Browsing Category | Montana

Regrets

Many years ago Dick Geary told me that I’d always have a horse when I wanted to take an afternoon off and go for a ride.


Dick and I never met in person. We communicated through weekly check-in emails and our columns. Both of us were bound to Montana – Dick was born into a Helmville ranching family; I had married a fly-fishing guide – but we each had a place in the world we held on to and wrote about frequently; a place that had shaped us as youth. For me, it was New Zealand. For Dick, it was Belize. We each had a boot in a land that still gripped us, and maybe that was why we connected here, through our writing, both of us a little bit restless and lonesome.


I missed being on a horse. I almost felt like it was pointless being in Montana if I wasn’t riding my own, or someone else’s, I emailed him one Sunday evening, when I was sifting through my inbox, trying to prepare for the coming week.


Well, he wrote back, there’s one here for you when you have time.


When I looked at my calendar, time was something I didn’t have a lot of.


A month later, Dick was haying. Pretty soon the first snow had fallen. And it just went on like that, a ride in Helmville with Dick, talking about Belize and New Zealand, ranching and writing, always pushed back to another month, then another season. I got pregnant. I left the newspaper. I was consumed by motherhood, then a winter move to New Zealand with an infant. Covid arrived just as we returned in March 2020 and my world became even more still, more insular. I couldn’t read the news anymore. I waited out another pregnancy until our second daughter arrived. It was in the first few weeks of Eliza’s birth that I was up in the early hours of the morning, that I thought of Dick. Maybe it was the relief of feeling like I was just starting to piece parts of myself back together again, or maybe it was the false spring warmth of March, but I was ready for that ride.


It had been years by then, since an email had gone out between us. I couldn’t remember the last time I had read his column. Maybe that alone made me hesitate before writing to the paper and asking for his contact info. Instead, I wrote his name in a search engine. It confirmed my hesitation. Dick had passed away, more than a year before.


I’ve spent a lot of time in the rocking chair by our front lounge window, rocking both our girls, at all hours, from infancy and into toddlerdom. It’s the best place to watch the first light in the sky at the start of the day, and to watch the sun disappear over the hills. I can’t help but think big thoughts when I’m there, one of my two life miracles on my chest, a cheek squashed into my skin, the rise and fall of their breath matching mine.


I don’t think I walk around with a lot of regrets. But if you were to ask me if there was anything I do regret in my life, without hesitation, I would say not taking Dick up on his offer of a horse to ride on a summer afternoon would be it.


It’s not a regret that hangs heavy over me. It’s more of a reminder that life is short and the months, summers, seasons, years, go by so fast. One day I’ll long for the years of rocking a baby at 4 a.m.


Next time I’m asked, I’m going to clear the calendar.



I’m going for that ride.

Comment Montana, Uncategorized

Summer, the end

Fog is suspended in the golden trees through the canyon above me as I zip up my jacket, pull the hood over my ears, and stretch the sleeves over my freezing fingers. I put one boot on a pedal and shove off with the other foot from the driveway of a kitchen where I store this gear-less bike with a basket. This is the last leg of my commute to work.

From the moment I open my eyes in the morning it is like a director somewhere has yelled out “Action!” There are babies calling out to be picked up, changed and dressed for the day. Breakfast is delivered to the couch where Jessie sleepily watches Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood while I feed Eliza then pour food in a bowl for Gabe the dog. Bags are packed up for the day and everyone gets secured in the running car as Raffi plays. I run inside and quickly get dressed, making a sprint for the door, coffee in hand, where I can finally drink it as we drive off. If I’m ever wearing make-up it’s been applied in the rear-view mirror.

By the time I get to that kitchen driveway where that bike is stored, I’m still feeling the adrenaline coursing through me, whipped onwards by caffeine. When I grasp the bike handles, the flow of my day abruptly stops and then restarts at a different setting. It’s like that same director of the film I am starring in has yelled out “And Cut!”

I coast down the dirt driveway and over Rock Creek Road, my arms jarring with the potholes, the air blistering my lips. My hood has flown back and my ears are like ice, but somehow each day I tell myself it is just early fall and gloves and hats are for later in the season. There is the smell of dead leaves in the bed of the stream I cross over, and I’m reminded of this same path in June when the runoff roars through and the trees above are green and fluttery.

Years ago, I used to walk this path at night, stopping to lean on the railings of the bridge and watch the stars and sometimes the moon reflected on the dark water under my feet. This was when I had that kind of time, when my hours were my own to squander.

