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The Twenty-Mile Clinic had originally been organized for the old folks in the little satellite town who found it hard to get to the doctors at the proper hospital in McKinley.  But now that Twenty Mile had become simply the name of a bus stop in McKinley, the clinic mostly served young women and their children who wanted to stay close to home or to the day care in the church across the street.  The church had been built by the same people who had organized the clinic, though they had never thought of daycare, since in those days women stayed home to care for the babies.  No one had heard of “well-baby clinics” then — and a sick child had been serious business.  Now the young mothers in the clinic waiting room seemed always on their way to work, watching the clock anxiously, but they had long lists of things to check.

The old lady was one of the last of that first generation, still hanging on in her little house where she had raised three kids.  Partly raised  — since none of them had made it to true adulthood, all of them succumbing to disease and accident in various ways.  Life is dangerous.  It had taken her husband, too, but later, when he had just begun to get old.  She was aware that he had relieved her of a possible burden.  But also that she might have become the burden.  Neither of them would resent such a burden.

Now she herself was truly old.  At night her brain roamed through dark caverns of memory, turning a faint and moving light on various carvings, facades, entrances, and sketched-out ochre paintings of wild beasts.  She didn’t want to stop at any one scene, was content to move along, roaming.  Life is a process.  It goes on and then it ends.

She was a writer.  All day she sat writing.  In the early years she had a manual typewriter, then an electric, and now, of course, a computer, which she loved.  When she finished a book, she tied up the manuscript in red ribbon and added it to the pile on her bookshelf.  If anyone had known she was a writer and asked her “what kind” of books she wrote, she would not have known how to answer.  Her kind of book.  That’s all.  Publishing was a foreign concept.

No one in Twenty Mile had any idea how farflung her web of friends reached, mostly men, often other writers.  Some of them published and famous.  But she didn’t really care about being published: she just loved the sensation of creating story, leaving a trail, like a spider with full spinnarets, making connections until there was a web of meaning, organic, inevitable.

“Mrs. Haverford?  Mrs. Haverford?  Are you all right, dear?”  The staff was used to dealing with women not much more than girls as well as their children, both as they budded inside them and then after they bloomed outside.  They weren’t very sure about old people.  Mrs. Haverford had no opinion about babies.  She was not an admirer of children.  She’d spent her time making messes to put food into them, cleaning up the messes they returned to the outside of them, cleaning up the disorder after them whereever they went, trying to see who they were, what they were trying to become and what she ought to do to help them along.

Now she just accepted whatever was.  The children in the waiting room were not her problem.

“Mrs. Haverford, this way.”  The nurse was young and wearing a ring.  Soon she’d be pregnant if she wasn’t already.  Her scrubs were pink and yellow with little pandas and penguins.  Flattening the folder of notes on the counter with her ringed hand, she said,  “I see we need to do a blood draw.  Is that okay?”  Mrs. Haverford nodded.  But how did she know what was okay?  She just did what they said.  They were irrelevant.  If you balked, that made them suspicious and then they pried.  So she obeyed the card that reminded her to make an appointment though she had a pretty good idea of what was happening in her own body.

The nurse had slender cool nurse hands and stroked her arm with sensitive fingertips, looking for a “good” artery.  Mrs. Haverford had lost a lot of weight and her flesh was loose within her skin.  “My veins roll,” she said.  The nurse nodded, put back the needle she had chosen and found another, so the information must have meant something to her.  The young woman was skillful and soon had the blood.

“You wait right here and the doctor will come in a minute.”  Mrs. Haverford prepared to kick her heels for half an hour.  Her mind went back to a little project she’d been working on: planning her suicide.  Her best correspondent, a old writer who did very well for himself though he was stormy and unaccountable — which might have been part of his charisma and good sales — had booked a Caribbean cruise.  She had found it quite astoundingly out of character for him to choose such a jolly trip.  And personally she thought it was a great waste of money to go with fat prosperous shuffleboard players into a deliberately predatory sequence of ports, accumulating trinkets to drag home.

Later, when the author was mysteriously and simply not on board anymore, even though the ship was between ports on the open sea, she understood what had happened.  But she couldn’t afford such a romantic end, swimming away from a ship in a warm, moonlit sea.

Then she had read an article about Mexican veterinary clinics where a person could buy the kind of drugs they use to put dogs to sleep.  To sleep.  A euphemism, of course, but why not?  Why feel bad about it?  She had even used the computer to order the right amount.  Forget all the stuff about sleeping pills and plastic bags over one’s head.  She knew how to inject the drug.  She had once worked for a veterinarian, used the same kind of flexi-strip to raise a vein that the nurse had just used on her.  She had made the injection and watched the dog simply slump down limp.  The light is on, the light is off.  Not so much effort as swimming.

