New shores

Philipsburg, Montana is hundreds of miles behind us as we drive, wipers brushing off the driving rain, sports radio commentary analyzing last night’s Saints vs. Panthers game on, as we hurtle towards California in a muddy Toyota Tundra.

Winter as we know it is also behind us. Today is Nevada. This is high desert grasses, bail bond billboards, isolated agricultural towns fronted by blinking lights advertising 24-hour casinos. We pass prisons. My eyes follow white, bare houses on tussock hills, then stay on the trains that smoothly parallel us as we move alongside lines of oil tankers. We are all going west.

There is no snow here. When we stop at gas stations and get out of the car, there is a smell of damp earth, shrubs and trees, all the earthiness that gets buried under white in Montana for most of the year.

We’ve been working steadily from mid-December to prepare for this getaway, and yet it was nine hours into this road trip before I felt the cut and release that always comes when I leave a place. I feel that flick of addiction. There’s a reason that people stay on the move all their lives.

Is it change?  A fresh start? New territory, maybe, or a return to a piece of ourselves that gets forgotten or put on the back burner until life slows down a little bit. And out here it does. Suddenly there is nothing but empty hours to let our minds churn things over, to take an idea and run with it.

Such as: getting out at the gas station in Elko, I think about what it would be like to live here. To work at a hotel reception, or the blackjack tables, or the supermarket checkout. Then there is this playful, new fear – every time our GPS tells us the fastest route would be to take this narrow dirt road on the left, just up ahead –  that surely by now there is a serial killer tech-savvy enough to lure a road-weary couple right over a cattle guard and onto his compound, where a gate will clang shut behind us.

We pass by oil fields, steam springing up, and I think back to a short story I read in my early 20s, about a woman who takes a job in a place just like this. I remember how that story made an impression on me. It was lonely and had a sense of bridges that had burned behind this woman. The theme was isolation. But I remember it was also a story about escape. She had survived something. As we drove, I just couldn’t remember what that something was. Or what the story was called. Or who the author was. There is no cell reception or coverage out here, so I can’t even do a Google search. So I sit back, trying to piece that tale back together from memory.

That’s what this time is for, hours and hours on the road, relishing in the rarity of being bored and seeing where that goes.

In another five hours we will be at the ocean. In seven hours we will pull into the gravel of my parents’ driveway where a porch light will be on, and bowls of ice cream will be brought to us by the fire. In the morning, I’ll be able to go for a run without putting on snow boots and three layers. I can slip on running shoes.

Even writing that last paragraph reminds me how wealthy I am in time. When it passes this slowly, I can’t help but be aware of it slipping by.

And this is just the first leg of a five-week journey. We are going west and south, and then really, really south. Southern hemisphere south.

But before all that, there is this. A slow re-awakening to a world outside of winter.

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So this is Winter

From my bed it is a perfect Montana scene.

My pillows are propped behind me and knees drawn up so this laptop is at the right angle to type away. And to my left, out a window still streaked with dog slobber, is my husband’s camper, tarped up in blue and frosted with last night’s snowfall. Beyond this are roofs with chimneys blowing out tufts of smoke, and then hills with trees heavy and dripping under drifts.

I’m well into my fourth winter in Montana. I forget how this turns my life into a series of activities done in slow motion. Everything – from walking to the car, to driving to work, to clothing myself every time I leave my house – is like I am moving under water. I feel like the trees outside the window, sagging under their weight. Everything takes twice is long and the window of daylight seems like little more than a sliver before the curtains fall back and it is dark again.

In other years, I’ve raged against the dying of the light.

This year, I’m aligned with this season arriving.
Our worlds are smaller. Travel on some days is ill-advised or impossible. Taking the dog out for a walk in snow boots, gloves, beanie, and sometimes snow pants is a long labor each time and each time we return, even from a walk around town, we blast through the front door, white flakes swirling around and off us, exposed hair frozen stiff, like we’ve just returned from an expedition to Antarctica. We put the kettle on, turn on the heater and it crackles to life and then we collapse on the couch.
When I first moved into this 1880s house, I put up a map of the world and blown up pictures of places that I have loved. They remind me of wilder, rockier times as I lie there on the couch, as the heater roars, still half in my snowy day clothes and I look up and around me. There’s a photo of a fire on a beach; a full moon over a lonely lagoon; a wall of tiles in Lisbon; a wave crashing on a Cornwall shore. But right now, stepping into this weather-beaten home with a sagging deck backed by a camper covered by a blue tarp flapping in the wind, this beats out all those places for me. Like that beach at night, lit up by a driftwood fire, or that neighborhood in Portugal that I wandered around in seven years ago, or that full moon I saw on a night run near a lagoon on the edge of rainforest, this is where I am meant to be.
Outside in our yard, the hammock has been folded up and the trees that shone green in June are a skeletal outline in the porch light as evening comes.
Maybe that isn’t a shot for a calendar. But it’s winter and it’s home and I’m grateful that it’s closing in around me.
2 Comments Montana

