In 1980, two months after I moved to Montana, I had to return, briefly and quickly, to Washington D. C. for a hearing. Except I couldn’t. I got there and back, but not quickly. Or easily.
Through the previous decade, I’d traveled across the US multiple times for National Park Service presentations and meetings. I’d navigated rental cars in San Francisco and show-me tours along the East Coast. I could leave my office in D.C. and take a taxi to Washington National (now Reagan) and be in—say—Phoenix before the day was over.
But after that trip back to D.C. as a Montana newcomer, I began to feel—to intuit–an unsettling image of my new home. I saw myself up high—on a plateau, surrounded by mountains. And hours and hassle away from the rest of the world. I felt a touch of claustrophobia.
Turns out, I experienced that shiver of entrapment for good reason. Montana’s at the end of the line. We’re the equivalent of a small Kansas town on a quiet spur line. Served by trains that arrive and depart in the middle of the night cause they have more important places to be during daylight hours. The milk-run railroad that my parents and grandparents once knew. The train connection that required waking in the middle of the night to get my mom started on her mission of mercy to Indiana. Or retrieve the minister home from his church conference in Illinois.
Rather without realizing it, I’d moved to a high and dry, isolated and insulated land. Where geographic location and weather and topography forever determine our lives–my life. Nor was I helped by purchasing a cheesy condo that overlooked downtown Helena but still huddled in the shade of foothills above me.
Buffalo fed and clothed and sheltered Montana’s original inhabitants. As if—in all their enormous shaggy splendor—the animals had been created for this place. Able to adapt. Forever moving. When Lewis and Clark traveled up the Missouri, they recorded wildlife at every turn and a few native people. But they didn’t find a waterway to the Pacific as President Jefferson had hoped. There was no gentle crossing of this vast interior land. Instead, they faced two more punishing mountain ranges.
The trappers and miners who followed in their wake found treasures—that they then couldn’t sell easily to the rest of the world until the federal government began subsidizing transcontinental railroads. The Northern Pacific finally spanned Montana in 1883.
Our enormous acreage is glued to the Canadian border for 500 miles. In today’s cars, we’re a day’s drive from Seattle, four from New York. Our average elevation is 3300 feet above sea level.
In 1980, fewer than a million folks lived within our expansive boundaries. We’re now at a booming 1.1 million. A dozen US cities exceed or come close to our entire population.
So planes, trains, and buses make no money serving Montanans. There are too few of us and too few of us traveling. The distances from here to any “there” are immense. There are no economies of scale. And winter weather adds yet another impediment.
Bozeman is something of an exception. It now caters to the millionaires who fly in on the way to their second homes in the Paradise Valley or come for skiing in Big Sky. It boasts a play-pretend urban airport—parking prices and snarls to match. Missoula, Billings, and Glacier/Kalispell are getting busier for similar reasons.
But for sure, Helena’s still the land of the last-in at night and first-out in the morning. If our connecting flight is at all delayed, we’re doomed to watch Montana planes—the last leg of a journey– taxiing out from their ramps. The flights that make “on time” departures from Seattle or Salt Lake and Denver, too often leave us back at the courtesy desk bargaining for a room voucher. And while in 1980, I could travel from Helena to D.C. through Minneapolis that route has disappeared.
Here, for the capital city, just three airlines arrive and depart. And only this year—after my 40 years of residence—can you actually board and deplane on all flights through a jet way. Prior to that, we braved snow and wind to climb into various small half-prop planes. We enjoy no airfare deals. No big-city to big-city bargains or flash sales.
End-of-the-line has also meant the death knell of sweet travel anonymity. Initially, I’d found it charming—in Helena’s baby airport—that the governor secured his own luggage. Then it became unnerving to realize that someone I knew or recognized would inevitably be in the Salt Lake or Seattle crowd trying to reach Helena. For many years, those of us traveling to an isolated, end-of-line place in the West, shared a frumpy, windowless Salt Lake waiting room far from an airport book store or the Cinnabon stall. Plus the likelihood of having to chat with folks we sort of knew.
For some golden years before the interstate system began to creep across the Nation, Montana was served by three transcontinental rail routes and a lacy network of spur lines. In the 1920s, one-room school teachers in the very center of Montana’s range land could take a spur line train to Great Falls for a day to Christmas shop. And the three cross-country lines offered politicians and businessmen functional access to both coasts and especially Chicago and Minneapolis. Now, a remote school teacher must brave icy roads to do her shopping. And only a once-a-day, vastly unpredictable Amtrak passenger train traverses Montana—and does so across our least populated northern border.
We experience those “end of the line” realities in other ways. Amazon never managed two-day delivery for prime members. Here, count on seven. 43 states enjoy one or more Trader Joe’s stores. We aren’t one of them. The US Postal Service keeps quietly erasing post offices from small towns. And Helena mail—capital city that we are–does not leave from here – but from Great Falls 90 miles away. Now that our local paper is being delivered by mail, it takes a two-day joyride before delivery back here.
When I moved to Montana in 1980, I was 34 years old. This step was an adventure, an opportunity to learn a new place and a great variation on previous work. I assumed that I’d give Montana my all, learn her gifts, and then sooner or later bite on another experience. I didn’t count on Dave. And I didn’t count on a place of such beauty, of history so perfectly reflected in landscape and buildings. Of a place without pretentiousness, ostentation. A place where those very end-of-the-line realities do not support flash and dazzle.
So, Montana has become my end-of-the-line. Like others of my age, I know that medical services here are OK but not great. If you live on ranches in central Montana, you’ve made peace with the absence of any speedy delivery to an emergency room. Senior living facilities are cookie-cutter corporate. While winter clothing and snow tires have all improved significantly in the 40 years, I know that short dark days and ice will determine where I go and what I do for more than half of each year. And, and I could no more afford to sell and buy elsewhere even if I wanted.
Still the living out of the end-of-my days here in this high and remote country is no hardship. Soon, tonight, I’ll water the geraniums and tomatoes on the porch and sit for a moment to look into our limitless sky. ©
