Hot Springs, Mont. - Hot Springs celebrates Chinese New Year today

OFF THE WIRE
Vince Devlin
 missoulian.com
Homesteader Days is the main event in this eastern Sanders County community, population approximately 550, but the summertime affair is a ways off.
What's a town to do in the meantime?
Celebrate the Chinese New Year, naturally.
"I don't think any Chinese people actually live in Hot Springs," says Curt Kruse, who designed a 30-foot-long dragon to be carried through town Saturday as part of the festivities. "We just do it because it's fun."
And so it was that about a dozen people showed up at the old Hot Springs gymnasium Friday morning for "dragon practice."
As a not-formally-named group of drummers - who otherwise get together weekly to play together - slapped out rhythms on djembes, half a dozen people grabbed sticks, hoisted the dragon into the air and snaked it around the gymnasium, laughing all the way.
"How do you say ‘scrunch' and ‘un-scrunch' in Chinese?" wondered Laura Lanfear as the group worked the dragon like an accordion, practicing closing in on one another, then separating and spreading the dragon out to its full 30-foot length.
The colorful dragon was put together by several townspeople in just a month's time, after Kruse had gone online to research dragons made for Chinese New Year's celebrations in places such as San Francisco and New York.
"I tried to draw on the best features I saw," Kruse says, "and tried to piece it together. It took a lot to figure out the structure, put the pipes on and make it stable."
"There's been no organization, no leader, no reason for it," says Scott Cox, who manned the dragon's tail Friday. "It's just a bunch of crazy people who live here, I guess. We're doing it because it's really fun."
The dragon's body is a 25-foot-long piece of 14-inch flexible ducting covered in fabric that was stretched out and painted in purples, reds, oranges and yellows.
The tail, and fins that attach to the top of the body via Velcro, are blues and greens.
The magnificent head has all those colors and more, and was the biggest challenge.
"We're not trained artists," explains Janell Clarke, who helped paint the dragon and is one of the drummers.
"The head just has a cardboard box for a frame, and we papier-mached the sculpture on top of it," Kruse says. "No one knew how to do papier-mache, so Laurie (Gibson) went online and found videos about it. We watched the videos, then tried to do it."
It's not Hot Springs' first dragon, however.
Celebrating the Chinese New Year, which annually falls sometime in January or February, began here at least two years ago.
The dragon made for those events, Clarke says, largely wore out, and so different folks decided to build a new one for this, the Year of the Rabbit.
"Originally we were just going to take it over to a piece of property I own, build a fire and snake it around there," Clarke says, "but it turned into a community project that became bigger than ourselves."
They needed someplace large enough to stretch out the fabric of the body and paint it, and that got plenty more people at the town's Senior Citizens Center, which had the space, involved.
"Everyone grabbed a color and went to work," Kruse says.
Then, kids from the school gathered to make dragon masks and paper lanterns for the celebration.
"What's neat is we learned if you can staple, duct-tape or glue, you can create," Clarke says.
They thought it would be fun to do more than just parade it down Main Street - which they will, Saturday at 4:30 p.m., accompanied by the drummers - and so they incorporated that with an art opening at On the Wall Gallery at Wall Street Place at 6 p.m., and added a Chinese community dinner at the old VFW at 6:30 p.m.
Then they scheduled everything around an annual visit to the town by members of the Bandidos, a motorcycle gang.
Nick Barber was recruited to be first in line and hold up the dragon's head, which is considerably heavier than the rest of the dragon.
"That wore me out," he said after dragon practice Friday, "and we only went around the gym a few times."
Abby Coleman, Dan Williams, and Lanfear, Gibson, Cox and Kruse also manned the PVC pipes that are used to keep the dragon high in the air, sometimes resting the poles on the ground so they could dance around them, too.
So there you have it: Few towns in Montana have ever been better prepared for both Bandidos and the Chinese New Year than is Hot Springs this weekend.
Reporter Vince Devlin can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at vdevlin@missoulian.com.