River widows

In this part of Montana, there is a decent percentage of women who spend a portion of the summers on their own, temporary widows to the rivers, Alaskan mines and an awakening fire season.  I only realize this when I travel somewhere else – back to visit my family in California for a weekend most recently where most have a Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 grind – and explain how work is going for my husband.
Work as a fly-fishing guide is great for him. Which means that I don’t really see that much of John right now and our life is absent of routine. In Montana, this is the norm. In California, it’s like explaining that I’m married to a sea captain.
These are the months when John could be guiding on Rock Creek one day, then be on the Big Hole for the next three, followed by a week on the Madison or Gallatin. Life for both of us is week to week, with no set schedules. But I’m finding that I like the rhythm of these long summer days that have become a re-visitation to my spinster self. There is no real household to keep in order, except for the dog, so I am lucky that way. Marriage may challenge  me to be better at sharing (though I learned early on that the supersized re-sealable bags of veggie burgers in the freezer are brilliant hiding spots for Ben and Jerry ice cream pints) but these are the months when I can regress  without guilt. Because the house, once more, is all mine again.
The fly-tying station set up at our kitchen table through the spring has been packed away. When I get up in the morning, I have a clean surface or a vase of flowers that I pass by as I pad across the wooden floor to the kitchen and sleepily turn on the coffee, opening the door to let the dog out. Everything is arranged exactly how I like it as I’m waking up in our home. I don’t have to justify playing Sade’s Greatest Hits as I write in my PJs on the couch until noon. 
After living and working together through the winter and spring, there is something about having this time to unabashedly do what we love in our separate spheres for a few days at a time. We are both independent people and I think it is good for us to remember what it is like to miss each other. Because I do love these chunks of time right now to myself, when I can watch movies that have subtitles in the evening with the fan flowing and the last beer in the fridge. I can make plans and then change them. I can start a project on the kitchen table, then leave it there overnight to continue with the following day and not be apologetic.
I can also pack up the dog and go find my husband on one of the beautiful rivers where he spends his days or meet him in Missoula or Bozeman for a night and maybe go hear a band or go out for drinks somewhere with a garden patio and strung lights (I demand places like this when we meet up for an outing in a city). There is a lot of freedom in this time. The summer feels long, and not even half-over, and there is that great July sense of long hours of sunlight, aching feet, and cool rivers to soak our soles and talk about what we are barbequing that night.
That’s about as far ahead as our planning stretches. I wouldn’t have it any other way right now.
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A quest for rest and Montana mermaids

Nothing breaks the hysteria of spring fever like a road trip to a tiki bar, in the middle of the northern Great Plains, complete with a Mai Tai and mermaids blowing kisses from the blue waters of the O’Haire Motor Inn pool.
There were three of us women who would usually be working in the evenings together. Filled up with tales of the Sip n Dip Lounge, dubbed the number one bar in the country worth flying for by GQ in 2003, we decided that last Wednesday was our moment. We all had the night off – probably the last time this would happen until the end of summer. And so began an overnight pilgrimage from Philipsburg to Great Falls to see the landlocked mermaids for ourselves.
After a long, ocean-less winter, I don’t know if there is anything that makes me feel more like myself again than driving off in a direction I’ve never been before. With Helmville behind us, and hours to get to our final destination – where the only plans we had were to order drinks with maraschino cherries stabbed by tiny umbrellas – there was that rare chunk of time when you can just cruise with your feet on the dashboard and watch a fresh landscape unfold as you listen to a podcasts.
We stopped for coffee. We stopped for fudge samples and beef jerky. We listened to NPR stories that featured themes revolving around the five senses. Leaving Lincoln, we drove past a shiny structure on our left, barely visible through the trees and spotted a sign for Blackfoot Pathways: Sculpture in the Wild. The car reversed and we entered the circular driveway for an exhibition that we hadn’t heard of, featuring international artists creating pieces inspired by the landscape and history of the Blackfoot Valley. We started off in a cluster, but broke off to wander down the path through the woods on our own, stopping and taking all the time we needed to pause in each clearing, or just keeping walking. I had left all electronics in the car – I only knew it was after 2 p.m. but sometime before 5. Sitting on a bench in the quiet afternoon, I realized how much I missed being unhurried. I couldn’t remember the last time I wasn’t aware of time.
A few hours later, the mermaids had just descended into the pool when we arrived and took a shell-shaped padded booth in the back of the Sip n’ Dip, watching the women in goggles and home-made fish tails swirl around in the glass behind rows of liquor bottles. One of us had brought the complimentary rubber ducky from our hotel room to be signed by Piano Pat, when she went on break from playing songs like “I Love this Bar” and “Sweet Caroline,” setting the scene at the start of the night as her fingers glided over the keyboard with her spoken intro: “Great Falls … Wednesday night …”
It’s hard to say who is more famous here – the mermaids, who attracted a guest appearance from Daryl Hannah in 2004 to reprise her role from the 1984 movie “Splash” – or Piano Pat Sponheim, who was a divorced single mother of three at age 28 when she started playing evenings in 1963, while still holding a job as a medical transcriptionist. Everyone around seems to know the story about Pat  – and  it’s as fun to see her live, singing Elvis, while I’m sipping a Blue Hawaiian as it is to see her crooning on a segment of NBC. By midnight my eyelids had started to droop and I was ill on sweet alcohol, but I still had that weird satisfaction of making it to a place that had always seemed like one of those bucket list items that just needed to get done.
Now that I’ve been christened by Sip n Dip mermaids, a few drinks the color of windshield wiper fluid, and a night of listening to Pat from a padded booth the shape of a sea shell, I remember how fun it is to think you know a corner of the country pretty well. Then you take a back road one Wednesday afternoon, allow yourself a few detours, and end up in a motor inn with a complimentary rubber ducky for a night. And you realize that you’re just scratching the surface.

