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It's been so long since I was meant to write this final chapter that I have nearly forgotten what happened. This is the moment when war is starting. Furthermore, the employment situation has taken turns which are interesting, even if they don't make a difference.
My train from Seattle drew up in Whitefish at six in the morning. Becka was there, rushing around to hire the car, get me breakfast, and move us out. She had been mountain biking for a couple of days and was now full of energy.
The historical exhibit in the train station said that Whitefish used to be called Stumptown (for reasons that its main street was littered with tree stumps, even after all the shop fronts had been put up), but it got rebranded when they decided to make a go with the tourism.
The main attraction is Glacier National Park, just a few miles away. (Americans say: "Glay-shure", and Brits say: "Glassy-er", which is how it's spelt.) The car hire guy told us where to get the fattest breakfast, where to buy our food supplies, and by midday we were already off on our first epic walk. By four o'clock in the afternoon, we were thoroughly soaked and remained sopping wet and cold with our pathetic tent for about two days afterwards.
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Glacier National Park is divided into what looks like six driveable approach valleys, with only one road crossing. The routes between the valleys on foot are hard, long, require camping. The Park is separated east-west by the continental divide. You hear this phrase peppering the conversations of all the tourists trying to make sense of the impressive geology, in spite of the fact that continental division has no geological meaning whatsoever. All it means is that on one side of the mountain range the rivers flow to the Atlantic, and on the other they flow to the Pacific. This has geographical significance only, because, among other things, it means you can't paddle a canoe from one sea to the other and cross this imaginary line. But rivers change course all the time. One small stream coming out of East Glacier park could flow south, and eventually, by erosion, break into a valley a hundred miles away. It could then flow into a westerly headed river. The imaginary line of the continental divide will suddenly shift east, beyond the course of this hypothetical river. There will have been no earthquakes, no noise, and no noticeable shifts in the local landscape. The rocks, the geology of the area, will not detect the slightest difference, because the change is imaginary.
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As imaginary lines go, the continental divide is quite a difficult path to follow, and, while she was cycling on her own for a few days, Becka met many people who were following the official course of it across the United States by bicycle! I hope never to be dragged on such a ridiculous adventure. Crossing rivers and not going round them is an important part of every journey. This is why I have to make myself clear as being against fictitious projects, such as following continental divides, or visiting the tops of every thousand-foot hill in Scotland in alphabetical order. One's got to be strict to not get hooked into things.
The main car route through the park is the Going to the sun road. A fine name, but I am ambivalent as to the necessity of this road. It's not that far to go around the park, and it does draw a major traffic jam at the col in between where everyone is struggling for a place to put their car. Because it's a through route, it makes it more politically difficult to install an exclusive bus service, like they did in Zion.
We did a long walk from there along a ledge called Garden Wall where Becka saw people walking and simply had to go. The animals were very tame, especially these smelly beaver like animals which try to come after you for food. We were always on edge, scared of bears. On the walk down to the road we considered the wisdom of overtaking a particular family group. What if there were bears ahead on the path? If we stayed back, behind them, the bears would eat them and leave us alone.
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The best walks and views by far are in the north-east, Many Glacier sector. We didn't know this at the time, so we spent only a day and a half there before hurrying on to sample the other places. Becka's strategy is always to ignore guidebooks and leaflets, go straight to the ranger's station and say, in effect, I'm a hard hiker with not much time. Tell me about a walk that will make me impressed.
Sometimes this gets us instructions to a place that's not on the map. The walk we did was called Shangri-La, involving going up the Swiftcurrent nature trail, and turning right into the trees at a particular log bridge. You then head up the slope to the rocks. We gorged ourselves on huckleberries on the way so that any bear we met would find us extra tasty. A surprisingly obscure rock climb, guided by a couple of well-positioned cairns, lead us up to a hanging valley with flowers and a lake. You could not have suspected this place existed by looking up from the bottom of the valley. After tracking around the lake, we were deposited high up in the bowl above the ice-berg lake (see picture bottom of page). It was a one-way, rocky, gravely slide to get down on what felt like a sixty degree slant.
I was pretty tired afterwards, so Becka needed to abandon me and run up Ptarmigan Tunnel before the day was done. She spotted a moose.
