The following story first appeared in a regional literary magazine here in Central Pennsylvania back in the early 2000's. I actually wrote it back in the 90's. I often share it with young friends who are heading west for the first time. Enjoy yourselves...
MARCH: A Long Way from Home
I got on an airplane in Baltimore, at 7:30 AM on a March morning in 1980 to take a seasonal job with one of the large Federal land management agencies that own most of the Northern Rockies. It was foggy and about 50 degrees. I debarked in Butte at about 3:00 PM, where it had warmed all the way up to 15 below zero after a nighttime low of 25 below. After a two hour ride with my new boss, we arrived at a tiny outpost of the Federal Government about 16 miles from the Continental Divide and 12 miles from a town of 200 people. Only the main road was paved in that town, the rest of the streets were gravel. It was ten degrees colder there than it had been in Butte.
The next morning when I opened the blinds on the window of the bunkhouse I was assigned as quarters, there was a coyote standing on a snowdrift maybe 10 feet from the window. He looked up when the blind opened, and we stared at each other through the window for almost half a minute. He was so close I could see his nostrils dilate as he strained to catch my scent. Presently, he cocked a leg in my direction, and trotted away at a dignified pace into a landscape full of gigantic mountains and endless snow. You could see him for almost half an hour, until the white distance simply swallowed him up.
I was 24, and I had never been west of Pittsburgh.
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APRIL: Regarding Domestic Life
During the first five weeks of my residence, our little combination Ranger Station/Visitor's Center had no visitors. None. Zero. I was busy though. Abe, my boss, and Larry, the maintenance man, both had duties that took them to half a dozen other similar facilities scattered over an area the size of, say, western Connecticut, so most day to day tasks fell to me, the only permanent resident. Since it snowed at least a little nearly every day during those first weeks, I had a fairly predictable schedule that involved plowing the driveway and parking area clear with a small snow plow mounted on a green government truck that was older than I was. After plowing I'd shovel the walks, and sometimes the roof if there was a lot of snow. By then, it would be time to plow the drive and parking area again, and so on....
Actually, I should revise my description of the April visitation rate to no tourists. Local people dropped in from time to time; we had heat and a coffee pot. There were two brothers, twins named Bart and Bob Miller (not their real names), somewhere on the long side of 35 years old, who visited regularly. In many ways they were typical native sons, but they weren't like anybody I'd ever met in Pennsylvania. They didn't seem to actually have jobs per se, yet they were the busiest people I'd ever met.
Between them, they drove the county snow plow and the school bus, they did some logging, primarily for poles and firewood, they built jack-leg fences and Beaver-slide hay derricks and log houses, they dug and cleaned irrigation ditches, they ran some cows of their own and for other folks as well, they bought, sold, and worked on pickup trucks, they guided hunters, they helped to make hay on several of the big ranches in the area. Bob was an amateur veterinarian, farrier, and castrator of calves, which is, evidently, something of an art form. Bart was rumored to have a small still somewhere up on the National Forest that was fired with lodgepole pine, and was said to produce something you could both drink and thin varnish with. As I was an ignorant eastern kid, both brothers felt a sort of moral duty to educate me.
One of the first things you noticed about these guys was their domestic status. In a state where, at least at the time, males outnumbered females about two to one, both of them were married to exceptionally handsome women. Bart's situation was especially odd. Although he was widely known as a reprobate of the first order, his wife, Betty, was a devout Mormon, and they lived under the same roof with her parents and brothers. Her father was a bishop. After I got to know Bart well enough to ask about his and Betty's arrangement, he provided me with the following explanation.
As he told it, they had gone to dinner over in Anaconda a couple of times, and after several such dates, he finally screwed up the fortitude to make a pass at her in the cab of his truck, a pass she responded to with considerable enthusiasm. Before things got too far along, he made a discrete inquiry regarding precautions against pregnancy. She told him she was taking birth control pills.