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A creek, a raft, tequila, Ryan Bingham, a happy dog and other necessities for a Montana staycation

 

 

If you live in Montana, nothing feels quite like spring like that first float down a river with the sun on your face. It was a Wednesday – my shoulders were warm under my jacket, and in another spring first, I was wearing sunglasses, watching the dry fly my husband had tied at our kitchen table a few days before catch the current and drift along beside our raft. Best of all: This abundance was a 35 minute drive from our front yard.
This was far from the original plan of how this week would be spent. We were supposed to be on the Smith River, braving the elements with three of John’s groomsmen from our wedding five months ago. One by one through March, each of them had to pull out from the five-day trip. John and I began making plans to do it on our own – but in the end we were foiled by finances (April is also the tax crunch month), my panic about the lack of time to work on projects with rapidly approaching deadlines, and, of course, the never-ending question of what to do with our dog, Gabe, who is improving month by month, but still has anxiety quirks that make him a liability as a week-long houseguest for friends and family. Sending him to a kennel for five days would be expensive and it would likely undo the trust we’d been building with him since we brought him home from Missoula Animal Control in December.
The solution: a short drive to the $20 forestry cabin that allows dogs, a maiden voyage of a friend’s raft that has been parked on our lawn for ten months, pork from our freezer, a gifted bottle of whisky, supplies for margaritas, cards for poker, and as always, stacks of books and playlists of favorite albums.
So I’ve had some great memories walking through the doors of beautiful hotel rooms. There is that euphoria over the view, the sense of leaving responsibilities and stresses at the door, and little luxuries like fluffy spa bathrobes and perfect white king beds with the sound of the waves crashing on the beach below. But it’s funny how walking back to a bare bones one-room cabin at dusk, lit by a lantern, candles and the glow of a potbelly stove; smelling pork loins grilling on the coals in the fire pit outside and hearing Ryan Bingham’s Fear and Saturday Night on the stereo as I’m greeted at the door by a dog who seems born to live in the woods, evokes a feeling that has redefined “vacation” for me.
The mornings had late starts, with coffee percolating. Gabe and I let John explore Rock Creek on his own that first day, as we dropped John and the raft off, went back for a second pot of coffee and sat in the sun, then shuttled down the creek later in the afternoon to pick him up after wandering around the creek banks on our own. On Wednesday, we came back to Philipsburg to pick up my car and leave Gabe at the house – he hasn’t proven himself as a raft dog yet – then floated Rock Creek on our own. I realized I hadn’t been on a river since we floated the Bitterroot last August. I caught a few fish, lost a few too, but spent much of that late afternoon watching the sky and the cliffs that rose up over the creek.
It was a beautiful and quiet float, the definition of a lazy afternoon as the world around us drifted by. The light began to lower and there was a sharp chill out as we reached the bridge where my car was parked. We tied the raft to a tree on the bank and drove back to the truck and trailer, spotting a male moose in the creek on our left and slowing down to watch his deceptively slow amble through the reeds. We were quiet and suddenly exhausted as we continued along Rock Creek Road, in our dusty boots, our jackets and hair smelling of campfire and bacon fumes.
Maybe it wasn’t the wildness of the Smith. But it was 52 hours away in our backyard that made us remember how much beauty and adventure we have right here around us.

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Commuting

Last week I realized that driving with my husband to work in the evenings has become my favorite block of time this winter.
I didn’t think this would be so in January. When two people live together and also work evenings together in a bar and dining room (our workplace is The Ranch at Rock Creek – and yes – this area is as gorgeous as it appears on their website), there’s always that chance that one, or both of us, will feel like we’re in each other’s spheres a little too much.
During the day, it can feel like a hustle from the time we wake up and the hot water kettle starts to boil. Both of us have projects we’re juggling. Each morning is different, depending on what is most immediate. No matter what I’m working on, I always feel a little haunted by the hundred other things that also need to be prioritized. I overestimate how much I can complete, then I get frustrated  with myself when 2 p.m. rolls around. I get dressed for work, dogged by the long list that hasn’t been checked off, put on my outside boots and cram my makeup bag into my oversize work lapel that seems to be ballooning more and more each week with day planners and random bits and pieces of projects that need to be filed, and grumpily track John to the truck, feeling like a mess.
But I’ve found that something happens when I shut the passenger door and we start rolling out of town and take a left at the highway. Philipsburg disappears behind us and we are in ranch land. The houses become smaller. Right at the place where I start to lose cell phone reception, all those pressing actions that need my attention, start to feel just a fraction less important.
When it has been snowing, we take our time, both of us focused only on the drifts that blow in gusts across the road as we slow to a crawl. The barbed wire fences fly past us. I’ll watch the cattle cluster together, their dark forms sometimes the only way to orientate distance in the bare, white hills that would lose dimension without these markers. I’ll see that one tiny, structure, still there after decades, maybe a century, all by itself in all that snow as it passes my window and wonder how it is still upright. It looks so small in this landscape – something about it always makes me want to turn the heater up a few degrees.
Sometimes we listen to a podcast as we drive and watch the scenery around us: the same mountain peaks that are perfectly framed over our kitchen sink window loom on our left; on the right, the tree line starts to meet us as we come around the corner and drop back down into the woods. Most of the time it’s the same country music station that fades in and out of reception as we talk. I’ll peel an orange that I’ve brought with me and hand half to John. When I’m done putting on mascara and put my makeup bag away – always before the road gets bumpy – he’ll take my hand and we’ll just drive in silence.
As the weeks have become months, the snow has receded. When we wake up and the hot water kettle whistles, I’ll often open a window instead of turning on the heater. There is grass under my boots instead of snow when I walk to the truck behind John. Beyond the fence lines as we drive, newborn calves rise shakily to their feet. The slushy roads that required four-wheel drive at this time last month, now have dust rising up in clouds behind us. It is spring.
And with this new season are the strange weather patterns that disorientate me. Hours after driving that last stretch of dirt road to work, I’ll look out across the basin to see what looks to be even more dust coming my way. Then I realize it’s a rogue snow flurry, like the last death rattles of winter.
This is my final week commuting with my husband, as he prepares for his season as a fly-fishing outfitter. April is a gentle start for him, but once the season gets going, we will be like two ships passing until late September.
Maybe a shared commute is the most ordinary of half hours. But I’m realizing it’s one of the winter routines that I will miss.

