"A woman in a Third Avenue West apartment was reported trying to catch bugs that weren’t there...."

Time to get back to the old Inter Lake police blotter news:

An Appleway Drive boy reported his mother was drunk and trying to kick him out. She told officers she was kicking him out due to his drinking and drug activity....

An officer assisted a man crawling in the middle of East First Street....

The Columbia Falls Police Department received a report from a confused First Avenue West North resident who said a man tried to come into the house and give the resident a $1,000 ticket, but didn’t say what kind. The resident told the man “I’m not interested” and shut the door.

Babb, Montana... we came for the pie — huckleberry pie.

(It's not just pie: 2 Sisters.)

Does a landlord have an ethical obligation to disclose that the previous tenant died in the apartment you're thinking of renting?

The NYT ethicist thinks the obligation is "seemingly obvious" or even "compulsory." He's responding to somebody who wasn't informed before signing the lease and now finds it "unsettling and slightly disturbing" to know that the previous tenant died. Of an overdose. Not a murder, just an overdose. A forgotten man slipped away through the portal to the beyond that exists within that rental unit... and everywhere else on the face of the earth.

This last week, we've been driving quite a distance across that face. Maybe an eyelid's expanse of earth-face. Much of the eyelid has been Montana, where the Montana American Legion has been carrying out its White Cross Highway Fatality Marker Program since 1953.

The unique idea of marking fatal traffic accident sites with a white cross was the brain child of Floyd Eaheart, a member of the American Legion Hellgate Post #27, Missoula, Montana; after six lives were lost in the Missoula area over the 1952 Labor Day Holiday. The safety program started out as a county and later district project for the Missoula American Legion Post. However, the idea was so good that it was soon adopted as a statewide program. The Montana Highway Commission (now Department of Transportation) approved the program in January 1953, with the blessing of the then 13th governor of Montana, J. Hugo Aronson (the Galloping Swede)....

The program is intended as a highway safety, not a memorial program.  Still, many families place wreaths or other decorations on the white crosses, which may be considered a memorial to a loved one lost in an accident.  Obstruction of the white cross with these decorations defeats the purpose of the safety program.  

You appropriate an individual's death for your message of traffic safety, with the state's approval, and you don't like when the people who loved that person pile on a message of their own. Either it's a speech forum, where viewpoint discrimination is banned or it's the state's own speech, and it's an Establishment Clause violation (unless the courts say it's not).

The white crosses serve as a public service message, reminding drivers to “Please Drive Carefully.”  They are a sobering reminder of a fatal traffic accident, a place where a human being lost his/her life....

Not all highway fatalities are marked.  Due to a federal ruling, white crosses are not allowed along interstate highways.

Here's some discussion of the case. I don't see what the interstate has to do with it. The Constitution applies off the off ramp. But the crosses are all over the place in Montana, reminding us where people have died. How unsettled the skittish NYT reader might feel, driving in Montana, knowing about all that death. Or perhaps it's soothing to see so few doorways to oblivion have opened up in the years since 1953. Half a century has gone by and yet there are long spaces on the road that have never swallowed a human being. Often you can traverse an entire eyelash on the face of the earth without seeing a white cross.

Seeing the white crosses, I wonder about the places where there has been death. What if you could — everywhere — see who (and what) has ever died on that spot. How covered with death would the earth be? I'm blogging in the breakfast room of a Holiday Inn Express in Bismarck, North Dakota. Am I sitting on a dinosaur carcass?

On the Going-to-the-Sun Road...

... it's truly amazing (and terrifying!):



We were in Glacier National Park. Keep your eyes peeled for the glacier cameo.

"Two young girls were driven home after being reported for stacking 50 rocks on railroad tracks."

"A railroad representative wanted the girls charged with trespassing."

It's the law enforcement roundup from the interlake region of Montana.

A woman called, requesting to speak with a particular deputy to ask him why he had left her son, “as sick as he was,” lying in the ditch earlier that day....

