shau Valley…some damage that could (but didn’t) have caused a My Lai kind of reaction from the American public. At least that is what that Marine and the other Marines that came with him told me. I remember after I jumped up and shouted at them to turn that horrible music off, he stopped and laughed at me. Let’s call him A. A laughed at me.

And I can remember four months later hearing the Beatles singing “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band” and the Jefferson Airplane singing “Somebody to Love,” not knowing if I should like it or disdain it for the break with what I thought was real music.

I remember A standing up there as I obviously showed some confusion about what was and was not proper music. He grinned and his gold-capped teeth caught the glint of the sun, and he raised his long muscular arms over his head, and showing off the twin, silver plated, .357 Python revolvers snug in their shoulder holsters, he said “Brother, you can’t stop the train that’s coming. Music brother, music, like you’ve never heard it. Can’t stop. Love it.”

I think of El Greco and Aretha and John Lennon and how A was right, you can’t stop it even if you want to. It’s coming at us like a freight train. Nor can I stop digital media, digital art, poetry slams, techno-thump-boom-boom-thump-thump music, or tattoos.

Sitting in a chair watching all the people come up and look at Sheila and Betty’s photos, I observed the wide variety of folks: old, young, children, Ivy League, cowboy boots and hats, people struggling with walkers, and the illustrated people with all their piercings and tattoos. Even though I had decided that I needed to accept the wild art I was exposed to, I still wasn’t sure about the colored, tinted, narrative skin I kept seeing on the young men and women.

Admiring Art in the Bar

I noticed a young man—a big strong man—carrying a little boy in a backpack. That young man had things in his ears that looked like they’d let fifty-caliber machine gun bullets pass clean through, and his skin was tattooed on the arms, the neck and who knows where else. I wondered why he did that to himself and I wondered how it might feel to have all those tattoos removed.

He came up to a neighboring booth and took his backpack off and picked up his son and hugged him. They looked at some digital art and then the illustrated man whispered something to his little boy, and they laughed. They smiled and they laughed and laughed and laughed.