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Pastimes : Lewis and Clark: Corps of Discovery -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Aj-Ruk who wrote (12)	3/17/2004 6:52:30 PM
From: ManyMoose	Respond to of 194

Why thank you! Here's one back at ya. It's about a poet, Richard Hugo, Poet Laureate of Montana. And the locality was traversed by Lewis and Clark. Death and the Good Life: Why Am I Looking Over My Shoulder? I never read murder mysteries… … But I know poets I bought the book off the rack at Safeway That town with rails on one side and a bar on the other leapt from the page And my memory And that pond at the edge of a misplaced chunk of Eastern Montana where the reddish work was done. I knew it. I knew the town. I knew the lake. “The Good Life” was only Paradise, A town with rails on one side and a bar on the other. And the pond where the ax dropped bloody was only Rainbow Lake Half way to Hot Springs up SR 28 I followed the trajectory of his tour-drunks page after page Details peer brightly through the fog he wandered in Like elk tracks on fresh snow, I follow Each turn of the river, each hayseed town, each barroom… …Had he been following me? Was that he retching into the Lochsa? Nursing boiler-makers in the Kooskia Bar and Café? Snoring in the next room at the Kamiah Motel? (We stayed there only once – enough.) The poet changed their names – to protect the innocent, I suppose. …But he sure as hell knew them perfectly. The towns and rivers went guilty by their real names. We lived in Kamiah four years, Then followed The Good Life over the arching Sellwood And up the West Hills on Sundays. Such a good life, and, of course, He made up the murders… …Didn’t he? We stopped in Paradise once. Remember? The locals were whispering about that out-of-hand deputy. And, God, I remember the big blond. She had long braids and brought ice cream. There’s no clear line Between the bloody ax and Rainbow Lake I hear a noise What? Who’s there? --Reflections on reading “Death and the Good Life” by Richard Hugo. “Death And The Good Life” was a murder mystery, presumably fiction. The paperback cover depicted the outline of a skull, the Death’s Head, embossed in the canopy of a cool green forest, representing the good life. My kind of poet, that. When he puts a word down on paper, if you’ve been there, you can see the place and you know he’s captured it perfectly. I don’t know what possessed him to write a murder mystery, but this one particularly gripped me because I knew virtually every scene came from reality. Rainbow Lake and Paradise were all too obvious—he didn’t bother to disguise them. I knew he’d been at the Riverside Motel in Kamiah. I knew he’d been in the Western Bar and Café, or another down the street called The Kooskia. I don’t know bars much, but Hugo did. I’d been in the one he described in Kooskia; the others, I knew where they were exactly. Once I saw an article about Richard Hugo in a Sunday supplement. The none-too-glamorous picture showed him clasping the hospital gown around his middle, trying to get out of bed. Not long after that, a year or so maybe, he reached the end of his tour drunk. Such a small book. These few words, shivers really, are my homage to it and its author, Poet Laureate of Montana, dead too soon.

To: Aj-Ruk who wrote (12)	6/25/2004 9:11:55 PM
From: ManyMoose	Respond to of 194

I was hoping to get some discussion on this topic as it relates to foreign affairs. Lewis and Clark had a clear mission, the ultimate result of which was securing the Louisiana Purchase and Oregon for The United States. This enabled a two-ocean nation packed with natural resources to become established. In doing so, Jefferson cemented American foreign policy towards Britain, France, Spain, Russia. Countless Native Nations learned about the United States for the first time. The overtures offered by Lewis and Clark to native chiefs were peaceful, and they conducted the entire expedition with only two deaths amongst the natives. These deaths were in self defense against youngsters who were out to steal horses and weapons from the encamped Lewis.