Montana and North Dakota heading into oil boom?
     The Saudi Arabia of America?

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The much awaited US Geological Survey (USGS) report has been released. The agency increased by 25 times its estimates of how much recoverable oil exists beneath the Northern Plains. The report stated that the Bakken Formation in Montana and North Dakota contains 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil, instead of the 151 million barrels the agency estimated in 1995. The crude oil is locked away in rocks that are buried miles underground, but recent technological advances have made it easier to get at. “Technically recoverable” oil resources are estimates of products that can be recovered using the technology and procedures that are currently available.

The estimate is larger than any other estimate for the lower 48 states and ranks as the largest oil discovery in the past 50 years.  A new black gold rush has already begun. So far Marathon Oil has acquired about 200,000 acres in the area and expects to spend $1.5 billion drilling about 300 oil wells within five years. According to Next Energy News, Marathon sees this as “one of the greatest booms in Oil discovery since Oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia in 1938.

The Kiplinger Report states we are still a few years away from a large increase in drilling:

Figure on at least five years before the oil starts flowing in large volumes. A lot of work will need to be done first. In addition to installing drilling gear, firms must build supporting infrastructure, including roads, pipelines as well as new water, sewage and sanitation systems to meet the needs of workers and other area residents.

Still, the activity already underway is transforming the windy gold and slate landscape of MonDak, the area along the Montana and Dakota border. Zach Dundas sketched the story in an article for Good Magazine:

Sidney and its hinterlands are a hive of activity. Oil-tanker trucks patrol the narrow highways and gravel farm roads day and night. The cafs, casinos, and bars are full of guys wearing coveralls emblazoned with oil-company logos, most prominently those of “Team” Halliburton and that notorious company’s rival Schlumberger, the outfit BusinessWeek calls “the stealth oil giant.” Ubiquitous “help wanted” signs testify to the most open job market anyone around here can remember--if you can work, you’re working in oil. A genuine boom is in full swing.

I will be interested to see what people make of these sudden changes. Montana, of course, has long experience with boom and bust economics, which is a way of saying it’s always had a marginal economy. Modern economies are all boom and bust, but fortunate places mitigate the busts in one sector with new booms in other sectors.

In any case, boom and bust is better than bust and bust.

Here’s a technical discussion of what is publicly known about the Bakken Field so far.

And here‘s Alexandra Fuller’s contrarian take on oil booms, based on her Wyoming observations.

Life in the Enchanted West
     Cowboy manners: smile when you call me that

Though I owned a horse when I was a kid, I didn’t have a saddle and we didn’t have any cows. My dad was a logger. Nonetheless, he taught me the Code of the West, in his intermittent and distracted way. He loved cowboys and he hated jerks and bad manners.

Though Montana now has its share of folks who look to Europe for their sense of how people ought to live—the ones who call the President a cowboy and feel they are being very mean when they do—some of us just can’t feel that it’s much of an insult to call someone a cowboy.

I’m talking about mythic cowboys, of course. The ones who can’t be destroyed by the debunkers, who live two or three paradigms south. Mythic cowboys live in in the narrative space of stories that should be true. They emerged when their creators felt that the ideals they embodied were threatened by all the usual things: urbanization, industrialization, corruption and modernity. Some way was needed to jazz up the ideals of civilization when the forces of barbarity seemed ascendant.

In other words, mythic cowboys were created to meet actual problems. It worked well enough, barely. All those GIs in World War II thought they knew a thing or two about how they were supposed to act when faced with the likes of Hitler. The details—50 caliber heavy machine gun in the waist of a B-17 instead of Colt .45 from the back of a gelding—mattered little.

Cowboys inhabit a timeless narrative space, along with the troubles and villains they face. Who hasn’t from time to time found himself in Hadleyville, that hapless town located in High Noon where the ordinary, fearful folks feel things might just be good enough if Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) will just ride away. That Miller gang is pretty scary. Think how unpleasant a fight would be.

