Gail Cassidy-Jellesed

Gail Cassidy Jellesed

My first husband, Gerald Cassidy, he was born and raised here. His dad, Jim Cassidy, owned property down across the tracks with a series of little houses. Me, I was born and raised in Ticonderoga. That’s in upstate New York, right there below Montreal, Canada, and those winters were really harsh! We just got dumped on! Well, that’s where we met; see, he was in the Navy and I was a senior in high school. So I ended up getting married to him back there in ’66. He only had about 30 days leave before he went off to Yemen—they were over there protecting something. He was an electrician on a destroyer there escorting the Kitty Hawk.

Well, we came out here on our honeymoon, and he introduced me to some really interesting critters—the two-legged kind! Like I said, we only had about a month to come back here. Then we ended up coming back to live in one of his dad’s houses, the little blue one in the row across the tracks, in ’68 when he got out and went to work at the mill. Gerald, he was a different kind of guy, and he liked all those old odd characters.

Old Whitey, he lived below the dump, eating whatever wandered out of it and got hit crossing the tracks—raccoon, skunk, porcupine, whatever! His shack was there between the tracks and the river, you know. Well I never ate anything like that before. They didn’t have characters like that back in Ticonderoga.

Homer T. Davis, he made moonshine way up O’Brien Creek. Just the kind of old guy Gerald loved to hang out with, so he took me across the river to meet ol’ Mr. Davis one day. Went up Rabbit O’Brien way to this old shack in the woods. Way back in there up this road you could hardly tell was a road. This was our honeymoon, remember, and I was looking for adventure, and getting to know the place this guy I just married came from! He was making something up there that day when we got there.

We sat down out front, and he said, “Can I get you anything?”

I said, “I’d like some water.”

“Oh, okay…” and he went off into the cabin.

He came back with a mason jar, just about one big drink in the bottom. I took a swig of that, but it wasn’t water, no! Oh God! I fell straight back out of my chair to the ground! Gerald just laughing his butt off!

“You think you’re so funny,” I said

“I just want you to meet all my friends!” he said, kinda sly.

He grew up with these old duffers, see. They were, to him, just part of his home, part of where he came from, and that’s how I got to know Troy, meeting all his old friends like Mr. Davis, who lived to be almost one hundred. We figured he must have been pretty well pickled. Anytime someone asks me about Troy, I think of those old guys. I treasure getting to know those old guys.

Chuck Neisess

Chuck comes by the table where I’m waiting to hear a story. “Let me go fill my cup, and I’ll come sit down and visit.” He comes back, sits down. We swap a little small talk—the elk were in his yard this morning, just running back and forth all night. He watched them for a while from the pump house, standing there dressed up in insulated coveralls trying, not successfully, to get a good picture. He eases into the story today, settling in before he says, “oh, I thought I’d tell you the story of when the bridge washed out on Highway 2.”

It was February 1974. In those days they would have a raffle for a cake during half-time at the games in town. It was my daughter’s turn to bring the cake for the raffle. We had a lot of snow that year, and then, all of a sudden it started raining and raining and raining. I came down the night before the game and right there at Jack’s Cafe you couldn’t even cross the bridge! Water was already too high. A few of us had gathered around there watching wondering how high it was going to get and all, rain just coming down the whole time. The water was really coming up high, you know. There was an old wooden bridge a little way upstream from that, something they had put in way back to haul across or maybe to get up into Garrisonville. We decided we better go up to see what was happening there.

It turned out, that little old wooden bridge was holding back a huge pile of logs and trees. Great big old logs were just stacking up there holding back an incredible amount of water!  We could hear the power of the flood in a kind of rumbling low growl, boulders being rolled and tumbled along the bottom down from the canyon, and that old wooden bridge was just swaying under the weight of it.

Jr. was standing there looking at it and he said, “I’m gonna get some dynamite, and we oughta blow that out of there before it gets any bigger!”

“Oh Jr.! You can’t do that!” everybody said, but there were more trees and stuff coming down all the time and it was building a heck of a dam of itself! So when Jr. gets back from his truck with that stick of dynamite we just watched him walk right out onto that bridge, swaying and bouncing. He just lit it, tossed it up onto the pile, and scurried back out of the way. It wasn’t a long bridge, but he had to make it off of there before it went, so he was running!