But they were also the years when I wanted what I have now. This life was a long-shot back then. Those slow walks home at night were sometimes walks of grief. Sometimes they were walks of release and an attempt at acceptance. Sometimes it was a walk of longing for my younger self, that 33-year-old me who just wanted to travel and write and go for long runs in beautiful places and not be relied on. I wanted to want what I had wanted then.

All of these past selves flash through my mind in the four minutes it takes me to get to my place of work, jeans splattered with mud that I have to wipe off with a towel. I  put my hair back before opening a door and unzip my coat for the morning.

I always get asked if I want a ride, and I always say I’m fine taking the bike. It’s one of the few stolen moments I get in my days right now.

It’s like letting the pages of a book flip quickly past my fingers, arriving to where I am in this moment: racing over golden leaves, living out this long-shot life, very much relied on. I don’t want to forget that.

Comment Montana

Summer, the middle

  I was one of many introverts, I’m sure, who sprung to life with purpose and creativity as the world went dark in March 2020. It was as if we had been in training for this kind of event our entire lives. I remember saying to a friend just months before, that if I could envision what wealth would look like to me, it would just be more time.
  And Voila.
  My wealth was so immediate and extraordinary, it was like I woke up one morning and rolled out of bed to find a $2 million lottery ticket at my feet.  Maybe most importantly – and a high-five to my 2020 self – I knew what I had been handed was rare and fleeting and I pounced on it. I rented an office at our local theater and started writing fiction again, which had seemed indulgent and nutty before. Now all the lines of nuttiness were either blurred or erased and it was just like, ‘well, if the world’s going crazy I may as well be crazy along with it.’  When Montana started to cautiously reopen two months later I had 52 pages of a screenplay and  – unknown to me then –  a coffee bean-sized Eliza brewing away. I was two months shy of 43 when I took that pregnancy test and I still can’t think of that season without the first lines of Ellie Goulding’s “Anything Can Happen” starting up in my mind.
  So more than a year later, when Covid crept back into our lives at the beginning of August, a part of me assumed I’d return to that headspace, enjoying our family of now four, and bursts of productivity, all without the interruption of work and routine. When a quarantine finally became inevitable, I was ready to go.
  Except I wasn’t. I did not return to that headspace. There was no pouncing. After 48 hours I was furious. Also restless and uncomfortable and maybe worst of all, feeling deeply guilty that I was restless and uncomfortable. Shouldn’t I want to gather up as much time as possible with my daughters, now nearly six months and age 2? All day at home with my babies who were growing so fast it made my heart hurt every time I had to fold up another onesie or pair of pants that no longer fit and put in the giveaway box – what a gift, right? Instead I felt like I had been thrown back into a cage.
  All I could think of was that perfect Saturday in early June, post-vaccinations, two months before, when the world was suddenly unmasked again. Spring had just catapulted into summer and we took the girls to the farmer’s market in Missoula. I stood in line to buy a fresh baguette and a coffee at a French bakery on the hip strip as Eliza cooed at all the new faces from her stroller. We walked across the new bridge walkway over the Clark Fork to meet John and Jessie for lunch and the river was roaring, the lilacs were out, and the quaking aspens were green and shimmery. My baguette was warm, my coffee was hot and strong, I had just slept more than five hours the night before, and the world was so perfect and beautiful and so suddenly and exquisitely open. Had the sky ever been that blue? The hills that green? Every person I passed on the bridge was grinning like mad, just like me, all of us released prisoners. Missoula today, and then where? The Amalfi Coast? Portugal? Paris? For the first time in a year we could allow ourselves to dream ahead beyond our living rooms.
  What I loved the most though on that June day, was that all the arguing, the posturing, the memes, the viral video clips, and the anger – so much anger –  seemed bathed in this fresh summer rain. It felt washed away. Irrelevant. It didn’t matter anymore because it was all over. Covid was in the rear view mirror. Yes, there were other strains of the virus. Yes, there were uncertainties. But ultimately, we were back. Let’s shake hands across enemy lines because we were moving forward. 
  When Covid returned to our town, our daycares, our workplaces, and life had to come to a standstill again while our health system tried to get a handle of what was happening, I really tried to channel my 2020 self. But I couldn’t get myself back to that place I had been 12 months before. There was no way around it. Two days in, I was looking at spending 10 days being morose about being morose. I was disoriented and I missed the calm, resilient lioness of opportunity I had been. My 2021 self was inwardly throwing a tantrum that could have rivaled my 2-year-old’s meltdowns. This was all supposed to be over! I want to speak to the person in charge! I would watch Jessie dissolve into tears at the smallest infringement and think you are my spirit animal right now.
  It’s funny that loneliness hasn’t been a prominent key on my emotional keyboard for much of my life. I love my time alone and solitude is hard to come by these days. Eliza still wants to be held for much of the night. I can’t even brush my teeth without Jessie’s tiny hands sliding under the bathroom door. It is nothing short of agonizing to watch our world slide back into a tunnel of unknowns, just when we thought we were back in the bright, clear light. Are we wiser now? Maybe just more prepared to have our plans evaporate and get more comfortable with saying “I don’t know” when we look at the school year ahead or international travel. We are back to buying insurance for everything.The certainty we crave so hard just isn’t here.
  But this is the gift I’m taking from my unexpectedly morose August quarantine: While solitude is the gas in the particular make, model and year that is me, at the end of the day, I do need people. I need the banter at work, the small talk while waiting to buy milk or post a package. I need our book club meetings in the library courtyard and spontaneous chats with neighbors while out walking the dog.
As an introvert, last year was a grand indulgence. Maybe its a good thing to be reminded that I still need actual face time to function in the long haul.
  I don’t know what wealth looks like to me now exactly. I don’t know if I would blithely say “time” anymore. Maybe a healthy sense of awe. Maybe on my really good days I’d say its knowing how wealthy I already am.
2 Comments Montana

