I’d been in Montana just six months. Largely still on my mid-career honeymoon. Albeit with a decent number of irritants: no correcting Selectrics in the office; a staff that considered attendance optional; a boss whose simpering manipulation made my skin crawl; Forest Service archaeologists skeptical of a woman from Washington D. C. Still, I was glad to be in Montana.
Over that first 1980 summer, I got a bit lonesome for urban density and retail creativity. And had been disappointed when the Historical Society’s Billings-based October History Conference revealed only more two-story department stores and no boutiques. But, I loved the landscape and the skies and the possibilities. And I was a glutton for work and the opportunities to make something of an otherwise overlooked and distrusted office and its mission.
Tom Judge, old school, slick, political operative, was governor when I arrived. Ted Schwinden won the fall election—described to me as the perfect Montana candidate—so practical, so crude, so rural, so middle-of-the-road as to be a chameleon in either party. But as a proud new Montanan and a still-slightly homesick Washingtonian, I looked forward to Schwinden’s inauguration. A lot. Pageantry, I thought. Ceremonies that would showcase our respectable if somewhat diminutive and counterfeit capitol (less marble and more mock marbling—scagliola, we said, if we wanted to impress visitors). I’d suffered withdrawal from skilled military concerts, the sunset precisions of a Marine Tattoo, the structured pomp and protocol of a Congressional hearing. So this would be my chance.
In fact, since attending the inauguration as a state employee could be misconstrued as inappropriate partisanship, I took vacation time and headed up the half-circle drive. A little puzzled by the absence of crowds.
Once near the Capitol’s huge outside stairs, I found two National Guardsmen in camo fatigues struggling with a baby cannon, presumably readying it to fire. In fact, aiming it squarely at General Thomas Frances Meagher, the problematic equestrian rider/drunk who gallops, sword raised, along the building’s facade. I hurried up the staircase and into the Rotunda.
There were no chairs. A group of us stood wherever there was space, angled toward a podium. A class of grade school children ranged up the interior grand staircase. I don’t remember who shushed us in that echoing space and invited a minister to offer the invocation. We quieted and, in a fashion revived just this month during our newly elected State Auditor’s swearing in, the preacher man proceeded to ask God for a long list of political outcomes that had nothing to do with inaugurating a new governor. And certainly nothing to do with Schwinden. I goggled.
And then, the school children were introduced to sing the Montana state song. I didn’t know it at the time. But neither did the kids. For a very painful couple of minutes, a teacher tried to coax them into some semblance of what is, truly, nothing more or less than a high school pep rally tune—complete with shouted-out M-O-N-T-A-N-A. They might as well have been wearing Mickey Mouse ears.
I think Governor Schwinden was sworn in about then and gave remarks, but at that point I was so shocked that I paid little attention. Shocked and embarrassed for my new state. I never did hear a ceremonial volley of cannon fire.
I would go on to learn in that 1981 legislative session that senators and representatives had no specific staff. Or places, other than their desks in the House and Senate, to read or review or write. Lockers, maybe, for their galoshes and coats. I would come to understand that legislators, apart from a single, overworked and overwhelmed legislative office, relied on lobbyists for much of their information.
I would come to realize that the status-defining fashion I’d seen on the Hill in DC was not so evident here. Male legislators, many of whom taught school or farmed in the intervening twenty months, blossomed in long and ancient overcoats rescued from their father’s closets. Or, once indoors, Western leather-yoked corduroy sport coats. Bolo ties. Cowboy boots. Women found sensible suits or paired broomstick skirts with thrift store jackets. Nylons were still de rigueur
I would realize just how apt our Spanish state motto was: “Oro y Plata” Gold and Silver. Engines of nineteenth century settlement for sure though not obviously the current economic drivers. But still the very framework for Montana’s mindset—tempered a bit by our 1970s Constitution rewrite and an economy that rendered copper less than profitable. We were struggling to reckon with the loss of revenue and influence previously amassed from mining and smelting.
