Big Sky Documentary Film Festival - Where Reality Plays Itself

Originally uploaded by love not fear

Sweet. Just got the press release from the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival announcing the 2008 selections.

There are 98 films this year from 40 countries. Already there are a handful of films I’ve heard about and I’m excited about.

This year, a fun added addition to the festival is an interactive community site where users can create an account to keep track of the films they have seen, and rate/review the films. Awesome.

Read the press release after the jump.

Sign up at the community site here [link].

Read the reviews I wrote about the films I saw last year: [part 1] [part 2] [part 3] [links].

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 16, 2008

Big Sky Documentary Film Festival Announces 2008 Selections

Event To Celebrate It’s 5th Anniversary With 98 Documentaries and 20,000 fans

Official selections for the 2008 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival are now on-line at: the official Big Sky Documentary Films site [link]. See complete list below.

Missoula, Montana — From February 14 - 20, 2008, the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival celebrates its 5th year by showcasing 98 films from 40 countries. The official selections represent a broad array of filmmaking styles, formats and production dates, from classics to World Premieres. The 2008 films were selected from nearly 1000 submissions from across the globe.

Since 2004 the festival has grown into a premier international venue for exhibition of innovative, contemporary and classic non-fiction cinema. Screenings are held in the historic Wilma Theater in scenic downtown Missoula, Montana. BSDFF has built a reputation for its programming excellence and is the largest event of its kind in the American West.

The event includes three competitions.

• Documentary Feature Competition - The award for Best Documentary Feature will be given to one film 50 minutes or longer in length. A cash award of $1000 will be presented by IndiePix.
• Documentary Short Competition - The award for Best Documentary Short will be given to one film up to 50 minutes in length.
• Big Sky Award Competition - The Big Sky Award will be given to one film of any length with significant content pertaining to the American West.

The 2008 jury includes distinguished filmmakers, industry professionals and academics. The jury members will present the awards at a reception and press conference on Tuesday, February 19, 2008. Competition films will be announced next week.

Each year BSDFF recognizes the work of important filmmakers by highlighting their contribution to documentary arts in the Big Sky Retrospective Series. The 2008 series will present the work of Hart Perry and Dana Heinz Perry. This distinguished filmmaking duo continues to make exciting new work today and will be two of this year’s BSDFF Judges. Their latest work, SEX: THE REVOLUTION, will have its World Premiere at Big Sky this year.

Q & A sessions with filmmakers follow most screenings. This year over President’s Day Weekend, Big Sky offers three panel discussions that are free and open to the public.
The Opening Night Film, THE GATES, presented by HBO Documentary Films, will feature the latest work from legendary documentarian, Albert Maysles. Missoula audiences will enjoy FREE PUBLIC ADMISSION for this special Valentines Day screening, courtesy of HBO. Co-director Antonio Ferrara will be in attendance.

Passes are now available for sale on-line at the BSDFF site [link] and will also be sold at the box office at the Wilma Theatre during the week of the festival. For ticket prices, pass purchases and more information for this year’s festival visit http://www.bigskyfilmfest.org/

Sponsors of the 2008 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival include Bresnan Communications, HBO Documentary Films, Modern Digital, Montana Film Office, Indie Pix, Sony, B-Side Entertainment, Absolut Vodka, Panasonic, Current TV, Avid, Big Sky Brewing, Vanns and the International Documentary Challenge.

2008 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival Official Selections