Summer, the beginning

  All of the sudden, summer is here.
  This will be my eighth one in Montana, and just saying that makes me feel both old and grateful.
It seems like another lifetime when I was driving from California in early June, arriving in Big Sky just before the sun was up, everything I owned packed into the used Saturn I had just bought for $1499, hoping it would just get me through the first season in my new home. I got out of the car, and stood there in the driveway, listening to the roar of the creek, deafening with spring runoff, and then birds everywhere in the first light. I had just arrived back in the exact place where I had spent the winter, but that place had been transformed. The snow, the quiet, the hushed darkness that I had cross-country skied through during the previous five months was gone. In its place was a land that was full of light, color, noise – not just birds and water, but wind in the leaves, in the waist-high green grasses; of cattle being moved; of horses released to the fields in the evening. It filled me with energy I didn’t know I was missing. I had only been gone from Montana for two months but it was another landscape I was returning to.
  I grew up in a temperate California climate where winters were almost irrelevant. I spent a decade in New Zealand, where summers were short and stormy months, potentially brilliant, with equal potential for disappointment. To me, Montana summers have everywhere else beat. Maybe it’s the brevity. Maybe it is the long winters that build up the anticipation. Maybe it is the suddenness of its arrival. It is long in coming. But every year it delivers.
  It is soft and warm. Gentle at first, then just when the heat you’ve been longing for gets a little too much to take, there are these storms that roll through, reminding you to just stop and bask in warmth while warmth is here. One storm arrived just as I was leaving work last week and a few of us stopped what we were doing and took a moment to watch its approach from the doorway. Even the summer in Montana has different moods, shades and smells – seasons within a season. For people who struggle with restlessness, this is a made-to-order landscape, changing every few hours. There isn’t enough time to get tired of it.
  Last summer felt stolen to me, first by a pandemic and then by morning sickness. I had enough energy after work in the evenings to do a faceplant into the couch and eat grape popsicles and chew on ice, until even the smell of water – even frozen – made me nauseous.
  This June, I feel like a corralled horse, anxiously pacing, watching the rest of the herd thunder past me for the hills. I am not the same woman who rolled into town in a beat-up Saturn eight years ago, arriving in this house I had rented from an online posting, unseen, and upon stepping into the lounge room, hearing my own footsteps echo on the wooden floors, thought, ‘how am I going to fill up all this space?’
  I laugh at that now, as I rock Eliza, now 4 months, with Jessie dragging her whale-themed potty around the house like a big teddy bear. This space has been filled.
  There is an Australian journalist I follow on social media, who gave birth a month before I did, and captures motherhood in a way that always has me nodding.
  “The phrase, ‘you can have it all, just not at once,’ keeps skittering around in my brain,” she wrote in a post I read at 3 a.m., as Eliza snoozed on my chest. “It’s not my turn for sleep-ins and long leisurely yoga classes and writing when the muse pokes her tousled head through the door. It is my turn to squint with one eye at the watch when I hear a yell from next door, and be delighted at wide new eyes looking at the world and wipe poo from between shoulder blades and wonder how the bloody hell it got there.”
  That Saturn that got me here is long gone. My arms are so full, especially during the summer  when I lose my husband to the guiding season.
  This last week I’ve watched from my couch, trapped by blankies and baby arms, my neighbor loading up to go ride her horse. Her kids are grown; she is a grandmother now. She swings her saddle into the bed of the truck and my shoulder muscles move vicariously through hers.
  Someday, it will be my turn to throw a saddle in the back of a truck on a bright summer morning. 
  For now, I am here, arms full, heart full, jiggling a baby rocker with my big toe as I write this, corralled. It’s my turn to be right here.
Comment Montana, Uncategorized

