Tag: Native Americana

What’s in My Purse?

On By Jennifer Mugrage6 Comments

I got this post idea from snapdragon .

Behold, my purse! Note the Native American-style fabric. I have long had a culture crush on American Indians.

Let’s see what’s in it …

First, the basics: wallet, lip gloss and lipstick, reading glasses, key fob with a little Minnetonka moccasin.

Now, the walking pharmacy: Two kinds of Aleve, two kinds of Claritin, Tums I forgot I had, Kleenex, dental floss picks, hand lotion, and a loose lipstick that is probably twenty years old, but I can’t bring myself to throw away. The Claritin is generally for my kids, not me.

Finally … air fresheners from the oil change place, Band-Aids and antibiotic ointment, tabs for when I simply must flag a passage in a book, business cards in case I need to give one out, and, oh, look! A pair of earrings that needs to go back to my jewelry box.

No, I don’t carry a brush. I have curly hair. One does not brush curly hair; the results are unfortunate.

I occasionally carry a comb in case one of my sons needs it, but they are getting older and starting to comb their own hair before they leave the house.

Other things that might, from time to time, get thrown on top of these: a hand-knitted hat or bonnet, a hair band, clip, or pin that I have taken off, a book that I want to have with me. And of course, the phone.

Blackpilled by Bitten

On By Jennifer Mugrage6 Comments

I have a friend who, shortly after he was married, came down with a mysterious illness. It was causing fatigue, pain, digestive problems, and a bunch of other debilitating symptoms. This guy is young (or was when he first became sick), handsome, and looks fit. He is not in a demographic that you would expect to have trouble being believed, but he had trouble. He’s been accused of faking. He’s been yelled at by a doctor. He and his wife used up all their money, and the illness made it difficult for him to work his job as a builder. Finally, after years of seeking solutions on their own, outside the traditional medical establishment, my friend found a doctor who was willing to look at his blood under a microscope.

Turns out, he has Lyme disease.

It took him fifteen years to get this diagnosis.

As I found out when I read this book, this sort of experience is not unusual for a Lyme patient.

Let’s start with another Lyme testimony

The author, Kris Newby, and her husband were both bitten by Lyme-bearing ticks while on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard in 2002. It didn’t take them 15 years to get a diagnosis … but the disease did ruin their professional lives, use up all their money, and cause them to search through more than ten doctors.

We had brain fog: we couldn’t think, multitask, or remember simple things. The crushing fatigue continued. Our necks felt like they were locked in a vice-grip. Paul’s symptoms were more muscle and joint related. He didn’t have the strength to lift his leg over a bike or press the trigger of a portable drill. Mine were more neurological. I was no longer capable of reading books aloud to my sons before bedtime … I’d run into the side of doorways and had trouble recalling the current month and year. … One day I found myself at a stoplight unable to remember what the red, yellow, and green lights meant.

Rather than admit defeat, Dr. B decided that I was an attention-seeking, hysterical female whose husband was suffering from sympathy pains. He diagnosed us with a “psychosomatic couples thing.”

I spent weeks pulling strings to get an appointment with another infectious disease specialist, this one at Stanford University School of Medicine. Our first few appointments were with a young physician/fellow whom I’ll call Dr. C. …During my final appointment, Dr. C told me, “You’d have more chance of winning the lottery than both of you getting Lyme disease.” Then he strongly recommended that we both seek psychological counseling for the depression we were experiencing.

Dr. D came in at the end of the appointment, handed me a box of tissues, and said, “Sorry, we don’t have the tools to fix what is wrong with you.” Then he dismissed us as patients.

ibid, pp. 85 – 88

As it turned out, most Lyme ticks are also infected with rickettsia, another tick-borne illness that is even harder to detect than Lyme in a blood test: “If you’re not looking for it, you won’t see it.” (231) More in a moment about the reasons for this double infection.

Years later, when Newby had been researching Lyme and rickettsia, she found herself again sitting in front of Dr. D., this time as a journalist rather than a patient.

As I sat in his office, I wondered if he remembered me, but I didn’t mention our previous meeting.

At the end of the meeting, I took a chance and asked him, “Are you screening for any rickettsias?”

He said he didn’t know. The genetic sequencing was being done at Columbia University … Dr. D. opened the study protocol on his laptop and realized there were no rickettsias on the screening list. He said he’d see if rickettsias could be added to the search.

As I got up to leave, he added, “When you came by my clinic before, we weren’t allowed to treat chronic Lyme disease. It was department policy. I’m sorry.”

ibid, pp. 236 – 237

The diagnostic standards: made-up

He was not wrong. The diagnostic standards for Lyme specifically deny that chronic Lyme exists.

In the Infectious Disease Society of America guidelines, chronic Lyme isn’t classified as an ongoing, persistent infection; it’s considered either an autoimmune syndrome or a psychological condition caused by “the aches and pains of living” or “prior traumatic psychological events.” These guidelines were often used by medical insurers to deny treatment, and many of its authors are paid consulting fees to testify as expert witnesses in these insurance cases. In some states, the guideline recommendations take on the force of law, so that Lyme physicians who practice outside them are at risk of losing their medical licenses.

ibid, p. 121

It gets worse. In preparation for her documentary Under Our Skin, the author put in a FOIA request to obtain emails between CDC employees and IDSA guidelines authors. She got the runaround for five years, so they completed the documentary without it. Eventually, she received 3,000 pages of emails which revealed that “a majority of the authors of the 2006 IDSA Lyme diagnosis and treatment guidelines held direct or indirect commercial interests related to Lyme disease … tests or vaccines for which they were patent holders. ” (124) Furthermore, “part of the group’s stated mission … was to run a covert ‘disinformation war ‘ to discredit Lyme patients, physicians, and journalists … ‘loonies’ and ‘quacks.'” (123)

This pill is not just red, it’s black

The Jen of ten years ago would have been very skeptical of this kind of expose. It would have struck me as too similar to Marxist conspiracy theories where all the bad stuff in the world is caused by “capitalists,” which means primarily “big corporations,” but then is applied to anybody who doesn’t want socialism. Journalists, and Hollywood movie directors, love their government/big business conspiracies. It’s one of the very few kinds of story that get them going. Ordinarily, when I am presented with a “corrupt capitalists” narrative, I sympathize with the supposed villains of the piece because I know that the authors of the piece, if they knew my views, would probably villainize me just as readily.

However, when it comes to health, the Jen of ten years ago has seen some stuff since that time. I’ve met people with Lyme (my friend above is the most poignant example, but there have been others). I’ve met people, particularly women, who have had an extraordinarily hard time getting autoimmune type physical complaints taken seriously. I’ve even had that happen, on a small scale, to myself.