Features:
2nd Verse The Rebirth of Poetry
4 Elements
24 Solo
A Dream in Doubt
A Father’s Music
A Snowmobile for George
A Walk to Beautiful
Achieving the Unachievable
An Audience of One
Bending Space
Bomb It
Butte, America
Cartoneros
Che Guevara-The Body and the Legend
Civilians on the Battlefield
Class C
Doubletime
Eloquent Nude
Finding Normal
Flying On One Engine
>From Prison to Home
Golden Days
Hear and Now
Hell on Wheels
I Love Hip Hop In Morocco
In the Shadow of the Moon
Jimmy Rosenberg - The Father, the Son & the Talent
King Corn
Knee Deep
Knuckleball
Kurt Cobain: About A Son
La Americana
Lynch
Mexiphobia
Movement (R)evolution Africa
Oh My God! It’s Harrod Blank!
Polis is This
River Ways
Row Hard, No Excuses
Second Chance Season
Sex - The Revolution
Shadow of the House
Silhouette City
Soldiers of Conscience
The Gates
The Linguists
The Listening Project
The Little Red Truck
The Sky Below
Up the Yangtze
We Feed the World
When Clouds Clear
Wild Horse Redemption
Wrath of Gods

Shorts:

Atlantis Unbound
Begging for Grace
Blind Faith
Body & Soul - Diana & Kathy
Broadcast Cowboy
Casualty of the Promised Land
City of Cranes
City of Lost Carts
Conversing With Aotearoa
Conviction
Crack in the Sidewalk
Dimmer
El Otro Lado
Getting Eve Off
Hattenhorst
Inheritance
Landscape as Muse - The Forest with Peter Von Tiesenhausen
Left in Baghdad
Love Takes
Ma’Rib
Milk Matters
Night Visions
Pictograph
Portraits of Hope
Prayer of Peace
Resting Places
Reversing the Odds
State of Mind
The End for Beginners
The Farther, The Dearer
The Legend of Rosalie
The Man With the Electric Boots
The Storytellers
The Ville
Unfettering the Falcons
Verve
Ya Shadad

Perry Films Retrospective:
And you Don’t Stop - 30 years of Hip Hop
Harlan County, USA
Hartigan
Imagining America
John Hammond: From Bessie Smith to Bruce Springsteen
Making a Noise: A Native American Musical Journey with Robbie Robertson
The Rest is Silence

Big Sky Documentary Film Festival - 2008 Official Selections
For details and descriptions see the interactive community site. [link]
Contact:
Big Sky Documentary Film Festival
131 South Higgins Avenue, Suite 307
Missoula, Montana 59802
(406) 541-3456
http://www.bigskyfilmfest.org/
director@bigskyfilmfest.org

The Big Sky Documentary Film Festival is a program of the
Big Sky Film Institute, a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation.

Get the soundtrack I mentioned in the Post.

From the Missoulain

Missoula police arrested Brian David Gunderson on Wednesday, alleging he played a major role in the unprovoked beating of two 21-year-old University of Montana students Oct. 15.

Police are still looking for another primary suspect, James Steven “Joby” Kelly, 18.

Let’s hope it doesn’t take too long to find him.

In other good news….

Under withering attack from conservatives, President Bush abandoned his push to put loyalist Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court and promised a quick replacement Thursday.

(from Yahoo! news)

Sunday night while I was on the radio and unbeknownst to me, a good friend of mine lay in a hospital bed with a broken jaw and a split tooth. Wally Catton and Marcus Chebul were singled out Saturday night by a group of allegedly teenage thugs because of their appearance, and were attacked and beaten by these unknown assailants.

Now, I don’t know Marcus, but Wally is a friend of mine. He’s a is a student at The University of Montana, and an expert on graphic novels. His drawings are incredible, and he has never hurt anyone. He exists for the sole purpose of bringing beauty into the world, and is an amazing human being.

Violence is making more regular appearances in our community, and when we are silent, we are allowing it to occur. We can be silent no longer. Missoula police are looking for leads about the beating on Saturday. If anyone has any information about the attack, please call the Missoula Police Department 24 hours a day at (406) 523-4777 or Monday through Friday 8AM-5PM at (406) 258-4672. The suspect vehicle was described by witnesses as a red sport utility vehicle, with a partial license plate beginning 4-B925.

I hope they catch these guys. Then I hope the police catch them.

datraveler has a little more personal take on the whole situation.

