Moose County, Michigan and Great Falls, Montana - Coincidence...or Something More?

In a couple weeks, I'll be adding a "Miscellanea" section to Ronald Frobnitz, comprising several smaller Cat Who... related features - one of them, hopefully, detailing similarities fans have found between their real world and Moose County (and Down Below, if you wish, though Moose County seems more distinctive and more of a series trademark. Not to rule out Down Below as a topic of discussion entirely - it has some terrifically colorful characters., and if you'd like to talk about anybody you know who resembles one of them, I'd be delighted - but the environment itself is pretty much archetypical urban, and any real-life similarities to it would therefore be rather unremarkable - unless they were in regards to a specific neighborhood (like Junktown, say) or establishment (like Maus Haus).) This'll be an ongoing reader participation project - one of them things which, unfortunately, have not historically received a good turnout here - but, to kick things off, I'll start by enumerating a few of the parallels I've discovered between Moose County and my current place of residence of Great Falls, Montana.

• In the early country episodes, Qwilleran comments on the abundance of "big, healthy, young blond fellows in Moose County" - a type common to Montana as well, due to the Scandinavian stock prevalent in this area. For whatever reasons, the Scandinavians are remarkably hearty people - which also plays a hand in...

• ...the remarkable longevity of Montana natives - provided that nature's course is allowed to run uninterrupted. In The Cat Who Went Underground, Qwilleran makes note of the "high percentage of fatal accidents" in Moose County and how its "people either live to be ninety-five or they die young - in hunting mishaps, drownings, car crashes, [or] tractor rollovers". The gap between the average ages when the most Montanans die is very disparate - folks up here either kick off at 103, leaving behind five generations of offspring and, very possibly, their own mother, who's 120 and still active in the Gardening Society and Outrunners Club, or they're done away at 15 in said car crashes, tractor rollovers, or hunting mishaps (not so much drownings - besides the polluted-beyond-recreational-use-viability-thanks-to-the-Anaconda-Company Missouri River, there aren't really that many bodies of water in eastern Montana sizable enough to drown oneself in. Otherwise, there'd be a more-than-satisfactory number of drownings in Montana, believe me). Outdoor winter sports also garner their share of fatal accidents - people getting lost hunting/ATVing/cross-country skiing and freezing to death or being eaten by grizzly bears, flipping over their snowmobiles and breaking their necks, etc. (Perhaps, then, Montana's heavy helping of mortal mishaps is not unnatural - we could just have unusually militant element of natural selection at work in our ecosystem.) Also, it's not usually fatal, but we do have a lot of emphysema, asthma, and other respiratory illnesses in Big Sky Country - mostly due to the pervasiveness of smoking - and we also have a lotta young folks in their twenties and thirties dropping dead of heart attacks - I don't really have a clue as to what's the cause of that. But, really, besides possibly suicide, I'd have to say that the foremost cause of premature death is...

• ...DWI! A heck of a lot of Montanans - Montana teens in particular - are fond of driving, particularly fond of drinking, and particularly fond of combining the two, and particularly prone to cracking up after doing so, usually, kamikaze-style, taking a few passengers and other, sober motorists down with them. (The high school I used to attend dedicated a small grove of cherry trees on-campus and an entire hall of the school to honoring former students who splattered themselves all over the pavement while driving drunk.) I remember when volunteers would stage fake drunk driving crashes like the one outside Pickax High in The Cat Who Sang for the Birds in an attempt to curb the onslaught when I went to high school (they probably still do it, in fact), but they weren't met with the horrified "groans" and "cries" elicited from the Pickax teens, but rather with typical adolescent callous indifference and smart-aleck derision (although, quite frankly, I can't see how any message can be truly well-communicated through such public-service-announcement-meets-performance-art pedantic fakery, and the stunt has been staged so many times that it's lost what little shock value it had - which really wasn't much for teenagers raised on a steady diet of gory, violent TV shows, music videos, and movies).

• Small detail - after a thorough analysis, I'm convinced that the noisy Hot Spot restaurant in Mooseville has to be based on a chain out here Applebee's. Like the Hot Spot, Applebee's attracts a younger crowd; though not the exclusive focus of its menu, Applebee's does offer a considerable number of hot and spicy dishes; and, as with the Hot Spot, the atmosphere is so harried, the seating so close, and the patrons and background music so raucous that it is impossible to relax, hold an audible conversation, or enjoy your meal (providing, of course, that you actually get the dish you ordered in the first place - inaccuracy in service is another parallel between the real and the fictional eateries). My mother likened it to eating in the middle of a circus. I disagree; a circus is better choreographed, more entertaining, and less likely to induce nausea. I ate at an Applebee's once, and, like Qwilleran with the Hot Spot, I would never eat there again.

