The film’s time is the 1880’s. Depp plays a young man from Cleveland, heading West on the train to a promised accounting job in a town called Machine, somewhere in the US southwest. The first few scenes on the train set the stage for dislocation: every time Depp wakes up from dozing off, there is a different set of passengers, each rougher and more threatening than the previous set. We’re not shown what Depp sees as he looks out the train window, but he is obviously disturbed by the increasingly stark landscapes as the train heads west.

Machine turns out to be a company town, dominated by a massive, clanking metalworks run by the obviously dying Robert Mitchum (in his last film appearance). Machine-both the town and the factory-are an absolute dystopia. Depp has a brief liaison with a young woman, is wounded by her ex-lover (Mitchum’s son, played by Gabriel Byrne), kills him in self-defense, and flees the town into the wilderness.

Pursued by a host of bounty hunters, Depp is rescued by Nobody, a savvy Indian played by the wonderful Gary Farmer, a Canadian native actor. That is when the real movie starts, carefully investigating the complex relationship developing between a helpless, wounded Cleveland accountant and an idiosyncratic, bush-savvy Indian. As a boy, Nobody was captured by whites and taken to England to be educated. After some years he escapes and returns to the wilds of the  American West, but not before memorizing the poetry of William Blake. Depp’s character happens to be named William Blake, and Nobody tries mightily and unsuccessfully to get the Cleveland William Blake to take ownership of the poems of the English William Blake, between bouts of gunplay with the bounty hunters.

To mild-mannered Depp/Blake’s surprise, he is born to killing, and dispatches the bounty hunters as they appear. But he is wounded and hallucinating; his powerful sense of dislocation is matched by the alien, exotic landscapes he and Nobody pass through. As the movie progresses, it becomes clear that Nobody is not helping Blake escape; he is taking him on a journey. The journey is a grand ecological transect of the West, from Arizona to the Olympic Peninsula. From dry sagebrush, through pinyon pine, ponderosa pine, lodgepole pine, Douglas-fir and finally, to cedar rainforest. The mortally wounded Blake begins to realize that this journey is also a transect from life to death, and that Nobody is his respectful guide. In the moving final scene, Nobody and the Makah villagers prepare and launch Blake’s death canoe into the mouth of a river that flows into the Pacific Ocean. The scene was shot in Neah Bay; you can’t get much farther West than that.

Nobody is the central character of Dead Man; Depp/Blake is a passive mirror. Why does Nobody take on this ruinous task of escorting Depp? Why is he committed to convincing Depp/Blake that he is the real William Blake, when he knows it is not the case? What native language is Nobody speaking, as he converses with Arizona Apaches and north coast Makahs? Why does he abandon Blake and then rejoin him, much to the displeasure of a lady friend?

The film is shot in gorgeous black and white, broken up into short scenes with momentary blank screens in between. Neil Young provides a haunting (and occasionally monotonous) guitar score. Jarmusch, who wrote and directed, gives a raft of good actors brief moments on screen, and then kills them off. Mitchum gets a few minutes; Gabriel Byrne barely lasts thirty seconds. Billy Bob Thornton gets a mini-cameo, and Alfred Molina takes a fatal bullet while you are still savoring the surprise of his presence. A gutsy director, to casually snuff out talent of that caliber.

Mythologies become boring with standard interpretations. Perhaps that is why I was so attracted to Dead Man, Days of Heaven, and even Rango, for that matter: they reinterpret the West from wonderfully unique and bizarre perspectives. Jarmusch, who grew up in Ohio, is surely that innocent moving through the savage and incomprehensible human and ecological landscapes of the early American West, trying to make sense of it all.

Not quite the same as slaying mastodons, but it does keep our killer instincts within the limits of suburban etiquette.

I don’t own a riding lawnmower, but they do look like a lot of fun (think of chasing mastodons on an ATV). However, for an oversized guy like me, I might look pretty ridiculous on one, sort of like the guys on miniature motorcycles at the Shriner parades.

I’m supposed to be an environmentalist, so my gas lawnmower is definitely suspect. My solution was to use it rarely, and when I did, I pushed it along at a fast trot, thereby drastically reducing my carbon footprint. But then I discovered that the old-fashioned manual reel mowers have been updated and are back on the market. So I bought one, from a well-known Canadian tool company, and it immediately transported me right back to the 1950’s-that unmistakable scissoring sound as the reel blades make contact with the cutter bar. Plus the endlessly satisfying finish of a vigorous push stroke, when you stop the mower but the reel keeps on freewheeling. More so if it has been lubricated in the past five years.