There was just a tremendous amount of stuff held up behind there, so, when it blew, that big rumbling boom shook all that loose, and all that water and debris went right down to the highway! Well, course, that was what washed the highway bridge out—boy, that stuff really went! The water came up over the road and washed out both ends of the bridge all the way down to the bottom, so when my daughter called later that night asking for me to come pick her up, I knew they wouldn’t be letting anybody come through there! She parked and walked down to the railroad bridge and all the way down to Lake Creek and back up to the highway where I got her. She had her car, she was driving a ’67 Rebel then, on the one side see, and I had the old station wagon on the other.

By the time we were going in to the game, they had gotten the stream back in its banks and going under the bridge, but the road was just gone on both ends. So we had to climb down a ladder, walk across that washout, climb up a ladder onto the bridge, and the same at the other end of the bridge, down a ladder across the washout and up a ladder back to the road. It was still raining like crazy, and I was carrying that cake trying to keep it kinda dry and not drop it, up and down those ladders!

Chuck Neisess

I am the youngest at the table by about three decades at least. Age doesn’t come up right away; first there’s the obvious questions like, “What kind of stories are you looking for?”

“I’m looking for the kind of story you want to tell…” Somewhat vague and really not an answer at all, I continue trying to put words to it. “Well, when I was a kid I always wanted to hear stories from my parents: ‘Tell me a story,’ I’d say. I want the kind of story you would want to tell in that moment, in the sitting on the porch with the grandparents kind of moment.”

Chuck Neisess is the storyteller of the day.

“Well, pull up a chair; I got lots a stories,” he says. “I got logging stories, hunting stories, and we won’t get into the bar stories just yet!”

“He can tell stories alllll day,” his wife chimes in. “And we’ve been married thirty years, so I’ve heard them all at least twice!”

He starts telling about logging up on Meadow Creek.

One day driving up from town with my sawyer, Tom, we noticed it was a little chilly in the morning. Even down in town close to the river where it doesn’t get so cold, the truck was a bit hard starting. Then, all the way up the Yaak Highway, the old, narrow, slow one, we never saw another truck—not even one load of logs coming down. Even when it got full light out, not a single person.

Once we got to the landing, Tom jumped out and got a fire going real quick, and I started unrolling the jumper cables. I was running an old Cat then, and it always needed a little warming to get started! I kept the truck running with the heater going and we climbed back in to warm our fingers while the skidder took the warmth of the fire and the charge of the jumpers. Pretty quick Tom rolled out and threw his saw over his shoulder. His boots squeaking on the hard packed snow where it had been plowed, he kicked his way over the berm and disappeared down the hill. I smacked my hands together over the heater vent and thought maybe I’d give it a few minutes before I even tried to get that big Cat diesel turned over. About that time, the first truck we’d seen all day came pulling up to the landing. It was the land owner for the piece we were working.

“What in the hell are you guys doing up here today!” He hollered out the window as he rolled to a stop.

“Well,” I called back, starting to get on out of the truck, “we got some logging to do!”

“Not today you don’t—it’s 26 below down at the house! No way you’re getting anything running today.”

Before we could go back and forth much about the weather or the tenacity of a logger with work that needs to get done, Tom came lumbering back up the hill shouldering the saw and kind of shaking his head a little.

“Won’t start. No way.”

We didn’t get any logging done that day, but there were other days.

The stories kind of loop into one another. A tough day logging turns into a hunting opportunity at the logging job, when a nice buck jumps off the side of the road and stops to look back at the rig on the way out.

I jumped out of the truck saying, “yeah, that’s a pretty nice buck. I think I’d like to take him!” I fired a single shot, and the buck dropped right there. So I handed Tom the rifle and headed off the road with my cleaning knife. Well, could have been my shot hit right at the base of the horns, right at that thickest boniest part, and the deer only lost consciousness for a bit, for about as long as it took me to get through the ditch and put my left hand onto his antler. That’s when that buck started waking up. With one hand on the antler and one hand on my cleaning knife just reaching to open the artery in the neck, I realized that this deer was going to get up and fight! I also, just the quickest flash after that, remembered handing my rifle to Tom and coming down here with just a knife. I was yelling up at him, “shoot him Tom! Shoot him again! He’s getting up! Shoot him damn it!”

Of course, Tom couldn’t get a shot off with me there right on top of the deer, and I couldn’t let go of the deer because, well, I was right there on top of him and that grip on the antler was the only way I could control what I thought might happen next. It was a pretty quick tussle, the buck tossing his antlers up and back and me just ending up straddling him completely, but eventually the buck bled out, and it was done.

