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 coach, the Sheldons hadn’t realized that once they relinquished their luggage in Chicago, they wouldn’t see it again until Shelby. Half of the country traversed and not even a toothbrush. So they were weary, hungry, and little more hygienically challenged than they’d hoped.
Beyond excited that they’d arrived, I assured them that our night’s luxurious B & B, the Stone School Inn, lay just around the corner. Valier, as you may know, is about 30 miles south and west of Shelby on a combination of interstate and two-lane roads. An easy drive especially with the Front Range of the Rockies as backdrop.
About 20 minutes in, I could hear Bryan mutter “around the corner!”
Gather up the disparate islands of the United Kingdom and lay them gently inside Montana’s capacious borders. Not only will England and Northern Ireland, the Isle of Skye, Wales, the Highlands of Scotland fit into Montana. More than a third of our state will be left over—perhaps all the western valleys—ancient Lake Missoula riding the crests of ridge lines beyond the Rockies toward the Pacific. To Montana’s 147,000 square miles, Britain comprises just 94,000.
And after you’ve settled the UK inside Montana, consider people. There are barely a million Montanans staking a claim to this particular state. There are 67 million inhabitants of the British Isles.
We—European Americans—arrived on this continent from tiny, densely populated countries beyond the Atlantic 400 or more years ago. We poured first onto the continent’s eastern shores and then pushed further and further inland. We were propelled from Europe by famine and industrialization and persecution. We were lured away by the hopes of better living, of being needed, of freedom to work and worship as we chose. We lived the same push and pull within our own continent—from East to West. We managed to create a country brewed from ideas, philosophies, dreams, cravings.
By an incredible combination of hubris and circumstance, European Americans laid brutal claim to these lands and have had the illusion of believing that we breathe freer here than we might anywhere else. And that we are somehow entitled, that the universe or a god granted us the right to an unending supply of the riches that came with the land. We made that assumption and acted on it at the price of millions of Native lives and the unbearably brutal treatment of millions more.
Here, in this upper Rockies, high plains land, for sure, I enjoy the gifts of light and space and colorful dimension. I love our relative quiet. Often, during Jean and Bryan’s visit, we traveled two-lane highways for an hour and never saw cars or people. The Sheldons rafted the North Fork of the Flathead River and passed incoming streams where the trout and white fish had never heard human voices. We spotted momma cow and calf pairs laying claim to their very own 10 acres of grazing land. We attended concerts lit by extraordinary sunsets and full moons, in diamond clear air.
We traveled to Glacier and Yellowstone. To my eyes, beautiful island kingdoms crawling with tourists. To the Sheldons, exotic beauty. The Last Chance Stampede Rodeo with all its pageantry and dust and danger dazzled. Even as an orchestrated, overwrought commercial version of the work cowhands accomplished on an open range. We attended the Montana Kootenai Tribe’s pow wow, perhaps Bryan and Jean’s favorite experience. A ceremony beloved by tribal members. And still a stark study of a people’s hard won struggle to preserve and celebrate some of their many lost traditions.
Truth: Jean and Bryan fell in love with the Montana. Exuberantly, thoughtfully, permanently. And yet, along with our sky and land which tell their own stories, I had served up for them vignettes fashioned from the myths we love to live, but myths nonetheless.
Our world on this side of the pond and on this side of the Mississippi runs on squares—on land that the government parceled out predictably and precisely. Starting with latitudes and longitudes, surveyors brought their alidades and engineers’ chains to the endless, unbroken spaces between the old Midwest and all of the Louisiana Purchase. And ruled it off as if we were a sheet of graph paper. To ferry Jean and Bryan to Valier, we drove due south and then turned due west following those surveyed lines. We sped by land given away by the federal government—so sure were we of the endlessness of it. Almost from the beginning, homestead legislation afforded settlers ownership just for the price of toughing it out and cultivating land. In fact out here, the feds were slow to realize that homesteaders could survive only on bigger and bigger plots.
Visitors pay outfitters to wrangle them up into three and half million acres of wilderness. Our towns sprawl to the limits of topography or of employment. We fashion house after house out of wood—on sizeable urban lawns or several acres of land. We add subdivisions and spawn ghost towns all at the same time. The Forest Service torches slash piles late fall and early spring. We watch hundreds of square miles burn every summer—or beetles turn range after range into a sickly red. In our search for precious metals, we poison aquifers with arsenic and believe—not correctly—that the land and our children will forgive us a little longer.
We were sold—or given–a bill of goods; blinded by our own fantasies; too sated and self-serving to realize that the abundances had limits and cost dearly.
Three years after Jean and Bryan’s visit here, I joined then in their home and their West Sussex landscape—a bit of England between London and Brighton in the southeastern corner of the country. Half a million years ago, hominids lived there. Neolithic humans mined flint from the Sussex Downs. Then, in succession, a Roman canton, Celtic country, a Saxon kingdom, a Norman stronghold, a medieval territory of castles and cathedrals and conquests from within and without. Now, Sussex is a county, informally divided into West and East. The greenery-swathed, winding lanes that we traversed between villages were created by deer and cattle and then pilgrims and soldiers and royals. Native stone buildings that spanned those centuries remain cheerfully occupied.