As the session progressed, though, I witnessed the power of Montana’s involved citizenry. Never mind the huge, wintry expanses involved in coming to testify before the legislature. Never mind the absolutely illegal and unpredictable last-minute hearings schedule. Montanans—real folks, hands shaking as they held their notes—came to testify and talk to their legislators. THEIR legislators. I began to realize that whatever the size of the state, Montana was still more direct democracy than a representative one. No cadre of staffers or security kept us from buttonholing OUR guy or the rare gal.
The good news in 1981 was that full-blown property rights paranoia and an utter capitulation to big business was still fifteen years in the future. In retrospect, that 1981 legislative session seems quaint, guileless by today’s deadly standard.
At some outrageous cost, I continued my subscription to the Washington Post for almost two years after coming to Montana. Delivered to me by mail, the Post supplied the fix I craved for exquisite writing, book reviews, and national news that had been my fare the previous decade. Still, over time, the stack of unread Posts grew to my height. I wanted to read them all, but Montana now owned more and more of my consciousness and allegiance.
Ever so gradually, I came to see just how many of the Washingtonians I knew—even in my small corner of Interior—craved fame. Not to the exclusion of their skill or worth. But fueled by a bit of the impulse nonetheless. The next pay grade. A byline. A date with a legislative staffer. A conference speaking gig. An invitation to testify before a Congressional committee. Publishing—immortality awarded with a catalog card in the Library of Congress files. None of us was immune.
As I began to know Montanans, I saw a difference. Most folks here gave their time and their hearts to what they loved because it was the right thing to do: defend ranch land from open pit coal mines; preserve county courthouses from “rehab costs too much” naysayers; save sacred Native landscapes from gold mining; bake for the next local library fundraiser. Often, to their chagrin, Montanans recognized that you can’t feed your children on landscape. They stuck it out nonetheless—meager salaries, dicey crops, isolation, and all.
Montana has sent some incredible, influential, visible senators and representatives to Washington: Jeannette Rankin, Mike Mansfield, Lee Metcalf, Burton K. Wheeler. We’ve launched our share of movie stars out into the world, Gary Cooper and Myrna Loy being best known. I arrived on the cusp of a cataclysmic boom in dazzling writers: Norman Maclean, Ivan Doig, James Welch, Rick Bass. Still, here in our expanses so far from big cities and big audiences, we claimed few outsized heroes, few folks whose names would ever appear in Jeopardy. Instead, I came to know that we raised mostly good people who lived and contributed without angling for glory.
Take shy Francis Bardanouve who served 34 years in the Montana legislature. Called the Conscience of the Legislature. Born into a farming family that lost its land in the Depression, Bardanouve built his life around honesty and integrity and decency. He worked to manage the state’s revenue carefully; he said it belonged to all HIS Montana neighbors. He likely wore the exact same sports coat all three decades of public service. His particular passion was improvement of Montana’s state-owned facilities for those who could not care for themselves. A skilled storyteller as well as a caring policy giant, Bardanouve did not worry about the cleft palate that made speaking a bit difficult and his appearance a bit unusual. He’s buried in a tiny town cemetery on our Hi-Line and I suspect few in our current legislature know his name. But Bardanouve was the Montana I was coming to see with clearer eyes.
A month into my first legislative session and a month after that slapdash inauguration, the Historical Society hosted a reception for legislators and a small ceremony to honor owners of properties listed in the National Register of Historic Places that biennium. I was still hopeful—and misguided. I shopped at the fanciest store in Helena for a cocktail dress—something upscale. I found a little number that seemed to work—albeit a size smaller than I was. And, turns out, embarrassingly ill-suited to the down-to-earth patterns of dress and fellowship among those present.
I forged on with our little historic preservation celebration, predictably mispronouncing at least two Montana place names: Pondera and Absarokee. But I was forgiven and welcomed. In fact, overwhelmed with gratitude from the folks who’d driven 400 icy miles to hear the name of their historic house read aloud and to receive a single piece of paper.
The priceless ceremonies of my new home. ©