Then there have been the scandals. The ADD drugs scandal, the depression drugs scandal, the cross-sex hormones scandal, and the one we don’t talk about, which involved financial incentives for drug companies to discredit victims of their product and doctors who tried alternative treatments almost exactly like the incentives in relation to Lyme described in this book.

So yeah, I’m not that Jen anymore. I do think Newby is a little leftie (maybe a lot leftie), but that’s not why she wrote this book. She wrote it because she got Lyme disease and a series of doctors called her crazy.

My friend with Lyme also has a lot of food allergies and substance sensitivities. During You-Know-What, when one of his kids broke an arm, he was worried about bringing her to the hospital, because they might force You-Know-What on her as a condition of treatment. They got the arm treated without a jab; happy ending. But we live in a relatively red state. This is a horrible position to be in: where you’ve basically lost all trust in the people you need for critical care.

And that’s not even the bad part.

The Bad Part

Most of Bitten is neither about IDSA scandal nor about the author’s personal experience with Lyme. Instead, it follows the life of Willy Burgdorfer, a Swiss-American scientist. Chapter 2 opens with Willy’s triumph when, in 1981, he discovered spirochetes, similar to those that cause African relapsing fever, inside the midgut of a blacklegged deer tick. Burgdorfer became a hero in the medical and scientific communities after he and his team proved that these tick-borne spirochetes were what was causing the mysterious Lyme disease. He received awards and honorary degrees. (13 – 15)

Willy called his discovery “serendipity,” a happy accident.

Shortly before his death, Willy was videotaped saying that he believed that the outbreak of tick-borne diseases that started around Lyme, Connecticut, had been caused by a bioweapons release. [This] could explain why the condition we call Lyme disease is so hard to diagnose and treat–and why the epidemic is spreading so far and so fast, [but] Willy’s confession was vague and fragmented because he was suffering from advanced Parkinson’s disease.

ibid, pp. 15 – 17

The book then backs up and starts with Willy’s childhood in Switzerland and his Ph.D. work there on ticks mailed from East Africa which caused relapsing fever and African swine fever. He does a postdoctoral program at the University of Basel (25), then accepts a research position at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Hamilton, Montana, studying Rocky Mountain spotted fever. More ticks! In fact, the biggest tick collection in North America. “The U.S. Public Health Service, which would later be renamed the National Institutes of Health, paid for the lab by developing, manufacturing, and distributing vaccines for … diseases transmitted from animal or arthropod vectors to man.” (35) As the chapters roll by, we follow Willy as he falls in love with and marries a fellow scientist who is a U.S. citizen. Already working for the U.S. government during the Cold War, he soon found himself involved in programs testing nerve gasses and biological weapons.

America’s first deployable incapacitating biological weapon was an aerosolized mix of a toxin, a virus, and a bacterium, designed to create a prolonged period of incapacitation across a population. The first component … SEB, was a toxic waste product of the bacterium that causes food poisoning. In three to twelve hours, [victims] would come down with chills, headache, muscle pain, coughing, and a fever as high as 106 F. The second component, Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus, would, in one to five days, cause a high fever and weakness and fatigue lasting for weeks. The third component, Q fever, would cause debilitating flulike symptoms for weeks to months … Q fever could be chronic and sometimes even fatal.

When exposed to this mass-produced germ cocktail, theoretically, few people would die, but it could put a significant percentage of a population out of commission, making an invasion easier. And no city infrastructure would be harmed. Later, Henry Kissinger questioned how nonlethal these weapons could be and wryly noted that they would be nonlethal only for someone with two nurses.

ibid, p. 145

In other words, this was a way to bomb civilians without bombing civilians.

In other words, weapons developers were mixing different germs and toxins deliberately and putting them into a form that could be easily spread.

Meanwhile, Willy was force-feeding pathogens to thousands of ticks.

Near the end of his life, Willy was interviewed on video by Tim Grey, an indie filmmaker, who later shared the tape with Newby.

“If there’s an emergence of a brand-new epidemic that has the tenets of all those things that you put together, do you feel responsible for that?”

“Yeah. It sounds like, throughout the thirty-eight years, I may have …”

Finally, after three hours and fourteen minutes, Grey asked him the one question, the only question, he really cared about: “Was the pathogen that you found in the tick that Allen Steere [the Lyme outbreak investigator] gave you the same pathogen or similar, or a generational mutation, of the one you published in the paper … the paper from 1952?”

In response, Willy crossed his arms defensively, took a deep breath, and stared into the camera for forty-three seconds–an eternity. Then he looked away, down and to the right; he appeared to be working through an internal debate. The left side of his mouth briefly curled up, as if he is thinking, “Oh, well.” Then anger flashes across his face. “Yah,” he said, more in German than English.

ibid, pp. 100 – 101

So now you know why I’m blackpilled when it comes to “science” and “medicine” and the NIH. This is why Lyme is going around ruining people’s lives. Because it was designed to.

Black-pilled, but still not a hippie

The book closes, as all hippie books must, with the obligatory chapter blaming Western colonialism.

Big Hole [Montana] was the site of one of the bloodiest conflicts between the U.S. government and the Nez Perce. … U.S. soldiers ambushed them while they were sleeping. The Nez Perce lost eight-nine people, mostly women and children, and the U.S. soldiers lost twenty-nine, with an additional forty injured.

Two months later, Chief Joseph surrendered.

The Native Americans who used to live here understood that they were part of nature, not the overlords of all living things.

When the white settlers arrived in the Bitterroot Valley, they clear-cut the trees around Hamilton for their houses, railroad ties, and mine shafts. This fostered the overgrowth of brush, which led to a proliferation of small mammals, the blood meal hosts for the wood ticks that carry Rickettsia rickettsi. The spotted fever epidemic at the turn of the last century was fueled by this disruption of a previously balanced ecosystem.

ibid, pp. 245 – 247

Now, you know that I have a special interest in American Indians, and feel as much sympathy for them as anybody. And just for the record, I am against the massacre of civilians. That said, it is ridiculous to imply that the settling of North America by Europeans is responsible for the existence of the Lyme epidemic, or of disease in general.

It is a fact of history that people groups move, expand, colonize, and kill each other. And as a result of these people movements, ecology changes, and new diseases spread or become prominent. All this is true. It does not follow that, before any given people movement, the ecosystem was perfectly “balanced,” or that there was no disease and no death. There would have been different causes of death, different diseases, and different wars. The Anasazi, for example, were severely malnourished. The Aztecs were systematically wiping out all the other peoples in central Mexico. Montana was not Eden. It’s a fallen world.

Rather than blaming the U.S. soldiers who killed the Nez Perce for the Lyme epidemic, let’s blame them for what they actually did; namely, killing the Nez Perce. And call me an old stick-in-the-mud, but I feel that the blame for the Lyme epidemic should fall on the Cold War era government bioweapons bureaucrats and scientists who actually infected ticks with Lyme and rickettsia, and apparently allowed them to escape somewhere on Long Island. I feel that Occam’s Razor would lead us to point towards them as the culprits, rather than to something big and vague like colonialism. Just a thought.