If you or someone you know is a victim of violence, the Student Assault Resource Center (SARC) can help. They have a 24 hour hotline at (406) 243-6559, which is staffed by trained SARC advocates who provide confidential information and peer counseling over the telephone. Advocates can also refer you to other resources to help in dealing with violence on campus or within the Missoula community. SARC is located at the Curry Health Center on the University of Montana Campus at 634 Eddy Street.

This is not the first time an assault of this nature occurred. Stop the violence.

I have an art show coming up in January. By January, many will have forgotten the attacks that have been occuring in Missoula. Wally and Marcus, and their family and friends will not have forgotten. And their medical expenses will not have gone away. I will be donating 50% of the proceeds from the sale of any of my art in January’s show to help defray the costs of Wally and Marcus’ medical expenses.

Wally and Marcus — Our thoughts are with you. You are beautiful.

We interrupt this regularly scheduled blog to bring you this message.

11 Sep 2005

Anne Gervasi is a licensed psychologist. She donated
her time and her talent working with Katrina refuges
at first, Reunion Arena and then, the Civic Center.
This is her first hand account and reaction to what
she had to deal with.

First-hand reaction to Katrina refuges

There are so many words that come to mind. As a
scholar I am thinking Diaspora, social displacement,
systemic disruption, mass trauma, pandemic and
unbelievable chaos. As a clinician, I am looking at
something that we have never been trained to handle in
this country-a level of victimization and its
resultant psycho-social ripples that mandate a whole
new field of clinical practice-mass victimology.
Katrina kicked the top off of a racist and social
termite’s nest that has been growing beneath the
ground since Reconstruction. These were deeply
religious people who have lost God and for that
matter, faith and hope. Hope has been replaced by
magical thinking that augurs a second and more
terrible level of social disruption and anger not far
down the road.

Over and over, I kept hearing a framing of self that
puzzled me until I realized that this is how it must
have been for blacks after Reconstruction. Over and
over, people said, “everyone has been so wonderful,
thank you, thank you.” When I said, “there is no need
to thank us, you are our fellow citizens and we want
to help you-American to American,” there would be a
long pause as if the idea of being the same never
struck them before.

They are angry and it is growing. The system failed
them. For that matter, there is no system because all
the safeguards and preparations that we thought were
in place aren’t there. I have been begging anyone who
would listen over the past two years for a program in
mass victimology to prepare for the next tragedy after
9/11. Now it is here and the lack of organization,
science, and preparation are going to result in
terrible consequences for us as a nation.

Imagine sending people who have been assimilated into
the most stable demographic population in America into
cities and towns all over the US who are as unprepared
as the victims to understand their sense of
dislocation and their support needs. The lower Gulf
States have a language, a history, a social dynamic, a
faith, a societal structure, and a ritual system
unlike any other in America. These people have lived
in and been acculturated to this system for
generations. When the dust settles and the mud dries,
we are going to see all over America, a nation that
will lose patience with the needs of a foreign refugee
population. Abandoned once again, the fury and the
trauma that have been momentarily quieted by the
outpouring of empathy and support post-crisis, will
arise larger and more terrible than we have been
equipped as a nation to handle. I hear it now, over
and over, in the survivor stories, in the loss of
self, and the need to reclaim dignity and power.

Right now, numbness is being replaced by magical
thinking. “People want me here-here is better. I think
I’ll stay here.” What is going to happen when reality
sets in? The bulk of people who are planning to stay
don’t understand the system here. Even though we abut
borders, we are a vastly different nation. At least we
are southerners. What is going to happen to the
thousands being sent to Connecticut or Illinois or New
Jersey? They are being offered free apartments,
furniture etc., by generous and well meaning people
who haven’t thought the long term consequences through
very well. A lot of the apartments are in areas where
they won’t have transportation or jobs. What is going
to happen six months down the road when the magic
wears off and the help slowly fades? How about the
holidays for a people who thrive on ritual, tradition,
and celebration?