[A version of this column appeared in a March edition of the Philipsburg Mail]

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21 years ago

Twenty-one years ago, I got a job washing dishes in a hotel on the Croatian coast, in a small resort town called Crikvenica.
It was 1996; I was 18 and still in the first six months of living away from my hometown in Santa Barbara county where I had spent all but three years of my life. I could drive, do my own laundry, load a dishwasher, get myself to class and back, and hold a part-time job at a local coffeehouse on Friday nights. When I graduated high school, I was finally trusted to return home safe from a three-day road trip up to San Francisco with my best friend, as long as we stayed a pre-approved lodging. In other words, traveling Europe for the first time was also combined with just learning how to live independently.
And it worked out, to the relief, I’m sure, of my parents, who waited on calls from payphones and postcards week to week. I made friends and bought Hungarian and Czech language books while traveling through Eastern Europe with a group of Canadians I had met in Austria. When they easily got visas to Turkey while my status had a delay, I turned around and took advantage of the month-long train pass that also, magically, covered all rail travel in Great Britain, where transport was most expensive. I spent New Year’s at a youth hostel in Cornwall, going on my first hike by myself. The first hotel room I ever had on my own was in Paris. I was surviving, I would tell myself, watching the buildings of cities I spent my senior year of high school dreaming of visiting glide past my window on the trains that became like second homes that month. I felt that if Europe was a test on entering adulthood, I was acing it.
Until I arrived in Crikvenica. It’s pronounced “Tza-kren-itz-ah” – and it was my first true settling point in Europe. The job was for three months in a hotel that had been bought by a church group, who were using it to temporarily house refugees from the Balkan war.
It was February, dark and wintry. The common language was Russian. The hotel had balconies that looked out to the sea but the building itself had a utilitarian Soviet Bloc feel to it. Until this time, I had only been around kids around my own age who were also traveling on their own for the first time, all of us from countries where English was the first language. Most of us were also from the same socio-economic backgrounds, which I would describe as above comfortable.
I was aware of the world from books and the evening news, but I didn’t understand how people who have been through trauma move forward. It was all women in the kitchen around me who were chopping and cooking– none spoke English. The hotel was run by former refugees, serving other refugees from Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro, who came with their families to have a two-week break from the camps they had been placed in, some for years. The hotel offered hot meals, space and counselling services. While the war had ended with a peace agreement two months before, an estimated 2.2 million people had been displaced by the armed conflict that had killed about 100,000 people. In the kitchen, my favorite was Marta, who was thin and tall with blonde hair, always tied back in a high, tight ponytail. She wore boots, bracelets that jangled around her wrists and a thick jacket with a fur-lined hood that she would hang up in a hook outside the kitchen, before slipping on her apron. She would always bring a radio that she would turn on and place above the sink and try and get the older women to dance with her. To me she was sophisticated and intimidating. Marta never spoke to me. Later, someone told me Marta fled with her family from Sarajevo during the siege, by escaping through the sewer system that finally led them to the 800-foot underground tunnel out of the city. The siege had been ongoing since 1992; towards the end, they’d been living on flour and water mixed together. I’d watch her sometimes while I was washing dishes and try to imagine all this happening to her, and I couldn’t reconcile it.
At some point in my time at the hotel, someone decided that I should see the war zones myself. These memories are so absurd and surreal, I had to drag a photo album down from a top shelf tonight to make sure I didn’t make it all up. I was sent with three other Canadian guys, who had come to help with maintenance, on a 12-hour bus trip to a church in Mostar, in southern Bosnia and Herzegovina, where gunfire could still be heard when were dropped off near the city square. We asked to use the phone at a shoe store that existed in a shell of a bombed building. We dialled the number given to us. A friend of a friend who spoke English picked us up and gave us what can only be described as a tour of everything that had been destroyed. We stayed with him for four days and each day was a road trip to a different razed town or city. Often we were escorted by soldiers who walked along with us, smoking and pointing out where land mines had been identified. There are times when I think back and wonder if I’ve confused all those memories with war movies I’ve seen. I look at the photos I took – a tank on a dirt road stopping for cows; piles of books in a shelled school, with holes in the wall that looked out to a landscape of levelled buildings – and clearly it wasn’t.
If anyone in the hotel kitchen needed me to do something, they’d call out “Hey Santa Barbara” because they couldn’t pronounce my name, but they recognized where I was from immediately. The soap opera by the same name had been cancelled in the U.S. for years. But every day at 4 p.m., the television room filled up with women in bathrobes and slippers who had just showered after work and settled into their favorite chairs to watch characters named “Eden” and “Flame” live their lives in the gilded world that I’m sure many assumed I had come from. They were never unkind to me – at the end of my time, one of them offered to read my future in cooled coffee grains from the stove-top percolator – but nothing about me made them feel like I knew what they had been through.
And I didn’t. I didn’t understand war and how healing happens. I was young and I thought it would be dramatic and obvious, like it was in the movies. Not dancing in a kitchen or taking hot showers and curling up in a chair to watch a show that makes to happy for a little while. I toured the bombed towns without connecting this to anyone’s history, especially the women I worked with. It felt like a movie set to me. When I look back at that first February abroad, I think about how lonely I was. It was the first time where I was in a place that was so foreign to me.
Spring came and I went on to Italy, then England and Ireland and finally back to California, just in time for my 19th birthday. I returned to friends and family who were just like me. Life in Santa Barbara went back to being easy and comfortable for awhile. I always thought I would go back to Crikvenica someday, maybe in the summer. But I didn’t and it has became one of those places that end up in a photo album that I pull out every few years, when I try to trace how I’ve become who I am now, at 39. It’s like following breadcrumbs. Why do I think what I think? Why does this make me angry? It’s hard to see when I am being shaped by a place, while I am there. Even for three months. But years later, when I look through photos of towns like Crikvenica – places that must have impacted me in some way that I didn’t realize at the time- and who I am now makes more sense to me.

