Boots
New Boots!
Remember that second pair of boots I was supposed to be making with the bootmaker over in Manton? You may not because I started them three or four years ago and haven’t done a thing with them since. Up until now that is. I’ve skipped straight past all that cumbersome cutting and skiving and stitching and gone straight on to strutting around in them. How, you say? Well, the bootmaker finished them for me in trade for help with a how-to DVD he’s making. Isn’t bartering cool?
The Taste of Yo-Yos (and Apples and Chili)
Over the weekend I traveled with Evany to Chico, California, for the National Yo-Yo Championships and later that afternoon to Manton, California, home of the world’s greatest bootmaking teacher, for the Apple Festival. The day started around 5am when I AIM’d Evany to see if she was awake and felt like leaving early (since both of us seem to only require about 47 minutes of sleep a night anymore, this is a perfectly acceptable thing to do in our friendship). I soon learned, though, that she was way ahead of me and actually about to leave her house for mine.
After an uneventful but gorgeous early morning drive up the Sacramento Valley, where a nearly full moon in the west faced off against the rising sun in the east, we arrived in Chico early. We decided to stop by and pick up my aunt, who treated us to a morning meal at Sin of Cortez (terrible name, but super yummy breakfast menu, complete with an eggless savory dish, which, by the way, is a lot more elusive than it should be, in my opinion).
Then we were off to take a gander at the yo-yos. I confess my main memory of my own childhood toy is that sticking my tongue in it caused a tingling sensation. This, it turned out, was way more entertaining to me than actually playing with it--let alone learning “tricks.” When I told Evany this, she knowingly replied without any hesitation, “Yeah! Why did it make your tongue tingle? What was that stuff in there that did that?” And yet while attending the yo-yo happenings, we were both inexplicably compelled to purchase a series of self-published books about yo-yo physics by a superhero named Captain Yo--even though neither one of us knows anything about physics and our knowledge of yo-yos is limited to how they taste. I don’t think Captain Yo needed any special powers to discern this about us, but he happily sold us three full sets anyway.
We didn’t need these books, however, to figure out that attending a yo-yo competition isn’t for wussies. We meandered cautiously through the crowd of mostly boys and a handful of girls while projectiles on strings in every possible form imaginable whizzed in all directions. During the 4A String Unattached to Yo-Yo competition, several yo-yos even went flying right off the stage. After about two hours of deeply enthralling people- and yo-yo-watching, I was ready to move on to the Apple Festival in Manton. Evany, on the other hand, probably could have stayed all day. She has what seems to be an insatiable appetite for these sorts of things.
We didn’t arrive in Manton until about 2pm and there wasn’t an apple-related item left on the premises--save for an apple fritter I bought from some Jesus people. Lucky for us, my fellow bootmaking student and generous friend Glenn had been able to secure a dozen apple pies through Jack’s inside connections, pre-festival. Jack’s brother and friends were also in town and insisted Jack wear a “cattle buying hat” at his boot booth (he is prone to wearing berets and pink train engineer caps). After the festival, we went back to his place to drink some of that box o’ wine he likes so much (also pink) and listen to stories. While he made some delicious chili from a tri-tip he bought at the apple doin’s, Evany and I raided his garden and apple box.
Over the course of the night, I learned something about Evany Thomas that I didn’t know before. She accidentally let slip that not only does she know what a Ghillie suit is, but that she is also a regular reader of the Cabela’s catalog. If you don’t know what that is, let me explain: You are more likely to find a Cabela’s catalog in the homes of my people than a phone book or the Bible. It is filled with “3-D clothing” that comes in various odors, guns, knives, cute tops, giant fish pillows, and other miraculous objects. By the end of winter, many men I know (and apparently Evany) can recite the master catalog from front to back. Needless to say, Evany was a big hit in Manton.