And I do blame them. Despite my semi-defense of colonialism as the way of the world, no, I do not think it’s a good idea to create a cocktail of infectious agents that result in chronic, debilitating, hard-to-diagnose disease, and then to put this into a form that is easy to disseminate. You don’t have to be a naive, anti-war hippie to realize that this is a terrible idea that is sure to bring Murphy’s Law crashing down upon your head. In the same way, I am just a humble non-scientist but I don’t think it’s a good idea to create a genetic “vaccine” packaged in a lipid particle that instructs the body to make a disease, for which you cannot control the dosage or where it goes in the human body. And I’m not sure it’s such a good idea to stop testing this concoction halfway through, turn up your nose at long-term testing, bill it to the public as safe and effective, ignore contrary data, suppress alternative treatment methods, and then demonize and gaslight people who report injuries. It just seems that there are a few things that might could go wrong there. Just a thought.

I was Seldom Disappointed with this funny memoir

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

The following review was posted on GoodReads on June 27.

I love Tony Hillerman’s Navajo police procedurals. A few years ago, I got to travel through Navajo country (Dinetah), which was amazing because for fans of Hillerman it’s like getting to visit Middle Earth. At the Navajo Cultural Center gift shop, they displayed many of Hillerman’s books, and this memoir. I picked it up, but it took me several years to get around to reading it.

Once I did, it went fast because this is a page-turner. Hillerman’s writing is understated and vivid (he started his writing career as a journalist).

It turns out that Hillerman is closer to the age of my grandparents. He grew up in the Dust Bowl during the Depression, fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Quite a lot of the book is devoted to his memories of France during WWII. He was then injured (legs, and eyes), spent some time in the hospital, and was sent home with crutches and an eye patch. He discovered that “Military Intelligence is usually neither.” He doesn’t dwell on it, but he had PTSD before that was a word. Nightmares, unable to keep his breakfast down. He recounts, in the 1950s, seeing a grisly car accident that made the police officer on the scene vomit, but Hillerman stood there unaffected.

Hillerman and his wife also adopted a number of children, and raised a big, happy family.

All of this is related with almost no self-pity, and it’s often very funny.

This book contained less about the Navajo than I expected. I guess Hillerman has poured his learning about them into his novels rather than into his memoir. But by the time the book reached his later years, when the Navajo became a big theme, I was not disappointed about this because the book itself had already been such an entertaining ride.

There is an appendix which lists a number of Hillerman’s books and sketches out the process that led to each one. They presented different kinds of problems that will be reassuringly familiar to other authors.

All in all, Tony Hillerman is a total mensch, a good egg, and it’s been an honor to get to know him.

Quote: Take Out the Distinctive Stuff

On By Jennifer Mugrage3 Comments

Next to come to mind was my original literary agent delivering her verdict on my first novel. Don’t want to show it to anyone, she said. Why not? It’s a bad book. Have to think of your reputation as well as mine. Why bad? It falls between the stools, halfway betwixt mainstream and mystery. No way to promote it. And where does the bookseller shelve it? Stick to nonfiction, said my agent. I can sell that for you. How about me rewriting it? Well, if you do, get rid of the Indian stuff.

Tony Hillerman, acclaimed author of the Navajo mysteries, in his memoir, p. 5

White Nails and Sho-Ban Casino Mug

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

Continuing with the “nails and mugs” series, just for fun. It’s these tiny luxuries that make life pleasant.

I got this mug at a local thrift store. I have never gambled at our local casino, but here is its web site.

The Sho-Ban tribal lands are less than an hour’s drive from my house. The Shoshone and Bannock tribes used to have a range that extended farther north, into central Idaho and Montana, as you can verify if you read the book Naya Nuki. They were moved to a smaller place, as has happened to so many tribes. Read this book for a strong argument that American Indians should be treated just like regular American citizens, not as collectivist wards of the state.

Anyway. Although I do not go to the Sho-Ban casino/hotel/event center to gamble, I have been there a number of times. Its banquet halls have hosted our local pro-life banquet for the last several years. Plus, I like to go and eat at their resto (fry bread! bison burgers!) and go to their gift shop. For my last two birthdays, I’ve asked my husband to get me a hand-beaded Sho-Ban item from the gift shop there. These things are not cheap, but boy oh boy, I love them so much. They also smell like woodsmoke when you first buy them.

Here’s a leather barrette beaded in classic Sho-Ban colors.

Apparently, people will come from out of state to play at the Sho-Ban casino. I’ve seen billboards advertising it in Utah, for example. And when my husband and I go and eat at the resto there, the servers assume we are staying at the hotel. I guess we are getting old enough to look the part.

To get from the Sho-Ban event center to our house, you can take the back roads. You can drive through the reservation, over Sage Hill, cross the Snake River, and come out on Highway 39.

It’s a little longer, but it’s prettier and gives a fresh perspective.

Rodeos also take place on the Fort Hall Reservation. I aim to attend one some day. We moved here in 2019, and by the time I realized I ought to attend a rodeo on the rez, they had been cancelled indefinitely because of you-know-what. But I think they are having them again now.

Megalithic Ruins in Montana II: Sage Wall, near Butte

On By Jennifer Mugrage6 Comments

Here I am at Sage Wall, to give you some idea of the scale.

Sage Wall is a possible megalithic site near Butte, Montana. In this post, I am going to thoroughly embarrass my geologist husband by saying that Sage Wall looks manmade to me. But first, how did I come to visit Sage Wall in person?

Getting to Sage Wall

It’s on my bucket list to visit as many archeological sites as a I can, the older the better. Sage Wall was a no-brainer because it’s only a half a day’s drive from my house. It is also a good candidate to visit because looking at photos is kind of ambiguous. To really get a sense of whether it seems manmade or like a natural formation, I felt I had to be there in person.

We drove up into the beautiful Montanan Pioneer Mountains (Idaho has some as well), stayed the night in Butte, and the next day, made our way to Sage Mountain Center, where I had a reservation. We could not have asked for a more beautiful day, weather-wise. Early June in the Butte area is still basically Spring.

Chris and Linda are the property owners at Sage Mountain. About three decades ago, they wanted to move out to the middle of nowhere and build a sustainable house and retreat center. They were not looking for megaliths. Linda stumbled upon the wall on a hike one day, and Chris, who has a background in building, looked at it, said, “Yep. That doesn’t look natural. Well, let’s get back to our projects.” It wasn’t until years later, when they had established a sustainability-themed retreat center and had started to create some hiking trails for their guests, that other people started noticing the wall. Chris and Linda cleared the brush around the wall, roped it off, and had it examined by LIDAR and ground-penetrating radar.