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We moved on, out to a town called East Glacier Park, which has a train station and fancy hotels. A poster on a door to the cafe advertised a rodeo somewhere in the back end of town. At the listed time, we followed these badly painted signs on scrap wood down a dirt track, into a field. The road then, sort-of, went down into a hole. We parked the car and wandered on foot. There was this dusty valley packed with SUVs and battered pick-up trucks, all with Montana plates. Nearly everyone was a rough looking native American. We had second thoughts about being there. And then third thoughts. Then thought, what the hell, if we don't catch anyone's eyes, there won't be any trouble. There was indeed a rodeo behind the fence. We climbed onto the grand-stand through a sea of American junk food litter, and saw all kinds of games with cows. Wrestling, sitting on them, roping them. It looked pretty dangerous. Especially for the twelve year old kids doing that bucking bronco thing on stocky calves, and getting thrown off. No helmets. No armour. No ambulance. Just lots of leather and dirt and a few gates. Well, if people get killed or maimed for life often doing this, I'm sure they already know. Whatever. Smoking's also popular around these parts. I'd hate to be someone delegated with the job of looking after health and safety in this state.
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I forgot to ask about the name. This is the Southeast entrance. There's an excellent circular walk through two passes, the path between them running along a ledge just on the other side of the mountain tops. While we were up there a lightning storm brewed and got us pretty scared. We'd had enough of these encounters. It was like a hail and missile attack in the valley below to the side. Luckily, the wind didn't carry it towards us. We only got wet during the long trudge down the last valley to the lake with the flowering bear grass (which bears don't eat).
We were soon on to another day.
On the first night, we camped at Sprague Creek and went to a very bad public talk about the park by an elderly gentleman with his slides all scrambled (or at least it seemed that way). One fact is that the number of glaciers in the park is decreasing, due to climate change, which doesn't exist, and anyway, if it did, it is not human induced. I can't remember the figures, but they have a count of the number of glaciers at around two hundred or so, as it was at the turn of the last century, and now it's down to something like fifty. They'll all be gone in another thirty years, say. It's quite a high count in glaciers, one thinks, but they seem to count every patch of snow that lasts through the summer as a separate glacier. So, as the glaciers shrink and fragment, it's possible for the glacier count to go up as well as down. Whatever. They look kind of pretty and add something to the landscape: a dash of white to compliment the clouds in the sky.
On the drive out, a black bear bounced happily across the road into the undergrowth near where people were parked. We told the part authorities of this encounter, but they weren't too concerned. Oh well. Maybe we were taking this bear scare too seriously. They just want to get on with their lives, with all these people walking around their homeland.
I was, as usual, exhausted. It was time for payback. Something easy and fun for me was due. I had argued long and hard for it.
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If I don't do something entirely on my own free will, and require chivvying along, like when I go on a too-hard walk, Becka takes the credit for me doing it. This applies to washing dishes and doing the housework too. She learnt this lesson from employee relationships: the one who bosses people around takes all the credit for them doing their jobs. If you boss them even more, about things they were going to do anyway if let alone, you can steal the credit much earlier. Bossing is such a hard task, and so beneficial to the employees, that it is almost part of their salary and benefits.
Now, on the flipside situation, if I do something willingly, then it doesn't count either, because I obviously wanted to do it, and got pleasure from it. This measure is important for making bargains, where I want her to do something for me, and am trying to trade it for something I have done for her. I can't trade it if I was forced to do what I did for her anyway, an I can't trade it if I chose to do it myself, for whatever reason that has nothing to do with the issue at hand. What this leaves me with is the necessity to be prepared to strike for bargains at the time of calling. "I'll follow you up this damn hill only if you promise we can go rafting tomorrow," for example.
It's kind of unfair, the necessity of making deals with people at the heat of the moment, when they are at their weakest, instead of them doing what you want, and you doing what they want, with mutual respect for all actions and wants, howsoever they can be easily satisfied. But it is necessary to do this when there is insufficient respect for the wants of others, and a wanton game-play and devaluation to the limit of rhetoric of any positive thing you have done for them on the basis of lack of choice and enjoyment. Sometimes money gets involved, because it's a number. People have respect for money, right down to tiny pittances, even though they don't respect you for, for example, the hours you waited for them at the bus stop in the cold.
