I moved to Helena in June 1980. New colleagues had the summer to scare me with winter survival stories. By August, I was an easy mark for the ladies’ wear clerk at Hennessey’s who steered me past sedate wool city coats and on to the rack of billowing down numbers. How could I go wrong? I chose something in light brown with white seams sewn in puffy vertical tubes to corral the down. Standup collar; zipper from nose to calves; decorative ties closing over the zipper. Snug at my shoulders, the coat belled out in a long A-line sweep—and honest-to-god swayed when I walked. I might as well have clanged. The coat could have been in style five years before and arrived on the sales rack one more tired time. Or it might just have been waiting for a tenderfoot like me. I had no benchmark for winter wear glam. But I was a Montanan now and needed to be ready for the blizzard fight along a clothesline from house to barn—or at least from parking lot to Historical Society.
A year later, I had my eye on Dave—the brilliant, helpful reference historian with bad boy shadows trailing behind him. 6’ 3” impeccably dressed 190 pounds who wore his cords just low enough and walked with swagger enough to set me wondering. Dave’s research had already buttressed my fight to save the Missouri River wood cutters’ cabins at Dauphin Rapids—a hundred years old and threatened by an underground gas pipeline. Now I needed him. Well I wanted him. The Great Falls Bureau of Land Management (BLM) district rangers and oil company reps at BLM’s regional office scheduled a meeting with me. Unlikely to take a female transplant, a Washington D. C. bureaucrat seriously. Very likely to employ some intimidation. I wanted credibility and company. Dave said yes.
At 7:00 am, in the 30 below January dark, I pulled in at Dave’s bachelor apartment, ran up the steps and knocked. Dave opened the door, took a moment, looked me over, paused, and asked,
“Can’t we just send the coat?”
Within the week, we’d won a delay in BLM’s approval of the pipeline permit and I was cooking Grandma Sherfy’s beef and noodles for Dave. ©