Here we are

There is a golden blur to the last five weeks. Nights and days bleed together. The state of our nation, world economies and so forth have become faraway concerns. Successes and failures are measured in the numbers of diapers changed, the volume and consistency of what is in them, ounces fed, and hours slept.

Not our hours, of course. John and I are still powered by the wild-eyed adrenaline designed to fuel new parents through these weeks, maybe months, in this Darwinian hurdle of human survival.

In the meantime, everything swirls around Eliza, now into her fifth week on earth. Eliza Jean Marie – an old family name on her father’s side and two middle names for both grandmothers. As I rock her I’m enjoying that it can all roll off the tongue sounding very French or very redneck. I wonder about the places in the world she will end up; what landscapes or cities she will make a home in.

Eliza is exquisite, of course. Just like her sister, she will worm her swaddled body up my chest and upper left arm and shoulder, until she and I are eyeball to eyeball, her head bobbing as she meets my gaze unblinkingly and this curious look of comprehension like oh, you’re the voice in my head comes over her face. Get used to it, kid, I want to tell her. I’m your mother, and I will probably be the voice in your head forever.

The successes all belong to Eliza. We own the failures, which are spectacular and jarring reminders that life with two kids is very different than life with one. At three weeks we decided to take Eliza and Jessie, now 21 months and a full-blown joyous, wilful toddler, on a ski trip to Idaho. Empowered by a blissful family lunch in Wallace – where I slowly drank a cold beer out of a mason jar, as Eliza slept peacefully in my arms and Jessie happily ate pesto bread with her dad as the sun shined down through the big windows on all of us – we decided to make a stop a local brewery down the road before heading to our hotel. 

It took us about 15 minutes to unload, do a round of diaper changes on the passenger seat, organize ourselves with strollers, front carriers, backpacks, diaper bags, and make our way up the street to the front door of the brewery, where we lasted less than five minutes inside. As soon as we had seated ourselves, Jessie dissolved, Eliza started screaming, and John looked over at me then up at our waitress – “let’s just get a growler to go.”

Back at the truck, the girls, still in tears, tucked into their car seats, John folded up the stroller and loaded it into the back. I stood there, hands in jacket pockets, watching a teenager on a bike ride past, looking at us like our life in motion was his worst nightmare. 

This scene would also have been my nightmare when I was a teenager, I think, sympathetically. Quite honestly, it would have been my nightmare when I was 33. 

And yet 10 years later, a “geriatric” mom on all the medical charts with decades of noon sleep-ins, brewery stops, and easy, lonesome roadtrips behind me, I’m surprised at how comfortable it feels, this chaos.

“Lets get these girls home,” John says, and I still have to remind myself that these girls are our girls. Maybe it’s because of this golden blur time, but I still have to pinch myself as a reminder that I’m not dreaming.

Comment Montana

Onwards

View from the shed apartment lounge that we lived in this time last year. Photo by Madz.

It is strange to be in a new year, after so much anticipation.

It was a year, as comedian Dave Chappelle commented in a podcast John and I listened to last month, while driving across Nevada, when for better or worse, we have all lived in close proximity with the decisions we have made in our life up until now. Our choice on the color of our couches and kitchen walls, to our careers, businesses, and spouses, was now under careful scrutiny as we have come face to face with them each day, often under serious stress. I told my cousin about that quote today and she laughed that she had just gotten rid of a dining room table that always went back to being wobbly, no matter what repairs she did to it.  She had thought it was quirky up until recently. She finally realized that 2020 was the year she needed a solid table to lay her head down on for a good cry and then get on with it.

