MT for the Masses

Have I ever told you about Montana? Well, I won't go too deep here, it's a big state with lots of ground to cover. American western writer Wallace Stegner considered the entire state of Montana to be "a very big city with very long streets." With less than a million people it may seem true, but you wouldn't know unless you drove those streets. So, imagine if you took the population of San Francisco and scattered it like seed across an empty state the size of California. That's Montana, complete with college towns and rodeos, hippies and philosophers, musicians and farmers, Republicans and Democrats, and everyone in between, all people combined to be outnumbered each by space, trees, livestock, mountains, sky. A state where the majority of people are still humbled by the land around them, seeing themselves as receivers of a gift few know about, not just as rightful heirs of a land just asking to be overtaken and populated. There is still resistance to that here. Here exists a pleasant unbalance: the land wins and the people are glad for it. That's a Montanan's secret to share at their leisure. I'm lucky to have a permanent bed here to sleep in and my family to live with whenever I want, so the secret is mine to share, too.

Recently a band called the Wayword Sons found their way Montanaward, setting up their folk instruments on the stripped down altar of my brother and sister's church for a concert here in Great Falls, bedding themselves in the house of the preachers and their son and his California uncle, resting their instruments to sleep next to the Christmas tree and atop the foosball table, laying their heads next to the full keg of Montana amber ale with the smell of lasagna and beef ribs and old hands mingling high in the air, and awaking to pots and pots of coffee and homemade waffles followed by the opening of instrument cases and a sit-down pick of strings playing songs you know the tune to and a few verses of but which can't be placed on any CD because they are everywhere songs.

That was a weekend in Great Falls, and as they slipped out of town in a van named Turd we followed them two nights later down to another smaller town. To get there we followed the Missouri River and watched it cross beneath the highway over and over again, meeting it on the other side of mountain passes or several times watching it slowly grow toward us across long and people-less prairies. You have to get out and drive and move around the state to fathom what may keep you in Montana. The "Big Sky" doesn't joke around, it's not just another Show-Me State or Garden State moniker. The land here rolls slightly and often, but as if someone took a rollling-pin to the land and you are a spot on a pizza, the land is pushed away in all directions up to a crust of long mountains which surround you in the distance, mountains which shoot the horizon much farther away than you expect. These mountains, at that distance, containing long rolling prairies within actually stretch your perspective and the sky above about 3X the distance you ordinarily see and expect. Just as an ocean horizon at sunset sends your mind peacefully adrift, Montana's big sky is an endless ocean above you.

This is where I come to get back home, whether in the kitchen with my sister, the studio with my brother, or with my nephew on the floor in Legoland. My lifestyle with them somehow elevates all that is important for a good existence, not a fancy one, but a good one. I usually grow my hair out and my beard gets thick, my belly swells and there is lots of reading to be done when I'm here. This is home, and a river runs through it, or at least to the north and west of it. There is wireless at Cool Beans, and lots of space on the couches. Good beer flows from the taps at Bert and Ernie's, and live music plays there most nights of the week, including a bluegrass roundup on Thursdays for anyone. The train pulls up outside of town but within range of hearing its whistle each day. The streets downtown were built in the 1800s so a horse cart could turn around, and each street has a back alley for your garbage pickup, extra parking, and so a guy like me can walk behind everything especially on snowy quiet days. They sell the best sausages at the Beer Baron grocery store, and the best bread at Great Harvest. There is more to describe, just as there are things to avoid which I won't mention, perhaps elements of small-town rural life in America which thrust some stereotypical images into your head, and which of course are true. But there are other truths about small towns like this which you can only uncover for yourself, and that's all I have to say about that, for now.