I don’t jog with my new Canadian-made manual reel mower, but it does give me a good full-body workout. And I have discovered the joy of mowing barefoot, something I would never do with the old gas hog. Now when I mow, the bottoms of my feet are in intimate contact with freshly cut lawn, and my ankles are continuously showered by a gentle rain of grass clippings. It’s sort of like a soothing New Age chlorophyll foot massage, but I digress. I was talking about killing mastodons.

I have a Very Important Theory about lawns. The reason why we are so fanatically attached to them is privilege: lawns harken back to the days of the grand manors and estates of Victorian England. The vast manicured grounds around the manor was a way for the owner to say to the world: “look, I own this land and I’m so wealthy I don’t have to grow potatoes or raise pigs on it. I can use up valuable farmland just for ornamentation, and get nothing from it! So envy me!”

Unfortunately no landscape scholars have accepted my Theory, which really annoys me. Maybe I’ll go out and kill a mastodon. Or perhaps plant potatoes in my front yard.

Andrew Nikiforuk, in his seminal book Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, equates petroleum production with the erosion of democracy. Regions and countries with petroleum deposits, like Alberta, use petroleum revenues to keep taxes low. The fundamental democratic equation that balances taxation with representative government is erased. If a big chunk of my salary pays for government budgets, I’m going to watch closely how they operate. If petroleum finances the government, I don’t give a damn what they do.

We find it baffling and incomprehensible as we watch someone casually throw their life away in favor of crack cocaine, when life has so much to offer. Be baffled no more: look to our universal addiction to petroleum for the answer. We are casually throwing our world away.

Gave a book reading here last night. It was a long drive to speak to twenty people, but I gave honest weight. Had time after the reading to catch the tail end of a climate change meeting. Local Revelstoke folks, most of them older, discussing changes they might expect. The talk turned to forest insect invasions, and one lady described a tent caterpillar invasion in the 1940’s. There were so many of them that they coated the railroad tracks, and the trains could get no traction on  squashed and greasy caterpillar bodies as they tried to negotiate the Rogers Pass. Desperate, the railroaders put men on each side of the locomotives cowcatchers, and gave them each a bucket of sand to drizzle on to the rails.

Breakfast over, it’s time to head home, back through the narrow slot of Eagle Pass, through the Monashee Mountains toward the Okanagan. Legend has it that the Chief Surveyor of the Canadian Pacific Rail Line was stumped on where to lay trackage westward through the Monashees until one day he saw five eagles flying out of a narrow canyon, and then he knew that would be the route. The pass is so narrow that the highway has to be on one side of the creek, and the rail line on the other. I’m sure the eagles lived to regret that particular flight.

Stop to stretch my legs at Craigellachie, where the last spike was driven, joining railroad trackage from east to west across Canada. Craigellachie might be a measure of British Columbia’s geographical fractalization: the CPR’s eastern leg went seven-eighths of the way across the country, while the BC side managed only a few hundred kilometers. The famous last spike photo has the CPR President driving the spike, while a group of dignitaries and workers look on. In the middle of the photo is a young kid, about twelve or thirteen, who has wormed his way unnoticed through the crowd, to stand just behind the President. The faces of the crowd are all somber and grave: they know this photograph will be historic. Not the kid. His face says crashing this party was duck soup, and I’m already thinking about my next adventure.

There are more lasts on this trip home. The last beehive burner at Malakwa. These were once a   fixture at every sawmill in every BC town. Instead of being cut up for scrap steel, this one has been turned into a restaurant. And then near Enderby, the last drive-in movie theater.

I’ve always liked visiting Revelstoke, a railroad town that is morphing into a center for back-country ski tourism. Mountain towns have their own urban energy, partly because they have no available footprint for suburbs and strip malls. But the main source of that energy channels directly from the peaks to the people.

Slacks sat down at a table with his sandwich and laptop. Obviously a businessman. Not flashy enough to be a realtor, maybe a consultant of some sort. I went to a table with my panini and newspaper. None of the articles interested me, and I kept mulling over the incident. It was by sheer random chance that slacks got the touch and not me; I probably would have turned the guy down. Or at the most bought him a sandwich, but not the drink and cookie. As I left, I walked over to slacks and handed him six dollars, saying, “let’s split the cost.” He thanked me, but refused the money. “That was an awkward situation, but you did the honorable thing,” I said to him. Slacks thought for a minute, and replied, “Well, it’s not that far from here”–pointing generally to himself and his laptop–”to there.”