Now he must have thought it odd that the 20 year old only daughter of a Mormon bishop from a town of 200 people had such a prescription, but he didn't find it odd enough to ask too many questions.
Maybe six weeks later, in the middle of an otherwise quiet Sunday, he answered a knock at his door to find her father and two of her brothers smiling at him through the screen door.
They were dressed for church, scrubbed, shaved, grinning cheerfully from ear to ear, and bristling with firearms. They invited themselves in, and explained to Bart the peculiar and time-honored Mormon belief in posthumous conversion, wherein a sinner, no matter how vile his wickedness, could be saved and brought to know God even after that sinner had actually left the corporal world. The wedding was held a week later in Butte, and Bart was welcomed into the bosom of the family.
"My God, Bart, you must have guessed she wasn't on the up and up!" “Well, yeah, I sorta did, but think about it. I didn't get shot, and they didn't make me convert, so I ain't posthumous or a Goddamned Mormon. I got a good place to live, all the relatives a guy could want and three beautiful kids. Betty is still one of the prettiest women in the whole county, and hell, every mother's son needs to git the dust blowed outta his pickle every once in a while! I think I done OK, depending on how a guy wants to look at things."
Alright, it ain’t Socrates nor Descartes, but it is philosophy, or at least it's philosophical. He and Betty seemed happy enough, and who are we to judge?
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MAY: On Independence To live in the most remote parts of Montana, you have to be able to take care of yourself. If something bad happens to you way back in the pucker brush, nobody is likely to come along and find you, and you might die. It's not that Montanans don't help each other out, most of the ones I know are among the most cooperative and openly friendly people I've ever met anywhere, but in the 1980’s there were only about 800,000 of them. The state is three times the size of Pennsylvania. There's just not a lot of them around.
Bob Miller was sawing down a lodgepole in cold weather during the first week of May, miles back off some Godforsaken logging road on the National Forest. Sometimes if there's a cold snap after the first warm spell of spring, the sap will start flowing in the trees, and then freeze. If you cut a tree in this condition, it may behave unpredictably. The tree slipped off the stump and came straight down, butt first, on Bob's left foot. The whole damned tree. His foot was, of course, broken to pieces. He smoked a cigarette, tightened his boot laces as much as possible, and drove himself 77 miles to the hospital in Anaconda. He did this in a truck with a manual transmission.
Think about that.
In such a place and under such circumstances, independence is not conceptual. It is reality and it is mortal as hell.
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The need for self reliance brings with it some other things that make Montana what it is. Hand in hand with independence comes a philosophy that espouses tolerance. The feeling is, if folks demonstrate that they can take care of themselves and aren't bothering anybody, then they have a right to live, think, and act as they see fit. At its best the independent and accepting disposition of Montana has fostered a kind of live and let live tolerance of all kinds of people, a tolerance that has drawn gifted writers, artists, and thinkers to the state and given it a lively and Bohemian creative life completely out of proportion to its tiny population and distance from the big coastal centers of the arts. At its worst, this is the same tolerance that has allowed the Freemen, and other less well known groups of hateful people, to flourish, the same acceptance that allowed Ted Kaczynski to live a quiet life near Lincoln for years without anyone ever wondering or asking what the hell he was up to. Montana is a monument to both the possibilities and pitfalls of absolute personal freedom, a paradox that most Montanans recognize and try to come to terms with.
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Bob Miller made it to the hospital, and the doctors pinned his foot together, put a huge fiberglass cast around it, and managed to save it. Two weeks later, he drove back to the scene of the injury, wrapped a plastic bag around his cast, got out his chainsaw and buzzed up the lodgepole that smashed his foot. When he got the pieces home, he split them up for cordwood. …………………………………………………………………………………………………
JUNE: The Arsenal of Democracy
In the early 1980's there weren't a lot of satellite dishes or TV cable companies in the most rural parts of the Intermountain West, so where I lived, real-time broadcast news of the outside world mostly came by way of a powerful AM radio station out of Butte. The music they played was awful and no one ever turned it on. Thus many of us out in the hinterlands were mighty surprised that early June day when the sky got just about pitch black at noon time, and a fine gray substance began to rain down on us. Of course we all assumed a nuclear exchange had occurred.
