Acceptance
This is an old song—for a new but disappearing summer. The berries, on Mary’s mountain ash, have begun their transubstantiation. From green to gold to orange. The mystery, the sacrament will end in scarlet. The…
Category: Montana Assays
A Tribute Especially for Tony
Never underestimate the universe’s brilliant, complex, and astonishing perversity. Salish Elder Tony Incashola and long-ago friend and historian Bob Utley both died on June 7. Their deaths–and their lives– shadowed June. I knew each in…
The Sly Season
May first in Montana; May Day. Spring, or so the calendar has said since late March. But we know better here. Now is not the time to hang the snow shovel in the garage Or…
The Montana Heritage Project
The Meagher County Poor Farm sits on the western edge of White Sulphur Springs, Montana. You turn off beside the once-grand old Ringling house and follow a winding gravel road until you come to what,…
Powerless – Unmanageable
The Brethren of my youth defined themselves by “no’s.” No smoking, no drinking, no gambling, no taking the lord’s name in vain. No attachment to worldly goods or fun that might lead to sex before…
Night Lights
After the first times I needed to pee at three in the morning at the Walter family’s primitive North Fork of the Flathead property, I learned what the rest of the family already knew. I…
Empty – Full
My British friends Jean and Bryan arrived in Montana on the remnant Amtrak passenger train, the Empire Builder, on a summer Saturday evening. The 48 hour trek west had been strange enough. Traveling in regular…
Montana Assays – An Introduction
I have made you an assayer and tester among my peopleThat you may know and assay their waysThey are bronze and iron, and they act corruptlyThe bellows blow fiercely, and the lead is consumed by…
Lives Lost
On a day of incomparable gleaming airy early-spring loveliness, Harlowton said goodbye to Gene Leary.* He was one of central Montana’s especially kind, thoughtful, contributing native sons: a service station owner, a community leader, a…
What Survives
I am not native. I arrived in Montana more than forty years ago, on an early June day. I came on the strength of one shattered dream, new enthusiasms that were just beginning to cook,…