Now, many people are coming to see the wall, seemingly to a point where it is almost becoming a problem. Sage Mountain Center is still on a wind-y, washboard-y dirt road, but now many people, seeking to get away from it all, have built new houses and cabins along that same road. Chris asked us, as we drove out, not to “go too fast past our neighbors. We’re trying not to bother them.” I got the impression that his main desire is still to just run a sustainability B&B in peace, but he’s been saddled with this danged wall.

What Would a Skeptic Say?

I want to give the skeptical geologists their due here. I think what they would say is this: “All these people who are saying Sage Wall is amazing megalithic structure are forgetting one thing: It is right in the middle of the Boulder Batholith! There are big granite rocks everywhere!”

source: formontana.net

They are not wrong. The mountains to the east of Butte, where Sage Mountain Center is located, are strewn with large granite boulders and outcroppings. These tend to fracture into shapes resembling worked blocks of stone.

Here are some pictures I took, on the way in, of natural granite outcroppings so you can see how they normally look and how they tend to fracture:

You can see that the fractures are often horizontal and strikingly block-like.

We also saw some pieces of granite that had very large quartz crystals formed in them, which stuck out like chips in a chocolate chip cookie:

And, just for fun, here’s a balanced rock:

I’m not sure whether this balanced rock is natural, but I’m leaning towards no. I’m thinking it was put there to mark the trail.

Anyway, the skeptics are correct that the presence of big, blocky rocks does not an ancient megalithic structure make. This is part of the reason I wanted to see Sage Wall myself. I did not take any videos of it, because I’m not good with video and didn’t have a script ready. But there are now many videos of Sage Wall online, including drone videos. I’ll try to embed some of them at the end of this post.

Why Sage Wall is Likely Man-Made in my Amateur Opinion

So no, the claim is not that this must be a megalithic structure because it is located somewhere that we would not expect rocks. It is definitely surrounded by rocks. However, it looks distinctly different from the more random rock outcroppings around it.

It is very long, and very straight. (The wall extends past the Sage Mountain Center property, but only their section of it has been cleared.)

Unlike what we see with other fracturing patterns, the wall consist of very big blocks laid out in what appear to be courses. To my (again, amateur) eye, when we see natural fracturing the blocks tend to fracture into smaller pieces where they are exposed.

In the pictures above (and in the one where I’m posing), you can see a hollow lower down in the wall where a block obviously fell out.

At three different places in the exposed section of the wall, there are gaps in the top similar to doors. Chris told us there had been a lot of speculation about these before researchers realized that they were simply places where boulders had fallen out. In fact, you can see the boulders below them, almost completely buried in dirt and pine duff.

On the picture above, you can also see the remains of a triangular shape. The left side of the triangle is made with shaped blocks, and the right side is incised into the megalith. The triangle happens to frame the gap where a block fell out.

According to Chris, the geophysicist who examined the wall with ground-penetrating radar found that it goes down into the ground about another 20 feet. At the bottom was something that reflected the radar, as it might be a floor or stone foundation.

All of this research is shortly to be posted on the wall’s website, here or possibly here.

Parallel to the wall are the fallen remains of what appears to be another wall. You can see that it is “fractured” in the same way, and these other blocks also have some of the nub and cup features that we’ll talk about below.

Here’s a bit of the second wall, seen end-on.

Behind the Wall

Here’ a view behind the more intact wall. Chris and Linda have installed a rope that allows visitors to climb up behind the wall. As you can see, the wall is not just part of a cliffside, but it does have earth and rocks filled in behind, either as terraces/a retaining wall, or the ravages of time.

From behind the wall, we look out through a gap left by a fallen stone across the avenue at the remains of the second wall.

Getting close to the top of the wall allows us to see what might be nubs and cups.

Nubs and Cups

Stone nubs and cups (not necessarily corresponding to each other) are sometimes features of megalithic architecture in other parts of the world.

“Cup and ring” markings are apparently found all over the world, but especially in Northern Europe. Here are two articles about them.

Stone nubs or knobs are also found, especially in Incan or pre-Incan megalithic architecture.

Here are some nubs found on top of the intact wall.

They are not the same as the pieces of quartz sticking out of the natural stone that we photographed earlier.

Because the wall is so weathered, some of them are not certain.

Note the possible incised lines above this last nub.

Here are some other things we saw on the back of the wall:

Incised straight line

Suspiciously square fracture line

On the fallen wall as well, we found some things that look like nubs, and some possible cups. As a nod to the skeptics, yes, these “cups” do look like they could have been caused by water erosion. This would be especially true if they were found under a waterfall or a persistent drip, which they are not, as far as I can see. Some of them are also suspiciously round.

Very round “cup” in which someone has placed some fresh lichen

Some also have very straight lines incised near them. My son suggested they could be a water feature.

Looks like a cup with a spout

False Nub Alarm? Or Another Part of the Complex?

As we hiked away from Sage Wall, I took care to photograph natural rock formations for comparison. Not very far from the walls, I saw something that also looked like nubs.

Did this mean that such nubs are a natural feature of the way granite weathers? Or could this be another part of the same complex as the wall? The formation on which I spotted these nubs certainly looks like the remains of a constructed passage.

A Post-Flood Megalithic Culture

After I left Sage Wall, my husband asked, humoring me, what I thought its purpose had been. My answer is that I have no idea. It is way too old, weathered, and partially buried for me to speculate. (This does not bother Julie Ryder over at Montana Megaliths, so if you want to see some people speculate very confidently, you can visit there.)

What I can say is that, granted this is not a natural formation, it most reminds me of Sacsahuayman and other sites in Peru. You have the same dry stone construction with megalithic blocks that are shaped, but are not in uniform sizes or in a regular pattern. And, of course, you have the nubs. As for scale, it appears that if Sage Wall were excavated down to its foundation, it would be thirty or forty feet high.

Another similarity is that both Sage Wall and the Incan or pre-Incan complexes are built at very high elevations (the Continental Divide runs near Butte).

This suggests to me that they partake of the same culture area.

Sage Wall, of course, has been abandoned much longer than any of the impressive Incan complexes, some of which Europeans got to witness still in use. Consequently, it’s much more weathered, run down, and filled in. But it looks like the same sort of thing.

So, it appears that Sage Wall and any other structures we might find in association with it were built by a group of people who knew how to build with megaliths, and who then had to abandon this site for some reason. It was before recorded history in North America, but that doesn’t mean it was before recorded history was happening elsewhere. Then, they or their descendants or people who partook of the same megalithic culture, moved on towards South America and continued their building there.

