*****
When you’re alone and life is making you lonely
You can always go downtown.
- Petula Clark

There is this one block of Market Street in Baltimore where I’ve been spending a lot of time lately, mostly on the weekend, mostly late at night, just standing or walking around, watching.

Over the course of about ten hours, on four different nights, I’ve seen: a group of women in matching feather boas carrying an enormous, inflatable penis; two drunks complimenting a bouncer for his skill in subduing a friend of theirs (who, they concede, “never should have swung that bottle”); one drunk making fun of a deaf-mute; hundreds if not thousands of men wearing untucked, button-up shirts with loud, vertical stripes; hundreds if not thousands of acres of exposed female flesh, on nights when a coat and hat were not enough to keep me warm; four different pairs of young women on four different occasions, pretending variously either to make out with each other or to grind their crotches against one another’s thighs or both, to the loud encouragement of their male companions as well as male strangers who happened to be passing by; about a dozen drunken piggyback rides (all of which consisted of females riding males except for one in which a very large male leapt — apparently unexpectedly — onto the back of another male and which resulted in torn pants and a skinned knee); a young man holding a piece of bloody gauze to his head and answering a police officer’s questions; more than four dozen extra-stretched limousines, of which about two dozen were designed to resemble various models of sport utility vehicles, of which, in turn, about a dozen were based on GM Hummer H2s; the driver of a Hummer limo voicing loud, ugly theories concerning the immigration status of an African cab driver whose broken-down cab was blocking traffic; and — in a scene I don’t want to read too much into, but still — two young white men handing money to a middle-aged black man before being allowed to put their arms around two young black women and then climb with these young women into a decidedly un-ritzy limousine that quickly departed the scene.

I could go on, but perhaps you get the point.

*****
“Noting credible evidence that two bars at Power Plant Live served alcohol to underage college students, the city liquor board fined the developer who controls the entertainment venue $800 yesterday for violating state liquor law and vowed to forge ahead with legislation that would make it illegal for anyone under the age of 21 to enter a bar in the city.”
- Baltimore Sun, March 3, 2006
*****

Over breakfast one morning I learned of “kids getting sick… boys carrying intoxicated girls… [y]oung women sprinting toward musty corners… to urinate…” The newspaper article made me wonder what I was missing. I had found it possible to live in Baltimore for more than six years without once feeling the slightest inclination to visit the downtown dance-club complex known as Power Plant Live [FN 1], and yet here were all of these thousands of people making a veritable pilgrimage there every weekend, “some from as far away as… Delaware,” according to the Sun.

Power Plant Live, I realized, is the face of the city for a great many people — probably the only thing some of them know about Baltimore, this city whose future concerns me, this city suffering from apathy and neglect, this city that, each year, loses more residents than it gains.

I began to wonder what message this ambassador was carrying to these people.

*****
“Far from constituting a kind of backdrop that we can ignore at will…[our surroundings] affect not only physical health and mental grasp and agility but our sense of humanity’s pressing problems and unfinished business.”
- Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place
*****

Power Plant Live lies at the dead-end of Market Street, one block north of Lombard Street, two blocks north of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. On a Sunday afternoon in winter, the area is deserted and almost appealing. A wide brick sidewalk runs alongside Market, and then — as Market curves to the left around a traffic circle to join Water Street — the sidewalk opens into a plaza, also brick, about the size of a football field. A large, square fountain sits at the front of the plaza, just off the traffic circle, and on the other side of the fountain a wrought-iron fence encloses a courtyard — elliptical on side and bordered by rowhouse-style restaurants on the other — that takes up most of the plaza. The area inside the fence is Power Plant Live.

Though the fence is clearly visible, it is softened by a row of small evergreens in bulky concrete planters; the trees also happen to obscure whatever is at ground level inside the fence. Rising above the courtyard, two and three stories up, are the neon signs advertising the dozen or so bars, restaurants and clubs located within.

Inside the courtyard, low ornamental fences in front of the restaurants demarcate open-air seating areas. The center of the courtyard is open, uncluttered. A pavilion stands ready for conversion to an outdoor bar, and, when I lean my elbow on its counter and squint at the awkward two-story structure in the center of the courtyard, I can almost imagine that I’m somewhere I’d like to be: the English Gardens in Munich, perhaps, in the beer garden at the foot of the pagoda.

I open my eyes and read the first sign I see: Tiki Bob’s Cantina.

According to Google, Tiki Bob’s Cantina is home to “the number one beach party” in, variously, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Seattle, Dallas, Detroit and — where am I, again?

The illusion shattered, I drive to Fells Point for lunch.

*****
The building of cities is one of man’s greatest achievements.
-Edmund Bacon, The Design of Cities
*****

Maybe I’m being too hard on Power Plant Live. What’s the harm in a bunch of chain bars and clubs, anyway? Doesn’t the city benefit from having successful, tax-paying enterprises in a spot that sent two previous clubs into bankruptcy? [FN 2]

And it’s not that I have a problem with out-of-towners. I wasn’t born here, after all. At least because of Power Plant Live, people who might not otherwise visit Baltimore are exposed to the city. Perhaps today’s Power Plant Live patrons are tomorrow’s Fells Point pub-crawlers, and the next day’s Mount Vernon brunch eaters. Maybe, the week after next, they’ll be plastering “Live Baltimore!” bumper stickers on their cars. [FN 3]

Stranger things have happened.

*****
Don’t you wish your girlfriend was hot like me?
Don’t you wish your girlfriend was a freak like me?
- Pussycat Dolls [FN 4]
*****

It is after 11 p.m. and the parking garage feels even colder than the street — which is to say extremely cold — on this mid-March Friday. The air looks greasy under pale yellow lights. A pair of women in brief denim skirts and spaghetti-strapped tanktops hurry on tall high heels toward the elevators. Four shadows drink from red plastic cups behind the tinted windows of a parked SUV. Tires bark and squeal toward the last open parking spaces. Loud shouts and taunts spill out of car doors and echo against the dingy concrete walls. Doors thud closed. A bottle smashes. Applause. Cheers.

On the sidewalk outside the garage a lanky boy with a firefighter mustache is passing a dollar to a panhandler. “Use it for…good use,” the benefactor drawls, his tongue thick with cold or drink or both. A group of girls pushes past, bare arms hugged to chests. “Oh my god I have to pee.” Four lanes of traffic rush down Lombard and all the lights are off in the office building across the street.

Around the corner, Market Street is choked with cars. Crowds — mostly white, mostly young — flood the sidewalk. Couples on dates, tight bunches of women walking fast, big ambling men in studiedly loose packs. “What the fuck, motherfucker, all I said was she has a sexy walk.” No one walks alone except for the panhandlers. A black man cuts back and forth through across the sidewalk, waving a card that shows the sign language alphabet. It only costs a dollar but no one is buying. Another black man in stained white pants blurts and sputters: “Hey, you got 35 cents? Hey, you got 55 cents?” Hunched figures sit wrapped in blankets in front of the McDonald’s but the sidewalk widens just there so you can keep your distance if you want to and everyone does. Ahead the sky is bright with gaudy neon. Three police officers and a bouncer in sunglasses stand at the opening in the fence, checking IDs, a thudding bass line calling low and sweet under everything.

In the blank bored windows of the clubs I see only my own blurry reflection, a man lamely dressed for the cold, the people rushing past me, some from as far away as Delaware.

I listen to Power Plant Live, and, save the bass, I hear only one thing. Why would you want to be out there when you could be in here?

I walk back to the garage and drive home to Baltimore.

*****
Footnotes
FN 1: Just so you know, the official name ends with an exclamation point, thus: Power Plant Live!

FN 2: Of course, one of these was named the Fish Market. It closed in 1989. There used to be a fish market there, of course, but still, respect for history aside, I just think it should have been obvious from the start that this wasn’t a good name for a dance club.

FN 3: This is just shorthand for “maybe they’ll move here.” Personally, I hate those “Live Baltimore!” stickers.

FN 4: Yes, I know that this song was originally (as in, last year) recorded by Tori Alamaze, and that her record label took it away from her and gave it to the essentially inflatable, poseable Pussycat Dolls. But, unfortunately for Alamaze, it wasn’t her version that got the bodies moving at Power Plant Live’s Have a Nice Day Café this St. Patrick’s Day. I have to go where the story takes me.

