Lay of the Land: A series of essays on the spirit of Montana
Editor’s Note: Shortly after Last Best News opened for business, we were surprised and honored to receive unsolicited essays from several friends and a few strangers.
We were even more surprised to discover that all of them covered similar ground. Whether in the form of memoir, yarn or personal essay, all of them touched on what it means to live in Montana, or to have formed some connection with this state.
We knew a good thing when we saw it, so we asked some other people to write similar essays, on whatever subject and in whatever form they pleased, as long as they said something about life as it is lived in Montana.
We have grouped all these essays under the general heading of Lay of the Land, and we plan to run them every other Wednesday starting today. We have 10 essays in our drawer at the moment, with five or six more scheduled to come in, and we expect to see more as time goes on.
So we don’t know how long the series will last, but we do know that we are very proud of what we have seen so far, and are excited to be offering them up to our readers. Without further ado…
Fred Gibson Jr., the author’s father. The photo was taken in 1964, the year of Montana’s territorial centennial, when all the men were wearing beards. He was a lifelong resident of Livingston.
By Jeff Gibson
Ed Kemmick wanted me to write about things as they were in the old days in Montana. I hear that all the time from my grandkids, but Ed is no spring chicken himself. We were off to a bad start, but after I told Ed I was not a senior citizen; that I was an elderly guy and unashamed of it, and that if he would not call me senior I would not address him as “Junior,” and he agreed, things lightened up.
The “old days” for me aren’t that far back anyway. A matter of 50 years or so is all. Just because Ed can’t remember quite that far back yet doesn’t mean his day isn’t coming. We clear, Ed?
Let me start off with a few baby steps about things you know about, and don’t make you too uncomfortable and then I’ll get into the incendiary farther down.
— — — —
Countless adults smoked in the old days. So did young folks, and they used chewing tobacco, as well. They called it chewing tobacco then, too, or maybe “snoose.” Today, the media call it “spit tobacco,” a pair of loaded words aimed at making people think “Oh, how icky!” Maybe it is, but there was a day when folks didn’t care to be goosed with a cattle prod while they were making their own judgments.
Boys stuffed their mouths with it. They bought cigarettes over the counter, too, when they were barely in their teens. They struck “farmer’s matches” with a thumbnail, when they still sold those matches, and lit up. It looked cool. A Zippo was cooler, though. A few boys lifted theirs from the drugstore, but I didn’t have the nerve.
My dad used to recite a bit of verse that went like this:
Root-a tee-toot, root-a tee-toot,
We’re the boys from the institute.
We don’t smoke and we don’t chew,
And we don’t play with them as do.
Dad recited it in a mocking, singsong voice. He smoked, too. Smoked more Raleigh cigarettes in a short lifetime than any man I knew. He could have quit anytime, but he liked the coupons.
Smoking cigarettes showed you were tough and it was also a bonding thing, a way to be sociable. I guess it’s the same today with smoking medicine. Just a few years ago, more than 60,000 Montanans suffered from terminal illnesses and or intractable pain that made them dash to the pot shop for medical marijuana. And they didn’t want pills. They wanted the rollable weed, just like cigarette smokers, so they could share their meds in a convivial setting.
— — — —
The following isn’t my favorite memory, but it was part of growing up. One day a pal and I were walking up an alley that led to our school, where we spent grades one through five. We were in the fourth grade. From the end of the alley, we saw a large group of school kids and a few teachers gathered around a cop. The cop’s car was parked by the curb. As we crossed the street, the circle of kids widened when the policeman waved them away. He leaned down and we heard an ear-splitting BANG! A cocker spaniel had been hit by a car and was lying on the boulevard with a broken back. The policeman ended the poor animal’s suffering on the spot.
The dog was still convulsing when my pal and I reached the scene. Nobody was crying, although nobody looked too happy, either. A teacher tut-tutted sadly, some adult brought a pail of water to wash away the blood, the cop put the dog in the trunk of his car and drove away. The rest of us went to class. It wouldn’t do to be late. Not a school day was canceled for emotional recovery and nary a word said about disciplining the cop for firing a shot in the presence of a couple of dozen grade-school kids, none of whom faulted him anyway. There might be better ways to deal with something like that, but we got through it.
— — — —
Not to try to change the subject with an attempt at humor, but one thing did traumatize kids back then. Some kids, anyway: the older boys. And that was the problem of obtaining a condom. Tobacco was everywhere sold over the counter, but condoms weren’t even on the counter. They were hidden behind the counter and under the counter, like all the good magazines.
I don’t know if it was illegal to sell condoms to a teenager who could freely buy tobacco, but it was definitely discouraged. Some kids tried to wheedle a more worldly-wise classmate into providing them with what they hoped they would need real soon. That was embarrassing enough, so I’ve been told, but it was nothing like approaching the druggist personally and asking him to sell you some. Maybe he would. Or maybe he’d grin maliciously and make a truly mortifying comment like: “You’re too young. Beat it.”
Nonetheless, some kids managed to get their hands on some. The box carried a stern printed notice that said: “Sold for the Prevention of Venereal Disease Only.” And that led to poor thinking.
A boy would read that, and then he’d think, “Hey! I don’t have VD! Neither does MayBelle, far as I know. We don’t need these things!”
