Change
is not something I’ve ever personally resisted, I enjoy learning and doing new things, and my gig is always an adventure.
OTOH, I like some things to be the same, if I can get them.
The town in the frozen north where I now sit is the town that the Ogwife grew up in.
But, then again, it isn’t.
She notices it, I notice it, and we both feel a bit strangely about it. Her because her memories are gone; me, because I miss the town this once was. Here there once were the hard and the rugged, men and women who came here and carved life and living out of the granite escarpments, dealt with harsh winters and rough seas and all manner of hardship. When I first came here over twenty years ago, those people were still here, and a lot of them were still living in the same way, hunting and fishing and trapping. The Hudson’s bay company still had an outpost, where you could buy point blankets with beaver pelts. Some roads were summer roads only. And snowmobile wasn’t a means of recreation, it was winter transport.
Now the town is more like Broad Ripple than Ketchikan. The old trading post now rents plastic canoes and kayaks to vacationers, the local stores replaced by walmart and each empty storefront filled with a used bookstore, an art gallery, havens for hippies and buskers playing artifically distressed musical instruments more out of tune than their singing.
I miss the raw smell of it. The knowledge that you might see a moose or a bear in town. Now it smells like patchouli and dope, and the most dangerous thing you see is the daisy-duke shorts and full length blue support hose on Al, the septuagenerian meth addict. He himself is harmless, but his clothing is lethal both in appearance and aroma.
So for my own twisted nostalgia here’s the lyrics to one of my favorite showtunes, by Lerner sans Lowe. If you haven’t heard Lee Marvin sing this in “Paint your wagon” you have missed something special.
God made the mountains
God made the sky
God made the people
God knows why
He fixed up the planet
As best as He could
Then in come the people
And gum it up good
The first thing you know
They civilized the foothills
And everywhere He put hills
The mountains and valley below
They come along and take ’em
And civilize and make ’em
A place where no civilized
Person would go
The first thing you know
The first thing you know
They civilize what’s pretty
By puttin’ up a city
Where nothin’ that’s
Pretty can grow
They muddy up the winter
And civilize it into
A place too uncivilized
Even for snow
The first thing you know
They civilize left
They civilize right
Till nothing is left
Till nothing is right
They civilize freedom
Till no one is free
No one except
By coincidence, me
The first thing you know
The boozer’s in prison
And the criminally isn’t
And only the rascals have dough
When I see a parson
I gotta put my arse in
A wagon that follows the tail of a crow
The first thing you know
I pick up and blow!
The first thing you know
Updated to add: only in this town would you see a smooooking hot broad in yoga pants and a gadsden shirt having a smoke with a gesticulating sunburned scarecrow of a man in flipflops and mismatched socks, and hes the business owner, and shes the street bum.
12 comments Og | Uncategorized
Always liked that movie. Supposedly Clint and Jean and Lee had a hellaof a good time making it. The director -not so much…
And Marvin SINGING!!?!!!!?OMG
My great uncle lived up that way. Worked in a granite quarry. For the life of me, I don’t remember his name. I think he was a Penrod. I sure miss the old folks. My grandma rode a covered wagon into IT (Indian Territory) and settled in Greer county. My grandpa was a Texas cowboy that rode through her schoolhouse on a lark, then wound up marrying the teacher that blessed him out good for it. Tough and gentle people, those.
Are you in Ketchikan? Spent a day there a few years ago on a cruise to Alaska, I wanted to jump ship and stay there. Something about a state that’s 2 1/2 times the size of Texas with 600K people living in it appeals my my anti-social nature. Especially when I saw all the salmon in the stream thru town.
Then again, when people first meet me, they think I’m a grouchy, cantankerous, anti-social old bastard. Once they get to know me they realize they were mistaken. My parents were married.
Always enjoyed watching PYW on the Saturday afternoon movie offerings of our local TV station when I was a kid.
@STxRynn – my inlaws are from Mangum.
Northern Ontario.
You on vacation? Thought you lived in the UP part of Michigan.
All of my grand parents where born around the turn of the century. I did not know my dads dad well as he died in 62. Kill by a drunk county employee who ran a stop sign. Busted my Grand Ma up pretty well but she lived on into her 90’s. All of they where good kind people. Give you the shirt of their back, but don’t try to take it.
I try to be like them every day, but it is getting harder and harder every day.
Love that song. Maybe my favorite movie….
Hailybury? (If I got the spelling right) When I was a wee lad our neighbor was a one-armed man from Hailybury. Or so my dad said later.
Even if you didn’t grow up in a small town things can change. In So Cal the movie people can move in and the joint realizes it isn’t a small town anymore. But that’s a rant for a different occasion.
You’ve never been to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. Every little town in the valley has that look, that smell and those characters.
I’d venture a guess that most of small-town America is going that way.
I been in Bend. I do sorta expect that sort of stuff in Oregon, though.
“I’d venture a guess that most of small-town America is going that way. ”
It’s in good part due to the sophistication that our all intrusive media provides 24/7. And even those who don’t partake of that fare wind up being pervaded by it because so many of their neighbors do partake.
“Well,” you may ask, “what is wrong with sophisticated? Isn’t that good?”
Look up the word and recognize that the oldest meaning of the word is “adulterated; no longer pure. Not genuine.”
It’s related to sophistry, so that oughta explain why it might not be good. Oh, for sure, it may have look pleasing, maybe, to those who were naive or unthinking of the ramifications that were likely to follow, and that they’d have lasting repercussions. But who was there to ask “what is the price?” Assuredly conservatives, and they’d surely been labeled as fuddy-duddies at best. Today we’re just labeled “evil” and marginalized. Repeat this comment and see how fast the latter happens.
Twenty years ago they were still doing all that out thataway? Just seems strange, considering that here in small town western Canada, I think twenty years ago they had even done away with logger sports at our annual festival. However, I find that although so much has changed, so much hasn’t.
Curious if you have in your archives a tale of how you met the Ogwife? I recall the mention of the distance you had to cover.