All measures and comparisons between personal actions are subjective. They cannot be compared or measured against one another fairly when they have happened in the past and different people have experienced them. The means do not exist, the sacrifices are theoretical, what has been done has been done, and can't be taken away. Without respect, we can only bargain about future actions which we can choose to take or have the power to deny. Contracts and promises, these are called. They are inefficient, formal, sociological structures for agreeing on the measure of things in the future. But we don't know the future. Events alter everything, and the balance between the two sides of the bargain can become grossly unfair. Theoreticians paper over this problem by calling it risk: you may have gained massively on the other side. But usually this is not possible. With employment contracts, sometimes the marginal gain on one side is massively offset by the sacrifice on the other, as when the boss tells you you can't have a day off because the contract you signed ten years ago says you can't.
The over-reliance on contracts and specific promises is a sign of a sick society or relationship, technically incapable of accounting for changing needs, and willing to hand power to people with the best position and skill to strike ruthless bargains in favour of themselves and their employers, and against those who are morally disgusted by the routine lack of respect in life demanded of the winners, who feel that what they are doing is no more tragic than taking strategic pieces of a board game.
Parts of it was pretty boring. Don't do the full day trip, because the interesting stuff is at the top end. We had one near capsize in the rapids where I got stuck in a stopper. (I don't know much about canoeing, but I have a vague idea what I should stay away from.) The option of paddling a one-person inflatable boat is more fun than the bouncy castle affair that is the eight-man raft, although the paddles were straight aligned rather than offset, which drove me round the bend.
Below the lunch stop I should have counted the number of times the raft boat captain said: "Let's go and paddle" whenever the conversation died. Eight strokes, then they'd drift a bit. It went on and on, flat as anything for miles. I almost wished I was walking.
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This place feels like nowheresville. It has the atmosphere of one of those villages in New Zealand on the west coast. There are old wooden houses with magnificent antiques and dark stained interiors. I can't remember if there was electricity. There must have been. There was a restaurant with good food, a shop which sold fancy pastries, and an old hostel that was so clearly a labour of love, like a museum, that you could even sit in the outside privy for an hour just reading all the postcards and decorations pinned on the walls. We sat in the living room totally alone for an hour as it got dark, reading books and sharing a bottle of wine before going out so we would already be drunk and not need to buy any expensive beer at the table. There was definitely no electricity in that room; we read by candle light. The character of the building pressed inwards, like pitched tar from the shadows. Why is it so infinitely more nice here than in, say, a bus station? Is it the noise?
I'd found one of those Ayn Rand paperbacks, and read as much as I could. I'd heard much about this person who wrote novels of a political nature. The book was called Anthem, and was published, according to the preface, after she made it big with a couple of other titles. The book was written to expose the evils of the collectivism of labour (obviously not what people do on a family farm). The preface said it had been written in 1937, but it was too controversial to publish at the time, and had to wait for 8 years to see print. I think it was because it was just very badly written sci-fi. But, when she became popular, publishers realized they could sell any old tosh with her name on it because her fans are lacking critical faculties.
I don't know what this Objectivist Philosophy that I've heard her fans getting all excited about is. Something to do with property being a natural, objective law, like the law of conservation of mass, except that, unlike the law of conservation of mass, it requires a government to enforce it. The government, of course, is supposed to do nothing but enforce property. Any problems that arise due to not having any property (for example, food) is entirely your own problem. You are not allowed to take food that isn't yours, even if you require it to live; the government will make sure you don't do that. This is called a laissez-faire, let-be, system. You are let-be as long as you follow the rules, which happen to favour the people it determines possesses the property, be it an apple, or ten thousand square miles of prime agricultural land. No violence is permitted. However, starvation is considered a serious act of violence for the quite real reason that it is both painful and deadly. But this contradiction of not classifying hunger as violence is no problem if you don't think about it, and make sure that you blame people for their own hunger. The objectivist system probably makes sense if you assume that human beings are non-living objects with objectives given to them by God that can switch themselves off at whim when it is necessary to not eat. However, since people are living, they can be threatened with hunger (and the denial of other basic needs), and are likely to sign all sorts of bad contracts that sell themselves short so they forever remain in a weak situation, even as much as though the had been coerced into these agreements with immediate violence.