There were lots of documentaries in those days about the impending nuclear crisis, and Montana, thanks to its low population density and abundance of federal land, contains uncountable ICBM silos. The thinking in Washington is, by locating the nukes in the western boonies, you minimize the "incidental losses" if your "assets" are "targeted". What this Washington-speak actually means is, in the event of a nuclear war, the deadest people will be in Montana, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming and the eastern parts of Washington and Oregon. Bart Miller's response to all of this was to stop his truck as often as possible at the chain link gates of any silo he happened to come upon in his travels, and take a leak in full view of the silent but watchful camera that stood sentinel at the entrance. I have always assumed his FBI file to be quite entertaining and extensive.
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There is a deep resentment of the Federal Government throughout the Rocky Mountain States, a resentment no easterner can truly appreciate. Their populations are low so they have little influence in Washington. The federal government is generally the biggest landowner in the state, doesn't pay taxes, doesn't have to obey local and state ordinances and laws, and most local folks depend on it for lumber, firewood, game, fish, grazing, jobs, minerals, irrigation and drinking water, and other things. Most Rocky Mountain natives feel like they should have some considerable say in how Federal Land gets used, since its use affects them dramatically and disproportionately. For better or worse, Uncle Sam has assumed the role of a hated absentee landlord in much of the west, and using the region as a place to stockpile weapons of mass destruction and toxic waste, as if nobody lives there, hasn't helped matters.
Of course, the "sagebrush rebellion" and "wise use" types, who simply want carte blanche to do whatever the hell they want to with Federal Land, and have been threatening to shoot at Federal Employees lately, aren't much of an alternative to a monolithic Big Brother. Mining-caused Superfund sites, 3600 acre clearcuts, severe overgrazing, and the de-watering of entire drainages have been some of the by-products of Federal acquiescence to local demands. This acquiescence has been generally lubricated by the none-too-subtle bullying of extractive industries and the elected officials from the region whose campaign chests are subsidized by these industries. Like it or not, there's no good evidence that local people and business interests manage land or resources any better than the "faceless bureaucrats".
What is needed in Montana, and all over the Intermountain West, is a better way to manage public land; a paradigm that responds to local interests and national priorities in something like a balanced way, and does so with a little grace and respect for the land and the folks who manage it, and live near it.
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To the relief of all in the vicinity, the gray stuff proved to be a stray volcanic ash cloud from Mount Saint Helens, and harmless. After several hours of nail-biting uncertainty, I joined quite a group of folks decompressing from the scare in the local gin mill. Bob Miller, deep in his cups, stood up at the table, stomped his huge cast on the floor to get everyone's attention, and roared out his contention that Montana should secede from the Union. His embarrassed wife Joanne tugged on his arm trying to get him to sit down, and hissed "Christ Bob, shut up! You're drunk. We can't win a civil war!" Bob glared at her, weaving a bit and struggling to balance and focus, "Why not? We got all their goddamned missiles!"
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JULY: Ignorance and Enlightenment
In early summer, I was joined by another seasonal employee, inflating our full-time staff to two, and bringing another kid from "back east" to the mountains. George Nylund (again a pseudonym) was from Minnesota, which to many Montanans is "Back East", and was, like me, in his early 20's. As it turned out, he had even more to learn than I did.
George drove straight through from Duluth to start his job, about 26 hours, and ate a lot of junk food on the ride. Consequently, his first week in paradise found him suffering from a quiet but uncomfortable intestinal disorder that sent him to a doctor in Anaconda on his first day off. When he got back, I made a delicate inquiry regarding the results of his visit and the state of his health. He said "I'll be fine. The doctor gave me a prescription for some suppositories". This was more information than I was really looking for, so I dropped the subject.
