missoulajournal

Western Tananger

We've spotted numerous Western Tanangers in the Montana back country over the years. But the shy, and very active, bird doesn't stay in one place long. This one gave me barely outside of 5 seconds to zoom in, frame and shoot. My first-ever Western Tananger photo!

Poem on a window in Butte

Take a walk along the nearly deserted streets and alleys of uptown Butte, Montana and you might eventually profess that the creaking buildings are struggling to tell their stories before they eventually crumble.

We did so recently and I found myself peering through the smudged glass panes of abandoned storefronts at the cobweb-choked remains of balustrades, arches, beams and bars... and the ghostly reflective interior mirrors on back walls where -- if I might have stood quietly enough and stared into one  for long enough -- I might have conjured the actual accounts of any of the thousands of immigrants from 100 years past who made their way from all corners of the globe to this once-booming copper-mining town.

In fact,  many of these slowly sinking buildings are still inhabited. Sinking because the mine shafts deep but obliquely snaked beneath this hill are collapsing. Still inhabited because the people here are connected -- in one way or another -- and love it here. You might swear, after a brief conversation with any of the affable & chatty locals, that each has a crystal ball’s link to the voices of the past.

I slid barely acknowledged -- by the building occupants -- into one such establishment, the M&M Bar, and realized immediately that it was much less than I had previously imagined.

But gradually the stories seemed to reveal themselves in the thick air... clinging like the oil from a million handprints on the bar-rail,  or stuck firmly like a red-enameled tack to the fading wallpaper. Or rubbed repeatedly and deeply into the red marbled vinyl of the bar-stool seats by thousands of oil-soaked miner’s trousers. Or merged timelessly with the smoke that curled from the cigarettes of the current inhabitants in a translucent ether with the imagined still-hanging smoke from thousands of souls who, on one Saturday night in some forgotten past, also drank, chatted and aged here.

We walked past a two-story structure caked with the whitewash of a hundred coats of paint that failed to disguise its age... surely an abandoned bar because -- as we peered through the front window into the dusty interior -- we saw the propped up remnants of a once-royal bar amidst the chaos of a partly evacuated structure. Abandoned blankets shoved against the entry door on the sidewalk outside were the only sign of recent life. But the blankets seemed to draw a link to the lives past from inside.

And then I saw, printed in white grease pencil on one exterior window pane, a poem. I didn’t place the poem as any known poet’s verse (it could be; I didn't recognize it) and so decided that some recent occupant of the entry way, wrapped in the blankets, drew a link between himself and the long past inhabitants of that abandoned establishment:

Blood of My Mistakes
I drink, like wine, the blood of my  mistakes
Draining the glass, tipping the bottom toward the sky
Dizzy with the apparition
I drink the wine, my dreams
fall into images of my own making
fermenting the dissonance of forethought/malice
demanding amends
dripping stains across the floor
I sip the mountains, sip the clouds
whether real or envisioned
drinking deeply, and in my grasp
hold the wind-stricken landscape
bare like above-ground roots
exposed when the soil erodes
My secrets ooze
the raw drip of my mistakes
hardened concretions, embedded shards
And I am drunk on
the remnants in my glass.

Harry Smith's Iris Patch

Harry Smith is an iris gardener.

I don't know Harry beyond what I can observe of his iris garden. But much of Harry's personality can, I believe, be revealed in the annual celebration of color at his 2-plus acre Iris Patch on Missoula's Westside.

Harry's garden is stunning in so many ways that, for the past 3 years, my wife and I have scheduled special trips to drive past his modest residence in early June... simply to take-in the transcendent rainbow of color that rings brightly over the hundreds of iris (mostly bearded) that stretch upward and unfurl their fragile multi-colored petals, bright with darkly etched stripes, radiant pollen-rich beards and fragile inner chambers.

We've stopped several times to chat with Harry and stroll the paths that wind through his flower garden.

He's a modest, candidly private person in his late 70s or early 80s who now lives alone. Upon conversing with Harry it becomes quickly evident how much he loves tending, seeding and pollinating his beautiful iris.

The beautiful tall, many-hued plants are popular with contemporary gardeners. But iris have actually descended from an ancient, and hearty, native plant commonly called "flags."

Nonetheless, despite their ancestry, modern iris must be meticulously weeded and culled to thrive. And so Harry can daily be observed in his iris patch. Hunched over... kneeling, spading, trimming and otherwise lovingly grooming his beautiful flowers.

A favorite activity of Harry's is pollinating. And he claims success with a unique "horned" strain (see photo below), where the beard of the iris blossom's descending petals rises in a pointed, colorful spike.

When I asked him how he developed his "unique" strain he quietly laughed and said: "Very quickly... over many years of practice." He explained that pollinating is as easy as transferring the pollen of one flower to the inner petal of another flower with a cotton q-tip. "And I can show you in two minutes time how to do it. It's that easy," he said.

But Harry admitted that he has developed his unique flowers over many years of repetitive pollinating, on his knees, slowly moving from blossom to blossom.

His hobby is easy and fun, says Harry... particularly for folks who have a little space and love to stay at home tending their flowers.

But he also admits that successful iris cultivation is not for everyone. Because, he says, it takes daily weeding, trimming, spading and transplanting. "It's not for folks with the disease of laziness," says Harry, chuckling.

Harry's patch has blossomed for the year; it is now ebbing into a type of dormancy. All that can now be observed is the thousands of jade-green leafy iris spears of his densly populated patch. Of course they're growing rhizomes, which will shoot upward next April and May.

And by next June my wife and I will develop several excuses to drive past Harry Smith's Iris Patch. You can view photos some of Harry's Iris from 2007 here.