Why do anarchists only drink herb tea? Because proper tea is theft!
It rained on our last day in the park. Fortunately the walk we chose was short. There were no loops, so it was merely up to the top of a hill and back down. We didn't know there was a watch tower at the top and that someone would be living in it. He was friendly and gave us a few minutes to dry out. I ate handfuls of huckleberries on the path back down. Huckleberry harvesting by members of the public is limited to one quart of berries per day. I don't think I put that many in my mouth, but I guess this figure is tuned to forbid commercial pickers from coming in and hoovering up the lot because they can't gather enough to cover the cost of their gas and accomodation.
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When fed up with walking in the rain, there is downhill cycling to do: A bumpy track that snakes down the face of a ski resort in the summer which takes you and your bike up on a gondola cable car for a fixed price per day and as many rides as you can stand.
You can get jackhammer's finger -- and rest of body -- if you do it too much, which we did. Luckily, the bike hire shop had no bikes without front suspension, or we would have probably hired a couple of them because they would have been cheaper, and bike suspension is obviously a gimmick. I don't think our arms would have lasted. For sure, we would have lost hold of the breaks and crashed into a tree if we were lucky. I don't know how the wheels stand up to that pounding with those thin metal spokes on which you are effectively jumping up and down on with your full weight.
Near the bottom of the path, the route splits into easy, medium, and hard routes. Becka foolishly persuaded me down the hard way... I don't know how people do it. Luckily I stopped my bike before I fell off the cliff, and carried it through the forest to the side, where there were trees to lower yourself from to get down to horizontal ground. Even the medium route was too silly in places.
We took a break and had a wander round the skills park (a sign strongly recommends you wear body armour before you play). Chainsawed bits of wood nailed to each other, with the tree stumps, splinters, and spare branches lying around. It looked really painful, except maybe to an eight year old who doesn't have much sense or weight behind themselves when they fall onto something hard. It was a challenge to follow along the paths even on foot. We kept our helmets on. Again, I have no idea how people learn to master this. Six ball juggling looks like a more attainable skill, partly because you can't get hurt. Bicycles were never meant to climb trees, just as roller blades don't work on gravel.
We camped in town by the railway, and then took the long train journey back to New York City, via Chicago, which was still just as friendly. In New York I looked up my friend from Clarion who had promised me a place to stay, but he had gone to Canada for the weekend of mountainbiking. He left us the key to his house under the doormat. I owe him one. He has a cat that is as quiet as a footstool.
So, back to England where I officially resigned from my job because it had been sold to another company, with no disrespect intended, but it was certainly taken. Never mind. Where there's life there's mischief. I intend never to work as an employee again. The contract you have to sign takes away way too many rights, and it's not worth it in the wide, interesting world. I find it humiliating having to beg people for time off work, and they have no right to have the power to deny it, (which they didn't, but they could have). One reason they didn't is because I would have quit much sooner. In most cases it's not about money. It's not wages per day. They sign you up for a package of a lot of worktime, and give an annual salary for it. You must attend their office for many hours per year, and it's work by exclusion of anything else you could otherwise be doing. You go there day after day, and the only way to avoid boredom is to do their work until eventually your brain contains nothing else.
Last week the grand American invasion of Iraq began. The arrogant gets who rammed this plan of premeditated violence through the obedient government machinery totally misunderstood public opinion both among their own people, and the people of Iraq. But that's what arrogance is all about: not taking other people's point of view into consideration because you believe you don't have to. Big trouble awakes the bewildered herd. We have been lied to too many times in one day. Anti-war protests have been stirring in even the most politically sealed states of America. And it's only day five. The killing has not even started. A friend of mine asked me why are the protests all lead by anarchists? I think it's because no one else in the system was taking the lead. Every single institution had been whipped into line so that no one with power was standing in opposition.
We have not been here before, when so much power of communication and organization was in the hands of the public. Let's pray it does not go sour. And maybe it won't. Justice is public. Justice is those decisions which favour all of us. Evil -- damage that is widespread and profits a small minority -- can only be conducted in private.
