#69 BACK IN THE DAY WHEN I READ EVERYTHING ABOUT LENNY BRUCE I COULD GET MY HANDS ON, I WROTE MAINLY ABOUT SOCIAL JUSTICE

This was the year my great Uncle Harold took my brother John and me on a the Great Empire Builder from Chicago to Seattle, Washington.  We stopped for a few days to visit our relatives in Havre Montana.  These kin then were not entirely like us, as with the eyes of a poor white country kid from Central Illinois transplanted to the 7th highest mean household income zip code in the country (with populations over 20,000) and went transplanted from not thinking much about wealth and status into a strange new (and not always so friendly environment) where money, wealth, power, and the pursuit of material goods and services ranked quite a bit higher up on the values charts than Church, Faith, Hope, or Charity.

IN HAVRE MONTANA

Riding the Great Empire Builder sitting above the bare brown earth

Perched as high as the telephone lines and telephone poles

It was summer, 1967, when first I saw Montana.

This my brother John and I saw: First a cow drinking from a brook

and then sagebrush only for a hundred miles until in the distance

appeared what turned into a large grove of trees growing along

the Missouri River where the train soon would stop in Havre, Montana.

Havre people are friendly, lots of kin. They smile and say “hello”

their faces tired and dry because even though you sweat

it's so hot and dry that the sweat dries up before fully forming your face.

Only at night will the sweat beads cling to and rolls down your nose.

Morning brings biting mosquitoes and it hasn't rained

for sixty long dry days in Havre, Montana.

You see a farmer trying to scratch something

from the land, but he can't do it because

Nature's already sucked the life from it.

The family talks around the TV about how the Indians are movin' in,

from off the reservation to town, not that they are prejudiced,

but why would those Indians want to leave the hills and Beaver Creek

to come and live here, in Havre Montana.

It's so hot but you know that winter will bring twenty feet of snow

at twenty below all the time. It never never rains, it just snows and burns

here, in Havre Montana.

You can cross the Milk River and be in the badlands, a happy place if you watch out

for rattlers and like to hear the eternal silence of the sun beating down so

hard on Havre, Montana.

The hunting's good – bear, wildcat and fishing up North.

There's gold that way too. Every man and boy owns a gun

and you can still be hung right here, right in Havre, Montana.