The doctor, another young woman, came into the room.  “We’ll see what your test results say, Mrs. Haverford, but in the meantime I’ll just write you a new prescription and we’ll see how it goes.”

How it goes. How it goes. Maybe when she got home the package from Mexico would have arrived. Would there be a full moon tonight?

When she had gone the young nurse turned to the doctor. “I just love Mrs. Haverford. She’s no trouble at all.” Then, “I took some really cute photos of my kitten last night. Want to see them?” She took a flip phone with a screen out of her scrubs pocket.

The doctor looked and admired, but she was thinking, “There was something funny about Mrs. Haverford.” Maybe the blood tests would have the answer. Then it was time for the next baby. There’s always a next baby.

by Mary Scriver

They call me the “Dump Ground Lady” but not to my face.  Actually, I’m the second one.  And actually it’s not even the dumpground I monitor, just a “roll-off” where there’s a ramp where people can drive up level with the tops of huge containers that fit on the back of a semi-truck.  The truck drives them off to the landfill, which is not really where you can see it, even though a lot of trees have been planted there to make it nice.  It’s miles from town and serves the whole county.

My job is to stay at the roll-off site all day and record what people dump.  In this day and age we’ve finally realized that you can’t just throw stuff away in a huge toxic heap that catches on fire.  It has to be processed, recycled as much as possible, and then buried in a huge pit without burning.  This job won’t last much longer.  Twenty-Mile, the little town that was here so long, is being engulfed by suburbs of McKinley, if it’s not too pretentious to call them suburbs.  Housing, anyway.  The people who live in those houses will not want to take their garbage to a roll-off: they will contract for regular pickup from a company and will feel abused that they have to sort their trash and walk it out to the alley.

On a good day the roll-off site is pretty nice except for the smell.  It’s not that the garbage smells, but the town sewage lagoon is not far away.  And a rancher on the edge of town runs a little feedlot operation where he fattens steers.  They eat in a pen and then when green-up comes they roam in a field until they’re ready for slaughter.  In summer that field grows alfalfa, which does pretty well because of the steer manure.  Seagulls and canada geese love picking around in that field and even in the pen.

The hauling containers have a big fence built around and over them, like the backstop on a baseball field.  When the wind blows hard, the wire sings an eerie chord that has no words.  We’re a three-container roll-off — used to be only two at first.  I can never figure out why there the trash keeps increasing when the town is always shrinking.  Part of my job is to manage the big wire covers attached to them and the gates that bar access so that people will fill one container before using the next.  I pick up what they spill and get them to put their cans in a barrel and their cardboard in a big wire cage the high school shop class made.  We need some way to collect grass clippings, which we have a lot of in summer because this is a lawn-proud town like most droughty little places with a lot of Scandinavians.  The tricky part about saving grass clippings is that some people like them for compost.  Others, of course, worry about what toxic weed-killers their neighbors have been using.

I don’t have to stay in the open all day, thank goodness.  I have a little shed with an electric heater and a table, even a window so I can watch for arrivals and get my gloves on soon enough to be out there to meet them.  Last year they even provided me with a biffy, but it’s not heated so no lingering.  I have a radio but the real advantage of this job is that I can write.  Actually, I get quite a bit done in the quiet times.

At home writing is a little problematic because I live with my mother, who’s a little bit demented and wants to see everything I write, and my sister, who thinks I never do my share of the housework.  Isn’t it enough that I bring in a paycheck?  It’s not a big one.  Before they turned to hiring women the commissioners tended to hire alcoholic old men too frail to herd sheep, but the fatal flow with that type, of course, is that they drink.  Out here it’s easy to sneak a bottle.

The woman before me started a lot of fights.  She was a college-educated divorcee from back east and thought she was actually supposed to enforce the rules.  Another dummy with a degree.  In every situation there are two sets of rules: the one that’s official and written down somewhere and the other one that people expect and enforce with their behavior.  She only lasted a few months before she took off.  One of the guys brought out a big load of stuff from a house he was gutting and she tried to charge him $5 for dumping the water heater.  That’s the rule, but this guy was the mayor’s cousin.

