We haven't revisited the Sawtooth Range in the Grand Tetons since wa-a-ay back in the title story, “Can we have archaic and idiot? 2” in the beloved 2009 collection Can We Have Archaic and Idiot? 2, have we? [And it seems surprising that so few readers get the allusion, to wit: “Can we have our cake and eat it? Too.” Okay, lame. Consider the source.] [A story actually written in the late 1990s but only later collected. Twice. FYI.]
Blaise Moulton, we recall, fell in love with Normal Proulx, dancing in a bar in West Yellowstone. Possessed of a glass eye, the lamentable result of a transorbital lobotomy (don't ask) in her teens, Blaise was one to make very good use of her other blinker as a paid literary researcher.1
We later caught up with Normal and Blaise in the edifying tale about how research work had changed with the maturation of the Web and Blaise's insights gleaned from Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in “Looking things UP!”2
We learned near the end of that story that she was planning to enlist me in a sort of literacy campaign. As she lamented in regard to the internet, “A flood of bits and pieces without meaningful substance.” (I'm certain she nodded in agreement reading this morning's New York Times® op-ed by Ross Douthat in which he referenced, “the curated virtual realities that the internet increasingly enables us all to inhabit.”)
He can say that again.
“the curated virtual realities that the internet increasingly enables us all to inhabit.” (NYT® Dec. 6, 2020)
She did contact me, though I really didn't have much to offer in the way of substantive advice, which I think she found pretty disappointing. Here I had invented her but then couldn't help her address either the mental framework into which she had stumbled, to assuage her concerns, or help with the larger question regarding the dumbing down of the world via the Web.
In any event, we've kept in touch, and here I've found some blank pages on which to catch you up.
First off, she and Normal are getting on just splendidly. Gosh, I think they've been “itemized” for at least 23 or 24 years now. We can probably attribute that to their disparate pursuits, each bringing a different slice of life's pie to the conjugal table.
With Blaise, for instance, though a lot of writers do their own research these days, some (moi) understand the value of a seasoned research assistant,3 even in these times of instant everything. So her work is as varied as the interests and pursuits of her clients.
Last month she was doing a deep dive into the domestication and spread of pomegranate production in northern India for a journalist writing for Bon Appétit®, and this week she put quite a few hours into verifying my just completed story about Newt biting a book customer's ankle. [Last week’s edition of this newsletter for you Substack readers.] (She has a source at the hospital who's willing to violate HIPAA rules and who will let her know if the foot has to come off: Stay tuned.)
In “Angel from Montgomery,” John Prine's song about an old woman serving a life sentence in her marriage, the protagonist asks, “How can a person go to work in the morning, come home in the evening and have nothing to say?” This is clearly not the case with Blaise. She always arrives home with something new and interesting for “show and tell.”
Then, too, Normal has branched out. Recall that he was a match salesman from Hebron, Ohio, (“Matches Made in Hebron!”) when the couple first hooked up. Of course Bic® and other lighters were steadily burning their way into the match market, but his creation of a Matches.com® Web site still gets a lot of right swipes.4 He's developed a strong marketing push with arsonists who much prefer wooden matches to lighters since the evidence is less likely to survive a blaze.5 Plus there are still some cigarette smokers (!) who think it's classy to cup a lit match in hand like Bogart in Casablanca.
They've continued to travel too. In the same way they managed to combine business with pleasure in that long ago meeting on the airplane flying into West Yellowstone, their work has given them ample excuse to go out into the world.
Last spring, for instance, they were in southern Arizona where Blaise had an assignment that involved the backstory and setting of Cochise Stronghold in the Dragoon Mountains inside Coronado National Forest. The Chiricahua Apaches held out in that mountain top retreat for some 15 years beginning in the 1860s. The historian involved wanted firsthand impressions and found she was too busy to make the trek herself.