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Being still

I’m writing this in a faded armchair that I bought for $30 two winters ago as the heater whirs, while wearing my nana’s slippers and listening to the Liquid Mind station. The porch light illuminates the snow as it falls on a grounded raft and drift boat in the front yard, now buried in white. My husband’s elk antlers, a map of the world and photos of places I haven’t seen in years are above and around me in our Philipsburg home –  I think it sums up the “then and now” I’m feeling tonight as I tap away on my laptop.

Example: a year ago this weekend I had my first taste of Las Vegas. We stayed on the 17th floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino with floor to ceiling windows that looked over empty wave pools, fake beaches, and red desert cliffs. We ate crab legs and steak; I got an hour-long massage and had my toes painted red with gold sparkles, then we went out for sushi and had cocktails that equaled our utilities bill for December.

Two months before this, I impulsively bought a cheap ticket to New York City, experiencing Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens  – another first time – with my best friend from kindergarten. It was fall; we went for walks through Central Park eating warm nuts, stood in line for tickets to an off-Broadway show for an hour as everything around us in Times Square lit up. At 2 a.m. on Sunday we were drinking jalapeno-laced cosmopolitans on a rooftop bar that looked up to the Empire State Building; by Monday afternoon I was back in  Philipsburg, eating a rye bagel with an onion garlic cream cheese at my desk that I had brought back in my carry-on from Ess-a-bagel on 3rd Avenue in Midtown East.

I spent a lot of time in transit these last 12 months –  thankfully I was in transit for lovely, fulfilling reasons that are fun to reflect on in this armchair as the snow falls at the start of 2017.

In September I caught the tail-end of summer in Martha’s Vineyard during a writers’ residency I had applied to at the start of 2016. I had a white room with a porch that looked out on the main street of Edgartown with seven other housemates. When I wasn’t writing, I was riding a bike all over the island, swimming, eating lobster in the rough just off the boats, and sampling beach plum jam from roadside stands and grabbing fistfuls of grapes from vines that hung heavy, entwined in the lower branches of trees near the sand dunes. When I flew back into Missoula in the late afternoon in October, John met me with my hiking pack filled with my warmest clothes, so I could take off the next morning at 5 a.m. for my first horse pack trip in the Bitterroots during a winter weather warning.

It felt like I’d hardly had time to do my laundry and drink a cup of coffee on my couch before we were off again in November, with a wedding dress on a hanger, wrapped in plastic and draped over our hiking packs and stacks of sleeping bags, roll mats and pillows in the back of the truck  – this time on a marathon drive to California with John to get married in my hometown. I don’t think either of us slept more than four hours a night for ten days. The weather was too beautiful, our friends had traveled too far, and there was too much pigeon crap to scrap off the dance floor in the barn we were having our reception in on a Saturday evening (my dad and brother heroically did this so we could have our bachelor/bachelorette parties on the Thursday before we got hitched) to think about going to bed before 3 a.m. most nights.

Our journey back to Philipsburg was a three-week honeymoon/roadtrip up the coast of California and Oregon, before cutting across through Washington. We ate, we drank, we played our wedding playlist with the windows down in the sun, all the way up the coast of Big Sur, Bodega Bay, the Lost Coast; and kept playing it as the weather cooled going north, with rain pounding the truck as we continued up through Yachats and Manzanita, spending Thanksgiving in a yurt with friends as the winds whipped the canvas around us.

I could feel it building, but I don’t think I fully anticipated the force of my homing instinct when we opened up the door to our house in December and turned on the lights and the heat.

I pretty much collapsed face down on the couch and did this long exhalation. Then I slept for the next three days. I don’t think our house has ever felt so good to me.

This has been such a gorgeous year of adventure. Life in this armchair in a 15 x 20 square foot living room tonight feels very small and contained in comparison. But it also feels right – it meets me where my mind space is now.

As the snow keeps falling on this January night in Montana, I have to say how sweet it feels to want to be exactly where I am.

[A version of this post appeared as a column in the Philipsburg Mail on January 12]

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One weekend in November

wedding.johncrying.judi.bumstead

Just over a month ago, I had what felt like a really crazy dream.

It was the kind of dream everyone has had at some point, where distance, dimensions and time fall away, and all these people in your life collide in one place.

