It looks like we'll need The Rainmaker

The Yellowstone River’s running high and muddy. Flood warnings have been posted for the Flathead. It’s still snowing in Great Falls.
But in northeast Montana drought persists.
Across much of the region less than an inch of rain had fallen this year through April.
Time to bring in the rainmaker.
An ad that ran in the Phillips County News two weeks ago said Matt Ryan was planning a return to Northeast Montana in late May and sought support for his work.
Then it began to rain.
Not a lot, but enough for Ryan to cancel his plans to travel to Montana.
Apparently the mere suggestion of a rainmaker was enough to prompt a change in the weather.
Ryan insists he doesn’t make it rain.
“Only God can do that,” he said recently from his home in Mt. Shasta, Calif. “I just know how to influence the weather.”
Ryan uses a combination of science and faith in a higher power to reorder the jet stream.
The process involves erecting steel pipes grounded in water that work as antenna to redirect energy flows.
He also relies on what “Christian people call prayer.”
The 55-year-old New York native has been influencing the weather for nearly 25 years. In 1984 – “on a wild hair,” he said – he sought out an Indian rainmaker.
“He was a prophet,” said Ryan, who studied under the Indian for 10 years.
Ryan doesn’t come cheap.
“For $15,000 I’d come up there,” he said.
The price, however, pales in comparison to the results.
“An inch of rain in Valley County is worth a million dollars,” he said.
And Ryan claims he always gets results
He can’t afford not to.
“You take hard-earned greenbacks from those Montana ranchers and don’t make it rain and they’ll hang your ass,” he said.
Ryan said precipitation in the first month following his rainmaking is usually above average and at least normal for the rest of the year.
While Ryan was glad to hear a half inch of rain had fallen across northeast Montana in early May cancelling his visit, he wanted folks there to know that if the drought persists, his services are still available.
“I just want to keep the consciousness going,” he said.
Like water witchers and faith healers, rainmakers have their skeptics. But when drought perists, desperate and expensive measures are sometimes called for.
So the call goes out to the rainmaker.
“We sometimes need to reach out in some way we’ve never reached out before,” Ryan said.
Parker Heinlein is at pman@mtintouch.net

Universal & Triumphant wins lottery

Look who won the lottery.
The Church Universal and Triumphant, an apocalyptic cult that calls the Royal Teton Ranch near Gardiner its home, apparently hit the jackpot last week.
The church sold its grazing rights on the ranch which borders Yellowstone National Park for $3.3 million and agreed to allow up to 25 bison from the park to winter there.
CUT, never much of a cow outfit anyway, recently sold the last of its cattle.
The move appears to be little more than an expensive feel-good gesture designed to placate critics of Montana’s bison management plan which resulted in the slaughter of 1,600 bison this winter.
The plan, designed to prevent bison from straying outside the park and potentially spreading a livestock disease, was harshly criticized earlier this month by the Federal Government Accountability Office. Their report said state and federal agencies failed to expand a free-ranging area for bison despite spending tens of millions of dollars on land easements and bison management.
In response, Gov. Brian Schweitzer and Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Suzanne Lewis decided to throw some more money at the problem.
The cash landed in the hands of the followers of K19 of the Cosmic Secret Service, one of a handful of “ascended masters” to which CUT adherents subscribe.
It’s a bit surprising that CUT – never in the running for neighbor-of-the-year -- would be so handsomely rewarded for doing so little. Since CUT’s arrival in Park County in the mid 1980s, church officials have been convicted on gun charges and fined for spilling diesel fuel into Mol Heron Creek. The church even threatened to tap into Yellowstone’s thermal aquifer.
But the cult has a history of dodging bullets and landing on its feet. When wildfires in the park threatened the Royal Teton Ranch in 1988, church members gathered en masse to chant, and lo and behold the flames changed direction.
Now for millions of dollars, the church has agreed to let a handful of bison graze on CUT land until April 15 when they would be hazed back inside the park.
What difference such a paltry gesture will make is hard to imagine. About 2,300 bison remain in the park and they are calving this month. Providing refuge for 25 of them won’t end the slaughter or the perceived threat of brucellosis.
Ten years ago the feds had a chance to buy the church’s grazing rights but didn’t because the $2.7 million price tag was too high.
That was the right decision then and would have been the right decision today.
Instead, the Church Universal and Triumphant won the lottery.
And the bison management plan remains an increasingly expensive mess.
Parker Heinlein is at pman@mtintouch.net

