Moose County, Michigan and Great Falls, Montana, Part II

The second in a what-was-not-supposed-to-be-a-series comparing the eerie eerie similarities between the behavior, culture, and otherwise of Moose County and my current residence of Great Falls, Montana and its environs, sparked mainly by a read through The Cat Who Robbed a Bank.

One of the most distinctive features of Moose County are the odd names of many of its towns - Wildcat, Dimsdale, Chipmunk, Trawnto, Sawdust City, etc. Montana has some unusual town names as well - Fishtail, Absarokee (pronounced "ab-SOAR-kee"), La Hood, Sixteen, Twodot (all the things I've heard about Twodot have been about its bar - but, then again, they say the bar's pretty much all there is of Twodot), Happy's Inn, Intake, Ekalaka, Biddle, Quietus, Garryowen, Cat Creek, Coffee Creek, Big Arm, Big Sandy, Belknap, Yaak, Mildred, Winifred, the ever-so-descriptive Montana City, the not-so-descriptive Nevada City and Virginia City, and Manhattan. Not as distinguished as Moose County, but, hey, it's close. And while we don't have a Brrr (although we do have a "Froid", which's French for "cold"), we do have a town named Cut Bank bearing a great resemblance to Brrr in that it takes great pride in its often-abysmal temperatures (though Cut Bank was once the coldest spot in the nation, not just the county). Cut Bank's local landmark? A giant penguin statue commemorating the event.
As I mentioned in my random thoughts on Robbed a Bank, the sight of Moose County mothers schooling their daughters in how to buy just the right li'l Easter-esque dresses to look pretty for Mr. Delacamp, how to purty themselves up with the right perfume and act appropriately, innocuously demure, etc. is the attitude with which most teenage girls are instilled here, though they usually skip the lessons in manners (and the dresses are shoved off in favor of jeans that're two sizes too small) and go straight for the submissive attitude (the prevailing wisdom up here is still that the best way to keep a man is to regularly bake him batches of chocolate chip cookies). Not that I am putting down the domestic arts, but, up here, pleasing a potential mate thusly - and getting married and knocked up as soon as possible (most of the dresses the bridal shops up here stock are not the traditional white-lace affairs, but candy-colored, revealing-to-the-point-of-being-hookeresque numbers that'd appeal to a teeny-bopper clientèle) - is taken as the be-all end-all of a heck of a lot of girls' lives, and most of said girls are too young or irresponsible or both to enter into an adult contract such as marriage or be responsible for another human life through procreation. This trend is probably, in a very basic way, founded in Montana's rural ranching and farming roots, where producing a lot of offspring very early in life help both in supplying extra hands for never-ending farm work and in fending off loneliness of otherwise isolated rural life, and where a young mother has a large familial support system to back her up if she doesn't know what the hey she's doing - but it leads to a lot of trouble outside of that environment.
I can understand Qwilleran's obsessive vigilance with keeping his columns typo-free - like in Moose County, the local wordsmiths seem to be pretty lax in proofreading. Lord help you if you submit a letter to the editor to the local paper, The Great Falls Tribune, for it'll be edited and printed as if Altavista's Babelfish program had translated to Japanese and back a few times. And I can't count the number of ads, both in the paper and out, for "imatation krab" (the "krab" appears to be part of a trademark for crab mock-up, but the "imatation" is not) and "potatoe" (and you wondered where Dan Quayle was coming from? "Potatoe" is virtually the officially-sanctioned spelling of the word up here). All this, of course, bears absolutely no relevance to the typos with which the C-pads I churn out at two in the morning are infested.
Taken from a letter to the editor of the Something in Robbed a Bank -
"Bixby County wants to create a 'gaming' casino to bolster its economy and create jobs. Is that a euphenism for 'gambling' or is it true that Bixbyites can't spell?"
Both those conclusions would apply to Montana, but the latter, for once, is not responsible for the former - gambling is indeed never referred to by the state government or by folks in the business by its proper name - it's "gaming" without fail, indeed a euphemistic purposes for something rather unpleasant but omnipresent.