I believe there is plenty of evidence–not from Sage Wall, but from other sources–that human dispersion happened very quickly after the Flood, and that when people spread out, they took a megalithic culture with them. Dolmens, pyramids, cities, and inexplicable megaliths have been discovered all over the world. In many cases, as with the Bosnian pyramids, they have been abandoned for so long that they are not immediately recognizable as the work of human hands. You have to know what you are looking at before you can see it. The Bosnian pyramids, first thought to be extremely regular hills, were confirmed as artifacts only when a team dug into them and found tunnels. It looks like something similar happened with Sage Wall.

Immediately after the Flood, the earth would have entered an Ice Age. The climate was in a tailspin: temperatures were low, precipitation at an all-time high. Much of that precipitation quickly got locked up in glaciers. Sea levels fell around the newly configured continents. There were land bridges all over: in Beringia, in Doggerland, in Sundaland. People took advantage of all this newly revealed, very humid land and scattered. But the Ice Age was short, and as glaciers melted, there were sudden catastrophic local floods. People had to abandon their sites. Many of their cities, camps, and settlements are now hidden under water along our coasts. In some cases, such as Gobeklitepe and the Vinca cities, they burned, buried, or otherwise destroyed their sites before moving on. Some of these sites might have been built very quickly and inhabited for only a short time before they were abandoned. Other things being equal, archaeologists tend to overestimate how long it took to build something, and how long ago it appeared. But even very recent sites can be quite mysterious. They have had trouble re-constructing Woodstock, for example.

How Did They Build It?

I don’t know. Obviously they were purty smart. Probably an argument is going to be made that Sage Wall must be a natural formation because “we know” that people in the Stone Age didn’t have the ability to make things like this, despite constant evidence being discovered to the contrary. Or they will argue that “we know” that there were no advanced civilizations in North America, despite Sage Wall itself. Such arguments tend to be self-re-enforcing.

I do know that we do not, currently, have the ability to build with megaliths … at least, not so easily that we consider them our first choice in building material. We might make a monument or a gravestone, but we wouldn’t attempt to build an entire house or city out of megaliths. The effort would just not be worth it. This suggests that the ancients may have had ways that were easier than our current methods.

It is worth noting that there is a well-established oral tradition of giants living in North America. There have also been giant skeletons discovered. In Peru, meanwhile, there is the tradition of the Viracochas, bearded, godlike culture-bringers. No, I’m not suggesting aliens. I do think we should take a closer look at the worldwide oral traditions of apocalypses, floods, gods, and giants, and that we should pay attention to myths that suggest that civilizations were “advanced” right from the beginning. If you want to dig into this more than you already have (and if you are reading this, I assume you already have!), please feel free to look at my page The Research Behind the Books for a suggested reading list.

Embedded YouTube Video about Sage Wall

The Strange Land will be 99 cents on Kindle this Saturday

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

Lord willing an’ the creek don’t rise.

I agreed with onlinebookclub.org to make TSL Book of the Day on June 14, but only on the condition that it was free on Kindle. As of drafting this post, I’m still communicating with my publisher to make the durn thing free. As John Piper might say, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals. I’m certainly not. But, with plenty of prayer, I trust that TSL will be free on this Saturday and will of course, with plenty of prayer, rocket into the stratosphere due to large numbers of positive reviews.

Edit: 99 cents was the best I could do. I have made arrangements with onlinebookclub. It will be 99 cents.

The Strange Land is a family saga that takes place in Beringia, the vast plain that used to exist where the Bering Strait now is, in approximately 10,000 B.C. Please go out and get it, if that’s just what you were looking for in your summer reading! Thanks in advance.

A Tale of Two Lost Boys: Perry Smith vs. Ikash son of Endu

On By Jennifer Mugrage6 Comments

Left to right: Dick Hickcock and Perry Smith, killers of the Clutter family; In Cold Blood by Truman Capote; The Strange Land by Jennifer Mugrage; “Don’t Eat My Family” by Jennifer Mugrage.

I hope this image gallery shows up right. I’ve never tried to make one before.

It’s unfortunate that I couldn’t find an image of either Perry or Ikash alone, but in some ways it’s fitting that the image I found for Perry features a mugshot and the image of Ikash shows him protecting his family.

This post will contain spoilers for The Strange Land, which has been out since 2021, and In Cold Blood, which has been out since 1966. This will be a rambling comparison between two character studies. Come along if you like that sort of thing.

It may seem — and O.K., it is — pretentious to compare a book of my own to Truman Capote’s masterpiece. My reasons for comparing the two characters will become clear, but to belabor the obvious, I am not comparing myself to Capote as a writer. It’s my blog, so I can be a little bit pretentious if I want, right? Shall we?

What the two lost boys have in common

The character of Perry Smith has a great deal in common, on a superficial level, with Ikash, the focus of my coming-of-age story The Strange Land. The similarities were strong enough to disturb me when I read Capote’s classic. After all, Perry drifts through the world aimlessly and then commits a senseless murder, whereas Ikash remains kind and courageous and goes on to become the shaman of his people. Perry is real, Ikash is fictional. Does this mean that I had fatally romanticized my character Ikash, a person who would not be nearly so noble in real life?

I do have a tendency to romanticize the sensitive, artistic guys, and ladies, if you share this tendency, it is something you need to watch. Just because a guy is not harsh, does not necessarily mean he is kind. As Jordan Peterson has said, “If you think strong men do a lot of damage, wait ’til you see the damage weak men will do!”

To start at the most superficial level, Smith and Ikash kind of look alike. Both are short and stocky (Smith had underdeveloped legs and feet), with wide faces, fine features, and dark eyes and hair. In fact, both are American Indian, though they are so far removed in time that this fact has no relevance for anything except their appearance. Smith’s father was John “Tex” Smith, an Irishman, and his mother was Florence Buckskin, a Cherokee. Ikash is a fictional character but was supposed to come from a tribe that was ancestral to the American Indians.

Both grew up in rough circumstances and eventually suffered the breakup of their families. Smith’s parents were both drunks. His mother left his father when he was small, and he turned to crime, lived in a series of orphanages, then on the Alaskan frontier with his father as a teenager. He eventually joined the Navy, then proceeded to drift from friend’s house to friend’s house to park bench to jail, not really having a place to go home to. His shrimpy stature was probably from malnutrition as a young child.

Ikash (again, fictional) had it slightly better. He did not suffer from hunger, because the tribe’s Beringian environment provided for them abundantly. However, his father was abusive to mother, leading eventually to her suicide, and periodically to his sons as well. After his mother’s suicide, Ikash’s family essentially broke up, and he and his brother lived together as bachelors. He was a bit of a pariah in the tribe because of his family’s reputation.

Both men are quiet, sensitive types. Both play the guitar (lute, in Ikash’s case) and sing. Both think of themselves as spiritual. In Perry’s case, he has occasional premonitions, visions, and, as he gets more beat up by the world, what appear to be dissociative episodes.