Sometimes I would come across mention of hunting in the Baltimore Sun, like when Maryland would issue a few black-bear permits out in the western part of the state, where there does seem to be some of what you might call chafing as we humans sprawl deeper and deeper into bear territory. Some people were outraged by these hunts, and some were indifferent to them, but no matter what your feelings were, it was strange to come across pictures of, say, a brown-eyed eight-year-old girl posing with the first dead bear of the season, and then just finish your coffee and head off to work in a city where the only gunshots you ever hear are generally followed with sirens. So while I technically knew that, if I wanted to, I could get in the car, drive two hours west, and “harvest” some animals, really these newspaper articles had the feel of dispatches from a strange and far-off place, and hunting was always something Someone Else did.

That all changed, of course, when we moved to Montana. We arrived in August, so our first months here coincided with the run-up to and opening of various game seasons, and after a while I started to get used to pickup trucks with rifles hanging in their back windows and the big full-color supplements in the Sunday paper advertising guns, ammunition, camo clothing, “game saws,” and the like. I even got to know a few hunters, and, in talking to them, I started to understand some of the historical, cultural, and economic dimensions of the sport that had eluded me before.

The economic rationale in particular was a new one on me, since any hunters I knew back east generally traveled pretty far to do it, making it more of an expensive and rare vacation indulgence than a lifestyle. Here, of course, someone can drive fifteen minutes out of town and be back with an elk by lunch time, a year’s worth of meat for the cost of a license and some gas and bullets. This is the sort of thing that can get a guy thinking, especially as he tries to adjust to a cut from east-coast to western wages. I’m not saying I’m champing at the bit to go kill something myself — there’s the little matter of gutting and butchering, which I’m frankly not sure I could handle, and besides, I don’t even walk to my mailbox without my bear spray, so the idea of purposely entering the territory of hyperphagic grizzlies would take some working up to — but let’s just say I’m curious.

So I was sitting around in my bathrobe the day after Thanksgiving, trying to decide if it had been long enough since I’d had any turkey that I could reasonably have a little more, when Law Dog, a new friend of ours, called and asked if I wanted to come get this dead deer with him. He’d shot two of the things on Thanksgiving but had only brought one of them out. Law Dog has been one of my main informants thus far on Montana hunting culture, and he had told me only a few days earlier that there is an unwritten rule in these parts to the effect that, when someone asks you to help him carry out some meat, you just do it, so of course I said yes.

A half-hour later, we were in Law Dog’s 4-Runner headed out of town. His friend, The Professor, was riding shotgun (although in fact it was a rifle he had along). I can’t of course tell you where Law Dog’s secret hunting spot is, but I will say that it’s close to town, which accords with his overall philosophy when it comes to hunting, i.e., that hunters should be good stewards of the environment, up to and including trying not to burn $150 worth of gas on a hunting trip. (This is a guy who says he won’t take you hunting until you read Posewitz’s Beyond Fair Chase, a book on “ethical hunting.”)

“I can’t say that I like the killing part, but I do think this is a good way for humans to get their protein,” Law Dog said, as we bounced along a snow-covered Forest Service road. “It reproduces itself, and it’s not all full of steroids and antibiotics.”

The Professor, who is in his forties but only started hunting three years ago, agreed. “I actually came to it out of an interest in eating healthier. My wife and I were already into organic foods, and it seemed like a natural next step to take responsibility for actually getting the food onto our table.”

The Professor wanted to try for his own deer, so after we’d checked to see that Law Dog’s kill was still where he’d left it, we set off for a couple of hours’ walk through the rolling, snow-blanketed hills. We didn’t follow a trail, of course, instead striking out through thick brush and struggling to keep our footing as we clambered up the steep slopes. The snow was deep and so dry and powdery that the occasional wind gusts threw it around like flour or fine sand.

The Professor never did get a clear shot at a deer, and, as the sun started to sink out of sight, we decided to turn back, descending from the ridge line down a precipitous hillside and into a densely forested bottom land. The firs closed in around us, their coats of snow glowing magically in the last of the light. I could see no more than twenty feet in any direction and felt enfolded in the forest — really in the forest — in a way I never normally do on a run-of-the-mill hike. It had something to do with being out here for a reason, combined with the way our earlier quiet stalking had tuned my senses and sharpened me to the slightest sounds and movements. We were fifteen minutes from downtown Missoula but in one of the most beautiful places I’d ever seen.

Back at Law Dog’s cache, there was ripe material for philosophizing about the cycle of life: not only were we there for our dinners, but an eagle had taken a magpie that had been feeding on one of the gut piles, leaving fluffy gray feathers strewn about. Law Dog and The Professor prepared the deer for dragging by tying it to a ski pole they could both use as a sort of yoke. I shouldered The Professor’s rifle, and we walked the mile or two back out to the truck through the darkening night. As we trudged along in the snow, a full moon came up over the trees, big and yellow and bright as a house on fire.

Am I?

I was born there, at George Washington University Hospital, across the street from the hospital where my father was born 44 years before me. We lived in the city for only four years before my parents bought their first house and we moved away to the Virginia suburbs, so my memories of the city are glancing and fragmented. But four years was long enough for some malarial vestige of that time and place to enter my blood, where it still circulates and surprises me now and then with rusty little mirror shards in the back of my eyeballs: unnameable faces, and the dust in the corners of the rooms.

My parents were renting a small apartment above an awning shop on 18th Street, in Adams Morgan. To protect me from the shadows at the dark end of the hall outside my bedroom, my mother painted an enormous tiger on the wall, copied from a book we’d read together. This wasn’t the only feline who watched over us: one day a stray cat arrived across the rooftops, accepting our offer of milk and an indoor bed and later returning the favor by warning my father of a burglar. In the mornings, the gray carpet in the living room was spotted with the cat’s overnight cockroach kills, golden-brown and smashed flat, like raisins from the bottom of the box.

My mother brought home stacks of books from the library where she worked, and we kept them as long as we wanted. My father’s Royal typewriter was stationed on a makeshift desk, a door laid across two filing cabinets. I ranged my toys on a forest-green wooden bench that was rough at the edges where it had been sawed too quickly.

Outside the apartment were careworn streets and dirty sidewalks, blocks of old row houses and fragrant little stores where the lights were too dim and the linoleum was turning gray. I stole a birthday card from the Koreans and was made to apologize, the shopkeeper leaning down toward me, the strange face a different color and shape from my parents’, hard to sex, impossible to read.

I didn’t know what heart attack meant but I knew it was strange that a grown man was lying down on the front steps of the building across the street from ours. People stood near him, touched him, placed a folded jacket under his head. We watched until the ambulance took him away.

My first snow was a blizzard that left towering drifts, and I was too short to see out of the trenches where the sidewalks used to be. In spring and summer we climbed the long hill to the playground in Kalorama Park. Rain formed wide puddles under the swing sets and tempted me away from the swings. I slapped the water with the palm of my hand and watched the shockwaves spread, the mirror image dissolve into shimmers.

The Showboat night club burned and the firemen stretched their hoses back and forth across the streets and along the gutters, grey and fat and ponderous like elephants’ legs. Sutton’s first fire, reads the caption in the photo album, but all I remember is stepping over the hoses.

My mother was away on an overnight trip for the first time in my life and I jumped from a ladder and broke my leg, the ankle bent ninety degrees inward like a twig that is too green to snap. It didn’t hurt until I was in the car, wrapped in the scratchy afghan that had belonged to my grandmother. Flashing red lights and my father’s eyes, big in the mirror. The policeman just waved us on to the hospital once my father explained.

The cat should have been safer in our apartment than in the alleys, but he misjudged a leap from the high windowsill in the living room and pulled our television down on top of himself. I was in school when it happened, and had to have it explained to me. They put him to sleep, I repeated to my teacher the next day. They had to put him out of his misery.

Now the awning shop sells name-brand lamps and ornaments, now there is a James Bond-themed martini bar across the street. A year or two ago, I read that a social club for rich young Republican men organized a party in an Adam’s Morgan nightclub for 500 of their class, and the Bush twins were among the 800 too many who had to be turned away.

By now the apartment will have been renovated, the tiger hidden behind washes of white paint. The catacomb is sealed and I can never enter again.

The place I’m from.

But sometimes I can remember how tall the buildings looked from down there, a grownup’s hand arching upward and a kind voice telling me to look.

We used an altered tone of voice when we did this quoting, nothing that an outsider would have noticed immediately although it was obvious enough to each of us. No sooner had one of us offered a quote and signaled it in this way, then, another one of us would be asking “what’s that from?” We used an even more ironic tone of voice for this question, aware that it was silly for so much of what we said to be “from” somewhere else, consisting of or at least referring to someone else’s words. But that’s life in the world of sampling and mash-ups.