(And, while I'm not inclined to pontificate about such matters, it is truly unpleasant; gambling does become a real negative influence upon a community once it's established. For one, it becomes impossible to purge or reign in its expansion, as the gambling lobby eventually gets so powerful through both the money it reaps from its casinos and the jobs and slice of the state economy it represents that its stranglehold on the state legislature becomes iron-clad, leading to insane government-approved measures to protect the industry. (For example, it's a devilish ordeal to get a liquor license for a restaurant in Montana - the state metes out an insanely low number of them, so one's virtually only chance of netting one is to wait for an existing restaurant to either go out of business or sell theirs - and the licenses go for five or six figures (I do not exaggerate) at auction. Getting a liquor license, however, is no problem for a casino, since casino-class liquor licenses are dirt-cheap and supplied on demand, and since a liquor license is almost a necessity for a restaurant to operate in Montana, most restaurnats are forced to resort to fielding mini-casinos to survive.) Additionally, gambling does indeed lead to higher crime in residential, non-"tourist destination" areas; the resultant proliferance of pawn shops provides thieves with a bevy of easy fences, and certain addicts do turn to white-collar crime to fund their habit; about every other month you hear about some bookkeeper or secretary or, in the latest example, a deputy sheriff who oversaw the county sheriff's office evidence room, caught for embezzling money in order to fuel a gambling addiction.)
Mining tycoon Ephraim Goodwinter's attitude toward worker safety still thrives through W. R. Grace's (yes, the same W. R. Grace accused of poisoning the town's drinking water in A Civil Action) treatment of the employees in its vermiculite mine in a town called Libby in northwest Montana. W. R. Grace unearthed a ton of asbestos in getting to the vermiculite and told the miners that the dust/residue was completely harmless even though the company knew otherwise, and everything went along happy-happy until fairly recently, when somebody started noticing that, er, wait a minute, an unusually high number of peopel were dropping dead of respiratory diseases - about 200 to date, with 300-400 more alive having come down with similar illnesses (and this is a town with a population of around only 3,200). This isn't even getting into the Anaconda Company, which had a similar track record of workplace safety, strip-mined several places in Montana all to hell, poisoned the Missouri river up and down, and yet, curiously (à la the "Goodwinter mystique", in a way), inspires local adulation on par with that which Chinese Communist party members bestow upon Mao. (To cite an example, the Anaconda Company left behind one of its smelter smokestacks when it got out of Dodge that became sort of a local landmark in its time, if only for its size, and the day that Anaconda finally got around to demolishing it was and is looked upon as a city-wide day of mourning. People still just adore that stack - it's memorialized through T-shirts, plaques, bronzes (yes - they're cast by a local artist and seem to sell fairly briskly), and mediocre acrylic paintings and has inspired the larger-than-life pop-cultural enshrinement up here that Elvis has in certain quarters.)
I included Qwill's conjured-up parody-horror of a Pickax Pickles ad in my Top 101 Cat Who... Moments list, probably because it struck a familiar chord in me, what with all the similar commercials I've seen on local TV. So far, we have had:
- Two aliens, as represented by two middle-aged fellows dressed up in white long johns, those headbands sold at carnivals that have "antennae" on 'em made up of long springs and glittery styrofoam balls, and Ray-Ban sunglasses (and is there anything that goes better with the Men in Black-ish Ray-Ban look than white long johns, really?), looking for a pawn shop to get some quick cash to get basck home after examining to a parking meter for information.
- A fellow dressed up in a cowboy hat, chaps, and boots and carrying a lasso and riding crop riding and wrangling a rolled-up carpet to the tune of "Rollin', rollin', rollin' / Keep them carpets rollin'". (The outfit that fielded this ad has since gone out of business, and now the carpet-commercial field in Great Falls is dominated by The Carpet Garage's myriad monster-truck-esque ads featuring dancing geckos.)
- A butcher and a guy in a cow suit slugging it out in a boxing ring to advertise meat specials.
- A local lawyer who appears in a series of self-funded public service announcements. (Putting aside for the moment the matter that a lawyer might not be the best choice of a person for a PSA to hold up as a role model, you might wonder a lawyer would choose to produce a series of public service announcements. The answer is simple - to get around the state law prohibiting lawyers from advertising their services on TV.)
- An ongoing series of commercials in which Sacajawea attempts to lead Lewis and Clark to Ace Hardware. (Actually, it's lately been only Sacajawea and either Lewis or Clark; the commercials used to feature both the explorers, but one of them apparently either got fired from their job at Ace or quit. It's hard to do a commercial serial when your Lewis can just up and leave the Expedition because OfficeMax's offering a better dental plan.)
- And, of course, the obligatory Mad Car Salesman. Our particular Mad Car Salesman, Dave Pierce, used to be seen wearing primarily a cowboy hat and a big plastic sheriff's badge, but he seems to have eschewed that costume for the moment for a blue suit and left the sheriff's outfit to his diminitive midget "Mini-Me" sidekick (I kid you not), who does a lot of the commercials solo now. Pierce also has dressed up in the mandatory MCS wide variety of costumes - too many to recall them all, but I remember a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and Darth Vader. Though Pierce's toned down a little bit, he's kept up his auctioneer-huckster "come on down" voice, and I've no doubt he'll be back in top form quite soon - he'd better be, lest we lose a city treasure.
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