"Adventure Man" not to ride again

I tried to keep the newspaper to myself.
No need for my wife to see the story about a 400-mile foot, bicycle and boat race planned this summer in southwest Montana.
But she saw the story anyway.
“Don’t even think about it Adventure Man” she said.
Ten years ago I took part in such a race. Age, lack of training and short-lived determination dashed my hopes of finishing after only three days, but I did bring home a coveted “Participant” ribbon and earned the now-reviled moniker “Adventure Man.”
It was a race that appealed to me: on foot, bicycle, horseback and kayak across nearly 400 miles of Montana backcountry.
I was invited to participate as a member of what race organizers dubbed “the media team” even though I was the only member of the media on the team.
It offered me a week out of the office and not wanting to exclude my wife from the fun, I volunteered her services as a member of our support team.
Unfortunately, she was the only member.
But all she had to do was wait at various trailheads where we might show up at any hour of the night or day and provide us with hot meals cooked over a Coleman stove in the pouring rain and set up tents so we’d have a dry place to sleep, then re-supply and eventually meet us at another trailhead where we may or may not appear.
We were risking life and limb in the wilderness and simply expected her to wait on us hand and foot on our way to the finish line and personal glory. She hung in there for a couple of days until I suggested she might be more comfortable living in the utility trailer until the race was done.
And for her it was.
“&%@&! you, Adventure Man” she hollered as she drove off into the night.
I held onto the fantasy a bit longer, visions of late night appearances on the Outdoor Channel coursing through my head.
But who was I kidding? The other competitors were young and fit and sponsored by the likes of Rolex. Their multi-member support teams were paid and drove motor homes.
I was an aging, desk-bound newspaperman. I should have known better, but I bought into my own press. Dubbed “Adventure Man” in the local paper, I thought I had something to prove.
My wife told me I had.
She just won’t tell me what it is and I’m not about to ask.
Parker Heinlein is at pman@mtintouch.net

Where have all the hillbillies gone?

Where have all the hillbillies gone?On the final leg of a cross-country road trip that included long days spent traveling through both the Ozark and Smokey mountain ranges, the feeling that something was missing began to gnaw at my gut. Then it hit me: We'd covered more than 6,000 miles without a single roadside reference to those simple mountain folk of the South. I couldn' t remember even one billboard advertising a hillbilly café down the road ora gift shop selling corn cob pipes. Hillbillies, apparently, have gone the way of the passenger pigeon, the dodo and the stay-at-home mom. Portrayed on film and television (think Jed Clampit and Ma and Pa Kettleif you're old enough) as barefoot, opossum-eating mountain dwellers who lived off the land, hillbillies have always seemed a bit more comic-stripcharacter than real. Certainly Snuffy Smith, Lil' Abner and Daisy Mae no longer have any basis in fact. They exist only in the funnies, replaced in American folklore by rappers, gay television stars and video game heroes. Too white and too closely tied to the land, they had less and less incommon with the rest of us. And, my mother would add, being a hillbilly was nothing to aspire to. They were lazy, didn't use proper English, stole chickens, operated moonshine stills and lived in hovels. All aspirations of mine at one time or another, but nothing that anon-line, cell phone-jabbering, bottled water-sipping, politically correct society could relate to in the 21st century. Signs advertising adult superstores, all-nude dancers and Yakov Smirnov's theater in Branson line the highways in Missouri, Georgia and Tennesseewhere hand-lettered advertisements for country cafes used to ask "Have yaet yet?" and offered home-cooked vittles. But while I mourn the absence of a visible hillbilly presence on the American landscape, I suspect there remains some isolated corner of this country where hill folk still reign supreme. Where a feller can still satisfy a hankerin' fer a sip of 'shine and there ain't a cell phone tower in sight. Where the Hatfield and McCoy feud still rages and the chicken is anything but store-bought. Parker Heinlein is at pman@mtintouch.net

It's time to go home

ST.CHRISTOHER KEY, Fla. -- The one great indulgence my wife and I allowourselves each year is to run away to Florida in March and live in atent. We fish, cook our catch over a Coleman stove and fall asleep at nightlistening to the breeze rustle through the palms. It's the only month of the year I don't mind being away from Montana.Winter there has worn out its welcome by then and spring remains littlemore than a rumor. When I was 13 growing up in Indiana a friend and I planned to hitchhiketo Florida late one summer. The night before our departure, however, Ijumped over a fence and landed on a broken Coke bottle. The next few weeks I spent on crutches and then it was time to go back to school.When I was old enough to leave home with my parents' blessing, I wentwest instead of south. It was the rest of my family who eventually ranaway to Florida. My parents lived here until Mom died and my sister still lives outside the tiny town of Live Oak near the Georgia border. But unlike my family, I have no plans to live here. Too hot most of thetime and too many people all of the time. A few weeks in March is just about perfect. The sea trout are plentiful on the grass flats and in the boat we can escape the crowds. We walk the beach along the Gulf of Mexico at firstlight picking up shells and I catch bait with my castnet in the shallowbay across from our campsite. It's warm enough during the day that shorts, a T-shirt and flip-flops areadequate, yet still cool enough at night that sleeping is comfortable. Like any runaways though, after a few weeks, we start to get homesick. We miss doors that don't zip, a bed off the ground, a landscape not filled to the horizon with buildings and people. The days keep getting warmer. It must be about time to head for home. Parker Heinlein is at pman@mtintouch.net

