One Big Holiday

- Dan, come play with us.
- No, sorry, I’m tired.
- You’re not tired.
- Yes, actually I am tired, I don’t really want to play right now.
- That’s stupid.
- Okay. I’ll see you later.
- (yelling down the hall after I leave) We’ll let you win!
- I don’t want to win… I don’t even want to play.
- Whatever, pussy! You know you want to, loser!
End of conversation. Final thoughts: I don’t want to play Super Smash Bros. anymore, and insulting me probably won’t make me suddenly change my mind. But hey, I’m no psych major.

Doug, 16, my youngest cousin, is the eloquent one, obviously. Zach, 19, second oldest, is most like me, if a little whiny, but you’d be pissed off too if everyone gave you shit for being able to read all the time. Nick is a year older than me, and the oldest (eldest?) of three brothers. He’s basically a huge prick, but he’s great with fireworks and electronic stuff. I think he set the example for Doug growing up - why be quiet and bookish if Nick is going to make fun of you? Why not be a loud and obnoxious shit like the oldest? My Uncle Jim is a nice guy, and my Aunt Joanne is one of the greatest people on this planet. (None of these people are actually related to me in any way, but it doesn’t really matter.) If you have to be trapped on a desert island, put her on your list of people to bring with you. Her stories are innumerable, and all of them hilarious beyond belief. From stories about when her and my mother were in nursing training in high school, to tales about her mother’s eye doctor appointments, offering me Hot Sex the day we arrive for 1 (maybe 2 funerals), and all the crazy things that happen to her children… It’s great therapy for when your grandmother and your grandmother’s sister die within 4 days of each other and your mother is having some Tough Times.

Pet raccoons, alligators, monkeys… My Aunt Joanne traded a sandwich for a baby alligator in elementary school one day. They kept it in the bathtub of their RV, and it lived there for seven years.

Did you know raccoons don’t have salivary glands? So it took the pet food from the food bowl, made little meatballs, dipped them in the water bowl, and set them down in a little row, while all the cats sat there and watched.

Finally, the monkey hated bananas, but it could use and flush the toilet (supposedly it learned from the cats).

I guess I’ve been here 5 days or something, or maybe it will be 5 days total by the time I leave. I have no idea, it’s been a busy… 6 weeks for me, ever since Thanksgiving started. Thanksgiving shit, last week of school shit, final projects shit, snowstorm shit, last minute christmas shit, last minute flying down to Maryland shit, sitting in the waiting room of the Intensive Care Unit for 4 hours plus every day shit, eating shitty diner food while sitting on those big poofy old fashioned red leather cushions with buttons, dealing with cousins’ shit, etc.

Zach’s friend - Do anything fun today?
Me - …We just got back from pulling the feeding tube and respirator out of my grandmother.
Zach’s friend - Oh.

I’m not crazy, it’s just been a stressful week.

My grandmother had surgery to clear an artery last Monday, but the reduced blockage led to increased bloodflow, which dislodged a blood clot, which traveled to her brain and caused a stroke (her 3rd in 5 years). She never recovered after that, despite being able to open her eyes and stare blankly around in circles. Anyway, I know I sound cold and stuff, or at least more cold than usual, but like I’ve been telling people, we sort of decided that she was dead when we decided to buy the plane tickets down here. You know? We knew she was never going to recover, despite my uncle’s protestations that she had woken up when he was there, squeezing his hand and smiling when he asked her to make him potato salad. (No wonder she was unresponsive to the rest of us, we never asked her to come back home and cook and clean for us.)

The tough parts are when we’re driving home at night and my mom thinks about her mother, and Charles, and she says things in Charles’ voice to my grandmother, like, “Hey mom, remember that time you bailed me out in North Carolina? Hey, remember that time you bailed me out in New York, and in Florida? Remember how disappointed you were when I dropped out of high school, one credit short of graduating? Remember how I crashed Dad’s car four times? Yeah, those were the good times…” I look out the window and try to find some constellations.

On a happier note, we kind of got a two-fer in down here, because my grandmother’s sister also just recently died - Aunt Marsha (or Marcy, I’m not sure, and I never really met her). Should I call her my Great Aunt? Everyone is simply an aunt or a cousin down here, ever since Uncle Ted found out at the age of 45 that he was really my grandmother’s uncle, not her brother. I still haven’t figured out what that means. Is he Cousin Ted now? Probably not. Anyway, it was sort of nice to see everyone on that side of the family, since they live so far away, and we visited them so rarely when we were growing up - I think my mom wanted to shield us from all the criminals and mentally ill family members (diagnosed or not).

It’s nice to go down to Maryland, but it’s always nice to be back.

Stanley - Well, at least you got to see a lot of your relatives, right?
Me - Uhh, well, two less than last time…

I’m in Montana for six weeks studying geology, living at a field station south of Helena and west of Bozeman. Technically it’s in Cardwell, but I don’t really know where that is.