My high-school friend Tim, who had a way of tauntingly asking “what’s that from?” even about something you’d obviously thought of yourself, left us during junior year to go study in France. The night before his departure, a group of us got together to see him off. Someone had a fake ID and bought a jug of wine, and we set off for a long ramble through the streets of D.C. Eventually, in the middle of the night, we came to rest on the playground equipment of a school in a tree-lined, quiet neighborhood far from any main avenues. This was at a time when I had not yet gotten over my strong initial revulsion to just about any alcoholic beverage, so I barely sipped from the bottle as we passed it among us. I felt confirmed in this decision when another boy named Josh paused in the middle of a sentence to lean over and vomit. I suppose it was not very good wine. The bottle did have a handle.

It was a dark, warm summer night and we felt well-concealed in the shadows by the jungle gym, outside the pool of harsh white cast by the floodlights from the roof of the school building. On the hill behind us, trees rustled gently in an occasional breeze. Conversation lagged, and — feeling what little wine I’d drunk — some sort of campfire impulse inspired me to tell the story of a suspenseful mystery I’d just finished reading, something that my mother, a librarian, had brought home in a pile of books for the family to take along on our just-concluded summer vacation. Mike, who was a year ahead of us and who had produced the fake ID earlier, was particularly taken by the story and agreed with me that certain elements were deliciously disturbing, in particular the killer’s taste for flaying and then wearing the skins of his victims.

The wine was drained and the evening grew late. We walked the ten or so blocks to Tim’s house and hugged him goodbye for the year, then trailed off in various directions according to where home was or where we were staying that night. I had arranged to sleep over at Chico’s house, which lay quite a long way distant from Tim’s. We meandered through the empty streets, past blinking traffic lights, and I felt as if we were in some mysterious realm with little connection to the real world. The occasional passing car sounded alien, compared to the constant din I was used to hearing during the day.

A few weeks after the playground get-together, Mike stopped me in the hall at school and told me of a movie he had just gone to see called Silence of the Lambs. The plot was familiar to him, he said, and he couldn’t at first figure out why he knew everything that was about to happen. What’s that from? Then he remembered: it was the same story that I had told on the dark playground as the jug of wine passed from hand to hand.

High school was of course a fearful time, and it was nice standing there in the hall talking to Mike, whose bona fides as a cool somewhat counter-cultural figure in the school’s cosmology were completely in order. He played in a band and could often be found in the crowd at whatever punk or hardcore show I’d convinced my parents to drop me off at on a Friday evening, standing with friends from another school or friends who maybe even didn’t go to school anymore, which was the next best thing to just being a grown-up. The nice thing about that conversation was that it wasn’t a performance, neither one of us trying to prove how much we knew about a certain band or how nihilistically desolate our souls were (the badge of distinction among those of us who dressed all in black). We were just talking about something that genuinely interested each of us. It was the kind of small moment of connection that suggests that high school might one day come to an end, and everyone in it might turn out to be a human being after all.

One day Mike called me and said he’d heard Julia, another person on the outer fringe of my social group, achingly cool, talking favorably about me. He thought I should call her up and ask her out. My opinion of Mike was that he should know what he was talking about when it came to such things, but, when I called Julia, she quickly turned me down. Interestingly, it wasn’t long before Mike and Julia became an item, and one of the school’s longer-lived ones at that.

From time to time, as I remember the Julia episode, I wonder if Mike really thought she’d go out with me, or if I was a pawn in some kind of weird machination. Did he already have his eye on her? If his suggestion was genuine, did he secretly hope she’d say no?

Trivial stuff, really, but the main reason that this little situation comes back to me and bugs me is that I can never ask Mike what he was thinking. He died a year or two back from a brain tumor, and it is so hauntingly strange to think of his long lanky frame and friendly face turning to dust in the cold cold ground. Mike and I were never terribly close, but the world felt immediately altered when I learned that he was no longer in it.

It is never-endingly strange to me how these little broken-mirror shards we call memories can link up. I was reading a book the other night called The Best American Essays of the Century, specifically an essay titled “Illumination Rounds,” an account by Michael Herr of some time he spent in Vietnam during 1968 and 1969, when I came across a passage in which Herr and a fellow journalist were accosted, as they rode in an Army helicopter, by a member of the flight crew.

“You guys ought to do a story on me sumtahm, the kid said. He was a helicopter gunner, six-three with an enormous head that sat in bad proportion to the rest of his body and a line of picket teeth that were always on show in a wet, uneven smile….

“Why should we do a story about you?”

“‘Cause I’m so fuckin’ good,” he said, “‘n’ that ain’ no shit, neither. Got me one hunnert ‘n’ fifty-se’en gooks kilt. ‘N’ fifty caribou.” He grinned… “Them’re all certified,” he added.

“What’s that from?” I asked myself, and then I remembered the scene in Stanley Kubrick’s film Full Metal Jacket that contains almost exactly the same dialog, although it diverges from Herr’s account to include the fictional gunner taking laughing pride in shooting “men, women and children.” (“If they run, they’re VC. If they stand still, they’re well-trained VC.”) In the movie, the reporter leans forward and asks, straining to make himself heard over the roar of the helicopter’s rotors, how the gunner can shoot women and children. “Easy,” shouts the gunner, grinning widely. “You just don’t lead ‘em as much.”

So I’d solved that, but, with the book now resting on my lap, my head back against the pillow and my eyelids heavy, I wondered whose voice I was hearing in my head, asking “what’s that from?” In a moment, though, it all came back to me, Tim’s stilted roaring voice and twinkling eyes, enjoying that joke more than anyone, and as my eyes closed I was transported to the alleys of D.C. on Tim’s last night before leaving for France, Mike an older, comforting presence whose absolute generosity of spirit and benevolence was implicit in his producing a fake I.D. just when we needed it, all of us walking along with our cigarettes cupped just right in our hands, back when it felt like everything I knew that was worth knowing came from movies and books and mysterious hints dropped by the cool kids far away down the hall, tempting to pick up and try on but easy — terrifyingly easy — to get wrong.

As always with this sort of situation, there is room in these events. Different people see different things in such a video. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Gotbaum case over the last week, trying to get my thoughts straight. I’m not sure why it matters to me, except I was once slightly involved in law enforcement and was trained in and thought about situations where, it was expected, I would use force to bring people under control, “the minimum force necessary,” but you’d be surprised what that can look like. Maybe I can picture myself a little too clearly getting into a situation where there’s nothing for it but to wrestle around on the floor with a 105-pound woman, trying to get her into handcuffs.

Then I come across a blog comment on the case where someone says “what’s really sad is that Americans are so spineless that they will assume anyone harmed by the state deserved it.” Is that me? I wonder. Did some switch turn over in me during my training? Am I now just an apologist for state force, trained to submit and take my beating and thank the man for it?

I don’t know, though. I like to think I’m as opposed to “police brutality” as the next guy (although this is about as pointless a thing to even say as “I support family values”), and I’m more concerned than many — I think — that this country is on a not-so-slow-slide toward a disturbing level of authoritarianism and uniform worship.

But I’ve watched the video (on which more later), and, while I’m willing to concede that the Phoenix police seem to have made at least one large mistake in their dealings with Carol Gotbaum, I’m afraid I just don’t see a lot of the rest of that stuff in this case.

Carol, mother of three, 45 years old when she died, was born in South Africa. In 1995 she married Noah Gotbaum, the financier son of an eminent New York family with long ties to the city: his mother (Betsy) is the head of the city’s public defenders bureau, his father (Victor) the former leader of the city’s largest municipal union, his stepmother (Sarah) the retired city parks commissioner. As their recent proficiency with lawyers, private detectives, and private forensic pathologists attests, the Gotbaum family is the kind of family that makes things happen. When Carol and Noah were married in the Boathouse in Central Park, an extensive fireworks display was seen over the Great Lawn. Though the fireworks had been set off for an unrelated New York Philharmonic event, wedding guests naturally assumed that Noah’s stepmother had made some calls, it was reported in the New York Times. (NYT) Betsy, meanwhile, is reportedly considering running for mayor of New York in 2009. (Village Voice)

Though Noah was from New York originally, he and Carol lived in London at first. They moved to the city in 2002 and took a brownstone on the Upper West Side in 2003. The New York Times relates that “friends recalled Noah and Carol as a romantic couple who would surprise each other with jaunts to Paris or Prague,” but there was a dark side. Carol suffered from depression and alcoholism. In the same article, the New York Times reports that she made several failed efforts at rehab over the years and was hospitalized about a year ago after what family members describe as a suicide attempt.

