I drove the Grizzly Gulch-Unionville loop last weekend on a day so perfect, so clean and blue and radiant I couldn’t stay inside.
44 years ago, soon after my arrival in Montana, colleagues at the Historical Society encouraged me to take my new Toyota Tercel for a drive on that jagged dusty oval. Whose winding 20 or so miles seemed an unadulterated wilderness. The town ended and this landscape of old mining equipment and lime stone kilns and scattered houses and wooden sluice boxes surrounded by forest began–only blocks from my new home. I was so unable then to recognize gradations of emptiness and wildness. But I was surely fascinated and excited by my small outing. I was here, after all, for one more adventure. One more dive into a strange, new place that would test my skills and courage. And, yes, show those National Park Service folks and Bob that I could strike out on my own.
I drove the road yesterday with curious, jaundiced eyes. There are so many more houses and barns and raggedy sheds now. So many more trailheads winding up beyond the road. So many half-built, partial-trailer dwellers who’d probably settled in with stars in their eyes. Or at least stars in the hearts of men who desperately wanted to live on the land away from neighbors, sight their guns against an empty cut bank. How many of their women wished to live in town. Were those horses ever ridden. Could that owner still afford gravel for his driveway. What about those expansive, new homes with sodded, mowed yards. Had their owners reckoned with endless trips to kids’ activities and marginal snow plowing. Or winter gloom–since all gulches—however rich they were once in gold—get no sun in winter.
I drove the road yesterday heartsick for Dave. For all the fall afternoons when the ferns had died and the sumac turned red. When the larch—the larch had begun their ripening to real gold. When the North Fork River was low and quiet and the grass was beyond mowing and the gophers were asleep for the winter. When we shared breakfast and a small whiskey with Tom and watched him walk across the meadow after the summer’s last visit. When Dave bundled up the raft for safekeeping in Helena. When the sun had already turned Tuscany rich and was dropping faster than we wanted as we swooped home down the curves of Seeley-Swan highway. When the rise and fall of football commentary on the radio kept us from reckoning with the week ahead and a long winter.
I wanted so much to be a passenger in the Tacoma with my hand tucked under Dave’s thigh again. Watching for each familiar landmark along the way home: the droopy remnants of skunk cabbage outside Bigfork; the perfect log barn by the Swan Lake Forest Service cabin; the immense pine lighted each Christmas that inspired Dave’s first book; the Hungry Bear that served our honeymoon dinner; the island mansion—Sponge Lodge, we called it; the Nevada Creek Reservoir that meant we were an hour out; and all the tiny side roads that Dave found suitable for a family piss.
It was that grief for which there is no absolution. No choice except to let it pour through. To lean into amazement and thanks that somehow, somehow I ended up here. With Dave. With Montana. With a garage full of rabbits and a backyard bordered by raspberries. With my very own Russian olive tree and its intoxication every June. With float trips and mama moose and tidy little foxes trotting by. With time to read Thoreau in the outhouse and to lug boiling water for sweet rain-barrel showers. Deer our only voyeurs. With those miles of stories I could only surmise–waiting in each slumped homestead house and abandoned dozer. With daughters I prize. And now grandchildren. With simple, fascinating historic and prehistoric sites. And mountain ranges that our first inhabitants worshipped.
Did I pay enough attention when it was all happening? Did I understand what measure of astonishing beauty and history and companionship and work I’d lucked into? Did I really? ©