Right now I’m in the town of Ennis in a café/bookstore/antiques/saddle shop, and I think the table I’m sitting at and the six chairs around me are for sale, but it’s the only place to sit. Aside from this set, all they have for sale are dozens of dressers, bureaus, vanities, and dry sinks. Maybe they already sold all the useful furniture. Every dresser/dry sink seems to have a theme for the knick-knacks decorating it, I think my favorite is the “ceramic frogs with crowns” cabinet. It’s covered with frogs wearing crowns, on top and on all the shelves inside. If you are ever in southwestern Montana and in need of flameless candles, this would also be the place to go.

Montana in general isn’t what I expected, but I don’t think anyone expects to find themselves living in a giant aluminum can from 1940. It’s more like half of an aluminum can tipped over on its side, but it’s big enough for 100 or more people to eat and study, and it’s easily four times bigger inside than it is outside. It’s a pretty impressive sight.

Everything is really big here, actually, especially the sky. There are no clouds, and basically no trees either, except along the rivers, so nothing obstructs your view of anything. There’s either a lot to see, or nothing, depending how you think about it, but either way it’s huge.

(Some stuffed animal in the back, probably a moose, just started singing “My Favorite Things” from the Sound of Music. It’s hard to capture the charm of this place.)

Back to the giant aluminum can. It’s incredibly cozy inside, there’s lots of pictures on the walls, a rickety piano in the back, a huge tiled fireplace/fire pit in the middle with a giant hanging square chimney maybe 10 – 20 feet long on a side hanging above it, surrounded by chairs and desks and tables along the walls. There’s some pretty dry geology reading, but we have a few dozen books too, ranging from the Chronicles of Narnia to “Sherlock Holmes in Dallas” to John McPhee’s “Encounters with the Archdruid,” and even a pretty juicy looking romance novel called “Serpentine.” I’ll try to type up the back cover when I get a chance, it’s worth a read.

(Some other animal just started singing that “when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie” song.)

There are (or were) 75 students in this course, and about 50 of us drove here from Indiana in 20 gigantic SUVs, each using about $80 of gas per day. I tried to do the math for our five day trip, but didn’t make it all the way. I think we averaged 15 mpg. But as wasteful as that seems, it’s amazing to see 20 dark colored SUVs shooting down the highway in a line, each with a giant CB antenna stuck to the roof.

There is no phone service at the field station and internet is dial up speed, limited to 30 minutes per person per day between the hours of 8 pm and 5 am. At first all of these rules seemed frustrating, but now it’s nice not being able to/not having to stay in contact with anyone.

While we were driving through Yellowstone the next-to-last day of the caravan trip from Indiana to Montana, the car I was in was hit/t-boned by an oncoming car while we were driving over a bridge. I think they swerved to avoid the bridge’s stone barrier because the road became narrower, and they swerved a little too far. The driver of my vehicle was pinned in her seat for three hours and ended up breaking her leg, the guy sitting next to me broke two ribs and ruptured his spleen. Myself and the other two passengers were fine, but when everything stopped moving and I saw steam or smoke coming from the front of the car. I didn’t want to risk being stuck in a burning vehicle and decided to jump out and get away. Then I blacked out and hit my head on the pavement, so we all got driven to the hospital in a van while the rest of the caravan, after a four hour hold up, continued on through Yellowstone to sleep at the cabins near Old Faithful.

It wasn’t all bad though, because this happened the evening of the Fourth of July, and as we were driving to the hospital in Jackson, Wyoming (Jackson Hole), we could see the fireworks going off over the town from miles away.

But we’re all back together and the first week is over now. In case you are interested what someone does at Geology camp, we spend from about 8 am to 4 pm in the field every day, hiking up and down slopes/mountains, looking at and learning the rock stratigraphy and the general structural features of the area, and later apply this knowledge to a new area. Basically we are learning how to wander into the woods and figure out what is going on, geologically… I’m sure it will be a useful experience.

The lodging is sort of uncomfortable here, but not awful by any means, and at nights it gets pretty cold. This is nice though because I wake up more often, and remember more of my dreams, and usually they’re pretty bizarre. Last night, for instance, I dreamed that a friend and I made glow in the dark brownies, or they might have been regular brownies with glow in the dark chocolate chips in them. Pretty cool right?

Sunday is our only day off, and today is my first Sunday off. We’ve been working a lot and I haven’t had much of a chance to just sit and relax, so for most of the morning I just read. I didn’t have the energy for a real book, so I browsed the magazine selection. Unfortunately, all they have are old computer and travel magazines from the year 2000. The Conde Nast Traveler magazines were pretty good, but PC World (“Sony’s New Playstation 2: Better than a PC?” “Wireless Internet: The New Craze!”) wasn’t all that interesting. I didn’t make it to the Sunset: Living in the West magazines yet, but they look promising.

It’s an eclectic bunch of students here. Two days ago Mikhail taught me how to write “how are you,” “asshole,” and “syncline” in Russian in the dust on the side of the SUVs.

Other big things in Montana: white trucks, country music, and huckleberries. The bacon here is incredible. Everything is sort of slow and gritty, but it’s a nice feeling.