Her emotional state reached “fever pitch” in September, according to Sarah Gotbaum. Betsy Gotbaum remembers Carol recently saying “I’m really down.” Betsy Gotbaum also remembers Carol saying “I know my behavior is self-destructive.” (NYT) On Sept. 27, Carol made plans to travel to a residential addictions-treatment facility in Arizona the next day. Noah has said that the reason he did not plan to accompany her was because she was booked on a direct flight. (NYT) Later, trying to locate his wife on the afternoon of September 28th, he would tell emergency operators at the Phoenix airport that “the police don’t really understand what they’re dealing with right now.” He would say “they’re playing with real fire right now. (NYT)

On the morning of Friday, September 28, Carol changed her travel plans, apparently so that she would have time to take her children to school that morning. Instead of flying directly, she would stop over in Phoenix. It is unclear when Noah became aware of this change, but at some point, it has been reported, arrangements were made to have Carol met by friends in Phoenix who would keep her company until her next flight left. (Flight chronology and airport behavior in this section are as reported by the New York Times.)

They never arrived.

Carol landed at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport at 12:18 p.m. and, as attested by both police and her family’s lawyer, stopped into an airport bar. The policewoman who would later search her after her arrest recorded that Carol “smelled strongly of intoxicating beverage on her breath.” (The eventual autopsy found alcohol, two anti-depressants, cough medicine, two antihistamines and ibuprofen in her bloodstream.)

1:05: Carol tries to check in for her 1:30 connecting flight, only to be told that she is too late, U.S. Airways has given her seat away, and the plane’s doors are closed. (This is, frankly, strange, given that domestic flights typically begin boarding only thirty minutes before departure time and also given that U.S. Airways, on its company web site, doesn’t threaten to give your seat away unless you arrive in the gate area later than fifteen minutes before the flight is scheduled to take off. But I can find no further details on this part of the story on-line.)

U.S. Airways places Carol on standby for a 2:58 p.m. flight.

2:30: In the waiting area for the 2:58 flight, she learns that she will not be given a seat. (I was once told by an airline employee that, in general, passengers on standby after missing a flight have the lowest status among all possible standby passengers, though, as noted earlier, it seems dubious in the extreme to say that Carol “missed” her flight.) Carol convinces another passenger to switch tickets with her. When informed that this is not permitted, she “explodes,” as the New York Times puts it. According to witnesses, this is the point at which she screams “I’m not a terrorist. I’m a sick mother. I need help.” (Perhaps the subject of terrorism arose because the gate employee who informed her that switching tickets is not permitted mentioned “security concerns,” or something like that.)

Carol then starts running down the concourse. At one point she stops and kneels. She bangs her hands on the floor. She upends her purse and dumps its contents on the floor. She throws her BlackBerry cell phone. She runs again, this time coming to a halt near the back end of a security checkpoint.

It is at this point that the publicly available video recording picks up. I’ll talk about the tape later, but for now I’ll just finish the story: standing near the checkpoint, Carol continues to scream, “profanity” according to some witnesses, the statement “I hate American police,” according to another. TSA security guards (two men and a woman) emerge from the checkpoint and try unsuccessfully to calm her down. She continues to yell and scream.

Three police officers arrive and two of them start talking to her. Eventually, there is a struggle. Carol is handcuffed with her arms behind her back and carried off by the police to a holding cell. Her handcuffs are attached to a bracket in the wall with a longer set of shackles, and she is left alone, unmonitored even by a camera. She continues to scream for a few minutes and then falls silent. Investigating this change, “6-8 minutes” after first confining her (Village Voice), officers find her prostrate and unconscious, the shackle chain stretched across her neck.

Carol is pronounced dead at 3:29 p.m.

Four days after Carol’s death, Michael Manning, a lawyer retained in this matter by the Gotbaum family, released a statement to the effect that “Carol was without doubt emotionally disturbed” and that “the family understands why the Phoenix Police Department intervened,” though he expressed concern about “what happened after the intervention.” By October 4, after Manning had had a chance to interview witnesses, his tone had hardened: “the police approached her… [and] made no effort to speak to her, calm her or assess the situation. Two of them immediately took her to the ground.”

Though police disputed Manning’s description and announced plans to release a surveillance tape that, they asserted, would contradict him, Manning’s take was and has remained the take of numerous commentators, bloggers, and blog commenters. And as is so often the case, the tape that police eventually released (sometime between Oct. 4th and Oct. 8th) was far from dispositive. It had no sound, for one thing, and it also happened that the camera that recorded the video had hung from the ceiling, a good 20 yards distant from where Carol’s confrontation with police played out, so that one must look very closely, pausing and rewinding and pausing again, to discern more than broad physical gestures.

The video opens with a several-second establishing shot: the concourse, a broad expanse of swirly-patterned gray carpet, is nearly empty, except for a man pulling a wheeled suitcase who has paused to look back over his shoulder down the concourse. The security checkpoint is in the middle-to-long range of the shot, to the right.

Then, from far off down the concourse, Carol comes into view, running toward the camera. First only her legs are visible, the rest obscured by an airport-information sign that limits the upper edge of the camera’s shot, then her light shirt, then her long reddish-brown hair. She stops about twenty yards short of the camera. She is yelling and bending from the waist with the force of what she is yelling, in almost precisely the manner of someone repeatedly, violently sneezing. A passerby crossing the foreground of the shot looks her way, as if startled. As she continues to scream, whipping back and forth, a tall man in the dark pants and white shirt of a TSA guard moves out from the security checkpoint to talk to her. After a few seconds, he is joined by two more guards.

It seems important to me that the guards simply talk to Carol, all remaining about six feet away from her. It also seems important that Carol waves her arms while she talks. It seems important that one of the guards at one point touches the other on the back as if to caution him, and that they then both take a step away from Carol.

The first police officer comes into view at around the forty-fifth second of tape, although Carol does not appear to notice him until about the fifty-third second of tape, when he stops about six feet from her and apparently addresses her. She turns toward him, and they talk for a few seconds before she backs away from him, her right arm up by her head, gesturing. Over the course of the next ten seconds, while the first cop continues to stand and talk to Carol, he is joined by another cop while a third takes up a station about twenty feet away.

Carol begins bending from the waist, apparently screaming again, and gestures up and down with her arms. The concourse is growing more crowded, with other passengers streaming around the scene of the confrontation. At one point, Carol suddenly starts backing away from the police. The first officer takes hold of her arm, and she spins away, trying to pull her arm free. The second cop moves in and takes hold of her other arm, and so begins the section of the video that culminates in Carol’s being handcuffed and taken away.

It seems important to me that police were at first simply talking to Carol. It also seems important that it is Carol who looks to have made the decision to end the conversation, suddenly moving away from the police in what appears to me the posture of someone who intends to keep moving away. It seems important, further, that the first officer on the scene had had less than 20 seconds — and the other two cops even less time than that — to assess the situation before the situation began to change. Before the “subject” went “mobile.”

It also seems important that Carol put up quite a fight. From first laying hands on her to finally getting her into cuffs, the cops struggle with Carol for almost a minute, a struggle intense enough that the third cop — who had at first held back, observing — makes the decision to join about ten seconds in. He steps back again about eight seconds later, perhaps thinking the other two have the situation in hand, then apparently finds it necessary to rejoin his colleagues after about another eight seconds.

Finally, Carol is handcuffed, and the police lift her to her feet. Two of them walk with her past the camera, each essentially holding her up by an arm because she is stiffening her legs and not really walking.

In the last seconds of the video, as they are about to pass the camera and leave our view, we finally see their faces: the police, stone-faced, glaring; Carol, her hair wild, her face a grimace of anger and pain.

But the things that seem important to me about the video don’t seem to have registered with quite the same effect on everyone else, which is, to me, one of the more interesting aspects of controversies like this one. An October 8th article by education scholar and Gotbaum family friend Diane Ravitch seems representative of one of the major prevailing points of view on the matter, a point of view in alignment with attorney Michael Massing’s October 4th assertion that police, in their dealings with Carol, “made no effort to speak to her, calm her or assess the situation” before two of them “immediately took her to the ground.”

To Ravitch, viewing the video, “anyone can see” that police used excessive force.

”Three burly police officers approached Carol, a slender woman of about 105 pounds, and promptly wrestled her to the ground, face-down. One of them appeared to sit on her back while she was handcuffed. Then they pulled her to her feet and dragged her away, with her hands cuffed behind her back…

“The police officers treated her like a reluctant cow that they were bringing to slaughter, not like a woman in emotional trauma. They were cowboys, she was the terrified beast that needed to be roped and tied down.”

Ravitch goes on to say that the police dealt with Carol as they would “with a rabid dog or a vicious criminal,” and said “the procedures need to be reviewed to figure out how to distinguish between a terrorist and a person who is emotionally and mentally disturbed.”