For many this has been a year of heartbreak and tragedy, confusion, grief.  For others, this has been a season of hustle, as redundancies and cancelled plans have led to opportunities that wouldn’t have been available in 2019. For others it’s been a combination of all of this. Some have commented that 2020 has accelerated trends that we were moving towards anyways, like working remotely or ongoing independent study for those of our kids who have ended up being happier and more productive outside the traditional classroom.  We have all felt lonely, scared and a little lost without actual face time with our communities and families at some point in the last ten months.

In our house, 2020 has been a mixed bag that I’m still sorting through. This time last year we had just settled into summer in New Zealand in a friend’s beautiful shed apartment. I threw myself into freelance projects and worked at a pub at night while hanging out with Jessie – then just six months old – during the day as John fished and explored the rivers around the South Island. The idea was that we were setting ourselves up to do this every northern hemisphere winter, for as many years as we could. We barely made it back to the U.S. before both countries – and the rest of the world – shut down indefinitely in March. We had unexpected weeks with family in Colorado in quarantine, as Jessie had long nights of teething and we slept in shifts, drank endless pots of coffee through the snowy late mornings, ordered take-out, and took solitary walks by the creek when we needed a breather and a big-picture perspective of what was happening. It was all going to go away by Easter. Then the middle of summer (which, unexpectedly, exploded with work for both John and I – turns out that everyone in the U.S. wanted to be in Montana). Then it was September. By then we knew we had to put the plan to return to New Zealand on the back-burner, maybe indefinitely.

Instead, as the months have gone on and work has calmed down, it was replaced by plans for another adventure this winter that has become more and more certain.

It’s a journey that might be closer to home, yet no less nerve-wracking than a move across the world. And if you’ve run into me in the last few weeks, you’ll see that I’m well on my way.

At 32 weeks pregnant, with an 18-month-old toddler running laps around the couch I’m beached on like an exhausted mammal looking up at photo collages of the rivers, lakes, mountains and oceans of New Zealand we were exploring this time last year, I’d put my hand up to agree that this has been a year when we have lived in tight quarters with our collective life decisions that have motored us along to where we are now, then screeched to a halt, dumping us here in 2020: Surprised, messily joyous, overwhelmed, hopeful, exhausted, grateful, tougher and thicker skinned than we were 12 months ago.

At a work meeting on December 31, going over wines and a tasting menu that evening, we talked about where we all were as 2020 came, maybe mercifully, to an end for each of us. The theme for the night, with fire-dancing, a bonfire and fireworks, was “the rising of the Phoenix,” which has never felt more appropriate. I said that I felt like my own theme word for the year was “pivot.” I’ve had to release more than I’ve ever had to release this last year. Ideas of myself. The vision board I had for our future. I had to learn to relinquish myself to the rest that my body and mind had actually been craving, after months of traveling and living in transition. Then turn around and throw myself into work. Then turn around again and re-accept the gift of rest when our workplace shut down for 10 days in August, as Covid cases rose in Montana. I had to learn to incorporate fatigue and morning sickness into my summer and make peace with collapsing on a couch at the end of the night to eat frozen grapes and watch Below Deck. I got to learn the joy of having a wonderful community of parents and childcare pros around me – literally, my neighbors – who adored Jessie and helped shuttle her around and give her a beautiful summer with a wee tribe of adventurers that she will be growing up with.

In all of the unexpected twists and turns, the releasing of plans and control of the future – whatever that looks like – I’m okay with where our household decisions have landed us, even close up – scratched wood floors, tiny kitchen, toys, abandoned sippy cups, peeling siding on the front that I’ve covered up with a wreath and wind chimes, and all.  Winter and darkness is very acute in Montana. Solstice on the 21st felt appropriately somber. And comforting – like a heavy duvet had been thrown over me. As the holiday cards still strung up around the house tonight remind me, 2020 has been “a year to remember.”

Ha. Yeah it has.

Now bring on 2021 from the ashes.

2 Comments California, Montana, New Zealand

Choosing to be “a little bit deaf” this week

The late Ruth Bader Ginsburg once told a graduating class that the best marriage advice she ever received was from her mother-in-law on her June wedding day in 1954.

“It helps, sometimes, to be a little bit deaf.”

