Flathead Lake, Montana -- Nothing About The Bakken -- October 8, 2018

Wow, I get tired of misuse of statistics.

From the article that went viral today regarding the homeless in Portland:

In Portland, the police oversight agency is reviewing how officers interact with homeless people - many suffering from drug addiction and mental health issues - after a report suggested they accounted for 52% of the arrests recorded last year, despite being a tiny fraction of the local population of some 640,000.

Here's another statistic regarding crime:

• Almost 100% of bank robberies occur in or near banks.

And:

• A disproportionate number of those in US prisons are criminals.

Homeless in Portland, and sleepless in Seattle.

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Nirvana

Montana.

Flathead Lake.

Autumn. Sun setting early. Cozy, warm kitchen table.

Time to read.

The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology, edited by William Kittredge and Annick Smith, c. 1998, University of Washington Press, Seattle and London
1,143 pages (does not include a dozen pages of bibliography at the end)

Contents

• Section 1: Native American Stories and Myths
• Section 2: Journals of Exploration
• Section 3: Stories of Early Pioneers and Indians
• Section 4: Writings About Butte
• Section 5: Remembering the Agricultural Frontier
• Section 6: Literature of Modern Montana
• Section 7: Contemporary Fiction
• Section 8: Contemporary Poetry

Hundreds of authors and poets. 

One example: George Bird Grinnell, p. 49

• 1849 - 1938
• Zoologist, anthropologist, and historian of the American West
• trained at Yale
• first expedition out west: 1870
• returned with Custer's expedition to the Black Hills in 1874
• explored the Yellowstone in 1875
• "Yellowtop-to-Head-Woman" was brought to Grinnell by John J. White, Jr. -- Grinnell said "it was a sacred story and must not be told except at night, and a prayer made for forgiveness for having told it."

Authors and poets featured in the anthology: Native Americans; native Montanans; from many different states in the US; a very few from outside the US; but what surprised me were all the authors and poets from Iowa:

• Con Price, p. 430: born in Iowa in 1869
• L. A. Huffman, p. 433: born in Iowa in 1854
• Joseph Kinsey Howard, p. 524: born in Iowa in 1906
• Jason Bolles, p. 673: born in Denison, Iowa, in 1900
• Wallace Stegner, p. 675: born in Iowa in 1909
• Dorothy M. Johnson, p. 719: born in McGrrgor, Iowa, in 1905
• Norman MacLean, p. 765: born in Iowa, in 1902
• James Crumly, p. 822: born in Texas in 1939; MFA from University of Iowa
• Gary Holthaus, p. 1092: born in Iowa in 1932

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Come Away With Me, Norah Jones