Each one of these vehicles requires careful thought, time, and accessories. They must be diligently researched before purchase. Much information and opinion will be gatherd from friends, colleagues and Grandpa Google. Once purchased, these vehicles must be tightened, WD-40′d, cleaned, sharpened, tuned and accessorized. Not to mention the actual use. This all represents a vast commitment of money, time and attention.

Where would all this collective concentration be diverted to if vehicles were at the margins of our male psyche instead of at its very pulsing, throbbing center? It is a sobering thought. We could learn ballet. End poverty. Fix that back door hinge. Read stories to our kids.

But maybe motor obsession is part of our male destiny, and we can’t fight genetics. I don’t know. I’ll think about that one while I’m riding my motorcycle.

I have a traditional and somewhat romantic notion of neighborhoods, as places of familiarity, mutual support and the daily rhythm of casual contact, small disputes and small pleasures. I’m not sure where that notion came from, maybe a combination of idealized children’s books, and Jane Jacobs. I am reminded of Tom Waits’ wonderfully poignant song, In the Neighborhood. At any rate, the notion is eroding. Whether I take the larger set of twenty-four or the smaller set of eight, more than half of my neighborhood residents either don’t make any social contact, or actively discourage it. To the point that I wonder why they chose to live in a neighborhood at all, rather than on an isolated acreage somewhere, or in a highrise condo, where neighborly contact is not expected. If privacy or misanthropy is so important to them, why do they choose to live cheek by jowl?

I am beginning to see this neighborhood as an elaborate lie, as a collection of nervous couples and families camped uneasily on real estate investments. Dogs rule here. They have a neighborhood: we don’t.

What special chemistry makes towns like Hood River and Nelson successful? Good urban planning? Visionary City Councils? Progressive mayors? I would say no. In my estimation, the biggest single attribute that makes these towns successful is geography, or rather the lack of it. Both towns are tucked into steep, mountainous terrain. They are hemmed in by water on one side, and unbuildable 35 degree slopes on the other. There is simply no room for sprawling suburban strip malls, gargantuan parking lots and bland pastel suburbs. Commerce, by and large, is forced to rely on that quaint, old-fashioned concept: Main Street. Fortunately, neither town had reason to eviscerate their downtown thoroughfare (Oak Street in Hood River, Baker Street in Nelson), so a serviceable, low-rise and architecturally varied building stock remains. High urban density and pedestrian orientation means that downtown merchants have a good chance of survival. Adaptive re-use is the name of the game: old gas stations become sporting goods stores, defunct canneries become breweries, and so on. Carpenters are kept busy renovating old heritage homes. There are lots of attic and basement rental suites, and they are full.

Certainly you can find a Wal-Mart-and a suburb–in either town, but mountains and rivers keep them in check. As a result, each town has been able to develop a distinctive (and slightly funky) identity.

There is a lesson to be learned in these two successful towns, but their success has nothing to do with politicians or planners, and everything to do with a constrained urban footprint. Hood River and Nelson are fortunate to have difficult geography. All the other flat-ground American and Canadian small towns will have to come up with a political substitute for steep mountains and big rivers. And good luck to them on that.

It struck me that in science, Tufte is absolutely right; you cannot let your conclusions overreach your data, and you cannot transfer a hypothesis or conclusion from one discipline to another without retesting it. But in creative writing, that is precisely what we are supposed to do: take a narrowly focused idea or incident, and grossly overinflate it into the conceit of an entire story or  novel, with no factual underpinnings whatsoever. Use A as a metaphor for not only B, but also for C, F, K and S-Z. I’ve always believed the separations between art and science are grossly exaggerated, but this one is definitely a showstopper.

Thomas Berger, in The Anatomy of Humor, defines a pun as “a signifier that stands for two signifieds.” I am not joking. Bad puns, Berger says, play on sound, good ones on meaning. Humor is like mathematics for me: I admire the results, but don’t understand the mechanics. For instance, I know what irony is, but I can’t define it (can you?). So I am faced with a difficult choice: just consume good literature and good science, or else ignore the rules and create some of both. After all, if you drill far enough down into language, it is a science. And the scientific process is based on the hypothesis, which can be created out of thin air.

In all this buzzing confusion, I can cling to one of the great and definitive puns of all time, this from Groucho Marx. “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.”

See how Main Street changes after 5:30pm. Skateboards and dreadlocks begin to populate the sidewalk. Overpowered pickups rumble down Main, young male drivers torn between speed and the quest for connection along the meager few blocks of urban neon. These are real lives, carried on with no regard for the uncertain particulars of yours.

Carry on; I’ll be back.