Sometimes there’s a lot of traffic and some days hardly anyone shows up.  There’s a kind of pattern to the days, depending on what people are doing and what the weather is like.  In spring women come out in cars, getting rid of their spring cleaning debris.  On weekends it’s the men bringing brush they’ve cut.  The Hutterite colony has a big truck they store garbage in, all sacked up, and they keep a sort of schedule, three old guys and one young one crammed into the cab.  The young one is to actually do the work while the old guys tell him stuff.  I don’t know what, because they speak German.

This town is next to a lake where they stock fish, but there’s a fish-cleaning station the Wall-Eye Club provided, so we don’t get that stuff, thank goodness.  On days the meat processor in town has been butchering, the containers look like the scene of a crime.  The seagulls hang around hoping to grab fat scraps.  Nowadays all the fat gets trimmed off carcasses.  I keep thinking maybe it ought to be rendered and recycled, but there’s not enough of it from one small operation.  It’s not efficient in that way.  But it’s good to buy local meat from a guy you know.

I’m writing a story about the guys who come out here more for something to do than because they have much to dump.  Some of them are on disability; most are retired.  There’s not much going on now that the bars have mostly closed.  Their doctors don’t want them to drink, but the bars had pool tables.  They like to pretend they pick up women, but I don’t know who those women would be.  Dina was the barkeep — picking her up would be ridiculous and anyway they were already around her all day.

The secret to these guys is that they don’t want girl friends or even wives.  I always wonder where their wives went — some got cancer and some just left, I think — but there isn’t a lot of girl friend material around here once you get past high school age.  This is no town for a lady.  It’s mannerly enough, but no education, no money, no scope for improvement.  As my dad used to say, “them as have get up and go, got up and went.”  What these guys really want is a mother: someone to cook and wash and clean.  Only the ex-military seem able to keep house by themselves.

We have our little dramas.  Once I watched two brothers meet on the spur road out here.  They stopped with their windows even and probably talked for a half hour.  Their wives hate each other and they never got a chance to see each other any other way.  Everyone had to drive out into the alfalfa field to get around them, but we all understood and we didn’t mind.  Once there was a fistfight, which was a problem because the commissioners won’t put in a phone line and that’s before I sold a story for enough to buy a cell phone.  Once there was shooting, but it was only the town maintenance guy picking off the muskrat that kept digging holes in the dike around the lagoon.

What I wait for is the rich rancher’s widow who brings out her little weekly bag of trash in her big old white Caddie. She’s old but very elegant and drives about five miles an hour. Her three little poodles bounce around in the car like yapping popcorn while she gracefully gets out, takes that bag out of her trunk, tosses it, and waves before she leaves. She always comes on Saturday. When her door is open, I can hear over the yammer of the dogs that she, same as me, is listening to the opera. Not too far away a meadowlark sings its aria. It’s not the same as a fat lady singing, but something is ending.

by Allan Tooley

I went down to Prehistoric Park the other day to take some photos. I wish the light were better, but that’s springtime in Montana.

Prehistoric Park was founded in 1994 by George Mayte. He was hoping, I suppose, to cash in on Jurassic Park fever, since that movie had debuted in the summer of 1993. Fossil hunting and other dinosaur-related industries saw an uptick after the movie came out, so I imagine it seemed like a good idea at the time. Like a lot of folks who’ve come to McKinley over the past 100+ years, he had high hopes and low funding. The park never took off like he wanted, and phases 2 and 3, which included amusement-park-type attractions, stayed looking good on paper. Mayte sold out to a couple of local developers in 2000, and they haven’t done much except keep what’s there in good shape. That’s fine by me; we ended up with a nice place to walk around on a spring day, with fairly impressive paleo-statuary. Here are some photos:

by Mary Scriver

This boy’s name was Cedric Meerkat and he was a Blackfeet boy.  Now you KNOW I’ve given him a made-up name because there are no meerkats in Blackfeet country.  Not unless somebody imported one.  But Cedric did sort of look like a meerkat, always sticking his head up and looking to see what was going on and whether anyone was watching him.  He needed to know because he wasn’t always doing what he was supposed to.  He was a skinny little guy with more curiosity than anything else.

Outside of his rubber-necking, he was a lot like Napi, who is the trickster figure of the Plains tribes.  Napi could just about do anything and he did — usually the wrong thing — and so part of him is also considered a kind of creator.  A lot of creation seems like a mistake at first.  And Napi was always trying to create babies — or at least you-know-what leads to babies.  But mostly he just made trouble.  Cedric didn’t so much MAKE trouble as he just got into trouble.

So Cedric was in my English class and he was always writing, but it was never the assignment.  And his writing was pretty weird.  In those days we didn’t know anything much about dyslexia.  Nowadays I would say that his brain development was simply atypical.  Instead of writing words, he “wrote” pictures.  All day long he drew, but he didn’t draw horses like the other kids.  He drew snakes.

