A girl so tall, she hunted geese with a rake

A classic George Ostrom column, from February, 1989...

I’ll never do that again. Wrote my column last week on weather…about the coldest day, and the highest winds, etc. And what happens? The ink wasn’t dry when the worst cold snap in a decade brings snow, bone-chilling temperatures and wind down upon us, with all the howling wrath of the gods.

During spot radio reporting of weather around the area when the arctic front came in, I had many calls from people giving low thermometer readings. Talked to Karen Feather at Polebridge, and after saying it was 38 below zero there, she gave me a dandy new expression. I had asked how the folks in the North Fork were coping with the isolation and bitter cold. She did not mention “cabin fever,” but did say a few people up there were getting a bit “shack nasty.” I like that. Has a clearly understandable ring to it.

Coming down the Middle Fork on Highway 2 last Saturday with Ivan O’Neil in his pickup, we were talking about possible hikes and climbs for “The Gang” next summer and I mentioned that the ridge east of Stanton Lake was a damn “shin-tangle.” Son Shannon was along and Ivan wondered out loud to Shan, “Do you suppose your old man just made up that word, ‘shin-tangle?’”

I don’t know where “shin-tangle,” “shack nasty,” “bees-knees,” “vulture breath,” “Swede-fiddle,” “BB-eyes,” “hell-hole,” “coyote-ugly” or any of those other expressions come from, but they are there and if they fit…we use ‘em. The only options are either sticking to basic nouns and adjectives or making up a new expression which might become part of our colorful linguistic heritage. I love the lingo of people like Bill Yenne, who tells of a girl so tall, “She hunted geese with a rake.” That kind of talk leaves nothing to doubt.

Then there was the wise guy who heads up the Flathead County computer operations. He was kidding about my constant plugging of the Red Cross Blood Donor program every Monday in Kalispell and I said, “I suppose you walk in there and sing like the beer commercial, ‘This blood’s for you.’”

Ivan, Shan and I were up the Middle Fork Saturday to see with our own eyeballs the latest BN train wrecks. A few miles above Java, we parked, crossed Bear Creek on a piled ice jam, and hiked through the snow toward the twisted wreckage of grain cars. It’s steep below the tracks and the footing was so bad we would slide back almost as far as we had stepped. Had made it about 50 feet up when we discovered the snow was covering tons of spilled corn which hadn’t been visible at first. We were on a mountain of corn and as it turned out, that was from the first wreck last month. They can talk about getting it all cleaned up next spring, but this writer has some doubts.

Up there along Bear Creek is a multi-million dollar jumble of broken steel rail, splintered ties, busted trees, twisted cars, sheared off wheels and axles. All these latest derailments involving close to a hundred cars, came very close together in both time and space, so they now resemble the world’s longest train wreck. As I stood there with the freezing north wind penetrating my longjohns, I imagined what would be going through Amtrak passenger’s minds when they see that metallic carnage on both sides of the track, “Let me off at the next stop.”

Where we climbed up to the line there were five or six smashed cars that had slid down the steep side hill and jutting out over the top of the middle one was a piece of rail. It was snapped in two like a man would break a toothpick. You wonder what awesome force it takes to do that.