Two mornings later, I had a day off and George had to work. I was lounging in my bunk, and rolled over, opened my eyes, and began my day with the sight of George, shaving in his underwear, framed in the open bathroom door (ah, the romance of government housing). As I began toying with the notion of getting up and making coffee, I was horrified to see George, with the door still open, reach for his brown prescription bottle and extract from it a foil wrapped "silver bullet" of considerable diameter. I was on the point of screaming at him to shut the door, but before I could, he peeled off the foil wrapper, put the immense lozenge in his mouth, and choked it down with a large glass of water!
“George!" I shrieked "That's a suppository!"
"I know, the Doctor prescribed them for me."
"George! Do you know what a suppository is?"
"Yeah it's for constipation!"
An innocent! He had no idea.
"George! You're not supposed to swallow those Goddamned things!"
"What do you mean? What am I supposed to do with them?"
A fair question. When I answered it he, of course, assumed I was trying to play a disgusting practical joke on him. We had a ferocious argument that ended with the two of us standing together in the kitchen in our underwear, literally a half inch away from fisticuffs, looking at the entry for "suppository" in Webster's Collegiate. "You see that you fucking idiot, it says 'rectum'! Do you know where your rectum is?"
He went white as a sheet, called the doctor's office immediately, and asked if he had been poisoning himself. The doctor launched into a howl of laughter so loud I could hear it clear across the bunkhouse. When he calmed down, he told George they were just gelatin capsules full of glycerin, and essentially inert. George composed himself, shot me a murderous look and told me that if I breathed a word about what had happened, he'd kill me. I couldn't help it though, and I told Bart Miller that afternoon in the mercantile. By evening, George was known across the entire county as "Wrong End Nylund", a name that stuck until his appointment ended in the fall. He is locally famous to this day.
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AUGUST: A Fish Story
To the sportsman, Montana is a prodigal place. I came west from what is, arguably, the best trout fishing state in the East. I’d been a pretty dedicated fisherman since high school, and I knew how to do some business with a fly rod. At least I thought I did.
When Bob Miller found out I liked to fish, and had been catching a few nice brook trout in the little creek behind the station, he graced me with a hot tip. "The real nice ones are actually back in the beaver ponds, just east of where you've been fishin." "What's 'real nice' Bob?" "Well, I seen a few fish come out of there over 20 inches." Where I was raised, a brookie of 12 inches is a monster, and even taking into account the propensity for fiction common to all fishermen, Bob had me salivating. I didn't ask for any suggestions on fly patterns or tactics from Bob, since both he and his brother employed coarser methods than I was used to. When they felt like a little relaxation, they used worms or live grasshoppers fished on an old fly rod, like most local folks. There was also talk of Bart supplying the fixings for the big Miller family picnic and fish fry by plumbing the depth of a nearby lake with a quarter stick of dynamite. This technique, colloquially referred to as employing the “Dupont Coachman” fly pattern, was not something I had ever heard of back home, and Bart would neither confirm nor deny his expertise with it.
I'd never been in the beaver ponds before. They turned out to be full of mosquitoes, moose, and, based on the tracks, the odd grizzly, and were a perfect maze of channels, dams, ponds, meadows, and swamps. It was slow going and scary as hell. I stopped at what looked like a good spot at a breast high dam that held back a pond of perhaps an acre. I made a cast into the pond with a small deer hair dry fly affixed to a tippet of five pound test monofilament, a rig I often employed in eastern waters. There was boil at the fly that looked like someone had flushed a toilet out in the beaverpond, my rod bucked over double, and the fly instantly parted from the tippet with an audible "ping". I was left standing atop the beaverdam with line wrapped around my head, my eyes wide as saucers, and my knees knocking together, mumbling cusswords to myself. Later that evening I learned that the technical local angling term for this condition is "having your knickers up in a knot".