But of course, the good cowboy doesn’t ride away if that means injustice triumphs. That would be against type. So Kane stays and things get unpleasant but then, after a hard trial, the good order is restored. Historian Victor Davis Hanson believes that when Europeans call George Bush a cowboy, their typological thinking is mainly correct:

The truth is that we live in a global Hadleyville suffering from the delusion that international communications, cell-phones, and the Internet--like the railroad and telegraph before them--equate to civilization. In fact, they are only a thin and flashy veneer atop a wild and savage world where outlaw regimes like North Korea, Saddam’s Iraq, and Iran push until pushed back. The United Nations can keep the peace and dispense justice about as well as the territorial marshal who is a three-day ride away or the bought sheriff of a cattle baron’s town. And a Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mullah Omar, or Saddam Hussein listens to international warnings about as much as Liberty Valance pays heed to the bumbling coward of a sheriff Link Appleyard.

That is why so many people privately appreciate an American Tom Doniphon, Shane, or Will Kane who from time to time appears out of nowhere to stand up to a Saddam, Taliban, or Kim Jong Il--or to the recent crop of bullies in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.

How now, cowboy? The uses and abuses of a national icon.

A crucial part of the charm of the cowboy type is the requirement for being a reluctant warrior. The good warrior doesn’t want war. Cowboys are primarily gentlemen—practitioners of the code of chivalry. They have manners, which also bespeak the timeless.

Manners, they know, are the little ways we practice the big virtues:

* “Always tip your hat to a lady and they’re all ladies.”

* “Actin’ like you’re big is probably going to have the opposite effect.”

* “A man taking a stand on high moral ground just might be standing on a bluff.”

* “One sign of good manners is being able to put up with bad ones.”

* “Sooner or later we all wind up sitting next to someone at dinner who is about as strange as a duck in Death Valley. Good etiquette requires that you waddle across the desert with ‘em until dessert is over.”

* “If a woman spills her drink, hand her a napkin and let her do the patting.”

* “Don’t answer the doorbell in your undershorts.”

* “If the guests outnumber the chairs, it’s called a buffet.”

* “If you’ve got nothing much to say, don’t take an hour to prove it.”

* “Don’t interrupt unless somebody’s hair is on fire.”

* “Never go anywhere without your head in your hat.”

* “Aftershave is not a marinade.”

* “Never interfere with another man’s dog unless the dog is about to attach himself to your leg.”

* “When served escargot, pour a little salt on it and forget it. It will melt while you wait for the next course.”

from Texas Bix Bender’s Cowboy Etiquette, with art by Larry Bute

I’ve spent a bit of time over the weekend reading some far left websites. Not many cowboys there.

Summer medic on wildland fires
     A change is as good as good as a rest

Lunch break: A member of the Zuni hotshots during lunch on the patio of the Shepp Ranch. The ranch is accessible only by air or jetboat. It’s a wonderful place to clear one’s mind of distractions.

I’m spending much of my summer working as an Incident Medical Specialist on wildland fires in the West—a medic on forest fires. It’s a great change of pace. I just got back from 16 days on the Rattlesnake Fire in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness. I was “spiked out” at the Shepp Ranch on the Salmon River and, for three of the days, at a remote “ranch” up Indian Creek.

No cell phones. No roads. On smoky days, no helicopters. Most transportation was by jet boat and nearly the only communication was hand-held radios, which allowed us to talk to others on the fire.

In some ways it’s the opposite of classrooms, which are overconnected sytems if ever there were such things. There’s so much communication going on that it’s hard to think.

The crew I spent the most time with was a Zuni Hotshot crew from New Mexico. A very respectful and hard-working bunch. Up at 5:30 every morning and then working until dark, which in the north country this time of year is after 9:00. The fire is more or less uncontrollable, so the work is mostly point protection: clearing brush and timber near buildings, lighting backfires, setting up pumps and sprinklers. The fire will burn until rain or snow puts it out. The country is too steep and too remote to be contained through any practical efforts.

It’s refreshing to be outside all the time, without news, internet, meetings, phone calls, bills and a thousand household chores. Just a book or two.

Winter and cabin fever in Red Lodge
     Gary Ferguson in the LA Times

Gary Ferguson has an essay in today’s LA Times (free registration required) about winter in the Rockies and the persistent Montana drought.

