Our editor for this project, Clark Whitehorn, invites us to lunch.  He works with University of Nebraska Press, but home is Helena, Montana. For more about Clark’s work, see here. From the start Clark has been behind this project, excited about its on-the-road methodology and place-based interviews. Clark notices how few titles of books have the word “feminist” in them.  He loves the van, too, has offered good advice about insulating it, and also about visual stencils, which I haven’t been able to take yet.  But I will!  Does the van have a name, he asks me, a couple of times.  I don’t have a satisfactory answer.

It’s in keeping with this interactive project that closes distances between the personal and professional that we consider visiting Clark, as we have visited others. Since we already had interviews in Montana, it seemed right to come to Helena and spend an afternoon getting to know one another.  Let Clark lay eyes on the van.  So we arrive. He shows us around his place – we are talking bears (a favorite Montana subject), and he shows us a Joel Sartore photo of a grizzly bear running down a bison calf in Yellowstone.  We admire an owl wood carving series in Clark’s study. It’s created by Earl Fred, and we learn his daughter Karen Fred pitches in, sometimes creates her own.

The Great Grey Owl (far right) is composed of 510 individual pieces.

I see a pull-up bar lodged at the top of a door jamb, reminding me of a less serious version we had for my youngest son.  Oh, that I could use it even a single time! We find out later that Clark has gone running that morning.  He is a book editor who is in shape.  He is a book editor who was in the Coast Guard.

Clark is telling us about the foods he has spread out on a cutting board – he carries them to a table set for we three, and then . . . stopping in his tracks, “My mother would be turning over in her grave!”   Lunch plates, apparently.  Already we were happy, everything is very nice, and now with lunch plates in hand, we can be happy again with no worries about his mother in the afterlife.

Clark Whitehorn, Our Host.  His mother would be pleased. 

José Aranda & Clark Whitehorn

Local foods, Big Timber smoked sausage, and stuffed Greek olives from the International Market in Butte.  Clark is talking about our lunch items but also about books, clearly he’s comfortable across western studies and Native studies. One book he mentions more at length, since I’m there and he’s thinking about feminist engaged research, is Neva Hassanein’s Changing the Way America Farms. She is an Environmental Studies professor at University of Montana. Food democracy, and just agricultural practices.  He likes that book, and checking it out later, so do I. We are eating crackers, three different cheeses, José is fond of the sun-dried tomato spread. Clark points out the Flathead Cherries grown in Missoula, and the Bing Cherries, and the ripe cantaloupe which is not, he confesses, local.   But it’s good!  He promises we can pick some raspberries later from his bushes in the back and take them on the road.

Clark phones the woman he is married to – Charlene Porsild. She is President and CEO of the Montana History Foundation.  It’s late Friday afternoon, and . . . does she want to come home a bit early and chat?  We are having fun, talking some about women’s history, and women hunters, and she can join in, have a beer.  Like Clark, Charlene has a PhD in History with specialties in the West. Hers is the Canadian West, specifically the Klondike, and her book Gamblers and Dreamers won, among other awards, the W. Terrentine Jackson Prize from the Western History Association.  Her work has an eye for the gender dimensions of history.

We end up talking less about Western history or community building in the Klondike than “Montucky” or what we come to call Montana’s “white problem.”   Their own high school son, after the mass shooting at Parkland High School in Florida, was a co-organizer of a school event designed to coincide with the March for Our Lives, a nationwide action led by students for better gun control legislation. Clark tells the story of coming out of the backcountry, from a hunting trip, and turning on the radio. He hears his son Noah’s voice on NPR!  He and his classmates are part of Helena Youth Against Gun Violence.  What both Clark and Charlene talk about is the high school culture of Helena, and its splits between hicks, jocks, goths, and “Capital H” boys who imagine growing up to be in a militia.  At some point, they report, their son gets grief from other boys, he is assumed to be anti-gun. Which is untrue, the boy grew up hunting with his father.  Apparently he is the only guy amongst a group of otherwise female students who participate in the March for Our Lives in Helena.

Apple Tress & Raspberry Bushes

Local Bounty

I appreciate these tales of Montana today and the political insight of parents who are parenting in conservative states, as we have.  I appreciate the language of “Montucky” which helps us articulate the important issue of whiteness for the Mountain West, including immediately in our interview with Randi Tanglen, the Director of Humanities Montana.  We make good, at the end of our long lunch, picking raspberries from the backyard bushes, they’re heavy with fruit.  Charlene pulls out a jar of Apple Butter, made from their trees, which we add as an unexpected delicacy to our toast in the Missoula KOA where we camp out. I spread raspberries over peanut butter on rice cakes.

It’s good to have had a time to connect.  Clark offers a next time, come and visit.  We shake our heads over the smokey haze hanging over the mountains we can’t quite see from their front porch – Mt. Helena, the Sleeping Giant, Mt. Ascension.  Maybe next time it will be a clear day.  I still need to come up with a better name for the van!  Clark tells me not to worry, the right name will emerge.