A Little Off the Top

Ethan Smith

Editor

I grew up in a deprived environment, which affected me for much of my youth, and yet I miraculously overcame it to lead a somewhat reasonable life.

When I was growing up, my parents refused to get cable.

I was 8 years old when the '80s arrived, and with it, cable TV. All my friends had it, or at least I felt that way, but I grew up in the sticks so the only way to get it was with a satellite dish. This was back in the day when basketball players wore shorts instead of three-quarter length skirts, I had nice hair, and satellite dishes were about 10 feet across.

No way was Mom going to let one of those monstrosities dot her landscape.

(Question: What's the West Virginia state flower? A satellite dish.)

I've been deprived of cable for much of my life, and I'm still trying to figure out how to sue my dad for emotional duress and child endangerment — attorneys are working on it even as we speak — but over the past few years I've led a self-imposed, cable-free lifestyle.

I really don't feel like I've been missing much.

There's some fun stuff on TV, I know, but most of it really doesn't interest me. I can't watch local news because I find it too painful, as the newest 22-year-old stumbles through her 30-second spots. ("Today in Ha-lee-na, the governor signed ….") Besides, if I miss anything, my coworkers will tell me about it.

But manna from heaven dropped out of the sky this month, when some friends asked me to housesit for them. They have satellite service and a huge high-definition TV.

I'm in the money! I thought to myself. Now was my chance to make up for lost time. More than 300 channels, at my fingertips. This promised to be awesome.

I could watch Barry Bonds' kids eat steroid-loaded peanuts during his home run march, hear Paris Hilton cry, and maybe see if Brittany is going to lose her kids — all in high definition.

I've learned a lot over the past week of watching the boob tube, mainly that almost every specialty channel now consists of reality programming.

They have the "world's most dangerous job" show, which features guys out on a deep-sea boat off the coast of Alaska — what my friend calls the "hairy guys with crabs" show.

Apparently the appeal of the show is that if you get swept overboard, you have about five minutes to live in the freezing water, and it takes four and a half minutes to turn the boat around, so everyone tunes in to see if someone's gonna get swept overboard.

(Oh my gosh, he's going out into the elements to change a spark plug on the hydraulic wench. I mean 'winch.' He could die! And it's not even a Champion spark plug!)

They have reality shows that feature everyday life in a county jail (been there, done that ) — Oh my gosh, that guy's gonna pick up the soap … — shows about people who run hotels that cater to the ultra rich, and shows about guys who like to ride sharks.

The guy who likes to swim with great white sharks apparently feels really unfulfilled in life because he hasn't "ridden" one by holding onto its dorsal fin and letting it pull him through the water. These are 14-footers we're talking about here.

One of his coworkers said the guy was getting really depressed because he hadn't ridden one yet, despite days spent swimming with them. Then the camera panned to the guy, and he really did look down in the dumps.

I could tell because of the high definition. I felt his pain.

I can think of a lot of reasons to be depressed, but not being able to grab onto a 1,200 pound shark isn't one of them.

This guy will end up like Timothy Treadwell, the moron who liked to try to pet the Alaskan brown bears, and who ended up getting eaten.

Look for the DVD of this guy getting his arm bit off in a feeding frenzy, coming soon to a video store near you. ("Hey, Larry, let's see what happens when we drop a half-eaten hamburger into the water while he's swimming.")

So, after a week of watching high definition TV, I realized I wasn't missing much. Of the 300 channels available, only about two of them had anything worth watching at any given time, and high definition just meant the junk came in clearer.

Historic fire doesn't have to happen again

Among Other Things

By Paul Fugelberg

Long dry spells, hot weather, frequent gusty winds, dry lightning storms. Those were faced by folks in western Montana and throughout the Pacific Northwest in 1910. The result was a disastrous fire season.

But it doesn't have to happen again nearly a century later. In 1910 there were no high tech radio communications, television or the Internet, dependable telephone service, retardant-carrying helicopters or Neptunes, computer networks, smokejumpers, four-wheel drive vehicles, semi-trucks, tank trucks, spotter aircraft or bulldozers.