Commentators like Ravitch make much of the fact that Carol was a small woman and that it was three large male officers who took her into custody. They see this as proof that the police over-reacted. But it seems to me, from watching the video, that these three police had their hands full. It seems to me from watching the video that just one officer might not have been able to get Carol into handcuffs at all, at least not without using something other than “holds,” not to mention that it’s hard for me to imagine police officers who would be content to simply roll around on the ground and wrestle “with a rabid dog or a vicious criminal” without bringing some other tools into use.

Around one hundred people left comments on Ravitch’s web posting. Roughly speaking, over eighty percent supported Ravitch’s basic thrust. Some typical comments are listed below:

Nommo: “They just murdered her, is all.”

caribconsult: “If these so-called ‘airport security’ police can’t tell the difference between an hysterical person and a terrorist, what in the hell are they doing at the airport? Who was the nitwit that gave them this assignment they so woefully discharged?”

arcturus9797: “The video gives damning evidence that she was treated with brutal force…. Carol was crying for help and what she got was a vicious attack. If law enforcement authorities cannot tell a bizarrely acting woman pleading for help from a terrorist, they cannot be acting competently or professionally. Carol was unarmed and presented no danger to anyone, except herself, and she could have been calmed down.”

Among the commenters who disagreed with Ravitch are a few you wouldn’t really want to find yourself siding with, namely those who take a sort of “she had it coming” stance, blaming her for being white and well-to-do (accidents of birth, remember) and taking satisfaction that she experienced what so many poor minorities do, etc., which seems to me a rather backasswards way of looking at the issue of police use of force.

But I was struck by a few comments from people who have been in this kind of situation before:

dbw1: “I am a volunteer EMT. I have been at emergency scenes where, whether due to head injury or drugs or behavioral reasons, a patient has behaved in an irrational manner. It often requires MORE police (and this responsibility always falls to the police) to subdue a patient safely than it would take to simply subdue someone. To a bystander, the process often appears overwhelming.”

sd63: “As a mental health professional, I’d like to comment. This is a horrific tragedy and my heart goes out to Mrs. Gotbaum’s family. Based on my understanding, the police were following their protocol appropriately by detaining someone displaying erratic behavior. It is difficult to ascertain the problem and offer solutions when someone is distraught and surrounded by strangers in a chaotic setting like an airport. My concern is with the fact that they left her alone in the holding room, even for a few minutes. One needs to rule out a physical cause for this type of behavior (diabetic reaction?), a drug reaction or (as was the case) a very vulnerable person with suicidal potential. I believe they are given training regarding the assessment and management of individuals in an acute psychiatric crisis. Perhaps they were waiting for her to calm down, but they should have had someone sit with her 1:1. Again, I’m so sorry for such a tragic loss.”

There was a similar comment on the Youtube page of the version of the security video I watched:

shinykid : “Usually I don’t chime in on stuff like this, but as a worker at a mental health facility for forensics, I too have to occasionally secure individuals in order to keep them from hurting themselves or others. The police did a fine job in taking custody of the woman in a relatively painless fashion.”

In the days following Gotbaum’s arrest, the Arizona Republic convened a panel of mental-health practitioners to comment on events, including Frank Scarpati, a counselor at Community Bridges, a Mesa substance-abuse center, and Dr. Michael Carlton, who directs the chemical-dependency unit at St. Luke’s Medical Center in Phoenix. Scarpati characterized the police as having done “probably… the best they could,” observing that “they simply saw someone emotionally out of control who could have been a danger.” Carlton said that, to someone in the throes of a complete breakdown, as Gotbaum appeared to be, “reasoning with her in that state of mind may not have worked… you might as well be from Mars.”

I’m out of time and a little bit over the 1,600-2,000-word limit I’d hoped to impose on these essays. My self-imposed deadline is bearing down on me, and besides I have to get back to my “day job” and polish up a report I’m editing.

I’m not under any illusion that I’ve changed anyone’s mind with this essay, and I’m not positive I want to. I’m not positive it’s warranted: most of my conclusions, after all, come from about a minute of indistinct, soundless videotape with an undocumented chain of custody, videotape that covers neither the beginning nor the end of the awful events of September 28th. It was with some hesitation that I even decided to write this: I was afraid that people with whom I’ve been discussing this case might feel bludgeoned by my words, and that’s not my intent either. As I said earlier, there is room in all of this, and I guess I can see a narrative fitting these facts in which police were in fact rougher than they needed to be, but honestly this would have to have been either off-camera or at the micro level: on camera, no fists flew, no kicks were given, and all in all the tape looks to me like what happens when police are trying to put handcuffs on someone who doesn’t want them to (and I really was trained that handcuffing in such a situation really is for the person’s safety, so the officers can have more control over what an out-of-control person does, so law enforcement either really does accept this as a principle or my teachers were just trying to trick me). It doesn’t take much to make handcuffing pretty difficult, if you think about how large a handcuff is — and for that matter, let me just say that handcuffing gets easier the more pain you are willing to inflict, which is worth thinking about: I’m sure those cops didn’t want to look like bumbling weak fools on the floor of an airport concourse for a minute or so.

And weirdly, while I came into this sure I believed that cops had erred by not watching Carol in her cell, I find I can now see this as something other than the grossest negligence, now that I understand that she was dead within minutes of being put in her cell, as reported in the New York Times (that bastion of vicious right-wing police cheerleaders), conceivably before the police who struggled with her had even caught their breaths. But I do think it was a mistake for them to leave her alone nonetheless.

I also worried about causing undue pain to anyone who knew Carol, on the off chance they might stumble across this. I decided to proceed because, for one thing, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I wanted to be sure that I had really exposed myself to a good amount of the actual evidence, rather than relying on the opinions of others. And there is also the fact that media events such as this one become part of the public consciousness, part of the story we tell ourselves about what sort of society we live in. It’s stressful, therefore, to find myself believing something different about the Gotbaum case than do many people I respect and love, and I wanted to try to get through some of that in a calm and rational manner.

And then on the other hand there’s this: I remember standing on a coral atoll called Dog Rocks in the Florida Straits, where I’d been sent with a half dozen other Coast Guard boarding officers to take control of and eventually evacuate about 75 Haitian migrants whose sinking sailboat had run aground there. The surface of the island was jagged sharp coral, like broken glass set in concrete. There was no water on the island, and none of the Haitians had brought much food. We were supplying both of those things, and so most of the people were what we were in the habit of referring to as “compliant.” There was this one guy, though, who kept shouting something in Haitian and waving his arms, like he was trying to get everyone to do something. This was the kind of thing we were in the habit of thinking we were supposed to confront. You know. Before it got out of hand. There were three of us who made a sort of flickering eye contact and nodded and gestured in shrugs and chin nudges (it took longer to write that out than it took to actually do it), and then we were walking toward the guy, one of us planning to “contact” and the others planning to “cover” and all of us thinking to ourselves about where we would put our hands on him if it came to that.

I remember thinking, “he’ll sure shut up fast if we take him down onto this coral,” which makes me wonder if I really have a useful perspective on this kind of thing at all.

What it does not get you: those little one-pot pouches of coffee you may have grown accustomed to at the Super 8s along the highway, nor any other kind of coffee, nor cups, coffee or otherwise, disposable or otherwise.

No coffee filters, either.

There are however two baskets of fake flowers, two paintings of baskets of flowers, two shadowboxes of fake flowers, and a vase of fake flowers. There is flowered wallpaper in the bathroom and an applique sticker of flowers on the bathroom mirror. Knotty pine paneling. A small desk. A small wing chair.

They named the town after the French-Canadian trapper Pierre Chouteau in 1888. It seems like the kind of town where people might be secretly proud that they misspelled his name. They built the courthouse in 1906, the first bank in 1919. They put off building the Roxy until just after the war, 1946, probably a good year for movies. This week, the Roxy features The Game Plan, starring wrestler Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as a football player who eventually learns that a real man isn’t afraid to show his feelings and cook and do other things that real men are alleged not to. It is one of those movies where these lessons are taught by a little girl and, in a subvariation followed in this case, a dog. On the poster that hangs under glass by the Roxy’s door, the little girl is wearing a tutu and has her arms crossed, and Johnson is holding a fat beagle awkwardly toward the camera, eyes wide, as if he is wondering how he got there.

Saturday evening and the restaurant under the big yellow awning on main street, John Henry’s, is bustling. The hunters are in early and will go to bed early, but at five thirty they are tucking into the beef stroganoff special for $7.99, a large party of them ranged around several tables pushed together, their camouflaged caps tilted far back on their heads, their long-underwear sleeves pushed up above their elbows, their eyes fixed on the Iowa State game on two glowing flat-screen televisions on the wall and another one over the bar so that it’s everywhere you turn. The bartender is out of the medium-sized beer glasses so I am sipping mine from a mug the size of an iced-tea pitcher. The old man next to us at the bar is eating the beef stroganoff special alone. The waitress asks him about his foot, and he says it’s getting better. “Want to see it?” he asks her.