Marked by successive waves of human living and ruling and warfare, Sussex has been extraordinarily pivotal to British survival and history, however exposed to the world along its English Channel flank. There are 1200 Sussex residents per square mile to Montana’s seven. That Sussex density, the length and breadth of that history, its survival across time and assault deliver cultural richness, stories and legends, artistry, layer upon layer of “this is the place” moments beyond anything I could comprehend.
To my eyes, its antiquity and population have spawned a conscience and carefulness of living and planning unknown here. Though Britain has its share of motorways, excessive highway rights-of-way consume little countryside. Roundabouts stitch lanes and roads and motorways together, rather than the enormous concrete cloverleaves of our interstates. Our lavish cut-and-fill curves rival those of the Indianapolis 500. And we think it our due to drive accordingly. Not in Sussex—where lightning fast reflexes, reasonable speeds, courtesy, and confidence are required.
Though nothing like the amazing net of steam trains that once basted the country together, trains and good bus services still keep Brits commuting and vacationing. Which is why, perhaps, Jean and Bryan expected more of Amtrak, Montana’s only transcontinental passenger rail service, than it could deliver.
And in the UK, armies of volunteers, older men and women, have restored and operate steam trains and original depots across the country. Tourist dollars and holiday fun wreathed in clouds of steam and soot. In fact, volunteerism flourishes. Bryan’s a Shedder. Named to recognize male Brits’ historic attachment to humble backyard buildings perfect for having a smoke and a moment alone, Bryan’s Shed buddies do repairs and odd jobs for locals who need assistance.
To prune or remove a tree in Sussex, you ask permission from the County Council. “Wooden” houses are rare; brick and local stone more common. Manufactured lodges cluster in planned and zoned holiday parks. Villages defined by “high streets” are lined with historic buildings and grow carefully. Folks still live above their shops. Ranchettes have not crowded out real farms. Small gardens survive in front or back of many homes, planted to vegetables in World War II. “Council” houses are still being built to meet residential needs. Extensive biking, bridle, and hiking paths cross private land, coexistence made manageable by rules for both users and owners. Birds and animals are often protected or safeguarded from inhumane hunting or capture. Even fox hunting has had its proverbial wings clipped. Historic preservation’s driven not just in adherence rules and sentimental emotions, but because it’s economical and functional. Every square inch of land and many social systems reflect consciousness and courtesy so that at once, many people, their history, and natural resources can survive into an indefinite future.
Remember, I was in Sussex on this visit for two weeks. With my own biases and expectations. Big box stores and graceless housing developments have emerged. Generalizations do no country justice. Still, to our carelessness, I saw caution. To our hubris, I saw matter-of-fact modesty of spirit and living. To our certainty that freedom means doing any damn thing we please, I saw recognition that cooperating makes for saner and better living for everyone. To our often expansive and expensive recreation (think off-road-vehicles, giant boats, behemoth motor homes), I saw plain and simple play and joy. A walk on the beach, a cup of coffee, a market. With the sheer density of people, the span of history, the need to navigate through millennia of tyrants—religious and political–I saw conservation, cleverness, artistry, cooperation.
Many Montanans cannot currently find an affordable place to live. Mobile homes, even recent models, are no match for our weather. Ranks of dismal apartment buildings appear in dismal places. Which begs the question: who among us actually needs 3,000 square feet to live and two sinks in one bathroom? Who of us cooks on six gas burners and three commercial ovens at one time? When did every member of a household require his or her own bathroom? When did our egos demand that we kill any species we can and display our butchered animals as trophies? When did we decide that we could slaughter any of God’s creatures as cruelly as possible for sport or gluttony?
However hardscrabble our first white settlers were, however utterly dependent on the knowledge of the original inhabitants that we hounded into bare survival, however much our concerted effort to throw off the copper collar and reach a point of sensible independence, now . . . now Montana’s joined the rest of the country in valuing glittery shows of wealth and hollow power over living our consciences.
How might we meet our incredible opportunities here? Our ill-gotten gains, but now ours nonetheless? Eternal gratitude perhaps? Awe that we have this gift of breadth and possibility? Less hubris and more humility and honesty? Living small under our big sky rather than rapaciously? Reckoning with the price for “taking” these lands from their original inhabitants? Joy. Determination to preserve the very qualities of natural resources and history and beauty to which we pay homage.
No place and no people are perfect. I am home here now. I glory in Montana’s history and broad landscape. I am a big sky, big country, small town girl. I try hard to spend reflecting time on my porch, at a window with my long and lovely view to the Big Belts. And I am extraordinarily thankful for the opportunity to see how other countries, other people live their lives and their resolves and behaviors in ways that might also serve us. What might our huge empty state learn from a small, full country with an outsized history? ©
