Colice Jeanne Pisgah: Australia
Missoula doesn't mean much to many people. To me it means freedom. Girlhood on a nearby wheat farm owned by my father was stifling. In the third grade I learned that a certain building in this desolate frontier village contained both time machines, and teleportation devices (they are called "books"). I discovered the Missoula Public Library. I read. And read. Books took me out and away from a thousand acres of wheat and endless square miles of treeless mountains. But though they exercised my imagination, books were not enough. By my junior year in high school, I was afraid I would die without living. I couldn't have told you what "living" was but I was sure it encompassed nothing of what I saw around me in Missoula, Montana. My SAT's were ridiculously high, but my father would not hear of me leaving Montana. Thus do the gods hide their best surprises behind fearsome scowls. September of my third year at UM, I walked into Modern American Lit where on the first day Leslie Fiedler (yes, that Leslier Fiedler, before he became a little bit famous and a little bit rich) announced that the three great lessons of American civilization were: 1. The Indians had suffered a major but only temporary setback. 2. The Capitalist Puritans' belief that they were masters of the continent (and thus the world) was only the final proof of their greatest sin: Pride. 3. Huck Finn = Fuck Him, and figure the rest out yourself. Fiedler soon enough fled east, but not before he woke me up and I entered life, which I learned, for me meant the life of the mind. Daddy died my senior year (his pickup skidded into a MacDonald's playground in a Missoula blizzard), and Mama right afterward (heart attack). I inherited the farm, and sold it at one of those periodic real estate cusps when L.A. money re-discovers "frontier life." Big bucks, big enough to get me out and away. To Australia (don't ask, because I don't know why). Where I write pseudonymous thrillers, and still long for the free life of the mind which Leslie Fiedler showed me so long ago in an over-heated, dingy classroom in Missoula, Montana. Such freedom is as hard to find now as it was then. Which is why, for less
than a pittance, I said yes when Magellan's Log came callling. |