• One aspect of the Casablanca apartment building debacle - the structure's historical and sentimental import versus the reality of the building's beyond-repair dilapidation - brings to mind a similar situation locally concerning a bridge that was built in the 1910's and continued to be in use and open to through traffic until a couple years ago, when the city declared it unsafe and condemned it - which, to tell the truth, was the wisest choice - though one can tell that the bridge had indeed been quite beautiful in its day, the concrete has crumbled away from its arches, revealing the aging support cables, the piers are battered and cracked, the guardrails have almost completely collapsed, and the whole thing is just a sad mess. Construction workers and engineers who'd worked on it said that it never got the repairs it needed thirty years ago, and it was always the sort of bridge where you'd hold your breath as you rode over it for fear that it'd choose _that_ particular time to finally give in to the laws of gravity and collapse, bringing you and your car down with it. At the eleventh hour, though, after the city had held meetings, lined up a contractor, and set a date for the demolition, a preservation group popped up and filed a lawsuit, blocking any action from being taken on the bridge. This new group wasn't very big, but its members consisted largely of haughty doctor's and lawyer's wives wealthy enough to have clout in the community and be entitled to get all self-righteous about their chosen side of a debate without worrying about educating themselves about the messy particulars of the topic, and idle enough to be able to devote a large amount of time to an issue and harp on it enough to be heard. The court cases, hearings, and injunctions, and so forth went on for about a year - for some reason concerning city council control over city finances and contracts, the bridge issue could no be put to a public vote - the Montana Supreme Court finally ruled that, yes, they could keep the bridge - under the condition, I believe that the group use its own money, and none of the taxpayers', to finance its upkeep. Of course, the very next thing that happened was that the contractor who was supposed to filed a lawsuit - and rightfully so - to recoup the expenses he'd incurred in preparing for the job, doing the little preparatory work, turning down other jobs in favor of this one, etc. - which meant that he had to be repaid - from the tax coffers, of course.
  So, about a year later, the bridge's still around. It hasn't been "upkept", as far as I can see - it's just sitting around and further deteriorating. Preservation Cascade (the aforementioned preservation group - Great Falls is situated in Cascade County) has played host to a number of flighty ideas about how to use the bridge, the latest being to transform it into a flower garden, paying no heed to the fact that one of the bridge's bulkheads is situated right next to a very productive and potently odiferous oil refinery, which would not, in my mind, lend a very scenic, sweet-smelling, or healthful locale for flowers to grow (and it's awful tough to stop and enjoy the flora while preoccupied with fighting back the gag reflex). Obviously, no one on the committee has read The Cat Who Lived High, or else they'd've learned one of that book's primary lessons: there's a time to give up, and there are consequences for long-untended neglect. (Of course, Preservation Cascade has fixed _that_, as they've come up with a plan for "saving" the bridge - they're going to totally strip away the balustrades, outside of the arches, and most of the concrete - leaving only the bridge's (quite unstable) skeleton intact, and then totally reconstruct the dang thing. They're not even saving the original historic structure, they're gonna tear it down and replace it with an "amazingly lifelike replica". So, basically, they're SOCK and the Pennimans rolled into one, then. Neat trick.)

• Suspicion of outsiders. This is a BIG parallel, and, in a way, I can see the reasons behind it - a heavy influx and influence of typically richer out-of-staters with usually different values than the native population can disrupt the balance of a rural community and deprive it of the very qualities that made it attractive to the relocatees in the first place. (I do find it peculiar, however, that relatively little protest has arisen in Pickax from the considerable number of gentrification projects conceived or backed by Qwilleran and his Klingenschoen Fund dollars. But that's for another column.) I will say, however, that both the Treasure State and Moose County take their xenophobia to extremes - Montana's fierce state chauvinism has created a sort of caste system where social status is determined by how many generations one can trace one's lineage in the "mother state" (with natives defining themselves as "second-generation Montanans", "third-generation Montanans"), with the aristocracy comprising, one supposes, those who can prove they're descended from the Cro-Magnons excavated by Jack Horner down in Bozeman. Out-of-staters (that's the stock term for them - or "us", since I myself fall into the "out-of-stater" category as well) are, of course, on the lowest rung of the social ladder and, as with visitors from "Down Below", are therefore the suspects and scapegoats of all kinds of despciable crimes (the difference being that in Moose County the suspicions are mostly founded, since Down Belowers are more often than not, particularly in the later books, the perpetrators in Braun's mysteries (city folks also end up stabbed-and-slabbed a great deal - though, when they are the victims, there's a better-than-average chance that they were involved in _some_ shady activity where they had it coming to them)).