Highly experienced firefighters were virtually non-existent. In fact, there was a radio of one regularly employed Forest Service person to guard 250,000 to 400,000 acres depending on the location. There had already been some 2,500 small fires and 50 large blazes in northeastern Washington, the Idaho Panhandle and western Montana. Remarkably, firefighting efforts — as unsophisticated as they were — had contained many fires reasonably well, but they still burned.

And then came the winds — sometimes gusting to 70 miles per hour.

Within 48 hours some three million acres and between seven and eight billion board feet of timber burned. Eighty-five persons died, 78 of them firefighters.

The advancing walls of flame gobbled up the eastern third of Wallace, Idaho, all of the Montana communities of Belknap, Taft, Deborgia and Haugen, and parts of Noxon, Trout Creek, Heron, Tuscor and Whitepine, skirted around Mullan, skipped over Avery, and stopped just west of Thompson Falls.

As in all disasters, the event itself was only part of the story. The rest involved people as human nature revealed itself in all of its facets during the big blowup of Aug. 20 and 21, 1910. There was heroism and cowardice, selflessness and selfishness, humor and pathos, triumph and tragedy.

Northern Pacific Engine 1356, now displayed at the Missoula train depot, helped haul hundreds of refugees from Wallace and towns on the Montana side of Lookout Pass to safety. The trip was terrifying — over burning, weakened trestles, through a tunnel of fire on both sides, through blinding smoke, flying embers, and falling trees. Some railcars even smoldered.

GN had rough time, too

Things weren't any better for the Great Northern Railway either. Simply reaching Polson was a harrowing experience. The late Golden E. Bibee was among early settlers who arrived at the north end of Flathead Lake via the GN and then came to Polson by boat from Somers.

He recounted the train trip from the southern edge of the new Glacier National Park. Forest fires raged on all sides. He wrote: "It looked like the world was on fire. A pilot engine ran ahead of our train. The night was dark but most of the way the forest fire lighted the coaches like day.

"Somewhere in the middle of the burn, the train stopped and several people came aboard. One young mother apologized to my wife because her children had whooping cough. She said they had a very narrow escape and were very thankful to get away from the fire alive."

The boat trip to Polson was no less hazardous. The Bibees were aboard the City of Polson when the boat became lost in the smoke. As if the smoke weren't bad enough, a windstorm struck as they were half-way down the lake.

"The winds grew wilder and the wind stronger, causing the smoke to sting the eyes intensely. My little family clung together and hung on. My wife was too seasick to care whether the ship went down or not and the crew seemed uneasy. There was much consultation — we were facing the storm, bouncing like a cork on the waves. For some time we barely held our own. Then the squall stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The sun disappeared behind a mountain and darkness came on sudden and intense.

"Then came the search for the shoreline and the Narrows. How this was accomplished I'll never understand. I couldn't see the bow of the boat. The squall seemed to have thickened the smoke rather than clear it."

The boat crept throughout the narrows safely, sped up and pretty soon slowed down again, as the captain groped for the dock, guided by the electric plant's whistle.

Extensive smoke cloud

The smoke cloud turned day into night in the Flathead and Mission valleys, and reached as far as Bismarck, Casper, Calgary, Pierre, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Sheboygan, Sault St. Marie, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal, Folks back east referred to the historic phenomenon as the "Five Dark Days, Aug. 20-25, 1910."

Then the weather suddenly reversed itself. There was a light general rainfall, even snow at higher elevations, winds changed. Firefighter crews regrouped for another assault.

Then at the end of August a heavy, general rainfall put an end to the fire season.

Folks breathed sighs of relief as the threat abated. Others sighed in despair as they wondered where, how and with what they were going to put their lives, homes and businesses together again.

As I said, we've a lot more resources available these days to fight forest fires — but a summer-bustin' general rainfall would be nice.