This is how the dream went: I woke up at a beach in California on a Friday morning, surrounded by friends I had known from pockets of the world over 39 years. We buried our feet and the palms of our hands in the sand, sunglasses on, bleary, happy and disoriented to wake up in this place that was completely other from the Northwest autumns and Southern hemisphere springs we had just driven or flown in from the night before. We made coffee, went swimming in the Pacific, marveled at sun – not rain; not snow – on our skin, then we packed up our sleeping bags, roll mats and tents and went to Ellen’s Pancake House in Buellton for breakfast and ordered all the things – waffles, biscuits and gravy, blueberry pancakes, Danish sausage – we would have pointed to on the menu when we had each just gotten our driver’s license in 1994 and learned how easy it was to ditch Phys ed.

Then suddenly we were all on this plateau as the sun was setting over the oak trees, vineyards and the hills where I was first taught how to ride, on a quarter horse mare named Lucy. I was eating perfectly barbecued tri tip, drinking wine from the vines around us, and all the same people were there, plus more, and so was the man I loved and both our families as the sun finally disappeared.

And then, just as suddenly, we were all at the Maverick, which hadn’t changed since two high school reunions with Cristi Silva by my side, who was still by my side, as the same dollar bills dangled from the ceiling above us and the same old guys propped up the bar. And there was a country western band, and suddenly I was line dancing with Kelli Ramsay, who I’ve slept next to under stars on both sides of the equator, then I was dancing with Andrea French, the hitchhiker I met in Ireland when I was 18. Wagon Wheel was playing – the same song Andrea and I danced to in a tent in Glenorchy four years ago when we ran into each other again, then rode horses the next morning through the same scenery Andrea had kept in two tiny photos in her wallet when I first met her on the Beara Peninsula in 1996. And Kathleen Sieck, who I’ve sat next to on piano benches and built imaginary worlds with since I was four, was right there too, and dancing with Madeline, who I last saw when I sat by her potbelly stove in a shed in Fiordland in 2013, wrapped in a blanket, eating stew as South Island winter rain pelted the tin roof. Then, weirdly, Chris in the Morning from Northern Exposure was hanging out in the background in a black cowboy hat pulled low, and Madeline was asking him to dance, while Kathleen two-stepped with Craig, the wrangler who gave me a ride home in Big Sky, Montana in his truck one December evening three years ago, and whose front seat passenger had been a fly-fishing guide/bartender with beautiful blue eyes and a deep, gentle laugh named John McKinnie, who opened the door for me when I got in and out; the same guy I was now slow dancing with in this bar in my hometown on a Friday night, and who I planned to marry in a meadow by an old barn on a friends’ ranch the next day.

Everyone always says weddings are a blur and that it goes by too fast to grasp – but really I don’t think I had any idea how true that was until November.

That long weekend beginning with family and friends arriving on a Thursday and spilling over into that beautiful, long Friday of gatherings that led to more gatherings and finally into a Saturday that I kept wanting to find a freeze button for, was full of so much love and beauty, I couldn’t stand it. I loved that along with Cristi –  who as the maid of honor did everything from moving hay bales, to makeup the morning of, to putting together a most spectacular going away gift –  I had Angie, who I first met in Europe after we had both left our small hometowns to travel for the first time; Whitney, my Los Olivos Elementary School bestie who met me for a weekend in New York City last October, where we toasted more than 33 years of friendship with jalapeno-laced cosmos on a rooftop below the Empire State Building after nearly dying in a bicycle taxi ride; Megan, my sister-in-law who lives just down the highway from us in Montana and puts all the strength and stamina she once used to jump out of planes and fight wildfires into raising two gorgeous, strong-hearted twin boys who carefully carried our $30 rings (that’s a collective amount) hand in hand with their dad;  all while Kathleen sang so perfectly Patty Griffin’s “Heavenly Day” on her guitar at the front, as we walked towards an arbor of walnut and oak branches and eucalyptus she had spent that week collecting and putting together along with her mother, Maggie, one of my mom’s best friends who stepped in as wedding coordinator in the last months and saved us all, and Kathleen’s sister Anna Taylor who actually does this for a living and got roped into the chaos to cast her special magic over it.

At one point the day before I watched Anna organize us all, directing where the arbor should be placed as wooden benches made by a friend my brother went to high school with, were unloaded and placed on the grass. At the barn behind us, John, my dad, and my brother, Sean, were laying out the dance floor with Norm, the ranch manager. In Anna’s arms was her infant son, Wills, adopted just days before. She was no-nonsense and so chic as she gave directives with her one free hand, never setting Wills down, but all I could think of was the Anna I knew at age four, long before she became kind of a big deal in the wedding world, when she was my fierce, spunky protector at Garden House Preschool in Ballard and pushed a kid who was bullying me up against a wall, wild west style with both fists clenching the shirt under his chin, and told him to back off.

I had about a thousand flashbacks just like that during the weekend when I looked around at the beautiful send-off we were getting. Friends gave us so much of their time and talent to celebrate, it’s astounding to look back on. And their homes: John and Georgia Wiester hosted a wonderful rehearsal barbecue for us on their Buellton ranch on Friday night that welcomed in the wedding party. Ken and Bobbi Hunter were so kind to allow us to be part of a handful of friends and family who have had a wedding in a restored 1880’s barn on a Los Alamos ranch. My friend Rachel who married us, gently and joyfully coached us through the ins and outs of saying our vows and making sure we had all our paperwork in order. Jeff Sieck, Kathleen’s husband – brewed a hoppy brown ale and an Irish Red “Hold Yer Peace” beer in our honor that we toasted with (he’s not brewing professionally at this time, but he should be), and then MC’d the reception while he and Kathleen managed to still get their three beautiful daughters, Vera, Fiona and Clementine, into cowboy boots and gowns to be our flower girls. Long-time family friend Judi Bumstead made sure my husband was photographed weeping in both color and black and white; while Nick Kelly, Angie’s husband, and a breathtaking landscape photographer, made a special exception to do photos of a wedding; and my parents’ friend Julie Moss, as well as Cristi, and our friend Michelle, all graciously showed up with cameras and made sure that so many moments were captured in pictures and video.

