Reading Notes

"The Cook and a Hole in the Sky"

Norman Maclean

"Being acquitted of killing a sheepherder in Montana isn't the same as being innocent."

"Life every now and then becomes literature - not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually come to mean by life are those moments when life, instead of going sideways, backwards, forward, or nowhere at all, lines out straight, tense and inevitable, with a complication, climax, and, given some luck, a purgation, as if life had been made and not happened."

"The men who had been brought in from Butte or Spokane [bindle stiffs - homeless laborers] were dead tired and barefoot long before they reached the fire. At the hiring hall in Butte and Spokane each had to have a good pair of boots and a jacket to be employed, so they took turns in the alley changing the one good pair they had."

"Every time we got the fire under control, something strange would happen - the fire would jump our fire trench, usually at some fairly ordinary place, so we became sure that IWWs [Industrial Workers of the World a.k.a. 'I Won't Work', the bums they hired off the streets] were rolling burning logs over the trench and starting the fire off again. If they were, it was probably just to keep their jobs going."

"A crew from the Engineers that had camped at the ranger station for a few days. They were mapping the back country where, they said, "the government hadn't figured out yet what they had stolen from the Indians.""

"They had the practical woodsman's distrust of Forest Service maps. They were convinced that a lot of the back country was mapped in those early days by guys who sat in tents or int he Regional Office in Missoula int he winter and said, "No, it goes here." ...

So our bunch immediately got in an argument with the mapping crew. We pretended to ourselves that we were in the Regional Office in Missoula. "Hell," we would say, "that creek doesn't go there. It goes here." Sometimes we were only trying to confuse them and sometimes we meant it."

So THAT'S why the names out west are so creative and awesome!

"The mapping crew was mored troubled about the name of a creek than where it went. They had been over on the north fork of the Clearwater and of course had run into Wet Ass Creek.... They were divided as to whether they should put down its real name on the map they were going to submit to the drafting room of the regional office. ...

We sided loudly with those who were for its right name and argued that too much of the West had been named after some guy's home town in Minnesota or Massachusetts or even after the guy himself."

Is the story true? I did find this "Weitas Creek" near Clearwater:

"We looked forward to its becoming a National Park - Wet Ass National Park, where all the pilgrims from Brooklyn can stop their cars in the middle of the road to let their children feed the grizzlies and vice versa."

And vice versa! LOL.

There's a kid at the library making loud annoying sounds while I read. Here's my rant:

i can't stand people who laugh with punchable faces and noisy untidy saliva.

haughty scoffing laughs that teenage boys, infirm in experience, use in the way of saying a pretentious, unfounded 'indeed.'

the ones that don't make you want to join in, not sincere laughter that is contagious with merriment, but self-aggrandizing ones that make you want to slap the shit out of a boy who clumsies around overstepping his place.

laughter like he could be a king - because it suits his ego.