The trauma they are experiencing is so profound that
we have no cultural term or machinery set up for it.
The dead and nameless bodies by the thousands rotting
in the water, arriving dead on the buses with them, or
dying next to them in the shelters are a huge
festering wound that no one dares mention. This is a
true Diaspora the likes of which we haven’t seen since
Reconstruction. The immediate needs that are being
addressed ignore the greater traumas yet to be spoken.
No governmental system can survive the number of
wounded and disillusioned people that we are going to
see sprouting up all over America. Something far
greater and more organized has to be done.

Then to the helpers and what is happening there. Turf
wars have already sprung up. In the name of “I know
better than you do,” chaos and wasted energy are
multiplying. The Red Cross was initially in charge of
certifying the credentials of the helping therapists.
After Oklahoma City and the pretenders who arrived
there, this seemed like a wonderful clearing house.
Everyone who wanted to help had to go through a brief
orientation and a thorough checking of credentials.
Only licensed professionals were allowed. Driver’s
licenses were checked for criminal records. This
seemed to be a common sense excellent approach to the
question of rapists, pedophiles, and other thugs being
denied access to a vulnerable population. Actually,
things ran better than I expected at the beginning.
Then in came the physicians who I guess felt that
their non-existent coursework in this area qualified
them to better run things. Immediate chaos,
disorganization, and all sorts of ersatz “helpers”
began running around. They grabbed our current Red
Cross badges and then stopped us from going back on
the floor to finish seeing our patients without the
new badges, which they just happened to be out of. We
had an optometrist with prescriptive lenses but no
glasses or readers and no idea when he’d ever see any.
We had a deaf booth but no deaf helpers. In the midst
of all this chaos, thousands and thousands of the
walking wounded mixing with the powerless
well-intentioned came the whispered word, pandemic.
Lots of people are suddenly getting sick, and we have
to have precautions. Don’t eat or drink or touch the
patients. We only have one bottle of disinfectant in
the mental health section, so come back here-the
length of the Convention Center-after each patient.
“What of the people who are being cycled out of here?”
“What are we sending into the population?” If people
are sick and contagious, where are the precautions to
separate the vulnerable? What of precautions such as
masks and gloves to keep the medical professionals and
first responders safe? All the here and now is
suspended in the hope that maybe tomorrow will take
care of itself and the worst won’t happen. Those are
the question we asked on the first day. NO ONE IS IN
CHARGE.

Therefore, there is no consistent answer or approach
or forethought. I am no infection guru but as soon as
I heard on day one that people with no water were
forced to drink water with bloated bodies, feces, and
rats in it, the thought of cholera, typhoid, and
delayed disease immediately occurred to me. What if
the fears of disease are correct? People are fanning
out throughout America. Where is the CDC?

In the age of computers, we are doing worse than the
pencil squibs and the rolls of paper to log in the
displaced after World War II. Literacy and computer
access seems to be considered as a given for people
who have lost it all. Accessing FEMA is through a
website. People are in shelters waiting for FEMA to
come “in a few days.” “Be patient.” The Lieutenant
Governor of Louisiana pumped my hand and replied to my
desperate queries about how to help people find their
parents and babies, “Be patient-give us a few days.”

The mothers who have lost their children, and there
are many, and the children who have lost their
parents, have had it with the “be patient” response.
The shelters are surprisingly silent. It is hard to
find the traumatized mothers because they cry
silently. One mother asked how patient I would be if
my five-month-old was somewhere unknown for over a
week. Over and over, others would ask, “Do you think
my baby has milk and diapers?” “Do you think they are
being kind to my baby?” And then, so softly that I
would have to ask them to repeat, “Do you think my
baby is okay?” My response-the convenient lie. Every
time I said, “of course,” I prayed to God that it was
true.