“I could give you a hundred examples. I don’t care if you believe me or not. For instance, right before I had my motorcycle accident I saw the whole thing happen: saw it in my mind–the rain, the skid tracks, me lying there bleeding and my legs broken. That’s what I’ve got now. A premonition.”

… “About that premonition stuff. Tell me this: If you were so damn sure you were gonna crack up, why didn’t you call it quits? It wouldn’t have happened if you’d stayed off your bike–right?”

That was a riddle that Perry had pondered. He felt he’d solved it, but the solution, while simple, was also somewhat hazy: “No. Because once a thing is set to happen, all you can do is hope it won’t. Or will–depending. As long as you live, there’s always something waiting, and even if it’s bad, and you know it’s bad, what can you do? You can’t stop living. Like my dream. Since I was a kid, I’ve had this same dream … What it comes down to is, [in my dream] I want the diamonds more than I’m afraid of the snake. So I go to pick one, I have the diamond in my hand, I’m pulling at it, when the snake lands on top of me… he starts to swallow me. Feet first. Like going down in quicksand.”

Perry hesitated. He could not help noticing that Dick was uninterested in his dream.

Dick said, “So? The snake swallows you? Or what?”

“Never mind. It’s not important.” (But it was! The finale was of great importance, a source of private joy. [It was a] towering bird, the yellow “sort of parrot” … which had first flown into his dreams when he was seven years old, a hated, hating half-breed child living in the California orphanage run by nuns–shrouded disciplinarians who whipped him for wetting his bed. It was after one of these beatings, one he could never forget, that the parrot appeared, arrived while he slept, a bird “taller than Jesus, yellow like a sunflower,” a warrior-angel who blinded the nuns with its beak, fed upon their eyes, slaughtered them as they “pleaded for mercy,” then so gently lifted him, enfolded him, winged him away to “paradise.”

As the years went by, the particular torments from which the bird delivered him altered, but the parrot remained, a hovering avenger.

pp. 90, 92 – 93

Perry has no outlet for his artistic nature and believes that no one appreciates his depth and intelligence.

Ikash, for his part, wants to have visions like his cousin Ki-Ki who is the tribal shaman, and eventually does have visions, but then worries that they are endangering his loved ones.

Ikash can spend a lot of time alone, thinking or praying. Smith travels with a box full of books, papers, maps, and magazines, even when homeless, which is a habit that endeared him to me before I heard more details about the murder he committed.

Ikash, as has been mentioned, moves into a protective role towards members of his tribe. Smith, despite being an unstable character in some other ways, several times protects girls and young women from the predations of his partner in crime, Dick Hickcock.

he had “no respect for people who can’t control themselves sexually,” especially when the lack of control involved what he called “pervertiness”–“bothering kids,” “queer stuff,” rape. And he had thought he had made his views obvious to Dick; indeed, hadn’t they almost had a fist fight when quite recently he had prevented Dick from raping a terrified young girl?

page 202

Finally, another burden these two young men have in common is chronic, or recurring, pain. Smith’s legs were smashed up in his motorcycle crash and appear not to have healed properly. There’s a memorable scene in In Cold Blood where the two criminals, on the way to their heist, stop at a gas station. Perry goes into the bathroom and stays in there for so long that both Dick and the gas station attendant are filled with disgust and impatience. In fact, Perry is first sitting on the toilet, then trying to rise to a standing position, with his legs hurting so badly that he’s holding onto the sink, sweating, and shaking. Ikash has periodic recurring pain from some old broken bones (collarbone, ribs), and also suffers periodic “phantom” pains in other parts of his body, that while short-lived, are severe enough to be temporarily debilitating. Ikash believes that these episodes represent instances of his “bearing” the actual sufferings of other members of his tribe, for them. They can also be understood as the lingering effects of trauma and grief, stored in the body. As can Smith’s health problems.

So what accounts for the different outcomes between these two lost boys?

Easy, you might say. You made Ikash up, so you can make him turn out however you like. Perry Smith lived in the real world, where there are no happy endings.

Well, O.K. I did not write a nihilistic book where characters are trapped by their abusive pasts, character flaws, and poor decisions by themselves and others, because I don’t believe that the world is, ultimately, a nihilistic place. But if you’re going to write hope into a book, it has to come from somewhere. It can’t be deus ex machina hope; it has to be Deus ex caelo, or should I say credo in unum Deum, Patrem Omnipotentem, Factorem caeli et terrae.

Some reviewers of my book said they found the scenes of domestic abuse difficult to read. Actually, I kept them as minimal as I could and still convey the problem, and there is much that I spared Ikash, as can be seen when we compare him to Perry Smith, who had it much worse.

Smith was the youngest in his family, so he was very small when things got chaotic between his mother and father. His mother would bring strange men home and fornicate with them in view of the children, something Ikash’s mother Sari definitely would not do. One of these episodes led to a fight “in which a bullwhip, hot water, and gas lamp were used as weapons.” After the breakup of the family, Perry ended up in orphanages where the nuns would shame and beat him for bedwetting. Ikash was also a bedwetter, as is not uncommon among little boys. Perry Smith had even more reason for it given the instability in his home. This problem continued into adulthood. He believed that his kidneys had been ruined by a childhood diet of bread dipped in sweetened condensed milk, which during the Smith family’s nomadic days was often all they had for supper.

Ikash’s family, though unhappy, remained intact until he was fifteen.

When Smith joined the Merchant Marine, Capote strongly implies that he had another horrible experience which Ikash escaped.

“But I never would have joined [the Merchant Marine] if I’d known what I was going up against,” Perry once said. “I never minded the work, and I liked being a sailor–seaports, and all that. But the queens on the ship wouldn’t leave me alone. A sixteen-year-old kid, and a small kid. I could handle myself, sure. But a lot of queens aren’t effeminate, you know. Hell, I’ve known queens could toss a pool table out a window. And the piano after it. Those kind of girls, they can give you an evil time, especially when there’s a couple of them, they get together and gang up on you, and you’re just a kid. It can make you practically want to kill yourself.”

pp. 133 – 134

Apparently, Smith was the victim of homosexual predators while he was at sea. This kind of violation, arguably the ultimate in horror, is not something I’ve ever felt up to subjecting my characters to. It is, sadly, quite common in the world (especially the ancient world), and I am not saying it’s something that a person cannot come back from. The grace of God is enough to redeem and restore anyone, no matter what they have been through (see The Sparrow.) But I have never had the slightest ability nor desire to put my male characters through this. Real life, on the other hand, is not so merciful.

Ultimately, though, it’s not Perry’s additional bad experiences that left his character to turn sour; instead, it’s relationships that he lacked and Ikash had.