The table is laughing, reliving some of their own youthful exuberance; sighs and smiles go around the table, nods and knowing looks. “Chuck can tell stories allll day,” they remind me again. “I mean all day.” There’s stories of walking the boom up at Libby dam, there’s a box of records in the old cabin, thousand dollars for an acre with a livable house, one acre turning into 4 acres, fishing. And always there is the open ended invitation, “but that’s a whole other story!”

Once Unwritten Stories

We live in a world and a time inundated with information, an information overload, an abundance of data bytes, clips, samples and tags. An almost unfathomable deluge of coded, algorithmic presentations of script. The world shrinks and the reach of our seeing spreads wide—expansive but thin. Top five things to see only in your state, secret wonders to experience and the top rated gadgets to get you there…the lists are right at our fingertips, and the hottest commodity traded in the economy of today is your attention, a consumer audience. The stories of our lives are being told in tags and highlights that are traded to an audience who’s expansiveness would have once been unthinkable, but there are still those stories that are yet unwritten, stories with full human depth and intricacy.

I grew up here in Troy. This is what I tell people, although I didn’t move here with my family until the summer before my freshman year of high school, and if you’ve ever been around a freshman in high school you will know how grown-up I thought I was at the time. I know, now, how much growing up happened here, in this valley, on these back roads, in that river, up that ridge, and under your roofs. What I came here with was a watchful eye, aware of the stories unfolding around me. Aware of the lives unfolding around me, but life not so linear, not such a thin line. What I have always felt around me in people’s stories is not a snap-shot on a linear trajectory, but something with more volume, more a breadth of lived experience full of heart and humor, hope and humility. Like those pin-holes we made to watch the solar eclipse, there exists a body of humanity in a moment.

I was drawn to poetry as a container for things that are larger than they are. It’s that fascination with the momentary pin-hole revealing the presence of elements unseen—broken tips of grass, deer tracks in the sand.

One thing I know about people, here in small town Montana and anywhere, is that we talk. Wherever we come together, there is talk: the line at the grocery, rolled down windows up some back road, in the hall, at church, in the bar, or, most often, standing in the kitchen. It’s what we do. Language is a core part of what we have always been, since people have been people. Some of those first words must have been words of survival, something that made the difference between passing on a genetic code and letting it slip into the forgotten. Those first words could have been a warning of danger, or a direction for food.

One of the oral traditions I learned growing up was the hunting story. That storytelling is an expected capacity for anyone who ventures into the woods looking for wild game, as much as navigation or building a fire. There is a certain privilege in both telling and hearing a hunting story, because the information shared is of primal importance. We code them with place names like “No Tellum Creek,” or “Sweet-water Rim” and only those who know, know.

I imagine those first stories were the same way, privileged sharing with a group whose survival mattered to the storyteller. Over time, hundreds of thousands of years perhaps, those stories organized and developed into a shared identity and the oral storytelling tradition became a defining element of the cultural advance of humanity. Those spoken stories solidified the unity of their group. Eventually, the stories were physically recorded, through symbolic representation and written language. Now, this wasn’t as simple as talk-to-text, and I can’t help but think some of the less repeated stories slipped away. Maybe a story of a summer walk down by the water, hand holding, even a clandestine kiss by the big shade tree. There were those stories outside the realm of the epic Kings, stories of fathers and mothers, sons and daughters. If the stories etched in stone were of the heads of the great empires, the ones told along the road or in the kitchen were of the breathing body, the sizzling nerve and beating heart, of the people.

My kids look to their phones for the latest trends, watching maniacally for the entertainment that becomes an identity. Storytelling has changed. The flashes and fragments they flick toward me, “omg you have to see this,” make no sense. As quickly as the wrist opens to point the screen my direction, it curls away. I look for the story, the human connection, but it is lost to me. They laugh and cock their heads talking about how I went to school back in the nineteen hundreds. I cannot say they have it so easy, kids these days. I see them adrift in a churning world that got so big so fast, a world without a filter, chaotic. I do not want them to miss out on the stories that take time. The ones that come out only when you sit around a fire for a long time.

People of Troy, I want to hear your stories, the ones that simmer in the back of your mind, ones about what life was like, stories that, together, can bring into focus a community and a landscape on the cusp of a millennia, because their survival matters to me. I want to write them down before they slip away into the forgotten.

Love Poem

Love Poem

I shrank into myself somewhere, sometime, became keenly aware of my self, my own critic,

eying every move and clumsy attempt. I settled into the roll of “observer.” Watching myself

experience life rather than simply experiencing life. The observer of all things at arms length, I

watched with a skeptical, William Blake, eye: “to believe a lie/ When you see with, not through,

the eye.” I would not be fooled.

