Over the Edge »- November 30

a&e

11

In Search of Grea

Terry finally got away on a trip out of Palliser Springs during the

August long weekend. He knew if he didn't, he was likely to be
called in on a weekend-long assignment and the time off would be
gone.

He headed west to Taber and then drove south across the Chin Lakes
reservoir. Suddenly Chief Mountain appeared above the rolling prai-
rie like a great monument. Terry later learned it was 2,768 metres in
altitude, and its high, tower-like rock structure rose 561 metres above
the mountain's base. The Blackfoot tribe had also called it “Great Chief
Mountain”. Terry wondered what brave deeds the chief of long ago
had accomplished in order to have such a majestic mountain named
after him, or if he was a figure of mythology like a Greek god.

He crossed the border into Montana at the Coutts-Sweetgrass cus-
toms station. To his left were the imposing Sweet Grass Hills. The high-
est of the three main “hills” and the one closest to Interstate 15 heading
south was West Butte, which was more than 2,000 metres in altitude.
In any province or state to the east, it would have been a mountain, but
in west-central Montana, it was considered just a hill. He heard that
Native Americans believed its summit was sacred, visited by the souls
of warriors and sages.

From Shelby he headed west on the narrow Highway 2. On the radio
he was sometimes able to tune in Men at Work's popular song about
men from Down Under, but most stations in the region were country
and Western. He frequently heard Ronnie Milsap's “There Ain't No
Gettin' Over Me” and grew to like the song. The genre of Outlaw Coun-
try was still popular, with booming bass, drums and guitars invoking
the vastness of Texas, but it also seemed to fit the plains of Montana
and, incidentally, the southern Alberta prairie around the Aspen Hills,
where many Texas cattlemen had settled in the late nineteenth century.

Just before Cut Bank he turned off the road to visit an historical
marker. He found a marble obelisk from the 1920s dedicated to the
greatness of Lewis and Clark, their discoveries on their trek west dur-
ing the first decade of the nineteenth century, and the pioneers who
followed. However, there was evidence the spray-paint crowd had
visited the site and covered it with dark slogans and obscenities. The
neo-classicism of the marble and of the inset images of heroic figures
of exploration and early settlement was evidently no longer in favour.

As Terry drove farther west toward the village of Browning and
eventually the American Glacier National Park, more and more small
white crosses marked the difficult curves in the two-lane federal high-
way likely built in the 1930s and not widened since. Each cross indi-
cated a fatality along the route.

In the national park Terry camped near Two Medicine Lake and
then drove over Logan Pass the next day. The magnificent mountains
reminded him of the early skyscrapers of New York, Chicago and Van-
couver, many built in the 1920s just before the Art Deco period.

Two years later Terry took a trip during a long weekend in early
spring to north-central Montana. “The Ballad of Pancho and Lefty” by
Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard was on regional country and Western
radio. Terry wondered if the power of such examples of Outlaw Coun-
try came from elements recalling, just below active consciousness, the
themes and background music of Western movies he saw when he was
eight or nine. Such background music accompanied scenes in which
a lone cowboy rode out of a small town into a nearly trackless desert
to the next town sixty to 100 miles away, or those in which the cavalry
rode deeper and deeper into a narrow canyon.

Driving south from Shelby on Interstate 15, Terry saw a combine
parked at the top of a hill and a sign on it reading “FARMERS' STRIKE.”

I: the first year of employment as a reporter for a daily newspaper,

In Great Falls Terry visited the museum of the late-nineteenth-century
cowboy artist, Charles M. Russell, who was successful in evoking the
subtle beauty of the northern prairie. His paintings also conveyed the
nobility of the northern plains Native American tribes at the time of
contact when they still had some freedom to roam. Here is a great artist
of this region, he thought to himself.

He wrote a friend after this trip about the visit to the museum and
how he liked Russell's works. His friend wrote back that Russell, while
favourable to Native American culture, was anti-Semitic. This infor-
mation dashed any thoughts of Russell's greatness.

Two years later Terry was sitting in the lounge of Boston Pizza in
Palliser Springs. He listened to the popular music from the overhead
speakers, and a hit at the time was Tina Turner's “We Don't Need An-
other Hero!” Across the street he saw an employee of the principal de-
veloper in town running a tractor with a seed drill across an empty lot
between a service station and a steak restaurant. The developer owned
the lot, and, through investigation later in the week, Terry learned the
employee had been seeding the lot to wheat. The developer owned
a number of similar empty lots at strategic locations in the city. He
wanted an agricultural exemption for these properties so that he could
pay the lowest possible taxes for as long as possible until the economy
turned up and he could quickly develop them to their highest commer-
cial potential with little prior cost and with minimal contribution to
the city's coffers. Terry considered that the developers described in the
mainstream press as great “men of vision” were likely anything but.

A couple of weekends later he took trip during a long weekend to
Helena. The biggest song on Montana country and Western radio was
“The Highway Man,” sung by Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Waylon
Jennings and Kris Kristofferson. It called to mind men greater than life
working on dam projects in the distant past, some falling and losing
their lives. Outlaw Country was still in fashion in central Montana.

Helena, a small state capital, had an area of about four square blocks
downtown where three-storey, late-nineteenth-century granite build-
ings created the atmosphere of the core districts of much larger urban
centres.

A postal strike was threatened at the time. On the way back home
Terry stopped at a bar in Shelby to write a couple of letters to American
friends before driving back across the border. He sat down at a table
and had a gin and tonic. Around 4:00 a new bartender came on shift.
Terry waited for a while, and for a number of minutes afterwards there
was no move by any staff member to offer service. He walked up to the
bar and ordered an Irish Coffee.

“You want ice cream in your coffee, sport?” the bartender said
loudly and contemptuously.

“Nonsense,” Terry responded, picked up his envelopes, writing
paper and newspaper and left angrily. The bartender, evidently be-
lieving Terry was not destined to greatness in journalism or any other
field, laughed over his little victory over a patron he had decided he
didn't want in his establishment.

At the Shelby post office Terry mailed the letters he had been able
to finish before the incident with the bartender, and then he headed
north on Interstate 15 toward the Canadian customs station at Coutts.
He admired the beauty of the Sweetgrass Hills just the east on his right
and the imposing West Butte with its scree slopes at lower elevations
and, above the tree line, large, impressive rocks. He wondered if the
shamans and warriors whose souls were believed by Natives to visit
its summit had in fact been great men and heroes, perhaps more ad-
mirable than any men currently considered great or visionary in the
Northern Plains and the Southern Alberta prairies.

TnNess

by Paul Strickland