What I once knew in theory I now know in my bones: that the overpowering weight of a Rocky Mountain winter, the snowbound days that drive us to the edge of madness, are the price paid in one season for the flush of life in another. What can at first seem a terrifying silence in the winter wilderness is in truth the sound of possibility.

Ferguson’s latest book is The Great Divide: The Rocky Mountains in the American Mind, a book which I just read (after hearing his eloquence at the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula). The Great Divide tells what sort of people have been attracted to this place in the past, and of the changing role of the Rockies in the American psyche. In Missoula he was the only writer on a panel of environmental writers who offered much hope for the future. He said one solution to immigration into this state was to create a literature that attracted the sort of people we want.

Of course, he was assuming most people in the audience would agree with him about what sort of people those were. In American politics, things tend to go together in a way that it’s hard to support environmental causes without also supporting a lot of other causes. I would like to see a reshuffling of which issues the two parties claim as theirs, in the hope that one of them might put together a better hand than either seems content to hold at present.

In any case, his is the best kind of thinking about what placemaking means.  Ferguson lives in Red Lodge.

America’s future depends on us
     Feeling young in eastern Montana

Ed Marston makes a point I’ve talked about before. The Rocky Mountain and Great Plains states are related to the eastern states in somewhat the way the American colonies were related to England in, say, 1770. Those who feel they are at the center of power feel we are rustic provincials. Marston suggests that nonetheless it might be up to us to decide America’s future:

. . .in the end, of course, the scorned, cultureless colonies triumphed and came to dominate the English-speaking world. They succeeded because the colonists had, in addition to several million square miles of land at their backs, aggression, pride and a genius for politics.

A couple summers ago I put on an institute for teachers, and all our speakers from out of state commented on the sense of desolation they got driving through the eastern part of the state. If you judge Harlowton or Chester by the standards of a Portland strip mall, it might seem to be lacking. But when I’m out there, my overwhelming sense is of a young world, full of possibililty.

When I visit Portland or Seattle, my overwhelming sense is, “My goodness. It’s too late.”

Montana Blogs
     Developing regional culture

Who knows where blogging will lead. My own hopes are that it will support a flourishing of regional culture, as more people realize they can write for families and local communities about things unlikely to draw audiences of the size needed for traditional publishing.

Right now there’s a lot of experimentation and learning going on. The technology is new and often strange, and many readers haven’t migrated from the morning paper or other forms of old media.

But it’s a form worth thinking about, and maybe taking a stab at yourself. My favorite website in the world is a family photo blog that our family does. Several of us post photos with brief captions. Recently, my seven-year-old grandson posted a poem he wrote about his great-grandmother a couple days after she died. It’s a place where we express (and in the expression develop) our notions of what our family is about. It’s important to us now, and I imagine it will be priceless a generation or two down the line.

My view is that every family needs its writers, photographers--its own literature and art--and we now have the tools to do this.

And not just families. Neighborhoods, towns, clubs and organizations. As I said, we are just at the beginning. Who knows what might be coming. It’s worth watching. Here are some of the blogs from Montana that made me feel good, for various reasons.

A Montana cattle rancher’s opinions and facts: I sometimes wonder if my cattle can read my mind. The cows were still out in the hills scrounging for feed and later in the week I was going to let them come down towards home. You will note the “wereâ€� in the statement. They decided to break the fence down and come home without any help. Luckily the next fence held long enough to move some other cattle around to let them the rest of the way down. I hate when I have to do things unplanned and in a hurry but we managed. We spent a while fixing everything and I am back under control for now. “Ifâ€� there are any cattle left in the hills I will let them work in if they want. The ones that came home will start getting a cake supplement now and I will hold off haying them. The hired man wanted to know if I was rewarding them for breaking the fence down and coming home. I told him “weâ€� were rewarding them for not breaking any more fence down than they did and patiently waiting while we moved some other cattle around before they came down. Got to look on the bright side.