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As it turned out, I wound up living in Montana for seven years, and spent more time fishing than I probably should have. I return to fish and backpack nearly every year. I can't really say if the fishing is any better or worse than it "used to be", but it's different, I watched it change. Not long ago my brother-in-law called to tell me that he'd been looking at a People magazine at the barber shop and had read that fly fishing, a pursuit I've enjoyed since I was a teenager, was the number one trendy sport in the country. He had called me right away to tell me "You're so out of it, you're actually back in!" Of course this popularity has affected Montana's stupendous trout fishery in some fundamental ways.
While I wasn't in Montana for the "good old days" whenever that was, I can remember fishing the Madison, Yellowstone, Big Hole, Clark Fork, Bitterroot, and Kootenai rivers in the early 1980's, covering lots of water, catching sometimes obscene numbers of big trout, and often not seeing anyone all day. That doesn't happen anymore. The simple, impressionistic flies that used to work well have been replaced by much more exact copies of insects and baitfish, because many fish have been fooled by feathered hooks before, and they are more careful. People from California, Texas, and Back East have bought up and posted river frontage, especially in southwestern Montana, and eliminated public access to long stretches of some streams, hoarding the fishing for themselves, and turning what used to be working ranches into effete and nasty little "ranchettes".
These same newcomers have thrown their money and time at preservation of in-stream water flows, fighting whirling disease in the rainbow trout population, habitat restoration and preservation, and many other good things. Unlike many traditional Montana fishermen, they also tend to release most of their fish and to catch them with barbless hooks. All in all, maybe the good and bad effects on the "Big Name" rivers cancel each other out; the fishery remains healthy or even improved, but you share it with more folks.
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I returned to the beaver ponds the next evening armed with a much heavier tippet and, at the suggestion of my boss, some huge, gaudy, and delightfully old fashioned Potts “Mite” series wet flies. These native Montana patterns have collars woven from coarse hair, and are both seductive looking in the water and nearly indestructible. I had never used such flies and had no confidence in them, but they worked great. Over the next few weeks, I took several brook trout from those ponds that might have weighed three or even four pounds, real monsters, and even ate a couple. Their meat was pink like salmon, and just as delicious. Once, near the end of August, I was talking with Bob Miller in the station when a tourist walked in and asked me if the little creek and beaver ponds he'd passed driving up had any fish in them. I paused for a second and said "Just little ones and a few whitefish". When he left, Bob stared at me in mild surprise. "Damn, you're turnin into a real local ain't ya!"
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SEPTEMBER: Exodus
Abe let me know during the first week of the month that I'd be laid off in four weeks, and George went home the next week, leaving me the sole proprietor for the end of the season. One morning there was snow on the ridgeline above the Ranger Station, and for the first time in my life I heard elk bugling. The weather was beautiful those last few weeks, and the fishing was very good, but I was restless. Back in March and April, when I was plowing and shoveling snow, all I thought about was going home. Now I felt different.
I had learned so much in such a short time, as will happen when you're in your early 20's and don't know much to begin with. I had learned how to saw down and buck up a lodgepole without killing myself or anyone else. I learned how to properly cook a big brook trout. I learned how to saddle, ride, and be thrown from a horse. I learned what mountain oysters are, and that they make me sick. I learned how to roll my own cigarettes, and drink Rainier Beer. I learned that when you ask a girl from a town of 200 people to take a drive to Butte or Missoula with you, pretty much everyone knows about it by evening. I learned what Blue Healer dogs and Hereford cattle are. I learned to play shake-a-day with Fatty the barkeep. And I learned to love Montana.
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I ran out of work in October, and after having an end of the season dinner and debauch with the Miller twins and their spouses, I drove home to Pennsylvania in a used Ford pickup I bought over in Anaconda. It was cheap, but it needed work and would barely make 60 miles an hour. Consequently, the ride took almost five days, and I had lots of time to think. I thought that I had maybe seen the Promised Land, and like Moses, I was grateful for that. Over the tapping of the valves and the roaring from the rust hole in the muffler, I wondered if I would ever get back there.
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