Wednesday, October 7, 2009

The Montana Ludlow Legacy Tour

Notes from Lynn:

The University of Montana looks as it should: Shady lanes, “Go Griz” sweatshirts, halls of brick, earnest students, “M” whitewashed on the mountainside. As we strolled toward an exhibit of Pulitizer Prize photography, we couldn’t help but reflect on two bright young women who would have walked the same paths 80 years ago. Melda and Cornelia, Cornelia and Melda. They laughed a lot, danced the Charleston, wrote poetry, argued about Scott Fitzgerald, picnicked on the Clark Fork and ignited a friendship that would burn as long as they lived.

They parted after college, rarely to see each other except for all-too-infrequent holiday visits. Cornelia married Hiram Francis and lived the rest of her life on their ranch in the Jocko Valley on the Flathead Reservation lands north of Missoula. She taught English and journalism in Arlee High School and reared Howard, Perry and Emily. Melda married John Ludlow and, after some hard years in the Depression, edited books in Caldwell, Idaho. She moved in World War II to San Francisco. She lived the rest of her life in nearby Mill Valley, at that time something of an artists’ colony, and reared me and my younger brothers, Conrad and Roger.

The two friends were 94 when they died in 2005 within months of each other. In sorting out Melda’s voluminous papers, I found scores of carbon copies of her 70-year correspondence with Cornelia. It chronicles her life in a urban world of writing, music, art and poetry. She had kept stacks of Cornelia’s letters –folksy, literate and acutely amusing. Most describe day-to-day events on the ranch and in her little community. I bundled them up and sent them to the Montana addresses of Emily and Perry (Howard had passed away).
The friendship of the mothers has been reborn for their children, as we discovered when the Guppy left Washington and arrived in the nose of Montana (take a look at a map of the state’s western border with Idaho).

Perry greeted us warmly at his beautiful, well-appointed home in a new upland subdivision south of Missoula. It’s a fast-growing city that has buried its western charm and university identity in chains of fast-food joints, mini-casinos, a billboard on every corner and basic schlock. But Perry’s large windows frame a panorama of the Rocky Mountains and displays of western clouds backlit by the setting sun. Perry’s lovely wife Maria, who comes from Argentina, is responsible for the casual elegance of her home. But she was away. And Perry couldn’t wait to show us the garage. It isn’t tidy. It isn’t elegant. It isn’t up-to-date; in fact, quite the opposite.

Perry, retired from the Bureau of Land Management, showed us a gleaming 1936 Ford sedan, a vision in black and chrome. From the V-8 engine to the mohair upholstery, everything had been restored, renovated and repaired. Then he took us to his next project -- the rusted skeleton and dented bones of a 1953 Triumph, his own sportster convertible in the faraway days of his youth.

Another surprise hit us when we traveled north to Polson to find the home of Cornelia’s gracious daughter, Emily Lennon, who taught the fourth and first grades in Missoula for 37 years, and her husband, Mark, a retired forester for the state. On the southwesterly shore of Flathead Lake, the lakefront house is in my opinion the most wonderful home on the planet. It was a wreck when they bought it in a courthouse auction in 1991, intending the little place as a weekend retreat from their jobs in Missoula. They put as much work and effort into the house as Perry invests in his old cars. Windows open to a view of a lake that is a rival to Tahoe and not half as decorated with neon. Cornelia must have been proud. Melda would have been envious.

Notables:
We paused at St. Ignatius, a onetime Catholic missionary outpost halfway between Missoula and Polson. We needed to drink in the grandeur of the Mission Range (at right), a spectacular spectacle that has somehow been ignored by the travel writers.

Headed at dusk for the Big Hole Battlefield, we ducked into a closed Forest Service campground (May Creek), slept in the van and woke up at dawn to patches of snow. It is a foretaste, we fear, of an early winter that may chill our visits to Boulder, Minnesota, Michigan and points East. Under the quilt we were pretty warm, but the Guppy was an icebox until we turned on the engine and the heater.

Notes from Margo:

We’re in Idaho now, having finished the Montana Ludlow Legacy Tour. We visited the graves of Lynn’s mother, grandfather and a dozen other relatives in a cemetery (at left) with a million-dollar view of the Bitterroot Range. We stopped at the university where Lynn went for two quarters in 1956. We were welcomed by the Francis family, who have known Lynn’s family for three generations now.

Part of my response, as one who grew up mostly in the rural West, is that this is like my stomping grounds in Colorado, only more so. More mountains, more conifer forests, more severe weather, more mining camps, more Indian wars, more trout fishing. But part of my response is to be amazed at Lynn’s roots in this country. His relatives were buried in the Bitterroot starting in the 1870s – the first one to die there was killed at the Battle of Big Hole by Nez Perce Indians – who, of course, had been there thousands of years before then. (More on the battle in our next post.)

I’m a first-generation American on my father’s side, and a second-generation American on my mother’s side. I had no family buried on American soil until 1996. So, I love this territory we’re in, and it feels familiar to me in lots of ways, but I’m conscious right now of how new my family is to this country.

Another subtext for me in the mountains is a continuing consciousness of the trees, as they relate to the lumber I use in my work, and the trees that are the foundation of the dead-tree version of journalism that Lynn and I worked in for so many years. We had the tree plantations of Western Washington, which grow mostly Douglas fir, which is the wood used for most framing, and which I use for most of my indoor projects. And we’re driving through mixed conifer forests now – they’ve been logged for many years for pine, larch, Douglas fir, spruce, the works – lots of woods that I use in my work. I’m just very conscious that this is where all this lumber and pulp comes from, and we should continue to be careful of it.

The canyons we’re traveling through now are all, to varying degrees, showing signs of the pine beetle devastation that’s killing trees all over the West. In some forests, it looks like maybe a quarter of the trees are dead or dying. In others, it’s much less severe, like maybe one in ten trees. But it’s everywhere, and it’ll make the coming fire seasons severe. Mark Lennon, whom we visited with two days ago, worked his entire career in forestry management and fire-fighting. He seemed saddened, and at a loss as to what to do about the pine beetle infestation. The forests are dying, and there is no political will to harvest the beetle-infected wood while it still has some commercial value. The trees die, dry out, and then go up in a conflagration after the next random lightning strike. He summarized the situation: You either manage the forests or they’ll burn. Anyway, it’s something to think about.

Notable:
We read a letter to the editor in the Missoulian newspaper about a fabulous exhibit of Pulitzer Prize photographs at the University of Montana. So, of course, we went. It filled three galleries. It was visually overwhelming, and Lynn actually dropped out at one point. In very stark, large-format black-and-white images, the photos showed one atrocity after another, frozen in time, with the details open to scrutiny. Each one was an important moment, maybe even a summary of some important event of that year. But as a totality, it was gruesome.

There were a few exceptions, like our friend Kim Komenich’s Examiner picture of people who celebrated the fall of Ferdinand Marcos by crowding on a 40-foot statue of the Filipino dictator’s head. Another showed the joy of the women’s Nigerian relay team as they realized they won an Olympic bronze medal in track.

But most of the photos were of starving children, soldiers dying, political assassinations, earthquakes, floods, fires… Pain and suffering, and lots of it. But very beautifully depicted.

Mileage: Missoula to Polson : 70
Polson to Battle of Big Hole: 178
Battle of Big Hole to Salmon, Idaho: 62

Total mileage so far: 2325

Weather this morning: Light snow

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