They were terrific snakes, not just generic reptiles, but “real” snakes that he knew about from books, since there aren’t many snakes on the high and dry prairie.  Some people around here become rattlesnake hunters, looking for them in order to kill them, and even dynamiting snake dens in early spring before they untangle themselves from their hibernation balls and come out to lie on the jumble of stones to warm up.  Cedric treated snakes as a design problem.  But then he began to understand what a “symbol” was and I became important as a source of information.  He could see what a snake looked like, but he was a terrible reader, dyslexic, so he’d just ask me.

“What’s this?” he asked.  It was a picture of a bracelet that was a snake swallowing its tail.  Ouroboros.  I explained about the ancient history of the snake that was “creating itself” and how it meant renewal and sometimes rebirth.  I tried to explain how decay in existence — the eating — then became something new — the snake.  I talked a little about how a snake sheds its old skin, emerging bright and new, and about how multi-cultural and how deep in history the figure was: Norse, Hindu, Greek, and Egyptian.  Big concepts for a junior high kid, but Cedric seemed to understand.

His “back story” was tragic, like many reservation stories.  When he and his sister were small, the family had been in a car crash that killed the parents and badly injured the children.  Both of them received life-saving transfusions but that was long enough ago that there was no reliable way to separate blood donations carrying HIV virus from those that were not.  The chance gesture of the nurse hooking up blood from one donation to the sister and another to Cedric determined their futures.  It was the sister who received the virus-infected blood.  She died rather quickly over the next few years, her eyes becoming bigger and bigger until they swallowed her up.  Cedric sat with her in that time and drew her face, growing up and dying at the same time.  Ouroboros he knew from recognition, experience.

One day we read Rikki-Tiki-Tavi and he was worried until I found a biology book that showed both a mongoose and a meerkat and assured him that he was not a mongoose.  But I jokingly warned him to watch out for mongooses.  Or is that “mongeese?”  English is not logical.

Then one day he came to me to ask what a phallic symbol was.  While I explained, I saw that his face was changing.  The hormones of adolescence were thickening his bones, sharpening his nose, deepening his voice.  He would not grow a beard — he was American Indian — but there would be night changes.  His dreams would change.

I blushed as I explained, but he didn’t.  His lack of embarrassment was not because he had no sense of propriety, no understanding that some things were private, but out of an impatience with false modesty.  What was something like sexual maturity in the face of death, especially the deaths of loved ones?  And yet over the next months, he didn’t gravitate to girls.  I began to realize that he was probably gay.

What future was there for a dyslexic, gay, American Indian young man with no immediate family?  But he did have a larger family of cousins, uncles, grannies, aunties, and so on.  They didn’t reject him or classify him.  Just accepted that Cedric was Cedric.

Then one day he disappeared and I didn’t think I’d ever see him again.  I wondered if he would seek out HIV on purpose, to follow his sister, or whether he would take precautions so as to survive.  Or maybe he would reject sex, pull into himself, avoid relationship.  None seemed like very good options.  I hoped he’d develop his art.

Years later I was driving from Montana over to Seattle to visit my sister.  I was tired from the end of school and had already had way too much coffee, so maybe that’s why I stopped at that Snake Pit on the Idaho border that I usually passed up.  It was touristy and sensational.  I’d been told that some people stopped there just to see the snakes eat, because they ate small live mammals.  That snuff film mentality seems to be everywhere.

“Are the snakes being fed now?” I asked when I bought my ticket.

“Naw, you’ve missed it.  They don’t eat very often,” said the bored young woman.

The exhibit space was a sort of barn with a lot of glass cases around the edge, sort of like an aquarium.  In the middle was an open pit, sure enough, and in it was a huge boa constrictor or python — I can’t tell those big squeezing snakes apart.  It made me think of Cedric.  I looked across the pit and there he was.

For a minute I thought I’d imagined him.  I wasn’t even that sure he was Cedric.  He was with a few other fellows, dressed in metal-studded leather motorcycle outfits except that Cedric’s wasn’t black: it was dark purple and the sleeves were missing.  His arms were covered with tattoos of snakes, coiling around and around his arms and each other.  His hair was bright blue and stuck up in a spiky crest, more like a tropical bird than a snake.  He had a pierced nose, lips, eyebrow, and ears — and he was wearing black lipstick.

