What’s left of the Conrad Bank building began yielding to the wrecking ball this morning. Most recently the home of B&B Loan and Rental, the building was gutted two years ago by a fire that destroyed the interior but allowed the hideous Sixties-era facade to come down, revealing some beautiful architectural flourishes and a brief glimpse into an era of wonderful buildings now long gone. In my hometown of Helena, an unbelievable wealth of architectural jewels has been lost to earthquakes, fires (accidental and otherwise) and the early-70s whim of fashion with the Orwellian name of Urban Renewal.

In Rome you can see arched colonnades built in the time of Christ. Ours have considerably shorter lifespans:

The Conrad Building was too far gone; without a deep-pocketed benefactor interested in preserving it, there was simply no way to keep it standing. Which is a pity, because you couldn’t build it for money today. And who in his financially-right mind would want to, when it’s so much cheaper to drop a steel box on an empty lot and tart it up with fake brick and neon? Like a lot of things in Montana, these beauties are getting rarer all the time. It’s worth appreciating the ones we still have, and passing them on to the next generation if we can. And I suppose if they have to go, I’d rather they didn’t fall in the name of some developer’s hare-brained scheme to earn a percentage.

I’d rather see them go in a blaze of glory.

Obama’s not bad; he’s actually sort of a Bill-in-training. He can sound convincingly inspiring and will throw in the occasional fumbling pause, which actually helps him seem more genuine. But he’s so damn vague. I’m not sure he did anything but verbally wave the flag and hand out cookies. I know at this stage his strategy is just to stiff-arm Hillary till her campaign bleeds out, but come on, man. You’re going to have to stand for something before November.

Compared to Hillary, though, he’s Antony eulogizing Caesar: Hillary. Talks. Like. THIIIIIIIIS. Every word is its own sentence delivered with a audible stabbing motion, rising one after the next in volume to a thundering crescendo, as if merely raising her voice until she’s shouting lends her proclamations real weight. Try it; it’s fun actually. I. Will. Provide. Uni. Versal. Health. Care. For. ALLLLLLLLL.

Crikey. There’s only so much of that wind one can lean into before going all Doctor Gonzo and reaching for the guns. So I set aside my cigarette holder and .44 and made a run north to the Benton Lake Wildlife Refuge this afternoon. There was plenty of wind to be had there, too, but I’ll take that variety any day. Lots of snow geese honking and wallowing in the marsh, but the highlight of the day came as I was driving north on the western dike. I caught a pair of harriers swooping and diving above the cattails. I watched them for a while through binoculars as they rode the thermals in front of the Highwoods. Then two more harriers showed up and I could follow them all at once. I sipped coffee and listened to Wynton Marsalis on the car radio while waiting to see if they’d catch anything. Things got downright transcendent for a minute; it could only have been more intellectual if I were holding a half-smoked Gauloises and reading Nietzsche with one eye.

But it got me out of the house.

Is it just me, or do “Sheriffs’ Associations” need their annual donations every couple of weeks? I made the mistake of picking up the phone the other night and got hit by one of these groups. I offered to look at their printed material, but of course the caller pressed me for a “commitment.” The envelope came today, from the United States Deputy Sheriffs’ Association, with a return address in Billings. Only they’re really based in Texas, and use post-office boxes to solicit in various states. They are a genuine 501(c)(3) charitable organization, and seem to do some actual good. However, as near as I can tell, they only use about one-seventh of their donations for actual projects—the rest is overhead and payment to their professional telemarketing firm. Good charitable giving percentages start at about 35%. The group’s director sports the requisite law enforcement facial hair, but I can’t tell from his bio if he is or ever has been an actual deputy sheriff. He seems to travel quite a bit to get his picture taken with other deputies, though.

Long story short, their envelope and “get-out-of-speeding-ticket” window decal went in the trash, and the ten bucks they wanted will likely go to fund a Caller ID subscription. I’d rather give to charities I know for sure are worthwhile. And there are other, less scrupulous groups to beware of. The similarly-named American Deputy Sheriff’s Association could only be called a charity, well…charitably. There may be others out there as well; if they spent as much time fighting crime as they do cadging for change, you wouldn’t be able to so much as jaywalk. If you’d like to donate to local law enforcement, call them directly and ask how. As for the telemarketing groups, well…there oughtta be a law.

Metro station roof

Just returned from a week-long vacation to visit the folks, who live in Virginia just south of Washington, D.C. It’s a great place to visit, especially since the territory is so different from Montana. Your sense of navigation gets messed up—roads go in all directions through endless housing tracts carved out of deciduous forest, and you never have any sense of where you are. The sort of “take a right at Eddie’s Corner” instructions we use out here have no meaning in the east. But it’s great to soak up the big-city atmosphere once in a while, riding the Metro and gawking at tall buildings.