I am sure that there is a special ring of hell for the
media: The survivor stories end-on-end for the
titillation of the public. I heard Soledad O’Brien say
something about the still unrecognized need to address
the psychological trauma. I sent a response to the CNN
tip-line that there were hordes of every manner of
mental health professional working 24/7. CNN’s
response? Dr. Phil and the stories of the survivors”
on Larry King. They went to the guy who lost his
clinical license for serious professional infractions
to tell the stories? I could see the “entertainer”
down there gathering tales of the already exploited so
that he and Larry could both pimp their ratings. The
real unsung mental health heroes, the counselors,
psychologists, social workers and psychiatrists
dealing with un-medicated psychosis and severe
traumatic responses were represented by Dr.
“Keep-It-Real”? We don’t need tabloid help from the
media. Scream about accountability and point fingers
for those who can’t. Where is the real help from the
media? Help us find those babies and parents and
missing family. We have a man in one of the shelters
who is caring for four kids. They call him uncle. He
is actually the cousin of the fianc� of the mother who
is probably dead. The children are silent. They sit
and play and weep with open mouths that can’t scream.
Where is the media to scream for them?

Finally, to hell with this “no blame game.” The
stories that I know to be true are enough to make me
boil. The compassionate foreign doctors who can’t find
anyone to validate their credentials, the expensive
mobile hospital still sitting parked waiting for
federal paperwork to move into Louisiana, the five
C130s sitting on the Tarmac in San Diego since the
night of Katrina, still waiting for orders to move.
Where the hell are the beds? We have some old people
sleeping on hot plastic pool floats with no sheets.
They are still no showers for people who have walked
for hours through fetid waters. Their skin is breaking
out in rashes. Still no showers. Where the hell are
the DeCon showers bought with Homeland Security money
that can shower 30 people at a time. The convention
centers have no bathing facilities so the filth and
skin reactions are getting worse. What of lice? There
are no clothes for the really heavy and large. I was
reduced to writing the women I knew who went to Weight
Watchers to comb their attics for “before” outfits.
When I arrived with the sack of my gatherings, I had
to engage in a full scale battle and puff myself up to
all my red-headed doctor fury to get them distributed
to the women still sitting there in their stinking
clothes.

The survivors are like the Mayor of New Orleans who
apologized to George Bush for his anger. “If we tell
the way we feel, maybe help will stop.” All the
apologists on the air distancing George and his
co-vacationers and idiot appointees should be
impeached. I liked Nagin when he called it all
bullshit. He was right. How about Haley Barbour
complaining about the lack of support for his state?
Did he so soon forget his past life and what he did to
set up this government of spin artists? If they had
acted like a government the body count would be less.
The aid would be better managed. The days of filth,
and feces, and death would have been ended sooner. God
help all of the poseurs in charge when these folks
finally get in touch with their justifiable rage. Did
you see the White House’s logo for the hurricane?
George and some asshole in a ball cap against a
background of Katrina waving the flag. They had the
energy and time for a nice logo but no time to get the
elements of help in gear?

The tragedy is leavened by some moments of farce, the
guy who arrived with a case of Gucci shoes in various
sizes that he “saved” from his closet. The man wearing
twelve expensive watches up his arm. I guess he is a
punctual sort. There are the too-poignant-for-words
vignettes. I saw a lady sitting on a blanket holding a
photo of two children that she had pulled from the
water. She kept crying and looking at it. I thought
they were her children. She didn’t know whose they
were. They were just losses and she mourned them.

Of course there were the criminals, thugs, and
mobsters. One of the greatest indictments of the “spin
machine” that is going to come from this situation
will be the repeated characterizations of the victims
as lawless and criminal. Over and over I heard people
tell me about how ashamed they were to be portrayed
that way. Ninety-nine percent of these people never
were characterized as anything but lawful and good
citizens. In their most desperate hours to be reduced
to taking food and water to survive and then to be
lumped with the television thieves and the shooters is
too shameful for most of them to bear. I heard from
hospital employees that survived on a cup of watered
grits so that the patients could make it. And then I
heard had they had to hide the ones that didn’t in
closets to keep up the morale of the others.

The people that survived this tragedy and the people
who help them all know one truth. The help and the
love and the care that has been extended to them have
been on a citizen-to-citizen basis. The churches,
doctors, therapists, and ordinary citizens who are
giving all they can in time and resources are managing
to band-aid at the most elementary level-neighbor to
neighbor. The government has failed. We are more
vulnerable now than before 9/11 because faith in the
system is gone. No system can sustain itself as a
viable entity when the citizenry are the walking
wounded. Victims implode a system from within and
expose its decay. This is the beginning of the end
unless we can get a drastic change of philosophy and
restore the government to a system “by the people for
the people.” Right now nobody down here believes we
have that.