Choteau is so quiet that we can hear the beating wings of a flock of birds passing overhead as we walk back to the motel. A cold wind is arriving in town for the night. Back at the room, icy breezes gust through and around the shoddily installed air conditioner in the window above the bed. I walk back out into the dark gravel roundabout to the car for water bottles so that we’ll have something to pour the wine into and the temperature feels like it has already dropped ten degrees. While A. pours the wine I lie on the floor by the gas-powered heater and remove its access panel and turn the dial next to the pilot light until blue flames leap to life in its guts. Soon the room is full of a dry parching heat. We grow drowsy watching The Wizard of Oz on television.

I can never sleep the first night in a new bed. The dead wind-kicked leaves scratch at the window. The heater clangs and rattles throughout its cycle as its metal parts expand and contract. At one a.m. I turn it off. By dawn, when the hunters are slamming the doors of their trucks out in the roundabout, the cold has retaken the room. We huddle together in bed for warmth and wait for the sun to rise. Then we slip out of bed, fire up the heater, and start getting out the breakfast things.

The manager calls the room at 10:45 to remind us that checkout time is 11:00 and asks if we want to stay another night. The maids are already hard at work as we pull the car out of the gravel roundabout, all the room doors open to the brisk morning air, no one else staying another night either, from the looks of it. We park by the Ace Hardware next to the storefront New Life Church and walk north, past the looming silver silos in the train yard and across the traffic circle where the courthouse sits and then on into the downtown. The streets are empty, the Dinosaur Museum is closed. A sun-faded pink tricycle sits in front of a modest house with a well-kept yard. Down at the Bella Vista, the motel that advertises a “game cleaning area,” big dusty pickups sit with open doors in front of the little cabins, and what topics of conversation are to be found late in the night during hunting season around the picnic table under the canopy out on the lawn?

A cattle truck makes its slow clanking way down the street, its smell taking even longer to pass. A pickup drives by with an ATV in its bed. There is a fresh-killed deer lashed to the ATV, splayed wide open, the cavity where its guts used to be gaping bloody and suprised at the sky.

The Mountain Top Surf Club is closed.

I am not insensible to the tug of a small town but when I stop and think I realize that it’s really the tug of small towns as portrayed in old radio shows and on TV, where the ominous downsides of everyone knowing everyone else are ignored and even the town drunk is friendly and not sad. Mainly I feel unease in a place like Choteau, a strong sense of being an outsider in a place that isn’t used to them. Well, Sheriff, they were walking all over town and they took pictures of the rail yard which is just what terrorists would be interested in, isn’t it. It seems strange to fear my fellow citizens but no less strange to think that the town of Choteau is really in the same country as, say, Baltimore, or even Missoula for that matter. Which is not to sneer at Choteau but simply to recognize how entirely differently life is lived here than it is in the places I’m used to: different rhythms, different fun, different means of surviving from one year to the next, and these vast open spaces rushing at you from all sides.

Still, off-balance makes for good travel, if by “travel” you understand that I mean something different from what I’m talking about when I say “I could use a vacation.” As it turned out, we spent less than 24 hours in Choteau, and yet, for me, our time there was infused with a spirit of discovery and adventure that surprised me, given how mundane our activities were: watching television in the motel room, having a drink in a restaurant, and walking slowly from one end of the town to the other. I was reminded of a book I come back to from time to time, Alain de Boton’s The Art of Travel, in which de Boton argues that the true pleasures of travel derive less from the destination than from the “traveling mind-set,” of which “receptivity might be said to be [the] chief characteristic.”

“Receptive, we approach new places with humility. We carry with us no rigid ideas about what is or is not interesting. We irritate locals because we stand in traffic islands and narrow streets and admire what they take to be unremarkable small details… We find a supermarket or a hairdresser’s shop unusually fascinating…”

Speaking as one who, when visiting family in Germany, always enjoyed going to supermarkets at least as much as going to castles, de Boton’s point here rings true, and it is in these moments of pure curiosity that I forget myself and live in the moment. It is less important what I am looking at than that I am looking, and it’s easier to look when I don’t already know the explanation and interpretation. Travel for information, edification — this must involve certain set destinations. But travel for pleasure of the kind I’m describing: it’s as easy to find in a town like Choteau as anywhere, and perhaps even easier.

When I got up this morning I noticed (1) a lot more snow on the deck and (2) that it was still snowing. I took the pictures I posted below not much later; as you easterners can see, we’re talking about an amount of snow that would cripple Baltimore for three or four days. Though last night we’d joked about whether A. would get a snow day, my first instinct this morning was that she had a decent shot. I fired up the laptop to check the university web site. But I began to remember that we live in Montana now as I searched and searched and not only couldn’t find a cancellation or closure notice, I couldn’t even find the place where such a notice would be, like “click here for weather closing information” or “campus will open on time today, Monday, November 19.” In other words, not only would A. not get a snow day today, the locals weren’t even considering it as a possibility. This was further underlined when A. called the Mountain Line to see if her bus would be running. The response was along the lines of “ummmmmm… why wouldn’t it be?”

There are all kinds of good reasons not to shut down here for a storm that would have easterners panicking and hoarding toilet paper: people are used to this kind of weather here, there are a lot more plowing companies ready to go to work, if you shut down for every couple-of-inch snowstorm in Montana you wouldn’t get a lot done, etc. We easterners are supposed to be pansies for shutting down so easily, which I wrote about almost a year ago. I came across another interesting viewpoint in a book my father gave me for my birthday this fall, a collection of the journalist Pete Dexter’s columns called Paper Trails. Dexter, who was raised in South Dakota, describes witnessing a car accident in Philadelphia, during a blizzard.

”A car was coming out of a gas station, another car wasn’t going to let it in. They came together at maybe two miles an hour, looking right at each other, and then they bumped fenders.”

He continues:

”Thirty inches of snow can fall on Vermillion, South Dakota, and people get around. Six inches stops everything in Philadelphia or New York [or Baltimore]. The reason isn’t that Vermillion has more snowplows or less cars. The reason is that in Vermillion, South Dakota, people give each other a little room.”

This certainly rings true, speaking as someone who still can’t get used to how willing the drivers here are to look for and stop for pedestrians, not to mention how you can actually just go 40 MPH in a 35 MPH zone and no one behind you seems to be about to explode with apoplexy. I had a friend in Baltimore who went off to Richmond for law school and developed a technique for spotting fellow Baltimoreans based on how angry they always seem, which made sense to me. Combined with their lack of practice driving in snow, those certainly aren’t people with whom you want to be sharing slippery roads.

Still, A. and I grew up on the east coast and snow feels like a holiday to us, so A. was sad to have to head out to work, and I’m not finding it any easier to get my head in the game here at home. Light flakes drifting down, mini-avalanches coming off of tree branches, birds making little trenches as they alight on the layer covering the deck railings. Compared to what I’m used to of late, this is a lot of snow, and it’s still mounting up.

Maybe I’ll just go check how much toilet paper we have.

And suddenly these thoughts are swept away by the exhilaration of discovery, success, like what Peary must have felt when a second and third check of his instruments confirmed that he was standing at long last on the North Pole. There, at the five-mile mark, just where it should be if (1) this is the right road and (2) I’m reading distance on the map correctly, the long-sought goal: ten or so silver silos and a jumble of long low cream-colored dormitory-like structures on the right side of the road, substantial modern buildings that are a far cry from the modest, weather-beaten, barely-there ranch houses we’ve seen along this road so far. The outpost of a religious sect whose members are “highly skilled agriculturists, formidably competitive with family farmers and ranchers” if ever there was one.

The road turns sharply to the south, just like the map says it should. Tucked into the corner of a field, just inside the fence, as final confirmation, a sign: “New Rockport Colony.”

Also: “Disease Control Program.”

Also: “Keep Out.”

We stare down the road into the colony for a long minute, and then, since we have no particularly compelling reason to ignore this sign, A. backs the car around and points us back toward Choteau and our motel. On the way, we cross paths with the first vehicle we’ve seen on this road, a big blue Ford pickup headed for the colony. The driver, a shadow in a broad-brimmed hat behind the tinted glass nods and waves as he passes. Technically we have failed, but my heart is light and full of song for the glorious beauty of this particular gravel road in this particular state at this particular moment in my young life.