Not exactly the most romantic piece of guidance a young, bride-to-be might be looking for.

I watched the 2018 documentary “RBG” on a flight from Montana to a fly-fishing convention in Virginia with my husband two years ago. The documentary, ahead of her death at age 87 last month, went into detail about the early years of her nearly half-century marriage to her husband, Marty, who she met at age 18 at Cornell University. Ruth would credit Marty as being her best friend and greatest advocate as they were both accepted into Harvard Law School, grew their careers and family, even when Marty was diagnosed with testicular cancer in 1957 at age 25. During that period, rather than have Marty drop out of law school, Ruth would go to his classes for him and take notes, while also attending her own classes, all while raising their 2-year-old daughter and nursing Marty through chemotherapy. These were the conditions that she was studying in, as one of nine women in a class of 552 men, going on to become one of the first women to be accepted at the Harvard Law Review. 

That’s a lot of stress for two student newlywed parents to make it through and then go on to have almost five, and by all accounts happy, decades together until Marty’s death in 2010. That idea of being “a little bit deaf”, Ruth would go on to say, would also carry into her career, allowing her to forge strong, life-long friendships with others who did not share her beliefs, maybe most famously with fellow Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who disagreed with Ruth on just about every single issue that came before the court, yet spending New Year’s Eve together with their families was a tradition they both upheld for years.

As Election Day 2020 fast approaches, I’ve been thinking about the usefulness of deliberately going a little bit deaf in these final days – I think I’ve actually yearned for this for a long time, I’ve realized, but didn’t know how to allow myself that – luxury? Boundary? But two years after first hearing that quote from Ruth and finding it humorous in a 1950s marriage-advice way, I’ve found myself honing in on it as a mission statement for myself this election season.

I think I get what she was saying: Look at the bigger picture. Choose your battles and zero in. Stay focused and don’t let yourself get drained or sidetracked or chipped away at by petty wars that go personal. Or in another quote of Ruth’s: “When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best tune out. Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one’s ability to persuade.”

Coming from someone whose career was a study and experimentation in persuasion in the highest court in the land, that’s probably advice worth noting.

A few weeks ago, we rented a vacation home in Wyoming with two of John’s best friends from high school and their families to do a series of day floats on the Snake River. It was a beautiful rental, with chairs lined up on a big deck that looked out to trees just changing colors and the mountains around Jackson in the distance – perfect for morning coffee and reading before packing up the trucks and boats. The living room had this great sectional leather couch in front of the fireplace where we’d flop down after dinners of barbecued Montana elk, and putting the kids to bed, a whiskey or beer in hand. On our final night, I ended up staying up way later than I had planned, just discussing a news story that had come out that day, with one of the guys. He’s a U.S. Army Ranger about to retire at 40, is very smart, and leans more right, while I lean more left. He also makes a point to stay the hell away from social media – which is maybe what made debating feel fresh and fun, in a way that I’d forgotten about. Kind of like I was back in university in the 90s, or sitting in the kitchen of a youth hostel while backpacking around Europe. Back when we debated the big stuff face to face late at night, in our own, faulty, still-forming ideas, rather than just reposting witty memes and photos that are supposed to say our views for us – but too often just end up being another grenade thrown in what feels like a trench war as November arrives.

Even though I had my election ballot on my desk for a week, I found myself delaying in filling it out and taking it in. Maybe I needed a few more days of being “a little bit deaf” so I could stop being so reactive and angry.

I think it’s that I wanted to be my best self before going to the polls, even if, in 2020, that was in my own living room.

Comment Montana

The Blue Tent

I bought this tent I’m falling asleep in nine years ago this month. I had just finished up co-guiding a two-week trip around the South Island of New Zealand and I hadn’t slept more than five hours a night for that time. I was fit and grimy and all of my clothes smelled like sunscreen and citronella. I had a $1,600 wad of tip money and nowhere to really be for 13 days until my next trip. Bedding from my last apartment I had occupied was still tucked into the trunk of the 1994 Toyota Starlet I drove everywhere in those years, with a chandelier Christmas ornament dangling from the rear-view mirror.

I remember going out to breakfast and ordering something really expensive to eat. Then I went to chain store called The Warehouse – the equivalent of a Walmart – and picked up this tent in the outdoor aisle, just over from the gardening section. I set it up in the front yard of the farm where all of the hiking trips were based out of; where all our packs, food and trailers were stored between trips and where the guides often crashed on floors and in twin bunk beds, with outdoor gear laid out to dry.

