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, and on images from Ivan Doig’s This House of Sky. A serendipitous and practical purchase that prepared me to anticipate the gorgeous landscape that we treasure. And a past and a present that are anything but simple or romantic or easy.
Four days after my arrival, I was invited to a sheep-shearing Sunday picnic at the Sieben Ranch, twenty miles north of Helena. I knew absolutely no one—and owned no jeans. None. I remember a kind welcome for an embarrassingly-dressed, shy stranger. And the heat and noise and furor of the shearing shed. But I was dumbstruck by the landscape and sky. It must have been newly washed, newly minted just for me! Every color in that huge rock-rimmed valley carried an intensity I’d not witnessed before! Certainly not in Washington D. C.’s hazy humidity.
Since then, especially for a sedentary public servant, I’ve been granted opportunities to fall in love with more of our land: sky-reaching stone reefs; haunting badland breaks; alpine meadows alight with wildflowers; creeks running under their ice-laced shawls; an aurora borealis over Glacier; green-gold cornucopias of aspen spilling down a draw.
My occupation was to understand and defend the preservation of the remnants that humans of years’ past left behind. And while Montana has known skilled craftsmen and stunning leaders and savvy businesspeople, the truth is that from the beginning, we have struggled to survive in a land that belongs to the buffalo.
Historic preservation, the business of saving reminders of Montana’s human story, slides the lens of time to that struggle: scattered tipi rings—the anchor stones to our original mobile homes. Mining ghost towns, cascading tumbles of disintegrating cabins up dark gulches at 4,000 feet elevation. A 1960s pink trailer along deeply wooded Seeley-Swan Highway, surrounded by cords of rotting wood and a rusting pickup with salvage yard door panels. The Meagher County Poor Farm in White Sulphur—the last refuge of dying, homeless sheepherders. And the threat that hung over Doig’s dad and grandmother. Butte’s half-occupied neighborhoods, teetering over collapsing tunnels. Bow-roofed homestead houses that arrived by train and are now chicken coops. Miles of irrigation ditches. Buffalo jumps. Anaconda’s smelter reduced to a heap of toxic tailings and a defiant finger smokestack raised to the gods of big business. Sweet bungalows in county seats—that often need paint. Abandoned rails. One room country schools, whose old-fashioned swings now shift in the wind.
Our capital, my home Helena, alone tells more of the state’s story. Montana millionaires built miniature mansions when they came to politic and party in the 1890s. Often now their extravagances are apartment houses. Our modest Capitol was a two-for-one deal. Bell and Kent, the architects, sold South Dakota the same plan. Our cluster of state offices is less expansive and elegant than most college campuses. We’ve lost our department stores, the classy haberdashers and old law firms, independent doctors that once traded on Last Chance Gulch. The edges of our capital city sport dated motels and used car lots; buildings that can be picked up and moved; fast food joints changing allegiances or waiting face lifts. Restaurants that serve fancy cuisine fail. Our banking industry flourishes . . . as do pawn shops, harbingers of different desperations.
Here’s the fundamental deal: Humans here labor to overcome the impediments of markets and miles. Of soil and seasons. Our story is that of boom and bust—taking new forms each generation. Of distance—of the journeys that take too long. Of connectivity flickering in and out over mountains. Of flights following the patterns of old milk trains: first out in the morning, last in at night, only going as far as the next true city in the fleet’s oldest planes. Of hunting because we need the meat. Of burning wood because it’s available. Of learning that landscape alone does not feed our children.
So I’m thinking tonight of Montana’s new crop of Covid refugees; of those of you who found our initial numbers heartening and our modest homes a steal compared to your coastal counterparts. I’m curious how you’ll weather. What you’ll think a winter or two from this one. Whether you’re prepared to ride out our particular brew of long deep nights and ice underfoot. Whether you’ll cotton to our disdain for fame and its trappings. Whether you’ll treasure human worth in terms of quiet living, work done well. Whether you’ll need a medical specialist. Or Amazon’s twenty-four hour delivery. Whether you’re ready to be HERE and not forever booked on what few outgoing flights we offer. Most of all, whether you’re willing to value deeply the humans who did live in harmony with the land—our native brothers and sisters—whose lives our greed and prejudices have already killed by the thousands.
What we’ve built talks true— true to what the land demands and offers; true to what constitutes our best efforts to answer. Those improbably beautiful scenes surround us. Ordinary drives here are immersed in heart-stopping, camera-begging views. I can sit at my desk and watch a mountain range forty miles away show me its hidden layers and crevices at purpling time each evening. Or at least when forest fire smoke doesn’t obscure them. But between my office and those mountains lies a tapestry of low income apartments; a splatter of prefab ranchettes; remnants of a historic town we picked up and moved when we needed a power-generating dam; tiny Victorian farmhouses surrounded by auto boneyards and sawmills—homegrown industries that need little capital. A host of dreams only half realized.
I came quickly to love this tenuous life and its even more tenuous remains. I lit quickly into battles against those who would judge our history and, by extension, our present by the grandeurs and pretensions of the coasts. No skyscrapers. No plantation houses. No enormous classical edifices of government. Just the elegance of function and struggle and ingenuity. ©