Star Route, New York City
In a show of remarkable restraint (at least for me), I decided not to tell Pat about the dream I had a few days before we flew to New York last week for the East Coast premiere of my short film at the Rural Route Film Festival. There wasn’t a lot to this dream. Mostly just the image of an airplane with the front end torn off and the name of our air carrier painted on the side. I’m sure this was probably brought on by my deep fear of flying, but it took a lot of effort to rein in my superstitious nature, particularly when the flight out there was suddenly rerouted south due to bad weather and someone in the cockpit came on the radio to tell us we had to land in Richmond, Virginia, because we were about to run out of fuel. About five minutes later we hit the runway with a loud and somewhat surprising thud. All of these things sort of seemed like bad omens to me, and yet here I am. I guess it’s time to officially give up on my hopes for a career as a crime-fighting soothsayer.
The flight delay meant we would miss Homemade Hillbilly Jam and a shorts program we were planning to attend that night as part of the festival. Instead, we headed straight for the Tribeca Grand, where Pat had booked us a room. I can be kind of cheap and normally stay at Hotel 17 when I’m traveling solo, but Pat had his fill of shared bathrooms and twin beds during our backpacking days. I like to tease him about his pampered lifestyle, but secretly love it when I get to tag along in his chauffeur-driven Town Cars.
It turns out, though, that it’s not as easy as it looks. Checking into the hotel required a lot of decisions. Do we want synthetic or down bedding? What kind of breakfast do we prefer? Bose sound system or iPod? New York Times or USA Today? Goldfish or sans goldfish? I found myself wondering what demographic profile we fit based on our answers--especially since Pat filled out the first half of the form and then became so weary he asked me to finish it. It must have been the complimentary champagne (which I embarrassingly accepted a little too eagerly) that made me decide that a Jack and Coke paired with oysters in bed would be preferable to dinner in the neighborhood. Surprisingly, this combination worked out OK for me the next day.
On Saturday, we cabbed over to the American Museum of Natural History to check out the dinosaurs and then took a brief walk through Central Park before catching a documentary narrated by John Waters called Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea (when we got home, I saw this story about another massive tilapia die-off there). Later we saw Muskrat Lovely by Amy Nicholson about an almost too-good-to-be-true combination beauty pageant and muskrat-skinning competition in Maryland. That was followed by Women Who Hunt by Carol Wagner and Theresa Davidson, which featured the skinning and gutting of several critters and turned out to be a little much for the urban audience. There seemed to be a lot of snickering and gasping in the audience (at least near where we were sitting), and I even overheard one man saying to another as we left the theater, “That was totally offensive.” I thought to myself he should consider himself lucky he couldn’t smell it.
I guess people’s reactions shouldn’t have surprised me, but in the middle of the film I suddenly felt keenly aware of how different my two worlds are and even a little confused about which one I belong in more. My sister and I are probably the first of many, many generations of women in my family not to hunt, although I like to accompany my dad and help with the butchering. Sure, there were a couple things that bothered me in the film, such as the mother and daughter who go trophy hunting for buffalo on a private reserve (something akin to shooting a cow in a field with a high caliber rifle), but for the most part, the movie reflected a reality I’ve known most of my life. It made me a little sad for the New Yorkers that their cellophane-wrapped view of the food chain allows them to think their hands aren’t bloody. Unless, of course, they are vegetarians...then I just feel sorry for them for being masochists and attending the movie in the first place.
On Sunday, we caught the Cowboys and Aliens program that featured my short. It was fun to see Boot Camp in the context of the other wonderful films, and to see how differently the New York audience reacted to it compared to the cow folk out in Elko.
The Bootmaker and Me in NYC
Hooray! I learned today that my short film, Boot Camp will be shown as part of the Rural Route Film Festival in Manhattan on July 30. Not sure yet if I’ll be able to attend, but if I do, I guess I’ll need to finish those boots I started late last year. An occasion like this will require very special shoes!
Boot Camp
I made a short film last year for the Western Folklife Center about my friend and bootmaking teacher, Jack Rowin. It showed at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in February, and now it’s online, but if you go there, you’ll have to scroll down the page a little bit. I know that might sound like a lot of trouble, but would you be tempted to watch it if I told you the movie also features the musical magic of Matt Margolin? Of course, you would.
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My Projects
- Web: TED's Translation Project
- DVD: How to make cowboy boots
- Book: My grandmother's life story
- Always: The House!
My Short Films
- What's a Nice Girl like You...
- Story Machines
- Boot Camp
- Moving Horses from Montana to Washington in 1903 (audio)
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The Blocksburg Book
