The Power of the Dog

The Power of the Dog | Official Teaser | Netflix
Netflix

Stupid, boring and irritating. But my wife liked it. We've got two brothers running a successful ranch in 1925 Montana. Their parents got old and moved away, to the big city presumably. 

Giant Frigging House in the Middle of Nowhere

Two brothers, one smart, full-on cowboy, one not so smart, but solid and reliable, live together is a giant frigging house in the middle of nowhere. The brothers are in their 30's. Solid up and marries the widow who runs the restaurant in the nearby crossroads. Smarty was perfectly comfortable with the way things were and doesn't take kindly to having his applecart upset. Widow has an effeminate teenage son who is studying to become a doctor. Eventually we see smarty's true colors, and now it starts to make sense. It's still stupid, but hardly anybody gets to live a smart life full of adventure and happy, smiling people. 

Cattle drive on the Great Plains - Castaigne, J. Andre - 1892

The scenery is cool, but the cattle look a little too fat. Pictures of cattle on old time trail drives look like they are skin and bones, relatively speaking. I suppose fat cattle is what they raise now. Oh, there is murder by anthrax, a common disease with cattle. That's kind of interesting.

Oh yeah, it was shot in New Zealand. 

On the road in Rapid City South Dakota

Gillette Wyoming 150 BNSF engines idle at Donkey Creek Trains start at the two minute mark.
700 miles today, all on Interstate 90. Just past Gillette I happened to glance over and noticed more locomotives than I had ever seen in one place, but then in a flash it was gone.

Saw the smokestack in Anaconda Montana, a national cemetery in Sheridan or Gillette, I forget. Half a dozen truck stop /coffee dispenseries. Flashing lights in my rear view mirror. Got stopped by a Wyoming state trooper for going 84 MPH in an 80 zone. "We have the highest speed limits in the country, but they are strictly enforced." He let me off with a warning.

On the road in Missoula Montana

Saw two oil trains on our way east through the Columbia gorge this morning. Noticed the sign for Mosier where an oil train derailed last week. The two trains I saw were on the other side of the river, the Washington side. The gorge east of the Cascades is kind of weird. Here we have this huge river and the hills on either side are covered with brown grass.
     Just east of Boardman we turned north. That road takes us through Kennewick and Pasco. Lots of traffic there and the road is very confused. We've been following highway 397, but in Pasco sweety's magic elf box tells us to take highway 182. 182 goes to Walla Walla. 395 takes a right off of 182 and I drove right by it because which road are we supposed to be on? 395 or 182? Never mind, the magic elf box takes us on a five minute  tour of a Mexican neighborhood and then puts us back on the road to Spokane.
    Spokane is booming. Traffic is heavy all the way to Coeur d'Alene. Once we get past town though it lightens up considerably. Here we are getting into the mountains and while the speed limit is 75, the road is twisty enough that I seldom reach the limit. There is also a medium long stretch of construction, it's uphill, one lane and there are trucks, so we are creeping along at 20 MPH for a few minutes. Then it's downhill for the next hundred miles. There are still turns that are tight enough to warrant reducing my speed, but there are straights where I am comfortable doing 80. I get passed by a full size Chevy crew cab pickup truck doing at least 90. He isn't slowing down for the turns at all.
    We're staying at the La Quinta and it's pretty nice. There is a stream running between the back of the building and the Interstate highway. If you open the window you can even hear the stream over the highway noise.


I saw a bunch of swifts swooping over the stream. I presume they were eating bugs, but I didn't see any. No-see-ums, maybe. The first 25 seconds the camera didn't focus.

    Saw a couple of small, home-built looking welder's rigs on the road today, and I got to wondering if anybody ever built a fancy, custom welding rig. My question was answered when we pulled into the parking lot here.

Monaconda

Mystery thing near Warm Springs, Montana. It's five and a half miles away from me on I-90.

On our way East to Iowa a couple of weeks ago, about two hours out of Missoula, I spied this thing. What the heck is it? It's a ways away, so it has got to be big. It looks kind of like a smokestack, but there is nothing else there. I know! It's a monolith, left here by ancient aliens! We're saved! Oh hallelujah! Now wait a minute bucky, there might be a more prosaic explanation.

Anaconda Smelter. C. 1950

A week later, on our way home, we stopped overnight in Butte, with dinner at the Montana Club. I'm wandering around after dinner and I notice this picture hanging on the wall. Golly gee, could that be the same alien monolith we saw on our way east? Yes, it could, and no, it's not an artifact of an ancient civilization. It is the smokestack from the Anaconda Smelter that used to be in Anaconda, Montana, just down the road from Warm Springs. The smelter was demolished in 1981, but the stack was saved. It is nearly 600 feet tall. The Washington Monument would easily fit inside.


Montana Mosaic 10: The Rise and Fall of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company (2006)
    Anaconda built Montana. They were an industrial powerhouse. The Anaconda company is gone from the state, but the poisonous legacy of it's mining operations remains. Montana has the largest EPA superfund site.

Update November 2021 replaced missing video.