Roads, Songs, Words
I believe in love and danger
I believe the truth is stranger
I believe that fear is much too strong
I believe the best will find me
When I leave the rest behind me
Out on the highway I’m my own.
Rodney Crowell
The graces of this year came for me along Montana roads.
When haven’t they? But this year’s road miles linger especially in my memory. Last January, I met Tricia, my friend and my tour guide in Italy, as she arrived on Amtrak’s Empire Builder. Before I returned her to the train in Shelby a week later, we enjoyed a thousand miles of uncommonly open winter roads—and the scenery they served up: white-gold grasslands, mountains outlined in snow, faltering towns, the mysteries of Yellowstone. Just a month ago, on a last lovely fall day (and before snow rendered some of those roads graceless), I met my friend Janene for breakfast at the Stray Bullet Café in Ovando. It was an hour’s drive for her up the Blackfoot from Missoula; and a slightly longer lovely one for me across the Continental Divide and down through the Avon-Helmville valley. It’s one of my favorite Montana landscapes, defined by sagging corrals, cattail swamps, a remnant collection of hay-stacking beaver slides, a roadside pine tree that some time-stretched ranch wife decorates every season, light!
In between those two trips, I found perfectly ordinary reasons to drive several thousand more Montana miles. Whatever the defining proportions of sky and skyline, hawk and antelope, memory and anticipation, I love the Montana world that unspools from our highways!
Along with the basics—most of them stowed in wonderful baskets and backpacks you’ve given me over the years–I take along:
Music for sure. Prokofiev’s “Peter and Wolf” and a host of other 78 classics animated my childhood listening. And in May, I savored the Helena’s Symphony and Chorale’s amazing performance of Mahler’s 8th. Three hundred musicians blew the roof off our Moorish Revival Civic Center. But more often, guitars and drum sets, ballads and folk anthems of place and culture accompany me along Montana roads. I am attached to the blues that rocked Butte’s head frames at this year’s folk festival; and to road songs that Emmy Lou Harris and Rodney Crowell, headlining at the Red Ants Pants extravaganza, sang to thunderstorm back-up on a ranch 80 miles east of here.
Books. I use driving miles to revisit my armchair travels. Against the geometries of this landscape, plots that sing, perfect words that slide around my heart become that much richer. From this year’s reading, I am remembering Beth Kepart’s gentle memoir, A Slant of Sun; Mary Karr’s far tougher, troubled remembrances; Haven Kimmel’s The Solace of Leaving Early; Joseph Monninger’s heartbreaking Eternal on the Water; Victoria Sweet’s powerful God’s Hotel; Ivan Doig’s flawless telling of A Bartender’s Tale; Tom McNeal’s To Be Sun Underwater; John Crocker’s biography of Thomas Govan, my major prof at the University of Oregon whose take on human nature gave me myself. And, of course, a tribe of skilled detectives: Louise Penny’s gentle Chief Inspector Gamache; Gerald Elias’s blind curmudgeon violinist, Daniel Jacobus; Craig Johnson’s laconic Sheriff Walt Longmire; Donna Leon’s thoughtful Commissario Brunetti.
Time to wrestle with the sweet ordinary stuff. I still work about 20 hours a week for Rocky Mountain Development Council—community outreach, some Senior Center oversight. I’m trying to learn to be a functional volunteer. Mr. Noodle remains my boon companion. Last spring, I got to travel Arizona and Kansas roads. I’m no more a creative cook or vigorous housekeeper than I was a year ago; my to-do lists are always long. Amanda and Matt welcomed Isabel Louise into the world on June 2, in Lingle, Wyoming. They teach, coach, and cope with full lives in lively small town. In Boise, Emily works towards her own graduate studies and shepherds Mathilda and Guillermo–clear-eyed learners, dancers, actors. In St. Louis, Heather and Coby remain invested in art and work, city life, family support.
Space to gain perspective. Thirty years ago, and then more deeply through Dave’s eyes, I came to understand that Montana’s old bridges and abandoned railroad grades; the slight trails etched in grass along a valley edge; early-engineered concrete lanes carried me into questions and stories that I wanted to explore. Our roads, all roads represent dreams, death, development. However deep in honeyed cliché, road metaphors whisper through poems, dance along scores of music for a reason. We are all figuring out how to make our way in this world, in work, at this season of our lives.
Friends. I do not figure out that way alone. I take you along. I cannot imagine traveling this life without you—colleague compatriots, new friends, long-time heart-close ones whose lives have been interlaced with mine over many years and miles. Sometimes you are along for the drive. Sometimes the roads lead to you. Sometimes you ride shotgun in spirit. Whether we are having the time of our lives or hanging on for dear life, I treasure you as traveling companions. Out on the roads that lie before us now, you share joy, camaraderie, the elixir of quiet acceptance and some no-nonsense antidotes to my flights of fancy!
This year may your travels be lonely enough, companionable enough, funny, fine, rich in healing and the music and books you love.
May you find safe passage through the high and windy passes.
May the scenery take your breath away.