There's Nothing Like That Old "Lid"

I bought a new hat recently.My wife said it was time.The lid I'd been wearing for a couple of years had taken on a personalityof its own. The emblem on the front was illegible, the color hard todescribe, other than earthtone, and it was beginning to smell a bit likethe dogs.But it still fit, shaded my eyes from the sun and provided shelter for mybalding head.What more could I ask?Something a little more fashionable I suppose.Maybe a trucker cap.Favored by rappers, skaters and the heavily inked, trucker caps -- atfirst glance anyway -- look a lot like the baseball caps I've worn foryears. But instead of a curved brim and a snug fit, these roomy lids feature a bill flat enough to play cards on and are usually worn askew. As in "heydude, your hat's on crooked."An admonition that seldom draws a friendly response. It's doubtful, however, that I'll ever wear a trucker cap. Like baseball caps worn backwards, hats that fit too loosely to stay on my head in astiff wind or don't shade my face, make little sense to me.Besides, I'm too old for such a fashion statement.I've always favored utilitarian chapeaus, like my oldred-and-black-checked Scotch cap with ear flaps. Elmer Fudd be damned. It sheltered me through blizzards and made do as a pillow when I forgot tobring one. Or the straw cowboy hat that keeps my ears and neck from frying in thesummer sun. I even have one of those long-billed fishing hats with a Lawrence ofArabia flap across the back that billows out like a cape when I'm runningthe boat at full throttle. But I prefer a simple cap. One that shades my eyes and covers my head.With an emblem appropriate in the company of women and children. Mine says Montana State.Does away with the need to ask: "Bobcats or Grizzlies?" I've worn hats that advertised bars, ropes and the feathers used to tieflies. It makes little difference. In a few months the logo will beillegible, blurred by sweat, grease, mud and blood. The color will fade and the new cap smell will vanish, replaced by an earthier aroma enabling me to find my hat in the dark. Then my wife will tell me it's time. And I'll begin looking for another. Something simple. Snug-fitting with a brim.I ask little of my lids. Parker Heinlein is at pman@mtintouch.net

Comfort is a Glock in Yellowstone

It’s time for a couple of corrections.
I’ve found a few mistakes.
One, I discovered myself.
The other was recently pointed out to me by a concerned reader.
I wrote last summer in a column on the cravings I experienced during a trek across the Bob Marshall Wilderness that “comfort comes on a long stretch of downhill trail.”
Wrong.
Comfort comes on a long stretch of level trail.
Downhill trails kill me.
What was I thinking?
I get shorter with each step down the mountain, little cushion left in my knees to lessen the pounding of a downhill slog on my aging carcass.
I suspect I wrote that line because for much of my life it was true. Downhill trails were a treat, especially if I was dragging a large piece of meat out of the hills.
But somewhere along the way pain crept in and now awaits me every time I top a rise and head down the other side.
A recent column I wrote on an amendment to allow the public to pack easily accessible firearms in our national parks also begs a correction.
It was pointed out to me in an e-mail that securing a parking spot in Yellowstone isn’t the primary purpose of the amendment.
“It’s about having the freedom to not have to worry about Nazis come thru your door to take your daughter and your mother and your grandson down to the local clinic for their tattoo or their community shower,” wrote Ron C.
I obviously didn’t understand the real issue.
On occasion I don’t.
Fortunately Ron C. cleared things up for me.
An armed populace is apparently necessary to combat the “international cops who carry 40s, tazers and hand cuffs,” in our parks and forests.
Again, I didn’t know that was a problem, and silly me, I wasn’t even aware Nazis were still a threat.
It’s been a while since I visited Yellowstone. I suppose I should pay closer attention.
Perhaps I was in pain following a long stretch of downhill trail, my thoughts focused on that happy place I head to when the pounding begins to takes its toll.
Had I been walking on flat ground I’m sure I would have seen the threat and written about it in a more serious manner.
So I stand corrected. Comfort is a long stretch of level trail and a Glock in a shoulder holster to fend off the Nazis in Yellowstone National Park.
Parker Heinlein is at pman@mtintouch.net