Anne Gervasi

A recurring theme in the lives of many of my friends is that of uncertainty. Uncertainty about what it is we want to be doing with our lives. We are a creative bunch. Most of us have jobs that, at the very least, pay the bills. None of us, none that I can think of, love our jobs. There may be one or two of us who have a job that we believe matters – that the work we do contributes to society and that we are doing important work.

But, for the most part, we all merely tolerate our jobs. None of us are doing something for money that we love. And that breeds resentment. Resentment of our situations, and, on an inherent level, of ourselves. We resent that we are forced to work forty or more hours a week for someone else. We want to be creating art, or music, to be living and experiencing life instead of merely existing within it.

And we do create, but not nearly as prolifically as we would like. We drink to escape the disconnect we feel within ourselves. And I want to go one further, and say that the disconnect is much deeper, and that it is a disconnect from our own wild nature.

We are animals, we are wild beings. We are hardwired for wildness, even someone who has never left the city, even that person longs to be connected with nature in some fashion, because we are a part of nature. We were not meant to slave away for hours a day in a cubicle in front of a computer. We were meant to be outside, and because of that, our ancestors lived off the land, planted gardens from which they got their food, raised cattle from which they gained their sustenance. We are so disconnected from that, believing our food to come from Acme, or Safeway, or Albertsons, wrapped in Styrofoam and plastic. We put faux natural products into our bodies further removing us from our wild nature.

I am not romanticizing the lifestyle of people who came before us. I understand that working off the land is hard, but I believe that those folks had a better connection with the land, with nature, with themselves, and with their true wild nature.

I feel this everyday in my life, and am trying to pay attention to the occurrences of wildness in my daily experience. Even if it is something as simple as stopping on the way to work to smell the lilacs in bloom, something as simple as stopping for fifteen seconds to soak up the sunshine, warm on my face. Sometimes simply being aware of the wild nature we all have is a step closer to reconnecting with that wild nature.

I am much less articulate about this subject than is Becca.

Dark clouds hovered over Frenchtown, ominously threatening to make Sunday a wet, muddy exercise in endurance. Mike picked me up around nine, and we had gotten a coupla of breakfast burritos to pad our stomachs for the beer and whiskey that was sure to be flowing as the day wore on. We were both less than awake during the drive out, and we drove, mostly in silence, with the radio loud on the way to the ranch.

The road up to the place where the branding would take place was mercifully dry, and the dust kicked up behind us as men in trucks rushed around, completing last minute details. The cowhands were young – fourteen or fifteen, and they sat lazily on the back of a flatbed, waiting for the day to begin. The cows had already been separated, and were braying loudly at being removed from their young. The calves were in a pen, kicking up dust and fighting with one another. We parked the rig and got our gloves, then walked over to greet the others.

Joe was already giving orders to Lisa, the nurse who would be vaccinating the calves. The generator was not yet running, and the irons were still cold, but things seemed to be shaping up. Joe Senior was wearing his rubber boots, and was sharpening his knife for the castrations. There were men rigging up the fences and lubricating the gates, kids running around and a couple of Healers underfoot. It seemed like everyone already had a job to do, and I rolled a cigarette for later.

Soon, the calves were herded into the main holding pen by the cowhands and the first few were guided into the chute. The irons were hot – so hot that some of them had turned an almost white-brass looking color. Joe uses a hot iron for dehorning the calves He had four different sized de-horning iron and a straight iron in the fire. The main JB iron was an electric one. The cattle come down the chute, one at a time, and are guided into a cattle catching table, their head sticking out the front of the table. The table is then tipped to its side so that the calve is lying horizontally. Joe then tightens down on it so that the calve is held tightly in place by a metal contraption across its ribs. One guy stand on the calf’s right rear leg, and holds his left rear leg and tail with his other had, so that the calve is still (mostly still) to accept the iron.