And our parents: Steve and Doris McKinnie road tripped from Colorado and were there for the first dress fittings in August to silver polishing and walnut cracking for the pies on the dessert table in that final week. And my parents, Ken and Judy Hyndman who hosted such a beautiful and perfect day, taking care of so many details – outdoor toilets, insurance, catering, alcohol, heating lamps, manicures, hair, invitations, a surprise bagpiper after we said our vows, and took on so much stress – so that John and I could just roll into town and get hitched and be on our way back to Montana and life as we know it. People kept saying that I was the most relaxed bride they’d ever seen. There were a lot of people who shouldered the load that so we could be as chilled out and happy as we were that weekend.

In the final hours of Saturday night as I was saying goodbye to friends who were packing up and leaving, I looked back at the dance floor and saw John, double-fisted with bridal bouquets, dancing to California Love on a near empty floor, my brother going crazy in the background, both of them hands up to Dr Dre, and without even thinking about it much, the words for the first time, just came out: “And there’s my husband.”

It was a wonderful to be blessed and sent on our way. Both into a long honeymoon roadtrip up the West coast but also the life we are in on this dark December night, utterly other than where we were six weeks ago: Sturgill Simpson playing in the kitchen, Swedish meatballs in the slow-cooker, John reading one couch over, a Christmas tree we cut down last week off Black Pine Road shimmering with lights and ornaments in the corner – including the Joy sand dollar given to us as a wedding present –  our new dog softly snoring on his bed on the floor, snow swirling outside the windows and -20 temperatures predicted.

I do feel the joy from the sand dollar ornament. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be right now.

(Below are a few pictures taken by our wonderful friends from the weekend. Top feature photo by Judi Bumstead).

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John also did a day by day travel log of our honeymoon- “How a fly fishing guide and a writer spend their honeymoon” – that you can find here, done partially so we can remember how we spent the honeymoon funds that were gifted to us by friends, as we veered off the initial itinerary a bit. Also for anyone getting married and too broke for a honeymoon: Traveler’s Joy. It’s game-changer for the nomadically-inclined.

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Autumn ride in the Bitterroots

 

I knew it was morning as my nose poked out of my sleeping bag like a mole.  I just wasn’t quite ready to peel my knitted beanie off over my eyes and deal with what was outside my tent in the daylight.

I could hear the crackle of the fire and the horses shuffling where we had left them, tied in a highline in the cover of thick pines the night before as a light rain fell. My toes – triple-socked in thick merino wool – searched out the large rock that had been heated in the embers of our fire and pushed to the bottom of my bag before I had wormed my way down in the darkness nine hours before. I had zipped myself up tight, wearing every dry layer I had brought, thinking that it was going to be one long and miserably cold night, even with two horse blankets between me and the ground.

At some point in the early hours I woke up and realized that despite the seemingly sub zero temps when I went to bed, I was, at 3 a.m., oddly snug.  Now, as I scooted to the front and slowly zipped it open in a half moon this morning, the flap fell back, revealing why.

It wasn’t the muddy mess of a camp I had expected. Instead, a layer of snow blanketed everything in white. The light tuffs had nearly doused our fire, but had insulated us in our fabric huts through the night.

This was disorienting for me in the first week of October. The flip flops I had brought as camp shoes, leaving them just outside the tent if I had to get up in the middle of the night, were now barely visible under the snow. I heard the crunch of boots and Chelsea, the wrangler in charge of the horses that got us out here in the heart of the Bitterroot National Forest, grins when she sees me surveying our camp.

“Merry Christmas,” she calls out cheerily, heading to the fire to revive it for coffee and a breakfast of elk sausage and potato hash.

There are three of us on this overnight trip with the sole purpose of cooking up and dishing out a stellar feast in the middle of nowhere, warmed only by fire coals: Jason, the chef, myself, the server, and Chelsea are all paid to be here, having been sent out a day ahead to prepare this lunch for a small group of Triple Creek Ranch guests on a day ride into the backcountry. But this morning, as two inches of snow covered the landscape, we wondered if the ride would be called off and this excursion would be nothing but our own adventure into a winter weather warning. Without radio or cell contact, we had no way of knowing if they would show up. Our job was to build it, keep the fire stoked, and hope they would come.

None of us were complaining that this was all on the clock the previous morning. We loaded up four horses and a mule named Cricket, and headed for the Little Blue Joint Creek trailhead with tents, sleeping bags, and food for our meals as well as a lunch of roasted butternut squash, pan seared halibut, foccacia bread, and berry nut crumble that Jason had spent that morning prepping and packing up in the Triple Creek kitchen as I loaded up coffee and sliced lemons for the guests. While we spent the winding truck drive on Highway 93 along the West Fork to our starting point above Painted Rocks Lake sharing how we had each come to live in Montana, before unloading the horses, measuring out supplies and figuring out what horse was best suited to each weighed-down soft pack, the ride itself was quiet as we fell into line on the trail. Both Chelsea and Jason ponied a pack horse behind them; I took the rear, as the least experienced packer of the three, riding a big, calm grey gelding named Opus, and watched for anything that might come loose and slip off as we headed north.