Thoughts from the Middle of Nowhere

An anonymous blog about life in Montana, from the Livingston area: I love the hard-working, honest and friendly people of Montana. In gas stations here in the morning, you’ll find men standing around sipping coffee and talking. I love that when you sit and chat with the boys here in Montana, you don’t speak of geeky subjects like routers and USB cables and Perl code, we speak of manly things like cattle and fences and horses and hunting. And I love it that no matter who you talk to - you end up finding a link - it will turn out you know someone they know either through family, work, or school. I love being able to walk into a bar and know everyone in there and be greeted as a friend and a neighbor. Montanans have accepted me and my family here - they know that I’m “not from around here� but they accept me as a local and as a friend and I’ve been made to feel welcome here. I’ve lived in other states where you’re made to feel if you’re not a native, you’re trespassing - not so here, I’m made to feel welcome here.

Big Sky Blog

A Billings blog about politics, school board, and general topics: Once again the voters of Billings have shown that they want little (if anything) to do with funding SD2’s projects!
All of the funding requests were voted down and probably for good reason. The real reason? MISTRUST I’d say. That said, it is a sad day for the children who are going to suffer in the long run.
I am not against funding education but last night I had the opportunity to attend a focus group conducted by MSUB. Not only was it educational, but after two hours of round table discussion it is clear that the members of the SD2 could well learn a few things that would help them in actually getting peoples input rather than the shotgun approach that they have used in the past.
The Dean of the College of Technology (COT) along with the staff at MSUB are studying the “Community College� idea to expand the education process that more closely fits the NEEDS of both our young children coming out of High School as well as the non-traditional students who are either trying to make career changes or move up the economic ladder in a state the now ranks 44th in the nation…up from 45.
Until the School Board can come up with VALID and concrete PLANS I doubt whether they will ever be successful in getting any requests for money approved by the voters of Billings.

Views from the Rim

A photo blog of weekend outings around Great Falls: About three miles from the top I came on a car pulled off to the side of the road and the driver looking over the side into a steep ravine. I looked down and there was one of the trucks that had passed me dangerously on a curve. It was on its top. Luckily, none of the four guys in the car were hurt and they were able to climb out through one of the windows.

Out There with Tom

Sense of place as an aspect of mind
     Changing geographies of possibility

When the old Salish got horses, their sense of place changed. Their minds were re-shaped by a larger geography of possibility.

For centuries the Salish who lived where I live now had organized their lives as traditional mountain folk do, moving through a landscape mosaic constantly shifting in time. In late winter, grizzly bears came out of caves in the high country, ravenous and searching the lower slopes for winter-killed carrion. In early spring, camas ripened in valley bottoms and sunflowers bloomed on south slopes. In mid summer, huckleberries ripened on foothills in the mottled light of ponderosa stands. And as summer days lengthened, antelope gathered into large herds, posting sentries and grazing on the golden grass. As the air became colder, bull elk became belligerent and reckless, descending from high ridges, bellowing challenges.

These rhythms and movements were aspects of mind for the old Salish.

When they got their first horses around 1730, their sense of place was transformed. They began to leave the mountain valleys to hunt buffalo on the Great Plains around the headwaters of the Missouri. They reorganized their lives around a spring hunt and a fall hunt. They adopted the portable teepees of the nomadic tribes. They became skilled warriors, able to hold their own on the contested plains. They became horsemen and breeders of horses sought by other tribes.

They lived in a new place, with new opportunities and dangers. They told their children new stories that included insights into horses, buffalo and the enemy Blackfeet. Their minds were shaped by a larger geography of possibility.

In changing the way they related to space, they changed their minds. 

The Great Divide: Season of the Freaks
     One story of the sixties was the migration of hippies to the Rocky Mountains

The “Great Divide” that Red Lodge writer Gary Ferguson refers to in his book of that title is the Rocky Mountains. Interestingly, his book has the same title as a new release by John Sperling. Sperling’s The Great Divide is a treatise on the backwardness of many people who live in the Rockies, the South, and the Midwest (as compared to the forwardness of the urban residents of the east and west coasts). The divide he contemplates is between the traditional “retros” and the urban “metros.”

Sperling seeks to intensify contention between people who apparently inhabit different realities by establishing “the great divide” as a metaphor that explains political and economic life in America today. Ferguson examines the way the actual “great divide” running north and south through the western half of the country--the Rockies--has long served as a refuge for people who want to get away from the bickering.

From the mountain men of the nineteenth century to the hippies of the sixties, the Rockies have held the promise that there might be life beyond the vast machinery of progress being assembled ever more noisily on both coasts.