• With rabid local pride comes rabid interest in local history; everybody's a Homer Tibbitt in Montana. We have more than our share of genealogical societies, though the popular focus remains trained on the region's big claim to _national_ historical fame and import, Lewis and Clark's stopover during one winter here. A noteworthy piece of trivia, to be sure, though Great Falls has overgauged its relative importance to the expedition as a whole, and the city's take on the trek is on the egocentric side - to listen to local historians (when they're not, of course, arguing over whether "Sacajawea" should be spelled with a "j" or a "g"), you'd think that Lewis and Clark journeyed all the way out West just to run across our future townsite. (Ironically, since L & C's party had a heck of a time portaging their canoes up the numerous waterfalls in this area's stretch of the Missouri - it cost them a lot of effort, supplies, and precious time - despite all the modern claims of how significant and awe-inspiring northwest Montana was to Lewis and Clark, I don't imagine that their impression of their stay here was very favorable.) Important or not, however, Great Falls has taken its small role in the exploration as license to exploit its tenuous ties to the famous duo to the hilt - we have a Lewis and Clark Elemenary School, Lewis and Clark statues in the parks, "Lewis and Clark Days" (holidays celebrated by having members of the various historical societies travel up and down the Missouri River in round boats made out of hide), a Lewis and Clark "Interpretive" Center (basically a museum/tourist attraction detailing the journey, actually very tasteful and informative), even hardware store clerks dressed up as Lewis and Clark to hawk chain saws and branch loppers. I'd be willing to wager that we are the only place in America where one can make a steady living as a Lewis or Clark impersonator - we do have, in fact, a group that does just that in the name of "historical preservation", though what they do to preserve history, besides swagger around in clothing made of old gasoline-soaked rags found in their basements and pose for the paper every other week, is beyond me.

• There also seems to be a higher-than-average interest in psychic phenomena and the paranormal up here - many Montanans discuss UFO sightings with the same matter-of-factness and solemnity that the folks in Mooseville do, and even I, a *disbeliever*, know of several stately matrons like Mildred who read cards (tarot or playing), "talk with spirits", etc. Sure, like Sedona, Arizona, Montana attracts a large number of New Agers who come to commune with the state's nature life and its inherent "spirituality", but much of the interest is home-grown; our next-door neighbor's nephew, for example, regularly hunts for Bigfoot and has written a book about cattle mutilations (Mystery Stalks the Prairie).

• Blue trucks. With all the farmers and ranchers up here, the long distances between locales, and the rough-and-tumble roads connecting them, Montanans are, by nature and necessity, truck fiends, and not the old, broken-down jalopies either - we're talkin's the big, chromed-up, double-cab luxury-model jobbers. Montanans are fiercely brand-loyal, too, with major wars between Ford and Chevy devotees and inflammatory bumper stickers and personalized license plates ["FRDKILR", "NTAFORD"] as ammo. To tell the truth, there aren't really very many blue trucks in Big Sky Country - we in Montana are more partial to earth tones - but the topic of blue trucks does bring to mind an (not necessarily humorous) anecdote about one truck owner with a rather unusual paint job in a strange, off-shade hue that skated the line between blue and purple (it was probably the color of Qwilleran's Purple Plum, in fact). Apparently, he had taken some ribbing about the color, since he had fitted the truck with a personalized license plate that read "ITS BLUE". My mother, an auto enthusiast, happened to disagree, and whenever we passed this truck on the road, she would make sure to roll down her window and shout out "It's PURPLE!!!" at the driver as we drove by. We encountered this truck (never its driver, not outside of the highway, anyway - thank goodness) several times - apparently, we shopped at the same grocery store as its owner - but we haven't seen it lately. Perhaps the owner moved. I suppose it would be overkill to finish this story by wondering why he did.

• Qwilleran to Junior Goodwinter, The Cat Who Played Post Office: "'Junior, this county has the world's worst drivers. They straddle the centerline; they make turns from the wrong lane; they don't even know what turn signals are for.'" Your Honor, the prosecution rests.

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