The clouds gathered and darkened above the trees and the rain came and went. The temperature through the afternoon warmed a few degrees and hats were pulled off and shoved into coat pockets. We started off navigating a trail through a dense forest that gave way to clearing after clearing as our horses plodded on, picking their way over rocks on narrow paths that overlooked Little Blue Joint Creek down below. Across from the ledge we rode carefully along, trees shone yellow and gold, a line of them climbing up towards peaks that had already been dusted in snow, a foreshadowing of the elements headed our way.

This was my first time on a horse in nearly three years – maybe the longest I’d ever gone without being in a saddle since I was 8, after buying my first pony for $75 with Christmas and birthday money I had saved up, moving on to leasing a feisty Arabian named Nissana when I was 11. The last time I’d spent any time in the saddle was on a two-day ride in the Catlins coast, on the South Island of New Zealand in 2013, when I’d borrowed a horse to cover the event for the Southland Times newspaper, a camera slung around my shoulder and waist as we galloped down Tautuku Beach. All through that summer leading up to that I had ridden a neighbor’s horse on the beach and through the dunes when I’d get home in the evening, grabbing apples and a handful of cookies as I went out the door for dinner like I was 10 again.

After a few hard falls over the years, I wasn’t as fearless as I used to be. But I knew that I had missed being on and just around horses – and  maybe I hadn’t realized how much, I thought, as we rode on, with lots of time to let our minds wander and probe the direction we were going in.

We only had about two good hours of daylight by the time we arrived at the small meadow where the guests would meet us the following day. Instead of hobbling the horses, I gave Chelsea a leg up so she could balance herself on Cricket’s back and set up the highline that wound through the trees above them, where they were each tied and could graze. We took turns leading each of them to the creek, where their muzzles touched the water to test the temperature before either plunging in or lumbering back to the bank to join the others.  Jason had gone to work cracking thick limbs into pieces for firewood, working steadily with an axe to fell small trees that landed with a satisfying thud as we stood back and watched. Each of us was in our element here, in our own, unique way to our ability.  And each equally awed by where we were. The beauty and isolation of the evening settling into the mountains, the crackling of the fire, the satisfaction of setting up our tents and laying out our gear, of having the saddles lined up neatly on a log behind us as dinner simmered and the light began to fade, of warm socks and headlamps turning on – all of this was a reminder of why we had chosen this place to build, or even rebuild our lives. It was evenings like this that people like Chelsea and I had longed for when we lived in cities, bound to a metropolis by our careers, yet longing for something wilder. For Jason, who was a Montanan native, it may have been a reminder of why he had come home.

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I went to sleep that night, listening them talk around the fire about horses they had loved in their lifetime and how they had been altered by that friendship, learning how to trust a creature far more powerful and headstrong, and in turn, earning that trust back.  It struck me that I hadn’t had that kind of connection to a horse since I was young – and how as I was getting older, getting slower and maybe more cautious, I wanted not so much the adrenaline of racing down a beach on a horse I didn’t know, as much as that quiet bond, earned and tested every time you greeted each other with a bucket of grain and a halter in the morning.

As I finally climb out of my tent, pulling my boots and another thick layer of socks with me, I see the clear skies sparkle over snow and hear the horses nicker to each other in the cedars. The fire flares up again as Chelsea throws a moss-covered branch on, and cowboy coffee gurgles away on the coals, the scene before us does actually have a Christmas morning feel to it.

Our guests did arrive in the end, riding into camp just as the weather turned for the worse again. Hands reached out from the long sleeves of oilskin jackets to grasp hot tea and cider; the hanging table the three of us had proudly worked on the evening before, complete with Yuletide-like branches woven through the tree limbs we had tied together with spare rope and suspended from hefty branches above, had steaming plates of penne pasta and halibut, bread warmed in foil by the fire along with the butternut squash. Despite the drizzle that came and went in the quick hour they were there, the mood was ebullient. They mounted up and rode out and we went to work to load up leftovers along with gear.

Our packing was haphazard in the rush to get to the truck and trailer before dark. Cricket, carrying a black plastic bag our sleeping bags that we had thrown on her and wrapped tight with rope, then freed to go lead-less, soon had a lopsided load as she stopped to graze, then trotted freely along to catch up. We stopped a few times to readjust, and at one point to collect the sleeping bags when they tumbled out, then finally gave the it one last tie-down and hoped it would be enough to get us back to base as the light lowered over the peaks. The horses were even more eager to be back, and we sliced an hour off our time from the previous day, unloading fast, and lowering the trailer door as Chelsea started the truck and turned the heater on. Cricket, without any prompting, hustled in, before anyone had a chance to take her pack off, looking back at us like I’m outta here.

It was twilight by the time we hit Highway 93 after a bumpy gravel road drive from the trailhead. We reeked of campfire smoke, our hair was matted and our boots were covered in mud and the cold had begun to seep into our toes. I was saddle sore and exhausted, but happy in that way that only 24 hours in the mountains can induce, with that lovely anticipation of a beer and a hot shower just ahead.

A few miles from the ranch we braked for a herd of elk crossing, then just stopped to watch them move across our headlights on the road. We were quiet as they leapt over a fence, one by one, and into a field. Then they disappeared into the darkenss.  There was a sense of reverence as the stars began to come out above us and the night came out in full.

None of us had to say it as we sat there and took this in, before the truck was put into drive and we carried on: At that moment there was no better place to be.

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2 Comments Montana