“Bull!” someone yells, and Joe Senior comes out with his bucket and knife to cut off the calf’s balls. The testicles are collected in a bucket, washed, and fried up for snacks that an old guy brings around to us throughout the day. They are small, almost like popcorn shrimp, and are quite tasty, once you get past the idea that they are a calf’s balls. Washing the first bite down with whiskey is highly recommended.

I hand Joe the electric iron, and he makes the first impression. There are other ways to brand cattle that are allegedly more humane, but most ranchers in these parts use hot irons. When Joe is satisfied with the impression, he pats the burn mark, hands the electric iron to me, and I hand him the straight iron. While the calf is being branded, Lisa is busy vaccinating him. Joe hands the straight iron back to me, and I clean both irons with a wire brush, removing any hair or flesh that may be attached to it. If he needs to be de-horned, Joe grabs an iron for that purpose, burns out the horn, and hands the iron back to me. I place it back into the fire, which is run by propane and looks a little like this.

Sunday, we did between one hundred and one hundred and ten head of cattle. “Bull!” or “Heifer” was yelled by one of the old guys as each calf came into the cattle catcher. Someone sitting a little ways off in a lawn chair recorded the stats. The smell of shit and mud and burning hair hung heavily in the air. After the first twenty calves or so, everyone fell into a routine. I was careful to hand the iron to Joe upside-down with the cord out of the way, so that he didn’t have to move it much when he took it from me. The guy standing in front of me, the one standing on the calves’ back legs, was careful to grab hold of the tail and block the asshole so that none of us were sprayed with shit. Once in a while, we’d stop for a minute to shovel mud onto the table to clean the shit from it. The guys holding down the calves’ back legs switched out every five calves or so in order that they did not get tired.

The generator, combined with the flame from the propane was loud enough that I wore earplugs, and I was somewhat removed from the conversations that were going on between the men handling the calves. I heard bits and pieces of conversations, some related to the branding, others discussing past brandings, or even conversations about some of the ranchers’ families. The spirit of comradery between the men was thick enough that it was almost tangible. They paid little notice to the calf whose eyes were rolling back into his head as he felt the heat of the iron, felt the snip of the knife against his balls. And the sense of trust between the men that we all knew our job, and we would all perform our job safely, was also amazing to me. We worked with the precision of a machine.

After a calf would get branded, denutted, vaccinated and de-horned, Joe would tip the cattle-catcher table upright again, and release the gate. The recently branded calf would run out of the gate, up another chute, and be herded into a field with the waiting cows. This process took between 45 seconds and 120 seconds per animal.

The smell of burnt hair was almost overpowering, and the color of the smoke from the burnt hair was a pure white. Kids cracked beers and brought them to thirsty men. I was careful not to burn anyone. The hair on my right arm had completely burned off from standing so close to the fire. I burned myself slightly with the electric iron when one of the men holding down the calves’ legs backed into me as he avoided being kicked by the calf, but the burn was not a bad one.

It was around one o’clock when we finished, finally, and the generator was turned off, the propane valve closed, the irons allowed to cool. People congratulated each other, smoked cigarettes, drank whiskey, and loaded up into their rigs for a dinner catered by the man who runs one of the longest running bars in Missoula. It was a simple meal of burgers and brauts, because the previous day, Charlie had catered an even bigger branding at another man’s ranch, but we were all glad that the work was finished, no humans were hurt, and the rain had held off. People were laughing and drinking and telling stories, and it felt good to be a part of something. It was good too, being a meat eater, to have participated in such an event, to know the sacrifices these animals make for us, and to know that I look forward to my next juicy steak, that I was not put off by what some would consider suffering and inhumane treatment of these animals. Cattle have no other reason to exist in our society other than to provide us humans with food, and it is good to be a visceral part of that process, to know that steaks come from real animals who have real pain, and not from a well-lit supermarket for $5.95 a pound.