The happenstance of the two books having the same title is thought-provoking. There are obvious parallels between the ‘retros” and the “metros” that Sperling talks about and the division between the “Old West” and the “New West” that many observers of life in today’s West have commented on. Were the antecedents for that division established by an influx of newcomers in the 1960s?

A chapter of Ferguson’s book that might be of particular interest to teachers contemplating joining the Expedition to the Sixties is Chapter 9: The Season of the Freaks. Ferguson points out that during the sixties and seventies, people who were disillusioned by the “system” often headed west, more often than not to the Rocky Mountains. Many of these people are still here. Indeed, they are more or less everywhere. They are easy to find and good candidates for oral interviews.

Many who headed for the Rockies in the 1960s and early 1970s came looking for a life without the corrupting influences of the “system,” but with a good supply of like-minded friends within arm’s reach. . . These newcomers were peaceniks and flower children and freaks.” [p. 232-233]

I imagine every town has stories of newcomers and old timers meeting each other. “While [Aspen police magistrate] Guioo was railing against the longhairs in Aspen, on any given summer afternoon in Crested Butte you could find hippie girls skinny-dipping at Nicholson Lake, waving and smiling at the contented old miners watching from their pickup trucks along the east side of the reservoir.”

Colorado newspaperman George Sibley wasn’t amused by the newcomers. Ferguson quotes at length from a 1968 editorial:

The problem children. . .are no more flower children than were all the howling children of the past decade children of Howl. What they are in fact are the basically dull and unoriginal sons and daughters of basically dull and unoriginal mothers and fathers; they are the ones who tack onto any and every movement without understanding in the least what the movement is about. They are bored because they are too unimaginative to creatively amuse themselves, restless because they have energy they do not want to waste on work, stoned on drugs because they are tired of being stoned on the tube. They are not hip, they are not beat. They fight their nothingness by letting somebody else do the work of giving them their identity.

For their part, the young newcomers often shared with Sperling a sense that they knew better than the old-timers they found in place. Though they often wanted what they viewed as the naturalness of rural life, they didn’t always want the traditions of the natives they found.

But it wasn’t just flower children who came. Vietnam vets also came, looking for quiet and for space. The West in the sixties was, as it had been earlier, a place of possibilities. “A place where young girls of privilege could savor the smell of sagebrush and sweat. Where some fortunate black men managed to tumble through a rabbit hole and find themselves a million miles from slavery. Where sickly white men jumped into creeks and sucked at mountain air and sometimes grew strong again.”

An interesting strand in the Sixties Expedition would be to interview people who moved here in the 1960s and 1970s. We could ask them why they came, what they left, what they were looking for, and what they found.

Homesteading the Digital Frontier
     Making Places for Citizenship

When the United States government transferred vast regions of the American West from public to private ownership through a series of homestead acts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a world that had become clogged and burdened with the inertia of old governments and old bureaucracies was suddenly young again. All the kings were dead.

The future was open. Everything might be different. People around the world reconsidered their prospects and many headed for the frontier, leaving behind regimes that no longer seemed to work.

In the West, they formed new towns, created new institutions, developed new traditions and practices, and raised their children in a world that, though it grew out of the old worlds, was unlike anything that had existed before. It was a world of huge opportunity and daunting risk. Entering it was a entering an epic adventure.

For the most part, things that worked were variations on things that had worked before. Towns that thrived did not invent themselves from nothing. They drew on the experience of Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, and London. But they were able to make it new because they had before them a world not yet organized into the fiefdoms of the past.

I find the sublime hurly burly of the American West a useful metaphor for thinking about what is happening today through digital technologies. The empire of network news has just suffered a significant blow from guys in pajamas, and new heroes and legends are forming. Digital red light districts are growing apace, without the citizenry quite knowing what to do about it or whether anything can be done about it. Entrepreneurs are rounding up stray resources and driving them across borders to fresh markets. People from distant lands are encountering each other for the first time, and old ways and new ways are being put to the test. Industry is laying new rails and inventing new ways of organizing and new ways of peddling goods. The world is in flux, a kaleidoscope of danger and promise.

The earth is young once again.