North Country Briefs

These tidbits were selected for me by my father from the past few months' Watertown Daily Times, and now I'm passing them on to you. None of them are as good as the windchime theft article (a windchime had been removed from a porch; "no suspects [had been] identified"), and no way do any of them come close to the DWI case of the guy driving his lawnmower home carrying a pizza who fell asleep stopped on an overpass on the way home. Still carrying the pizza. He had lost his license for DWI (in a car, one presumes), and also had been arrested once for trying to "direct traffic" while intoxicated. Nor do these match the item that covered a sad weekend when a woman both threatened her husband with a hammer and then later smacked him with a pair of pants, landing her in custody. But they will do.

Woman Cited in Assault In Frying Pan Incident

LAFARGEVILLE - Paula E. Snyder, 46, of 36768 Sprucedale Ave., has been summoned to town of Orleans court following a domestic fight Saturday night when she allegedly hit a man in the face with a frying pan, according to the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department. She is charged with third-degree assult of Christopher Gushlaw, 35, same address, deputies said. Mr. Gushlaw declined treatment for a black eye, deputies said.

Frying pan assaults seem to crop up in the North Country Briefs often enough that my father has a tidy collection of them, spanning years.

Man Charged in Theft Of Beer Bottle in Pants

A Watertown man was charged Friday afternoon with petit larceny after he tried to walk out of a grocery store with a bottle of beer in his pants, city police said. Earl Tooley, 59, of 653 State St., Apt. 1, attempted to steal a 22-ounce bottle of beer from the Great American supermarket, 672 State St., police said. He is to appear in City Court on Oct. 27, police said.

Part of the fun of these briefs is how very much info they pack in about a tiny, tiny incident. Quotes from the pants-slapping victims, the high school the DUI-suspect attended, the number of ounces in the beer you shoved down your pants, EVERYone's exact apartment number. I mean, this is such a small town community, when you lay out a photo montage of North Nosebleed AKA Adams Center, my (and Melvil Dewey's! our celebrity can out-librarian your town's celebrity!) home town, taken from the local grain elevator, the whole thing fits in 6 photos (handily fits). The area is full of tiny hamlets like this. Even with Fort Drum expanding now and then, the whole county only has 100,000 people, maybe. The only public transport connecting us to the world, the Greyhound route from Massena to Syracuse, has been cancelled due to lack of ridership. I used to know that bus schedule by heart, catching the bus at the end of my road to go somewhere (anywhere). Shouting over my shoulder "I've got my key, don't wait up!"


And lastly, from the very place where I went to school (the next field over from the high school):

Golf Cart Found Sunk

ADAMS - A golf cart at Tomacy's Golf Course was found submerged in a water hazard Sunday morning, according to state police. Somebody removed the cart from the area of the pro shop between 11 pm Saturday and 6 am Sunday, police said.

Part of the fun of this one is that - you may notice - it's a crime being handled by the State Police. Not the local police. Why? Because there are no local police. No professional fire fighters. A smattering of EMTs. When my horse kicked me in the head a local EMT happened by some miracle to be driving by and see me fall in the manure pile, so I got primo care and a fast ambulance ride. Otherwise, who knows when I'd have gotten help. We only get about about two dozen cars on the road all day. When my sister and I set up lemonade stands we always had to eat the costs. No customers up this way.

Speaking of my sister, she is also passing through the Nosebleed and today we went cross-country skiing, which put us in the mood to reminisce about how we had to do this for gym class throughout our school years. We skiied around the elementary school track, noses and eyes tearing-up in the wind and cold, and talked about how stinky and awful the shoes would be by the end of the day. The way they'd conduct the first couple classes every year without poles, a great hilarity for the many students with weight problems. The way the school would be pondering whether to close early because of terrible wind and blinding snow, but we'd still be out there on the ski trail, doing timed laps. One year I had a first period gym class (i.e. skiing in the dark AND the snow AND the wind), and honestly the skiing section of the year was a little more fun-- dry shoes, a clean trail (instead of a plaster-smooth sheet of skid marks) - even the chance to break the trail, which I got to do once or twice. But this time I was with my 3-years-elder big sister, and we didn't even discuss it-- she broke the trail.

She is, after all, stuck in a condo in Manhattan the rest of the year. I get California.

More News from North Nosebleed

Our local newspaper publishes the inadvertantly entertaining "North Country Briefs." One recent highlight: a woman was arrested for walking in the road. When she was arrested, she threw the chair she was cuffed to through the wall. One of her charges was then interfering with the administrative governing process, or something. I guess that's the new fangled way of saying "resisting arrest."

The paper also publishes the "news from 100 years ago."

Apparently in 1905 on this date the revolution in the Russian Empire was causing concern to local folks because New York Air Brake (our only local factory) had a componant factory in a village outside Moscow. A "platoon of dragoons" was dispatched to check on the US Americans working there. Nobody from Watertown, NY, was working there at the time.

Meanwhile, in other news, these past few days the obits have had a beautician, a farmer, a mechanic, and a slough of "homemakers." It really isn't fair to have the job you held be the first thing after your name in the obits, at least not up here, where there is so little in the way of employment. I mean, the farmer is a dying breed and it's good to know when one goes the way of the elves, but those other folks probably had other identities they were proud of, maybe prouder than the thing they did to pay the rent.

I also saw a photo spread of noteable local gingerbread houses. Someone did a trailer park in gingerbread.