Like Perry, Ikash’s immediate family was not great. His father and his older brothers bullied him. Unlike Perry, Ikash lived in a tribal situation where there were, close at hand, uncles and aunts, cousins, and a grandmother. This kind of situation is not automatically good, of course; tribes can be hotbeds of gossip and social pressure. And indeed, Ikash’s early experiences do cause him to mistrust older relatives who might otherwise be helpful to him. But he is fortunate to have quite a number of kind people in his life who wish to aid him and his mother. Grandmother Zillah does her best to provide breaks for Sari; cousin Ki-Ki mentors Ikash, and a model of a healthy marriage is provided by his father’s sister Ninna and her husband. Even with all these good helpers and models, it is barely enough.

Perry does not seem to have had anything like this kind of potentially beneficial community. His father and mother were itinerant, having met on the rodeo circuit. They don’t seem to live near any extended family. Perry does form connections with friends who he believes understand him, but because of his vagrant lifestyle, the connections are not lasting. At one point, he travels across the entire United States hoping to stay with an old Army buddy, only to find to his dismay that the buddy has moved and left no forwarding address. These kinds of near misses are the story of Perry Smith’s life. What might be called his last friend, Dick Hickock, is a cellmate who wants to use him to pull off a heist, and ultimately puts him in a situation that leads to the moral ruination, and then the death, of both of them. Dick does not understand Perry, nor does he have any concern for the best interests of Perry, the Clutter family–or anyone but himself.

In a counterintuitive dynamic, Perry’s very isolation tends to make him not only lonely, but also increasingly conceited. Having no long-term relationships means there is no check on his delusions. With no one to praise, appreciate and love him properly, there is also no one whose critiques he can take to heart. He’s left to his own assessment of himself, and not able to develop strength of character or clarity of mind. Ultimately, when he cuts Mr. Clutter’s throat, he does it without intending to. “I didn’t want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.” (p. 244)

Ikash, on the other hand, is surrounded by judgmental relatives who have known him since he was small, who can love on, scold, praise, and criticize him.

Without Hope and Without God in the World

At fourteen, Ikash begs his older cousin Ki-Ki, the tribal shaman, to teach him how to have a vision.

Ki-Ki, the shaman, seemed to be in love with the world and with the many specific things in it. He was in love with his dogs, for example, with the horses, with the wild animals, in love with his wife, in love with God. It was this quality that drew Ikash to him. Ikash would love to approach the world like that. But he had never felt such love for anything, except when it was stirred in him for a few moments by some story or song of Ki-Ki’s. He longed to live in the world of the stories, but he had never been able to manufacture such love inside himself.

p. 93

Ki-Ki is uncertain this will work, or that is even viable (as he says, “visions are dangerous“), but he is willing to give it a try.

They sat, cross-legged, each with his back against a tree. Upstream, there was a view of the grey top of a mountain.

The atmosphere seemed somewhat lacking to Ikash. He looked at his older cousin and muttered, “Aren’t you going to beat a drum or something?”

Ki-Ki grinned whitely. “Then you wouldn’t be sure it was real,” he said. “Besides, God is everywhere. We need no drum to talk to God.”

As soon as he said the word “God” for the second time, a presence was felt in the gully. It was so palpable that Ikash actually gasped.

Ki-Ki apparently felt it too, for he reached out a large, hard hand and grasped Ikash firmly around the wrist as if to keep him from being swept away.

Immediately Ikash knew what his cousin had meant about danger that was not a physical danger. He felt no threat, nor any hostility, such as he had often felt from his father. But the presence was overwhelming, crowding, as of something too huge for the valley to contain.

This was not the sort of vision he had hoped for.

He heard Ki-Ki speak. “It’s too much for him,” he said, and for a second it was as if some great face had turned its terrible eyes towards Ikash … and then, oh thank goodness, the presence was gone suddenly.

pp. 100 – 102

In other words, Ki-Ki, without really trying to, functions as an intermediary to introduce Ikash to God. Later, when quite a few other tragedies have happened and Ki-Ki has been taken from Ikash, the young man has a vision of his own that he can only describe as “a father.”

“A father?” [his brother] Sha blinked, completely thrown.

“A good father.” Ikash was staring earnestly at his brother, as if willing him to grasp this difficult concept. “It gave me a sense of a really good father, the kind we’ve always wanted but never known.”

“What did it look like?” asked [cousin] Mut. He was picturing a bigger, two-eyed version of his own father.

“I told you, it wasn’t visual. I didn’t see anything except the cloud. But I felt the Father. … We have a father.” He made a slight sweeping gesture with his hand that took in himself and, somehow, the entire camp as well. “That’s what makes us able to bear the loss of all the others.”

pp. 512 – 514

A perceptive reader has pointed out that the definition of a horror story is all the bad stuff in the world that happens, minus God. God is what keeps Ikash’s story from remaining one of unremitting horror. This was the horror–the horror of other people’s sins against him, the horror of a complete lack of adequate love, the horror of his own increasingly weak mind, and eventually, his own grievous sins against others–that Perry Smith lived.

Before Smith and Hickock committed their planned robbery, to which Hickock insisted they leave “no witnesses,” they stopped by a Catholic hospital. Perry Smith knew that nuns were guaranteed to have black nylons, and he wanted Hickock to obtain some so the two could cover their faces when they went to rob the Clutter family. Perhaps, if the two had managed to do this, they would not have ended up killing the Clutters. Dick, however, came out of the hospital without having tried to get any nylons (“it was a pukey idea”). Perry was not willing to go in. He believed that nuns were bad luck.

After Smith and Hickock’s arrest, Perry Smith was kept in a cell in the home of the town undersheriff and his wife, a cell that until then had been reserved for female prisoners. (The reason was a desire to keep the two culprits separated.) Sherriff and Mrs. Meier were “deeply Catholic.”

Mrs. Meier had been rebuffed by Perry when she had suggested a consultation with Father Goubeaux, a local priest. (Perry said, “Priests and nuns have had their chance with me. I’m still wearing the scars to prove it.”)

pp. 288 – 289

Now, of course, “nuns and priests” are not necessarily the only way to find out about the redemption offered to us by the God who gives life to the dead, and calls things that are not as though they were. They might not even be the best way. My only point is that unfortunately, for Perry Smith, the only people in his life whom he associated with God, were also people who were abusive to him. He never had a chance to be introduced to the concept of God by anyone he loved and trusted. This is the opposite of the case with Ikash.

Later, in jail, Perry did make friends with a former pastor, now a fellow inmate, who was mystical and simpatico with Perry. This man, however, seemed to be a bit of an apostate, and by that time Smith had already hardened against the whole idea of God. God, certainly, can overcome stories this sad and sadder, but in this case, for whatever reason, He didn’t.