So it was with Love. Grade school crushes, sure: always aware of myself—a grade school boy,

shy, perhaps a bit dusty and better suited to cleaning out the stalls or alphabetizing my books.

I did not see myself as the kind of person I knew of, thought of, pictured really being deeply in

Love!

I fell in love with poetry, and with the “Love Poem.” I recognized my self in the intensity behind

those pages, a hidden secret intensity that didn’t know how to get out. I could see myself, or

the bits of self I wished were me, in Yeats:

“We sat grown quiet at the name of love;

We saw the last embers of daylight die,

And in the trembling blue-green of the sky

Washed as by time’s waters as they rose and fell

About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:

That you were beautiful, and that I strove

To love you in the old high way of love;

That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown

As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.”

Oh, that sweet agony! That intensity! I became a slave to that intensity. I found it in poetry, but

only as the observer. In workshop, there were students who really tapped into it, like Abe

Moore: “water isn’t blue when you are this close, but please just dive in with me because this is

life, Babe, and we can’t stay long...” I longed to dive in, felt painfully aware of myself and the

quiet Lack of that intensity in my polite, well-mannered interactions with the world.

Secretly I knew that somewhere there was a woman who would open that part of me—to

whom I would speak those lines of poetry, “a thought for no one’s but your ears...” but leaving

out the wearisome part where everything becomes faded. Perhaps there sliding into another

proven line. Neruda maybe: “Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs...you stretch out like

the world.” And I waited to meet her, the patient observer, watching. Not willing to try anything

that hadn’t been proven in the canon, nothing that would fall short of my life in verse as I

imagined it. So I waited and kept that safe arms length from what could have been just an

experience.

I don’t know how many experiences passed by while I waited, but it didn’t happen. Like

Pygmalion, I became inextricably attached to the artistic representation of something I didn’t

truly know. I was waiting to say, “Oh hi! I recognize you from the pictures...” The pictures of

flowing water, shooting stars, summer rain, fireflies, sunrises, city crosswalks, full moons,

alabaster, bells tolling—ringing and ringing and ringing.

I saw an ocean of poetic intensity and me sitting on the shore holding a broken paddle,

listening to the mermaids from T.S. Eliot:

“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.”

I was Prufrock growing old, measuring out my life with the mundane while watching for the

mythical! I had to give up on the “Love Poem.”

Possibly the drowning of a close friend was the nudge I needed (Think Eliot again, “fear death

by drowning”) a young guy, like me, but a guy full of life and heart, truly living each day until he

wasn’t. I decided the “Love Poem” was the artistic representation only of an ideal, the ultimate

portrayal of only a dreamed reality. Not real life. Not, at least, the whole picture. The rest of that

picture, as far as I could tell, involved getting a job, paying bills, raising a family, getting a home

and a sensible car with good safety ratings. Keeping up on your insurance coverage,

protecting your assets.

So I resigned myself to fulfilling the parts of That story that I could reach. I slipped comfortably

into a marriage, despite early signs of caution, with the promise, eventually realized, of two

kids, two cars, a mortgage, and plenty insurance. I made my life into the “raising kids” story,

and there I would have remained, but didn’t. She had more language for what we had

sacrificed than I had. Not knowing what, exactly, she was going to find, she left to search.

My identity, father & husband, self-sacrificer, became un-moored, set adrift in a new sargasso

crossing. In my small craft an Old Breton Prayer: “O God, thy sea is so great / And my boat is

so small.”

Waves thumped soft and hollow against my hull. I drifted, and slowly I drifted closer to my self,

the one I had left lost in poem and song. The vast ocean of experience lay out before me,

waiting for me to dive. Here was life waiting for me as I had once waited for life. I had forgotten

so much of that huge potential.

I had forgotten just enough of the “Love Poem” that when I met the true love of my life, I was a

blank page ready for whatever colors flowed. I was an empty cup ready to fill and to drink. I

just knew that she and I had a story to share between us. I eased into the waters. I got to know

her as an old friend, familiar and open. We cried together and didn’t know quite why it felt so...

important and right! She brought me back to that awkward school boy fidgeting in his clothes

as if I had known her all along. The poems were mine, and now, as a man, as a full being, again

so aware, I could open to her and say, “Hi! I see you. I’ve been waiting for you for so long. I’m

so grateful you are here!”