The blue tent was like a safari photograph, with blankets and pillows from the Starlet arranged. I read a borrowed Hunter S. Thompson book all week and figured out the new laptop I had also purchased, starting my Homefires blog with the thin flap unzipped, and a view of the dairy cows grazing as I lounged on throw pillows and tried to describe my life at that time, going into the staff kitchen every so often to brew another cup of tea to take back out to my space.

That tent would get pitched in the back yards of friends all over the island that summer. It wasn’t hardy enough for big, high altitude, multi-day trips, but for what I needed – a small space of my own to block out the rest of the world – it was perfect.

Two years later I would take it with me to Spain when I walked the Camino de Santiago for two months, quickly learning that it was unnecessary weight to carry when I could just stay in the convents and guest houses along the thousand-year-old pilgrimage path for about six dollars a night. So I sent it to my parents’ house in California, where it would live in a closet for another four years, forgotten.

The blue tent was discovered and loaded up in the green Saturn I bought when I came back to the U.S., later in my 30s. I had one car-less winter in Big Sky, where I met my now-husband. Packing up the leftovers in my childhood room that late April and driving north and east back to Montana was a risky move, but it felt right – more so as John and I would unfold and pitch that tent by rivers all over the West that summer and fall. Each time I rolled it out I felt like I was coming back to an old, familiar room I had once lived in.  It was a piece of myself I was returning to, only now I was learning about sharing it with someone else.

Two years later it would go up at a sandy campground at Refugio Beach for me and my friends to sleep in, the night before John and I got married. And we would break it out on our honeymoon back to Montana through Big Sur and the Lost Coast in northern California, Oregon and Washington.

Tonight, the blue tent is pitched beside the East Fork of the Bitterroot. The sound of the creek is deafening. There is a large stone holding down the right corner of the tent where it has ripped – but other than that the canvas walls are still in good shape. In the morning, we will go on my first float of the season, in the spring sun, stopping at a river island for John to grill the antelope tenderloin we’ve defrosted for this trip, as our dog runs up and down the banks, in and out of water and we will have strawberries for dessert.

But right now, listening to the spring runoff outside, wishing desperately that I had thought to bring my water bottle in the tent with us because I’m so thirsty, I just think about every kind of soil these tent pegs have been hammered into. Our dog, smelly with river brine and dirt, nestles between us, buried in blankets. And I am strangely comfortable, even at 8 months pregnant, though every time I turn on my side I feel like a rotisserie chicken, with each move needing careful planning and a strategy.

When I do make it upright and then outside, the stars are bright and there is a layer of ice on the flap as my headlamp scours the picnic table for my water bottle. Nine years ago was another life. Sixteen hundred dollars in a wad of cash. That is so much to me right now, I think, as I chug water. And I wish I knew what I had done with that chandelier Christmas ornament that dangled from the rear-view mirror from that long gone Toyota Starlet on the other side of the world, because that chandelier seems ironic now. I was obscenely wealthy and I didn’t even know it back then.

But I remember that this tent made me feel rich in those years when I’d crawl into it. It still does, I think, as I settle in. There isn’t much to these canvas walls, but it’s ended up being a tent for all seasons.