It’s fun, too, to recharge the cultural batteries. We hit the museums hard, catching the current Robert Rauschenberg exhibit at the National Gallery and saw the National Museum of the American Indian for the first time. Probably the high point for me was the new Air and Space Annex, which is interesting for everyone and an absolute toy store for aviation buffs:

P-40 and Corsair, Air and Space Annex

Everywhere you turn is a bit of aviation history: here’s the Concorde, there’s an SR-71, and oh, let’s throw in a space shuttle for good measure. Amazing.

Good food, too. Seafood’s always a gamble here in the backwoods, but on the coast you almost can’t find a bad meal. We enjoyed a great dinner at a place overlooking the Potomac one night, and tried sushi nearly everywhere it was sold. Even had some good Southern food at a mom-and-pop diner run by a former Marine and his family:

In the South, gravy is a food group.

One final treat was seeing the WWII memorial. It’s impressive, even though the wind was freezing and the memorial’s reflecting pool was drained for the winter. It must have been a tough design challenge to incorporate so many themes and points of view into a site that had to mesh harmoniously with views of the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial. I’d say they did a fine job, even if it lacks the emotional impact of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. There’s probably no monument that’s adequate to contain so much history. But the day we were there, the wind helped bring the best part of the memorial to life:

If you’ve never been to the nation’s capital, you need to go. Room and board might set you back a few bucks, but the best sights in town won’t cost you a dime. They’ve already been paid for.

I left Saturday morning with friends for our annual winter cabin trip near White Sulphur Springs. For the last five years we’ve done a three-day weekend here, and depending on the amount of snow have had to ski in as far as two miles (except for the dry year we were able to drive all the way to the cabin door). This year, the first drifts stopped us at least three miles out, so we had no choice but to strap on the boards and start the uphill grunt.

We should have known the trip was cursed before we even got there. Driving in two vehicles, we were set to meet up at the east end of Great Falls to convoy over King’s Hill. While we were waiting for the second car to arrive, a sheriff’s rig pulled across the entrance to the highway and blocked the road. The stretch between Great Falls and Belt had just been shut down due to high wind and drifting snow. We regrouped and decided to go the long way around, through Helena and Townsend. It added an hour to our trip, but we figured we’d still have plenty of time for our three-mile ski.

Which didn’t last long. Once we were on foot, the wind picked up and was soon roaring at about 30 miles an hour, with gusts even higher. We were towing two gear sleds in addition to our packs, and the wind was blowing directly into our faces. The grains of dry snow started to feel like sand. We managed to go maybe three-quarters of a mile in an hour and a half, and realized we’d still be skiing long after dark at this rate. So we turned tail and headed for town, where warm beds, hot food, and blistering water awaited. After dinner at the Mint and a soak at the Spa, we turned in for the night.

The next morning the wind was blowing just as hard, so we cut bait on the entire trip and headed back to Great Falls on the now-open King’s Hill road. Just past the north side of the pass, we came across a woman who’d just put her car into the berm of plowed snow above the steep drop-off to Belt Creek. If she’d gone another two feet, she’d have dropped 80 feet to the creek. But she was unhurt and we gave her a lift in to Neihart to call a wrecker.

All in all, it was a weird, weird trip. Hopefully next year we’ll meet with better weather and fewer disasters.

Update: here’s a sketch showing how the cabin looks if you can actually reach it:

Speaking of which, I watched the Giants upset the Pack on the frozen tundra at Lambeau last night. It was fun to watch the broadcasters whine about the cold. There should be a Constitutional amendment requiring the Super Bowl to be played in cold weather. I’m hoping it reaches -40 here before the current spell breaks.

They say the camera adds ten pounds, so it’ll probably look like I have three or four of them trained on me at all times during the interview. I weighed myself the other night, and I didn’t just tip the scale—I put its kids through college. So I busted out a two-mile run for the first time in a long time last night. I’m feeling it today, but it’s either suffer the pain for a while or get used to not knowing what my shoes look like. I’m doing an annual backcountry ski trip with friends next weekend, so hopefully I won’t be completely immobile by then.

If by some miracle a third person should stumble onto this page, it’s probably due to my recent part in helping the Great Falls White Sox Voyagers launch their new name and image. We had a great time doing it and look forward to doing more soon. A ton of people volunteered their time to the project and we received some unlooked-for help from the blogosphere, particularly in the form of Greaterfalls.com and Ron Grimshaw. And the buzz hasn’t completely subsided yet…I’m currently slated to be grilled by ABC for a bit on the Sunday news. My plan is to deny everything and lawyer up.

That’s all for now, but I’ll try to update this train wreck more frequently from here on out—look for fresh material sometime in early June.