Lesson Learned

Lauren: Seeing as how my living situation is so drastically different from everything and anything I've done or been to before, I thought I'd take stock of the changes in my life. So here's my list of things learned so far:
1. Montana lightning storms last forever. Like, 7 hours. It's the most beautiful thing you could see in the sky, excepting the aurora borealis, perhaps. It's also mildly frightening because there's always several strikes happening at the same time - just a few miles apart, so there's a kind of unpredictability and enveloping power to it, which makes me not feel like venturing very far from my little porch. I'm learning to love these storms, because of the way they look and the way they smell- there's the scent of electric cellulose, like every cell in every green thing is vibrating in the static air. And everything's so clean when it's all over.
2. People REALLY want to walk the whole battlefield, and nothing - nothing - nothing you say can or will put them off from it. It doesn't matter if you tell them there are cow pats everywhere, mini tributaries you have to jump, sinking marshy mud, hoards of swarms of mosquitos, herds of ticks, and slightly skittish but possibly irritable cattle to avoid. Oh, and it's private land. THEY WILL STILL WANT TO GET BACK THERE. And you can, for the nominal fee of $10, walk a brisk pathway to the Little Bighorn, provided you hop a barbed wire fence. I don't know why everyone wants to walk the exact path Reno took to the Reno-Benteen Battlefield. I mean, it was no picnic of a hike for him, and he had horses; granted, he was being chased by hundreds, possibly thousands of affronted and aggressive Indians. Either way, it's a steep climb. And you have to ford a river. You can appreciate it much better by looking down on the valley from the top of the Reno-Benteen Battlefield, without the sweaty, muggy, bug-infested treck through the cow pastures and a strong river current.
3. History DOES matter. Buy a T-Shirt.
4. It is much harder to draw a man with a mustache than an Indian. I'm not sure what the practical applications of this knowledge are, but there you go. Linda had asked me to draw life-sized carboard cut-out busts of Sitting Bull and Custer to put t-shirts on and it was a lot of fun. SB came out pretty well, but for some reason Custer came out a little feminine, even with the 'stache. I'll put up pictures to show it, but let's just say that even though I didn't get him spot-on, I was very kind when it came to his receding hairline.
5. People LOVE pressed pennies. We have a pressed penny souvenir machine in the front of the museum and it gets used at least 10 times a day. I've seen fully grown men get more excited about pressing a penny than the monogramed gun of Thomas Custer (who won two congressional medals of honor, by the way) just five feet from the machine. There are websites devoted to documenting every themed pressed penny machine across the US. That means that there are actual Pressed Penny Cartographers out there, whose sole job is to map out every pressed penny you can get.
There are more crazy things I've learned in the last few weeks, but I'd like to leave room for reenactment week stuff and Justin's next entry. More later..... -L