Several residents near the fairgrounds called to complain that the music was too loud, drowning out their televisions and keeping their children awake.

A man was removed from a supermarket on Third Avenue East North after he picked up several food items and went to the bathroom to eat them.

A man so drunk he did not know if he was a guest was reported vomiting in the parking lot in front of a hotel on U.S. 2 West....

A Memory Lane resident received a call from an unidentified person who called the resident a “Hitler” and told the resident to “meet me at Whitefish bank tomorrow, and if you don’t, I will come to your house and kill you.”...

An Eighth Street West resident cornered a badger in their backyard. The resident was advised to leave it alone.

A man was given a ride home after being found sitting in a ditch near the intersection of Northwest Lane and Three Mile Drive.

So the big question is: When does sitting in a ditch turn the police into your taxi service? No questions on the topic of badgers: Leave them alone!

Cherries & Hucks.

Today, near Hungry Horse, Montana.

At the Continental Divide...

... you can all get together.

"These are our mountains... I look at what we have, and I think, why ruin it over an oil rig?"

The NYT quotes Cheryl Little Dog — "a recently elected member of the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council, the reservation’s governing body" — in an article about the decision of the Blackfeet Indians allowing oil drilling on their 1.5-million-acre reservation, which is within view of Glacier National Park. Fracking has made drilling in this area economically practicable, and the tribal leaders — as the NYT puts it — think "oil wealth could be more lucrative and reliable than any casino — a resource whose royalties could transform a reservation scarred by poverty and alcoholism."

Those are the tribal leaders, but:

To find the opposing view, one needs only to drive five miles west from Browning, past the casino, heading straight toward the mountains, and pull off at the red gate on the right. There, on a recent summer afternoon, over mugs of horsemint tea, Pauline Matt and a handful of Blackfeet women were trying to find a way to persuade the tribal leaders to stop the drilling.

“It threatens everything we are as Blackfeet,” she said...

“You see this butterfly, you hear those birds?” asked Crystal LaPlant, as she sat on Ms. Matt’s back porch one evening, the meadows alive with sound. “Once they start drilling, we aren’t going to have those things anymore.”

Ron Crossguns, who works for the Blackfeet tribe’s oil and gas division, has oil leases on his land, a 10-foot cross in his yard, and little patience for that kind of pastoral veneration. He called it “movie Indian” claptrap, divorced from modern realities. Mountains, he said, are just mountains.

“They’re just big rocks, nothing more,” Mr. Crossguns said. “Don’t try to make them into nothing holy. Jesus Christ put them there for animals to feed on, and for people to hunt on.”

You just know Ron Crossguns is not the NYT's idea of an authentic Indian. You know, and he knows, and he's calling bullshit claptrap.

ADDED: Note how the NYT plays its readers' stereotypes about religion. The women, with their mugs of herbal tea, speak of the spirit of the land. It's a mysterious folk way that conveniently merges with and supplements the religion-free environmentalism of elite East-Coasters. And then there's Crossguns, who's got a 10-foot cross in his yard, so readers know to look down on him. He gives the Times some choice quotes, and we can infer that he was prodded with questions about those steeped-in-spirituality women. Speaking of convenience — he's got Jesus creating the world and speaks with a double negative ("don't... nothing...."). How the Times must have rejoiced!

"The Flathead County Sheriff’s Office received a report of a person pulling a horse trailer with a truck on Montana 82 traveling at 80 miles per hour or more in a 45-mile-per-hour zone."

Meade reads the newspaper out loud, here in Flathead County, Montana:

A resident of White Rabbit Lane reported she was being harassed by her neighbor. She reported someone put a trash bag full of fish guts in the bed of her pickup truck.

A man reportedly head-butted a woman in a vehicle on U.S. 2 East in Columbia Falls.

The windshield of an animal control officer’s vehicle was struck by an owl on North Somers Road.

An employee at a business on Hungry Horse Boulevard in Hungry Horse reported a group of four teenage boys kept coming in, being obnoxious and inappropriate, spitting everywhere and making obscene gestures.