It is a gorgeous and rugged place with lots of standing rock outcroppings that provide great cover where someone familiar with the terrain could fend off cavalry attacks. Norm and Blaise hiked the 2.5 miles from the parking lot to the 5,000 foot crest and quickly grasped the defensive potential of a peak that offered views in every direction. There'd be no surprise assaults by the Bluecoats!
Blaise discovered that the prolonged stand-off happened during what the U.S. government liked to call the “Indian Wars” but which was, in reality, simply the taking of native land by force, rendering laughable Abraham Lincoln's speech on the occasion of his declaration of the first Thanksgiving® holiday in October of 1863.
He said:
“...In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict …”
He said, further:
“...the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements ...”
Ahem. It was the bullet, Blaise informed her client, with the axe employed only in hand-to-hand combat. As for Lincoln's assertion re harmony, it surely didn't feel harmonious to the slaughtered, tortured, starved, and then forcibly evicted native population—which abuse was going on all during the Civil War years at Abe's behest. These were “nations” with which we had “treaties.” I guess Abe forgot about that. But harmony is, one supposes, in the eye or ear of the beholder.
[Yoko® Ono's singing comes quickly to mind.]
After the hiking and photography they headed up to Tucson where Normal had paid for a booth at an international firefighters' convention—kind of a wink-and-a-nod appearance where he took orders from emergency personnel like Elmo (see bottom graf, page 120—in the print edition). [The story “St. Elmo?” for Substack readers.] It was, of course, common knowledge why he set up shop at such an event, but the organizers needed any funding they could get to stage a big whoopdeedoo in a fancy hotel, and how the matches might be used was never openly discussed.
The fact of the matter is that while arson is officially deemed “wrong” under the law (at the same time “correct” per Franklin's dictum about habits6,) it obviously makes work for fire departments.
We all know that nails are “adored” by passive-aggressive hammers, to coin a phrase. (“Please don't make me hit you!”)
Meanwhile Normal talks a good story about the use of controlled burns to reduce the damage done by wildfire. His display includes maps of successful burns, together with lurid photos of conflagrations where suppression efforts failed, and the table material includes brochures and complimentary boxed wooden matches bearing the “Made in Hebron” logo. (A bride match and a groom match holding a candle. How sweet!)
The way Blaise describes the scene is highly amusing. She stations herself a short distance away, wearing dark glasses and appearing to peruse a convention program. Some among the attendees, she reports, engage in lengthy discussions about methodology; others offer anecdotes about fires bravely fought. And then there are the many who cruise by to furtively pick up a business card without saying a thing. “Those are the arsonists,” she insists. “After the show they place anonymous orders to be delivered to P.O. boxes. They generally pay in cash.”
Meanwhile Normal has an iPad® hooked to desk speakers that runs a loop of the Doors® recording of “Light My Fire,” Elvis® doing “Burning Love,” and the Indigo Girls® crooning “Kid Fears.” (“Are you on fire, From the years? What would you give for your kid fears?” You can see how this would encourage purchase.) Oh, and Hendrix® with “Fire.” (“I have only one itching desire, Let me stand next to your fire, Let me stand next to your fire,” etc.)
While we're on sound-tracks, I'm reminded of that romantic scene in West Yellowstone, aren't you?
1 For the record, I've even hired her at times. I like for my protagonists to be gainfully employed.
2 Page 175 in Fifty Wheys to Love Your Liver, (BUB, 2018.)
3 Full disclosure: Having invented Blaise I don't actually have to pay her, which makes her work for me completely affordable, something not to be sneezed at by a self-employed scribe.
4 Mostly, it seems, from drunks looking for a very hot date.
5 And isn't it interesting that a match salesman would fall in love with a woman named Blaise? I actually never thought of this before. Truth.
6 See page 36. [In the print edition. Here on Substack look for “In the teeth of the roaring gale.”]
The usual grateful thanks to paid subscribers [who, by the way, get special bonuses!)
Silly. But I like silly!