Comment California, Montana, New Zealand

My boys of Summer

This was exactly what I had dreamed of: seeing the chipped, blue nail polish of my toes just slightly above me, framed by the mountains in the background, and the coolness of being suspended on a deep body of water, within an inflated pink flamingo doughnut and a beer dangling from my hand.
Somewhere on the banks of Storm Lake my husband was casting – I could hear the rhythmic whir, then the quick tightening of the line. Gabe the dog was patrolling the shore with great intensity and joy, exhausting himself by diving into the water to retrieve branches. The afternoon shower that had just swept through was gone, driving all but the determined and the already-camped-out away back to Philipsburg or Anaconda. On the way up we passed trucks slowly descending one gorged out piece of trail to tree root to rock like the dirt road out was staircase back down to paved easiness. But also life. And cell phone service. And routine. Stresses big and small. All the things we are up here to forget for an afternoon.
It is lush this high. I rolled the window down as we drove up, the rain already starting to work its way through the pines, making everything smell like soil and incense. The side of the road that stretches into the forest is covered in wildflowers in mid August, while everything below in town, around the lowlands, has gone dry and brittle. I’ve already learned that Augusts in Montana can be rough on the mind. It’s the panic of the last true long month of summer covered in smoke. Maybe not ours, but from somewhere where there is something on fire, a reminder of death and destruction. The smoke is confusing, full of unknowns. Threats are everywhere in the soupy, pink-tinged fog that covers the hills we are used to looking out to when we open the curtains. We don’t know what is out there. It’s unsettling. I have to push away resentment that the season I’ve been hanging out to be in is eaten away at – or outright devoured – by the fire season.
But up here in the aftermath of a summer storm, it is the best of August. Cool, with the sun just coming through the clouds above the ridge. We have an hour before it will disappear behind the mountains. That hour is enough. My flamingo tube turns slowly as the wind comes up, and it is like my eyes, behind sunglasses, are getting a sweeping, panoramic photo of everything around me: dog swimming, mountain ridge gleaming, husband fishing, tents being set up on the far side of the lake, and through all this, my toes gliding past each of these scenes as the water ripples turn me around and around and around. I feel like a queen taking a tally of her kingdom.
The smoke is far away and below us. The haziness is gone, at least for an afternoon. There is a reason we go up to get away. There is something about being suspended on a cool, deep body of water, where for at least an hour or two, we have clarity.
1 Comment Montana

End of the road

Greenie was never meant to go quietly into the night.  He was meant to go just like he did.
It happened where Skalkaho Road stretches out straight, aiming right for the Pintlers. It was a day out of a Tom Petty song. I even had my hand out the window. The moment I heard the sound, I knew it was the engine, and that at nearly 300,000 miles, this was the end of the road for us.

In 2014, I bought Greenie for under $1,499 in a dusty parking lot in central California, only hoping that he would get me as far as Montana – from there I’d get something more reliable, I told my dad, a mechanic. I had a hunch that Montana was where I was supposed to be. And I had just met someone. It seemed like a good omen that the used car salesman who sold me Greenie was a fly-fisherman, just like John, the guy I had just fallen in love with back in Big Sky. The salesman calmly left me to make up my mind, and pace the parking lot a few times before I  was finally ready to walk up the steps to the office and write a check in exchange for the keys.

Four winters, two lost keys, a flat tire, repeated maulings by an adopted 100-pound dog with separation anxiety issues, and more than 70,000 miles later, Greenie the 1999 Saturn SL2 coasted me safely into a patch of grass by the highway and let out one last smoky gurgle. He had done his job and then some. I was picked up by two morticians in a mini van traveling to Anaconda with a labradoodle dog in the back. Somehow, that also fit in with my time with Greenie: even at the end, he carried me to a story, one that I’d tell my dad later that week, describing the automatic door of the mini van slowly, painfully, opening to reveal an empty stretcher that I climbed in next to, the labradoodle beside me, as I was taken to a spot that had cell phone reception where I could call for a tow.

Greenie’s other role in my life was a secret storage unit, when my life started to overflow from our 1-bedroom house. It took five plastic bags and a box to get everything out, and back into our living room, where I had 24-hours to myself to sort through it all on my own later in the week.

It was like going through journal entries from the last four years since I came to Montana. There were old agendas and budgets from town council and hospital board meetings in one bag. Camping equipment and music festival lineups in another. One bag held all my roller derby gear and duck taped skates when I was the Gwyn Reaper. I found a wig, a green jacket and an 80s era felt jumpsuit from two White Front Halloween parties when John and I went as Maude and The Dude one year, and break-dancers the next. There was the first draft of a wedding invitation. Then two plastic wine glasses from our honeymoon road trip back to Montana, when sparkling wine was sent out to us as we swam in a pool overlooking Big Sur. There was a bag of walnuts from my parents’ backyard – wedding guest gifts – and a Happy Anniversary card sent last November.

Car break downs are always stressful, especially when you know it’s the end, and money has to be scrapped together for a new vehicle. But standing in my living room, looking around at all my loot, I just thought about what a life Greenie and I have had together. How he transported me from the coast to the mountains; from one season of my life, to the one I’m in now. I rolled the dice. And Greenie got me where I needed to be.

Tomorrow I’m off to Butte to pick up my next gamble – a 1990 Pontiac Bonneville for $1,350.
I’m hoping it can just get me to work and back until the end of the summer. But there’s a part of me that’s hopeful.

You never know where – and how far – a used car yard gamble is going to take you.

 

Comment Montana