We don’t know whether Perry Smith had a deathbed conversion in the last few seconds before being hung, but tragically, from all appearances, it doesn’t appear so. Neither did Dick Hickcock. That, plus the apparent senselessness of the fate of the Clutters, is what makes In Cold Blood such a tragedy. It underlines how much Smith and Hickock–and indeed all of us–need Jesus, and that is what makes this unedifying event such an appropriate topic for this Easter season.

In Cold Blood made my Blood Run Cold

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

Well, I will be thinking about this one for a long time.

On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues. As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy.

from the back of the book

The first thing to know about In Cold Blood that it’s incredibly well-written. Each paragraph is a work of art. Truly. It’s not ornate, which is why I don’t say “each sentence,” but it’s simply and eloquently told.

The book reads like a novel. It goes in chronological order – roughly – but it also slips through time seamlessly, like a good novel should, filling in glimpses of each character’s backstory just when it is needed, and in just the right dosage, no more. The details of the crime itself aren’t revealed until the last quarter of the book, though before Part II of the narrative, the crime has already taken place.

The other thing about this book is that it is really, really tragic. And not just because a family of four were shot in their beds. Just about every conceivable tragedy happens to someone, somewhere in this book. The only ameliorating thing I can say about it is that no indecent assault happens, as it were, “on camera.” We are given to understand that people have experienced it, but we have to read between the lines. The author uses the smallest effective dose.

The thing I really can’t forgive, though, is the way that Capote made me care about the murderer … one of them, that is. Dick Hickock is what today we would call a sociopath (the psychiatrist’s diagnosis is “severe character disorder”). I don’t give two figs for him, except that I wish he wasn’t crashing around the world, ruining everybody’s lives. The other one, though, is more complicated.

Perry Smith (“very nearly a paranoid schizophrenic” according to the doctor) is basically a lost man-child. He is “sensitive,” prescient, plays the guitar, and cherishes a dream, left over from boyhood, of finding sunken treasure. He “has a brilliant mind” (his words) and resents that he never got more than a third-grade education. (He got his high school equivalence during one of his stints in jail.) Perry travels with a cardboard suitcase full of books, journals, maps, and adventure magazines.

… his personal dictionary, a non-alphabetically listed miscellany of words he believed “beautiful” or “useful,” or at least “worth memorizing.” (Sample page: “Thanatoid = deathlike; Omnilingual = versed in languages; Amerce = punishment, amount fixed by court; Nescient = ignorance; Facinorous = atrociously wicked; Hagiophobia = a morbid fear of holy places & things; Lapidicolous = living under stones, as certain blind beetles; Dyspathy = lack of sympathy, fellow feeling; Psiloper = a fellow who fain would pass as a philosopher; Omophagia = eating raw flesh, the rite of some savage tribes; Depredate = to pillage, rob, and prey upon; Aphrodisiac = a drug or the like which excites sexual desire; Megalodactylous = having abnormally large fingers; Myrtophobia = fear of night and darkness.”)

page 146

This is a remarkable list, especially if it was truly taken from Perry Smith’s papers. It is remarkable for the way that every single entry seems to have some special relevance to Perry. Taken together, they almost constitute his biography as it is starting to emerge from the book at this point.

So, what makes him dangerous? Perry has dissociative tendencies, and a substratum of rage that he’s not even aware of. He thinks of himself as a genius with spiritual depths whom nobody appreciates. His is the rage that comes from being inadequately parented. Perry came from an unstable home and spent time in orphanages, where (to take just a sample incident) the nuns would beat and humiliate him for wetting the bed. He’s never had a good mother or father, and has roamed the world trying to find a home. All this deprivation has made him weak, and so he is dangerous in the way that weak, conceited men are dangerous. He is too weak to control his own actions when it matters.

Dad snatched a biscuit out of my hand, and said I ate too much, what a greedy, selfish bastard I was, and why didn’t I get out, he didn’t want me there no more. He carried on like that till I couldn’t stand it. My hands got hold of his throat. My hands–but I couldn’t control them. They wanted to choke him to death.

page 136

Perry also suffers chronic pain. A motorcycle accident left his legs never the same again, and the pain in his legs (and head) tends to flare up when he gets emotionally disturbed, making it even harder for him to concentrate.

I started feeling the tragedy within a page of meeting Perry. The first thing the book tells us is that it’s his dream to learn to skin dive and find buried treasure, and I had a feeling that dream was never going to come to pass. Damn you, Truman Capote!

I may do a whole separate post about Perry as a character, but there’s one more thing I will say about this book. Both Perry and Dick are types of people that you meet very often today. Perry’s history, in particular, is mirrored by many, many others. In fact, his wild, nearly fatherless youth of knocking about the American West reminds me very much of the family history of some of my own cowboy relatives.

Both murderers are treated by the psychiatrist who is called to write reports about them as if they are uniquely mentally ill individuals. Perhaps at the time they were (or perhaps the fact that they had already committed murder made them seem more egregious), but as I look at our society nowadays, their mental landscapes seem more like the rule than the exception. Do with that what you will.

Read this book if you don’t cry easily and want to enjoy 343 pages of the most amazing writing. But just be aware of what you are getting into.

Megalithic Ruins in Montana

On By Jennifer Mugrage2 Comments

Deep in Montana’s remote wilderness lies the Sage Wall, a stunning megalithic structure composed of massive granite blocks intricately stacked in a straight line extending 275 feet (84 meters). Reaching up to 25 feet (8 meters) high, with some blocks weighing 91 tons, it is believed that the wall continues an additional 15 feet underground. This unique formation appears to have precise, interlocking stones resembling ancient masonry found worldwide.

Despite its remarkable features, the Sage Wall remained hidden for centuries, covered by dense foliage on private land owned by Christopher Borton and Linda Welsh. Its discovery occurred when the landowners cleared their heavily forested property, revealing the wall and sparking scientific interest.

These paragraphs are taken from the article linked below:

Massive Stone Wall, Believed By Some To Be An Ancient Megastructure, Discovered in Montana, USA

It turns out that I have been sitting practically on the doorstep of a potential bucket list item!

If I had money and could travel, my destinations would be all the remarkable archeological sites in the world, particularly the ones that seem to partake of what appears to have been a worldwide megalithic culture. As I have pointed out before on this very blog, new examples of these are discovered almost yearly. Anyway, this site in Montana is one that I could actually be in a position to check out.

There are other sites in Montana that some believe are intentionally erected dolmens, and others believe are natural rock formations. Sage Wall, if it really is as it appears in the picture above, looks suspiciously manmade and highly similar to sites such as Sacsayhuaman in Peru. However, I realize that anyone who takes it as a given that there was never an ancient megalithic culture in North America will argue that Sage Wall is just a natural formation, and that rock does sometimes tend to fracture this way, as demonstrated by formations like Sage Wall.

The best way to deal with this is to see it in person.

Here’s how you do that:

Sage Wall and Trails