In local snowman developments, there is now a huge lady snowman with a big yellow bikini up on the top of a hill on the outskirts of Watertown. A little further down the road someone has, as their only holiday decoration, a lit-up plastic palm tree stuck in their front snowbank.

Today I finally got to see a house with Tyvek insulation panels instead of siding. That is our signature dish on the Northern New York architecture menu (usually with s a side of slumped-over burned-out barn). In the sunlight (which I haven't seen yet this trip, but when it happens) these foil-wrapped insulation panels really gleam beautifully across the wind-blasted fields of snow.

Happy Christmas from North Nosebleed

I'm home in North Nosebleed (25 miles south of the Great White North, population 2,500 if you count the larger farming area, 500 if you just count "downtown"), and we just got back from our Christmas morning church service. The minister was phoning it in, so he read a story from Reader's Digest and then read this piece of shite from the internet about how each of the 12 days of Christmas has a Christian symbolism behind it (11 ladies dancing = the 11 faithul apostles... the sad ultimate conclusion of which analogy is jesus in a pear tree, as in nailed dead to a pear tree). So of course stuck in my head for the rest of the service was the Great White North Bob and Doug McKenzie's 12 Days of Christmas, which ends with a beer ...in a pear tree.

Another highlight of my Christmas morning-- seeing that one of the many local snowmen has a very straight and tall pine-branch mohawk.

Now, PRESENTS.

On Wild Gay Love in the Wild West

Well, I just saw the straight-girl slash fan-fictionoid Ang Lee movie Brokeback Mountain. After the caveat that again - again! - a feature length movie that doesn't have two women having a conversation about anything! not even two women in one screen shot! - even still I really loved this love story.

I can't believe Heath Ledger's understated intensity. Wow. The Berkeley theater I saw it in last night was full of weeping gay couples at the end, and the quartet of us were all holding eachother and crying. I mean, in a good way. Not angry sobs. Quiet leaking.

Then we went out and processed. One revelation to think about: Bound is to the noir genre what this is to the cowboy drama. Bound's elevator scene: Brokeback's dirt parkinglot scene. You had the whole movie outlined for you, the sexual tension all balled up and lobbed at you in a wad of silence.

Then you spend the movie waiting for one or both of them to die, something you know by the bleak opening sequence and the fact that you're not seeing it in a queer film festival. In "Brokeback" you don't know what will get the guys in the end, the wilderness or the people of the land. Having grown up rural, I had my money on the people, and sadly that's a bet I'll keep winning again and again...

Now, this morning, I am reading something at work - where we do Russian environmental / indigenous rights protection - about the use of the word "wilderness" - it somehow reminds me of the sadness of the movie, that sense of an undefineable good thing lost to a system that requires definition. In this quote you have the recontextualization of that word by a person whose nation was destroyed in the defining of the wilderness.

Here's the passage:

We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth, as "wild." Only to the white man was nature a "wilderness" and only to him was the land "infested" with "wild" animals and "savage" people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it "wild" for us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the "Wild West" began.



- Chief Luther Standing Bear, Oglala Sioux Nation

Now, you can't equate a population of white "hairy" cowboys with the native nations it displaced, but reading this on the heels of "Brokeback" I have a renewed sense that this system of defining the wilderness (the undefineable, be it a relationship to land or a relationship between lovers) is universally oppressive-- it instills a wilderness of fear in working-poor white people, native peoples, anyone who by chance or position is drawn to reach for wholeness over someone else's false boundaries.

Waiting for the Other Cleat to Drop

We're very sad about the canning of 1st baseman great JT Snow from the Giants. We do not have any clue about where he will go now.

"We" are the the company of the yahoogroups "Wildaboutjtsnow" - not too surprisingly, mostly women. Right now, bitter, angry, Giant-hating women. At least one other fan is considering jumping ship to become a full time Diamondbacks fan. I just can't quite get over their turquoise get-ups. That color belongs on a cabaret show stage, not a ballfield.

I sent JT a letter last week thanking him for getting me into baseball, and for his heroics at 1st base. I included a copy of a clipping I love of him in a comical post-fly-ball pose that looks like he's in wrestling match with an invisible partner and he's losing. He never let pride get in the way of his job.

May I be as diligent and honest in my office chair as JT was on the Giants' playing field.

J. T. Snow:

With the Giants:

Games...1,182

Avg.....273

HR...124

RBI...615

Gold Gloves...4

Slackerstalker Hearts...1

When did we get old?

I had dinner with some other thirty-something friends last night and almost the whole evening's conversation centered around our annoying chronic health problems. I mean, the knees, the guts, the back, the mysterious dizziness, the computer-strained wrists, the trouble sleeping/ trouble waking up... And of course after our nutritious meal we all scattered to our cozy rented corners of the East Bay by 9:30 pm. When did we get old?

And remember that show "Thirty Something"? That was an old people's show!

The one member of our party who was particularly self-conscious about her aches and pains and "oldness" was also, I have to add, the one who earlier in the day went wide-eyed sidling up to a moo-cow and her calf with a handful of dry grass. Cows. It's calming just to watch them. We decided on our hike that day that the horrors we listen to on the news should be interspersed with a minute or two of footage of cows grazing, just to recalibrate back to center between beheadings and rapes and global pandemics.

Is this why people put wooden cut-outs of cows on their lawns? The aesthetics of calm?