I remembered that I’d seen a short row of motorcycles outside, each of them airbrushed with amazing designs, many dragons with iridescent scales or fiery birds: maybe phoenixes. The young men seemed happy but other-wordly. They laughed and pointed out the lump where the big snake’s last meal was digesting inside it.

I wasn’t sure it was really Cedric until I saw that he’d recognized me. The other men turned away to leave, but Cedric lingered just a moment. He didn’t come over — just raised a hand in salute and I saw he was wearing a silver bracelet shaped like an ouroboros. He grinned, a strange effect in a face with black lipstick, and then he left. I heard the motorcycles kickstarting outside.

The rest of the drive across eastern Washington went quickly, as it always does if you have a lot to think about.

From the PREHISTORIC AND HISTORIC OVERVIEW: McKINLEY NATIONAL FOREST. By Lance M. Foster, for the McKinley National Forest, USDA, 2009.

THE MEDICINE RIVER RANGER STATION: 1896-Today

1896-1904: Swanson Family Cabin

Medicine River Ranger Station (now usually known locally as the Medicine Station Cabin) was originally built by Joseph (Old Joe) Swanson about 1896 as a home for himself, his wife, Elizabeth and daughter, Edna. Swanson was born in 1874, a son of James Swanson who came into the McKinley area from Helena, as part of the Dog Gulch Rush of 1869 and settled here. Joe Swanson did a little placer mining in Little Medicine Creek and ran a few head of cattle, but the country was so remote and harsh that it was too hard on his family, and hungry Blackfeet Indians from the reservation nearby sometimes ran off with a cow or two. A young son named Robert was born there in 1896, but he died under a year old of a fever. A year later, another baby was born, another boy, Joseph Jr. He lived to the age of three, when he became ill as well and died in 1900. Both Swanson boys are buried close to the cabin, where their grieving mother would often visit them. In 1901, the Swansons moved to McKinley, where Elizabeth Swanson ran a boarding house. Elizabeth died in 1926, after giving birth to three more children, all of whom survived and lived in the McKinley area. Swanson never remarried. Old Joe served as a handy man and worked seasonal jobs including ranch work at the Sorenson Ranch, along with a little mining until his death in McKinley in 1957 at the age of 83.

1905-1954: Medicine River Station, McKinley National Forest

In 1905, the Medicine River Forest Reserve was formed and between this date and the forming of the McKinley National Forest in 1908, the Swanson Cabin was taken over by the U.S. Forest Service for administrative use and renamed the Medicine River Station. The cabin is the oldest administrative log structure on the McKinley National Forest and, in fact, predates the establishment of the Forest. Medicine River Station was used by the Forest Service on a regular basis until 1954.

1954-1992: Local Use, Greenway Livestock Association and local hunters and snowmobilers

Although still owned by the Forest Service, riders from the Greenway Livestock Association and local hunters and snowmobilers used the Medicine River Station over the years from 1955 up until 1992. A photograph from 1973 shows the cabin as it existed after decommissioning and during local use. An agreement between the U.S. Forest Service and the Greenway Livestock Association provided for its use and maintenance. During this time, the cabin became known as the Medicine Station Cabin by locals, although its legal name was still Medicine River Station.

1992-Present

The Medicine River Station Cabin is the oldest administrative log structure on the McKinley National Forest. Because of its historical value relating to the early history of the National Forest and its integrity, Eagle Cabin has been determined eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. From 1992-1996, the Forest Service, with the help of volunteers and donated materials, restored the cabin. Primitive building skills and materials were used to restore the cabin’s original features.

There is a $25 a night usage fee with a two-night minimum stay on holiday weekends. The cabin will accommodate up to six people with three bunk beds. The last four miles up to the cabin is not open to motorized vehicles. The site consists of the cabin, a woodshed, toilet, barn, horse corrals, a fire ring, and is surrounded by a jackleg pole fence.  An artesian well accessed by hand pump provides potable water, but there is no electricity. The cabin is heated with a wood stove. A propane camp stove is provided for cooking. Also available are dishes, silverware, cooking utensils, pots and pans, firewood, axe, shovel, outhouse and cleaning supplies.

by Sam DeBree

Editor’s note: this song was sent to us by Sam DeBree with the following story.

In 2002, I was involved in the production of the film “Northfork” outside of McKinley, and during a long weekend I decided to go home to Butte. Early in the morning after a night shoot I jumped into my not-so-trusty car, The Blue Cloud, and headed south. The car broke down just outside of town. After a short walk to Dino’s where I enjoyed a wonderful breakfast, I sat outside Merv’s Garage to wait for them to open and wrote this song. Thought you might enjoy it.