— — — —
Dad never grew up. He liked to do what other boys did. He liked to blow things up. It was easy. He went to the hardware store, told the owner he wanted some dynamite, and the owner drove him to a bunker outside town. He handed Dad a few sticks of dynamite, a coil of fuse, some blasting caps and a little pair of pliers to crimp the cap over the fuse. The owner told Dad nothing remained but to push the capped fuse into the end of a stick of dynamite, light the fuse and get away fast.
Dad and I, a brother and a friend drove five miles out of town, got out of the car and looked for things to blow up. Dad cut the dynamite sticks into three or four shorter lengths. We stuck a piece in a gopher hole. Another went into a marmot’s den under a ledge of rock. The little animals probably were away from home at the time, out looking for food or something. I sure hope so. If they weren’t, at least they never knew what hit them.
People who wouldn’t know an atom bomb from a hand grenade are always going around saying, “An M-80 firecracker is as powerful as a quarter-stick of dynamite!”
Not even close.
— — — —
Years later, after Dad died, I was talking with my mom’s elderly companion about his time in the Army Engineers during the war. He was in Italy at the time of the allied offensive that finally pushed the Germans out. He told me about collecting German “shoe mines” off the ground and blowing them up in a big pit, and about how he had to locate anti-tank mines with a detector, and then carefully set a charge that would blow them up in place, because many were booby-trapped and couldn’t be safely handled.
He told me about defusing a dozen allied 500-pound bombs that didn’t go off when they hit the ground. He described how he removed the detonating assembly from the back of the bomb, an assembly that held something called a striker bar that was held back from the detonator by a shear pin. If the bomb hit with enough force, the striker bar kept going, the pin gave way, the striker hit the detonator and that set off a cylinder of rather sensitive material called nitro-starch, which ran down the center of the bomb. The nitro-starch finally persuaded the main TNT load to do its thing. Boom.
The final steps in defusing a dud included pulling out the nitro-starch cylinder and disposing of it. Then one put a small charge of plastic explosive of just the right size on the side of the bomb and detonated that electrically. With a bit of luck, that split open the bomb case, and the TNT inside, which is a very stable explosive, simply burned up like an old tire.
Mom’s friend knew a young lieutenant who found a boxcar of German dynamite on some railroad tracks. Rather than just blow up the boxcar where it was, the lieutenant thought he could save a little track by unloading the dynamite and disposing of it elsewhere. He recruited a crew of Italian civilians to help. They entered the boxcar to go to work and nothing was ever seen of them again, and very little of the boxcar. Somebody must have bumped a boxcar full of dynamite.
You couldn’t pry a “there I was” war story out of Mom’s friend with a crowbar. He dealt with all those mines and bombs, and it was all in a day’s work. But dynamite scared him. The stuff was mostly an absorbent medium like sawdust mixed with liquid nitroglycerine. If dynamite wasn’t “turned” at regular intervals, the nitroglycerine seeped through the absorbent and pooled at the bottom. All it took then was the slightest touch.
I knew then that I should have been scared, too, that day I fooled around with dynamite with Dad and the other boys. Dynamite is unpredictable and dangerous. But that’s the point. That’s how some boys like to think of themselves. Plus the fact that we loved dynamite for the same reason some boys love unpredictable and dangerous girls. We were too dumb to know better.
— — — —
Picking up from where I sort of meandered off, we knew the hardware guy wouldn’t sell us a case a dynamite, not us boys, so Dad taught us how to make our own explosives. A child’s chemistry set contained all the necessary ingredients. Dad provided the recipe. You could double the ingredients, or even quadruple them. You just sent a list of what you wanted to a chemical supply house and got the goods back in a week. No questions from an NSA, no investigation by the FBI or even the IRS. It was as easy as ordering a pizza.
Dad built rockets that exploded on the pad in more spectacular fashion than the ones NASA was trying to launch down at the cape. While other boys did sissy things like putting Zebra firecrackers under empty soup cans, I made bombs that lifted 20-gallon garbage cans a yard off the ground.
We played with the supply house mercury that came in a tiny bottle that held a pound. We poured it into our hands, the better to sense its weight. We “polished” silver coins with it and then saw the coins turn dull over the next day or so as the silver and mercury formed an amalgam. All Dad ever said about the mercury was: “Better not eat it or heat it or you’ll probably die.”
Our scientific curiosity included anatomy. Kids got a lot of tonsillitis back then and “had their tonsils out.” Some of the doctors put the little meatballs in a bottle of alcohol so the patient could take them to school for show-and-tell.
One boy suffered a perforated appendix and was gravely ill for days. His classmates stood on the porch of the old wooden hospital he was in and waved their arms and waggled their fingers and made faces at him through a window as he lay nearly lifeless a few feet away. We thought it would cheer him up, but it was a waste of time. He didn’t even remember the visit.
He brought his bottled appendix to school later. It looked like a big, fat, ugly cutworm, and it had a hole in it. That’s how I remember it anyway. It was kind of creepy to think I had one of those inside me.
— — — —
We live in a different world today, Ed, and I’ll tell you something. You have no idea what you missed.
Jeff Gibson was born in Livingston and worked at the Billings Gazette as a young man. He retired from the Montana Standard in Butte, where he now lives. Gibson is the author of two novels: “Last Rites of Passage,” which he calls a coming of old-age story, and “Outlaws,” a story of love and money in the New West. Digital versions of both are available on Kindle and other readers, and hard copies through Amazon.