We first heard of the Hutterites not long after arriving in Missoula this summer. Our main source was a new friend who teaches at a Hutterite school, and the impression we formed from a not-very-detailed conversation with her was basically that Hutterites are in some vague way “like Amish and Mennonites,” live off by themselves on “colonies,” and do a lot of farming. That’s about all we had to go on when the sign appeared in front of Pattee Creek Market in late October: “Reserve Your Hutterite Turkey Today!” One day we stopped in and ordered one for pick-up on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, a sixteen pounder that would be big enough to share with the international students and other temporary orphans from the university we had decided to invite over to share in the warmth and joy of our happy home.

Now, I have this writing habit or you could call it call a compulsion and sometimes the energy and desire to do something about it courses through me like fire in prairie grass and there is nothing for it but to either find something to write about or pour myself a glass of Maker’s Mark. On the Thursday before Veteran’s Day weekend we were out of whisky and it occurred to me that maybe I could travel to the Hutterite colony where our turkey was going to come from and write about the trip. It would be a quirky travel essay contrasting the Hutterites’s way of life with ours, dazzling readers along the way with great swaths of poetic description of the astonishing terrain of the state of Montana, our new home. It would be like journalism or something. Maybe I could even submit it somewhere. I called the market and learned that our turkey would come from either the New Rockport or Birch Creek colonies, both out near Choteau, two hundred miles east of Missoula as the car drives, which seemed doable. A. looked only slightly dubious when I proposed the trip.

The day before we left, I got on-line and started to read up on Hutterites. As I began my research, it felt thrillingly ironic and post-modern to be learning about these primitive farmers via the internet, and I even took some notes on this irony, thinking it would make for a good passage in my essay. But as I read further I learned that Hutterites don’t exactly lead primitive lives. I read some more, and then I crossed out all the ironic stuff and collated my notes into the kind of wise yet approachable paragraph that all the best essayists use to sprinkle book learning in among their personal impressions in order to keep their readers from noticing how self-indulgent the overall essay is:

There are in Montana small communities of a close-knit Christian sect whose members call themselves Hutterites. Like Amish and Mennonites, with whom they trace their origins back to the sixteenth century and certain disagreements with the mainstream of the Protestant Reformation, Hutterites are Anabaptists, meaning they are not baptized at birth but rather as adults, and then only after making an informed, free-will confession of faith. Also like Amish and Mennonites, Hutterites are pacifistic, reclusive, and suspicious of many aspects of the modern world. But this suspicion does not lead Hutterites to reject modern technology per se: though they disapprove of photography and television, they willingly use telephones, automobiles, and, most importantly, state-of-the-art farming equipment. And unlike Amish and Mennonites, Hutterites do not believe in personal property. They own their land and equipment in common, so that each colony operates essentially like a small farming corporation, with all of the efficiency, “rationality,” and economies of scale this permits. As a result, they are considered highly skilled agriculturists, formidably competitive with family farmers and ranchers. In fact, at a recent conference on real estate and development issues facing Montana and the west, I saw one rancher just about swallowing his tongue in an effort not to say something impolitic about his neighbors, the Hutterites.

In addition to using phones, Hutterites have answering machines. I know because I left a long embarrassing message on one the day before we left for Choteau. The message was a recap of the long embarrassing explanation I’d given to the woman of few words who answered the New Rockport Colony’s main listed phone number. I’m a writer, my wife and I just moved to Montana, I’m working on a series of essays about exploring our new home state, I wanted to write about where our Thanksgiving turkey is coming from. I’ve always found that identifying myself as a writer when no one is paying me to be one is extremely difficult, especially when I’m asking for something special or out of the ordinary as a result of this alleged “fact.” Logically, I know that this is just what I have to do if I want to write the kind of essay I had in mind here, but that doesn’t make it any easier.

She asked if what I was writing would end up in a book. “It might,” I said, trying to sound confident, i.e., “it might” end up in a book if there’s room in my book after I put all the other things into my book, but there are books involved, certainly, I’m a real writer, why wouldn’t it end up in a book? She said I would have to talk to the guy who raises the turkeys. I dialed the number she gave me and that’s when I discovered for myself that Hutterites have answering machines. I talked to the turkey guy’s answering machine for so long that a loud beep cut me off in mid-sentence to indicate that I’d run out of tape.

He never did call me back.

We set off from the motel around four. A., who is really very understanding of my strange urges, offers to drive so that I can make observations and talk into my tape recorder. Just to orient ourselves, we first take a quick spin through the little town where we’ll be spending the night: Choteau, MT, on the eastern Rocky Mountain Front. The main street is mostly empty, the shops are mostly dark.

In a parking lot, under the blank pitiless gaze of a rusting Tyrannosaurus Rex statue, we consult the map. Then we head east, across the tracks, and out of town.

We wind out of Choteau on state road 221 and turn north, after about two miles, on state road 220. From the Rockies to Choteau to this very turn, we’ve been driving in a region of rolling hilly grasslands with colors in about a thousand different shades of brown, gold, and yellow: wet blonde hair, beach sand at sunset, old wedding rings, and so on. Cresting a short rise on 220, we go from plains to plane, geometric that is, a glass-flat muddy-looking expanse of farm fields extending as far as the eye can see, except of course for where they run into the cloud-capped Rocky Mountains to the east west. The sun throws the car’s long shadow on the stubbly field beside the road. We pass hay bales stacked in the approximate size and shape of a semi trailer. Cows slump on the ground immobile as glaciers, horses bend graceful necks down to feed, and the occasional lonely house peeks out from its little palisade of trees.

According to the map, we are looking for the second “improved” road north of the intersection of 221 and 220, but we are hampered both because the roads are not labeled on the map and we have no idea what is meant by “improved.” We pass several fine gravel roads, labeled with numbered green street signs just like they would be downtown somewhere (17th, 18th, 19th, etc.), but I am at first convinced that the mapmakers wouldn’t have used such a thick red line to represent gravel. After a while it becomes obvious we have driven too far and we turn back, paying more careful attention to distance and the mile markers along the road. Using the side of my finger as a ruler, I estimate that the second improved road should be about five miles north of the turn we made. Between mile markers five and four, we turn west on a gravel road named 18th.

The further we drive down the gravel road, the stupider I feel about the whole thing. We have no idea if it’s even the right road, but, if it is, the fact that there was no sign back at the highway suggests that these people are not exactly eager for drop-in visitors. Three miles, four. We haven’t seen a single vehicle or person, just ranch fields full of cattle to either side of the road and then the occasional house. Like some ghostly overlay, older houses often stand crumbling somewhere off to one side of the newer ones, co-generational with the rusty pickups subsiding gradually into the earth in the front yards, the past rubbing shoulders uneasily with the present and everyone’s back turned on a future that has not looked good for small ranchers and farmers for quite some time.

The gravel pops and murmurs under the tires. A huge flock of birds crosses the sky in front of us in a dozen or so long, undulating strings, the color of smudged pencil lines against the white wash of clouds. So big is the sky over this immense flat plain, unrolling eastward from the Rocky Mountains at our back, that it is two or three minutes before the birds fade from view on the southern horizon. I look after them for a few seconds before switching on my tape recorder and narrating a description. There is always something to write about and there is A. beside me and this is how I hope it will always be.

Back when I toyed for about five minutes with the idea of becoming a professor, I remember reading about a woman who was driving a school bus in order to be able to afford to keep working as an adjunct in English literature. She claimed to be fine with this, at least in the sense that she had never expected much better, and argued that you shouldn’t even try to become a professor these days (at least in the humanities) unless motivated by something other than the prospect of making a living, like a poet. That is, you should only do it if, the same way a poet writes poems, you would be willing to do it for free. I gave up the idea of becoming a professor but the impoverished adjunct’s way of looking at things has stuck with me in the form of a general philosophy that it’s important to pay attention to how you really want to spend your time, and besides, who doesn’t want to be “like a poet,” even if, in this example, it is just another word for banging your head against the wall.

I once took an on-line journalism course through Media Bistro in which I was mocked by the instructor for a statement he found on one of the web sites I kept before this one, something about how the mere fact of getting paid for a piece of writing is no sure mark of its quality, that what matters is how the writer feels about it, etc., etc. It was a journalism course, meaning that everyone in the class was there to polish marketable skills, so I understood where he was coming from. But I’m not about to let go of the idea that there are certain activities each of us needs to do whether anyone is paying us for them or not, and I am absolutely certain that — with writing in particular — too much attention to marketability is sure to change the shape and feel of what we’re doing, which in turn may defeat the purpose and turn the whole activity into something other than whatever it is we “need” to do.