A woman called with a question about how to deal with the fact that her 15-year-old son was using drugs....

A group of teenagers were reported drinking heavily....

The Whitefish Police Department received a call from a man who said he had been told by an officer that he could not have his guitar case open on the street downtown without a permit.

I'm most concerned about the owl, specifically targeting animal control. The animals do not want to be controlled. It could get ugly. Also: Teenagers. They are getting obnoxious and inappropriate. Things are collapsing all around.

Glacier.

We arrived in Glacier National Park and took a walk on a trail that ended at a fabulous lake: Avalanche!

At the Caffe Dolce...

... life is sweet in Missoula.

(Caffe Dolce is a real place. We practically lived there for 3 days.)

ADDED: A second view... showing a more crowded time of day:



This place was great as a café for hanging out with our laptops, but it becomes a real restaurant with table service at lunch and dinner. There's breakfast too, but you order at the counter. The French doors open out onto a nice walled patio — it's a corner in a mostly residential area — and we ate dinner there last night: Montana steak, wonderfully tender. The place seems both elegant and completely casual, the food and the coffee are great, and everyone who works there is really nice.

On the Kootenai Creek trail.

In the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness.





Yesterday in Montana.

Commercial architecture.

In Missoula, Montana.

I climbed a mountain!

In Missoula.



Sentinel Mountain.




There's a big old concrete "M" up there.



We took the steep path up, and I got scared of the heights, but the intrepid Meade was there...



... making everything beautiful.

Looking for the soul of Missoula.

Spelling time again.

The best blog coverage, year after year, is at Throwing Things.

ADDED: "doo buh TAHN tay: The attitude of the Montana Supreme Court towards Citizens United."

ALSO: Here's some detail about that Montana case, from George Will.

Three Montana corporations sued to bring the state into conformity with Citizens United by overturning a 100-year-old state law, passed when copper and other corporations supposedly held sway, that bans all corporate political spending. The state’s Supreme Court refused to do this, citing Montana’s supposedly unique susceptibility to corporate domination — an idea amusingly discordant with the three corporations’ failure even to persuade the state court to acknowledge the supremacy of the U.S. Supreme Court.

"Urbane New Jersey."

A funny expression I didn't expect to see in mainstream media:

President Barack Obama’s Justice Department has quietly agreed to move a pornography prosecution out of socially conservative Montana to more urbane New Jersey – fueling perceptions by some attorneys that the new administration is stepping back from the aggressive approach the Bush administration took to prosecuting obscenity.

"Urbane New Jersey" was deemed apt — apparently — in the enterprise of contrasting the much-maligned mid-Atlantic state with Montana — that state full of — oh, the unsophistication of it all! — social conservatives.

Actually, the dictionary definition of "urbane" is "notably polite or polished in manner."

What's as polite and polished as porn? Or is it that polite, polished people quietly tolerate things?

“This is a substantial change of position,” said Louis Sirkin, an attorney who has represented many in the pornography industry, including Hustler publisher Larry Flynt.

Isn't that's what you want in porn — a substantial change of position?

“The new administration has come in there and made a new determination….It certainly is different than what we have seen in the past.”

“I think it has a lot to do with the change in administration,” said a former federal prosecutor, Laurie Levenson of Loyola Law School. “It makes you wonder how far they were pushing the envelope before…..These cases are fraught with problems and are not a high priority.”

Blah blah blah... why are they not dropping this prosecution altogether?

Since Obama’s inauguration, prosecutors have pressed on with pending obscenity cases and accepted guilty pleas in one high-profile prosecution brought in Pittsburgh. However, there have been no announcements of new adult obscenity indictments, a trend that Justice Department officials declined to discuss....

Presumably, they want to end it all quietly, so shhhh....

Obscenity cases are politically sensitive for the Obama Justice Department because the deputy attorney general, David Ogden, was criticized by Republicans during his confirmation for his past legal work for Playboy and other purveyors of sexually explicit material.

Shhhh....