I mean, there’s writing and then there’s writing.

For about the past month, I was working on an impressionistic and discursive essay that I figured would have important things to say about the creative urge and how writing works, perhaps only for me personally but even if so it seemed a question worth pursuing. I’ve put that essay aside for the time being in favor of remaining sane, but here’s something I found in the course of my research, from a public address by the German writer W.G. Sebald in which he describes a 1976 trip he made to Salzburg to visit his long-lost school chum, the painter Jan Peter Tripp, whose work Sebald seems in the oblique Sebaldian manner to be crediting with first inspiring him to consider becoming a writer. Sebald describes the profound effect on him of one of Tripp’s pieces in particular, an engraving showing “the mentally ill judge Daniel Paul Schreber with a spider in his skull,” and asks “what can there be more terrible than the ideas always scurrying around our minds?” The engraving and Sebald’s question call up, for me, a song my mother used to sing to me when I was a child, in which an old woman swallows first a fly and then a series of successively larger creatures, each one intended to eat the one preceding it. Specifically I think of the spider, which the old woman swallowed immediately after the fly and which “wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her.” Consideration of first causes is a natural tendency at moments when the empty page looms and yet offers no suggestions concerning how to fill it. That is, why the hell do I feel the urge to do this? And what, oh what, will quiet that urge (other than whisky and anti-depressants)? At times, such questions can feel urgent indeed. “I don’t know why she swallowed the fly,” goes the song’s refrain. “Perhaps she’ll die.”

So no more early-morning scribbling in notebooks that will never see the light of day. Here’s the plan: an essay a week on this web site, and no cute categories or other prescriptions concerning what sorts of essays they’ll be. I’ve announced grand plans like this in the past, of course, but this time around I know some of the things that went wrong, mainly biting off more than I could chew and also getting too specific about what I was going to do. I used to have the idea that I could post regularly here and then work on more personal stuff on the side and somewhere during all of that also make a living, all of which I now realize from experience just won’t work. And I want to focus on the essay form, since, as E.B. White once wrote, “only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays,” and that looks like a glove that fits.

As for my old Media Bistro “professor,” of course I’m open to submitting things to magazines and the like, but I can’t worry about that too much to start with. When I am submitting things, I want to be able to point to a steady body of work that has been appearing here, weekly and column-like, as part of my bona fides. It doesn’t do me much good to get some random essay published somewhere after weeks of trying if the effort is distracting me from practicing: I don’t need the independent validation, and I have faster ways to earn $100. So I’m going to plug along for a while here before worrying too much about that side of things, and if you find yourself thinking that something I’ve written is good enough to publish, don’t worry, something else I write will be, too. Of course, if someone comes along and wants to hire me for an E.B. White-style weekly column (does anyone print that sort of thing anymore?), well, all bets might be off.

I’ll post the essays each Sunday, no later than noon Mountain Time (two p.m. Eastern Time). Enjoy, and thanks for reading.

Now back to Max Lentz. The Missoula native attended high school at World Class Kayak Academy here in town. (This is as reported in the Missoulian.) Max was on an academy kayaking trip to West Virginia earlier this month when he attempted to navigate a section of rapids on the Upper Gauley River. The seventeen-year-old — described by one of his teachers as a highly skilled kayaker — was following a standard route, a route he had just watched other kayakers use without incident. But as Max slid through the chute, his kayak nosed into a rock crack and became wedged there, and the force of the rushing water held him down even as it batted his would-be rescuers away again and again from their desperate efforts to pull him free. The rescue, which commenced within minutes, eventually turned into a recovery, and four hours passed before his body could be pried from the river’s grip.

My parents set out across the country by train at just about the exact same time Max and his schoolmates must have boarded their plane for West Virginia. My parents traveled by sleeper car, the last civilized means of travel left to us. (Actually, my mother says that the coach seats didn’t look bad, either — remember, this is a different train from, say, the commuters that ply the D.C.-New York line. Really different. When we dropped them off at the Essex station near Glacier National Park at the end of the week, and I got my first up-close look at their train, it was like a silver castle rolling by on wheels, or something out of the 1950s-era Robert Heinlein/Airstream-trailer-influenced vision of the spaceships that we were all supposed to be driving by now. It’s called the Empire Builder, which seemed appropriate, even if — with our proconsuls and legions posted to Mesopotamia — it’s a name that makes you squirm just a little.)

A. and I drove up on Friday and met my parents at the Izaak Walton Inn near the little “town” of Essex, on the fringe of Glacier National Park. The inn has been in operation since the 1920s and functions almost as the de facto train station. The staff has to run out back and wave to the trains as they go by. The motto on the inn’s promotional materials is “Where time slows down and lets you catch up.” We caught up by reading in the lobby by the fire, walking in the woods, and taking leisurely meals in the inn’s restaurant, where a fine huckleberry cobbler is to be had.

Back in Missoula, with my parents quartered for the week in our guest room, we fell into a similarly relaxed routine. A. was off to work each day, of course. I would put in a few hours myself, then my parents and I would drive out to explore. We took walks, meandered through the UM campus, enjoyed lunch at Dauphine’s. One afternoon we stopped to read the names on the war-memorial statue by the grand old courthouse. As I hinted above, it was a little strange to be showing my parents around a town I barely feel like I know myself. They asked questions, and either I wouldn’t know the precise answer or my response took the form of pedantic, anthropological theories: “Well, I believe this may date back to the Populist era of the late 1800s…” Missoula doesn’t feel like home yet, and I don’t know if it ever will. Maybe it’s not dirty enough.

A week after they arrived, it was time to put my parents back on the train so that they could continue on their way to San Francisco, where my brother is now living. We collected A. from work a little early and drove back up to the Glacier National Park area, two and a half hours along winding blacktop, through the Indian reservations, past immense Flathead Lake, gazing ahead at mountaintops disappearing into and then poking out of the tops of the clouds. On the hillsides, thousands of fir trees poked up at the sky, shaped like sharpened pencils stuck point upward in the rocky ground.

My parents were the only ones boarding at West Glacier, where the station — which really only functions as a bookstore these days, apparently — closes each day at 4:30 p.m. So we waited for the 8:21 to Seattle in the dark, bundled against the cold, leaning under the station overhang to get out of the rain. While we waited, two freight trains idled on the tracks in front of us, and it was possible to imagine that there had been some sort of mixup, that my parents’ train couldn’t possibly make it through, or that it would slide past on an outer track and forget to collect these two passengers. But at the last minute the freights rumbled away and the aforementioned silver, castle-like, two-story glory of a train eased into view. A door opened in the side and a conductor popped out and asked for my parents by name. We hugged goodbye in the rain and watched them settle into their berth, two seats facing each other by a lighted window that suspended them before us in the dark, as if on a television screen. Then the train pulled away into the trees, and there was nothing to look at but the rain and the dark shapes of the trees in the park.

The first time I saw the name “Max Lentz” was on a riverfront stroll with my parents on their first day in Missoula, along the path in Caras Park. The name was written on a card affixed to a large vase of flowers that someone had left by the path near Brennan’s Wave, the brief bump of rapids in the downtown section of the river, where the kayakers practice. At that moment, “Max Lentz” didn’t mean anything to me, but I must have marked the name in some corner of my subconscious, because “Lentz” sounded familiar a few days later when my mother observed white letters spelling it out high on the side of Mount Jumbo. The “L” is always there, of course, but — sure enough — as we drove up Broadway from the UM campus on a sunny afternoon, we could see the smaller letters spelling out the rest of the name, small enough that it seemed possible, though unlikely, that they’d always been there and I just hadn’t noticed them yet. After my parents left, I read in the paper that his friends had put the letters there, just for a day or two, and that the “M” on Mt. Sentinel had likewise been amended briefly to read “Max.”

My mother and I had just walked the trail up to the “M” (letters “a” and “x” had not made their appearance yet). It was a strenuous walk, back and forth across steep switchbacks, pitched at an angle so that it was almost like walking up stairs the whole way up. We encountered a lot of other hikers. The only one panting worse than us was a black dog with white eye patches. From the trail and from the base of the “M” we had gazed out over Missoula, the streets of the university district marked out by neat rows of trees now wearing their final golden coats before winter. Looking over at Mt. Jumbo, my mother had asked what the “L” stood for.

I didn’t know, I told her. I just got here myself.

For Lentz, back on the Upper Gauley River, October 5th started out as just another day of doing what he loved. Then thump, his kayak inexplicably came to a stop and suddenly all of this water was rushing over him. I’ll leave it to you find your own lesson in this, but I’m just glad that I got to see my parents last week. All we know for sure about this uncertain world is that it is always later than you think.