vol. 5 issue 13
Greetings,
I arrived near midnight, on a connecting flight from Minneapolis. I’d never been to Montana. I had a window seat, but the contours of the land below were invisible in the darkness. I regarded the void and stirred against feeling forlorn.
It was nearly two months before I had a vehicle reliable enough for long distance travel. Once I was able to leave the city limits of Missoula, I set off north along the spine of the Continental Divide. I drove East and North for over an hour, encountering no one. Some miles past Seeley Lake, on the main route that was sometimes dirt, sometimes paved, and always flanked by tall pines, the sudden eruption to my right of the vertical igneous rock that forms the northern Rockies startled me.
The massive wall of geology provoked in me the same visceral experience I had the first time I came upon Mt. Princeton in the Collegiate Peaks of Colorado: my gut tightened. I felt intimidated, which is to say, I felt helpless. I pulled off the road to gawk, but also to recuperate. There are many ways to be foolish. Not fearing the mountains is one of them.
My next outing was through the Bitterroot Valley along the Sapphire range. Again, not much but a few ranches, a gas station. A small town here and there. A dark storm was moving through the eastern parts of the valley, rendering the vista less blue, more golden in the late summer setting sun: golden foothills, golden fields, and arching above all this glistening glory was an eerily perfect rainbow.
A third trip out on I-90 to attend a child’s birthday party snaked towards the Western border with Idaho, through a broad and muscular valley north of Lolo Peak before weaving through a river gorge that awestruck me and underscored my insignificance.
Although it is true that everywhere is the Big Sky, Montana is different in all directions; the discovery of something new anywhere you looked…it is captivating. And yet, after each of my excursions, upon returning to the city limits of Missoula, I was flooded with relief to once again re-enter civilization. Before Montana, I would not have thought I would be so existentially challenged by a landscape.
Prior to having a trustworthy truck, I would look up at the mountains rimming the glacial valley where Missoula sits, anticipating when I would have the means to explore them. Still, my curiosity was balanced by the bustle of the place.
I was plenty distracted by my work, scenic hikes, birdwatching, river floats, the rodeo, and horses. I had begun to form a reliable community. My small landscaping business was succeeding. I was earning what I needed, and even a little to put by. Mostly, I was preoccupied with walking through my momentous internal landscape of grief after a year of so much loss; Montana does offer one the endlessness of space.
It was, I thought, a good place to learn new things, to start over.
But once I’d begun to venture out, the forlorn sense I’d felt before touching down returned. It was akin to living on the edge of the universe.
It did not occur to me to leave. But then Spirit called me; it was banal, of course. No trumpets or whistles tuning. Just a simple imperative resounding clearly in my mind: “You’re done. Go home.”
The relief that flooded through me was as visceral as my fear of the mountain. I felt joy for the first time in months. My blood coursed with it; that I had been so estranged from this peace was a revelation. I didn’t plan my trip. I just returned my library books, said goodbye to a few friends, and cleared out my belongings. I was gone by suppertime.
One week later, sitting at the bar in a central Kentucky college town, a couple of regulars asked about where I was from. Right here, I replied because that’s mostly the truth, even if it’s been a minute. They didn’t recognize me, so they didn’t buy it, so I confessed to having just pulled in from Montana.
Montana! All that open space and no one to fuck with you! Oh, you’ll go back, they concurred.
No, I said. I got what I needed.
I didn’t tell them how I’d been called to leave, and then did. I thought to myself: the feeling of desolation there was homeopathic, in that like cures like until too much of the same, and you become even sicker. I went there to heal. Once healed, I was free to no longer live on the edge of my life. In that way, Montana was my miracle.
Oh, yes you will! They interrupted my reverie. They figured they had me sorted, I reckon because they believe all Americans long for what Montana the Myth is. Because I guess they’d never heard of Winter. Because they couldn’t fathom an opinion other than their own.
Since the pandemic, Montana has been overrun with out-of-staters, mostly from California, New York, and Texas. That Montana has a progressive but low state income tax, no sales tax, and best of all really, really low property taxes (for now) are facts these new arrivals tout: Montana is free.
Plenty of Bozeangelinos (Bozeman + Los Angeles) and their kindred spirits now sprinkled across the rest of the Western half of the state also have been — they will often tell you outright — inspired to up sticks for the Treasure State after watching writer/director Taylor Sheridan’s streaming series Yellowstone, which depicts a murderous, self-serving Montana where you can pretty much do whatever you damn well please, including kill people. Triple the points if your mayhem is in service to keeping as much land in your grip as possible.
As I headed East, this time seeing — and thrilling at — the contours of the subtly shifting shades of green and gold hills and glinting mountains that fell away from me in endless waves as I drove, alone, for mile upon mile, I reflected on Montana the mythical land of promise, the land that for many Americans is where that elusive creature we think of as “American Freedom!” lives undisturbed, until it is, and then all you need is a shot gun and Old Glory waving from your pick-up truck to set things right again.
But that version of Montana, where violence is the coefficient of freedom, no or low taxation is proof of liberty, and everyone leaves you the hell alone, amounts to a half-truth, which makes it a useless trope.
Even despite the influx from other states, it is possible to go for miles — miles, many, many miles — before you might see another person, let alone a cow or a horse. This isolation occurs within a landscape where the chances of dying from not knowing how to meet the land on its own terms are high.
Such odds engender a commitment among locals to pay their fortune forward: Even your avowed political enemy might be your only hope against Winter, so don’t be an asshole. It’s best to keep an eye on everyone around you. Not to interfere, but in case you need to respond. That’s what I found in Montana, anyway. Take out politics, turn off Fox News and MSNBC, and what you will find is an organic sense of community.
Which is to say, the lack of tax-funded infrastructure is made up for by relying upon one another. If you’re not going to have a social safety net, then you need your neighbor. It is an imperfect system that seems to me in jeopardy as more people with a desire to be rid of their neighbors “back home” and the means to make that happen, arrive in the state, quenching their appetite for tax-free(ish) living, often on enormous parcels of land, all while possibly not committing to learning the skills they will need — and which money can’t buy — to be counted upon in extremis.
And yes, there are those who are in Montana (and Idaho and parts of Utah and Nevada) waiting for the Apocalypse. They reject taxes and outsiders, awaiting their superbeing to save them. But cults are mutually exclusive of freedom.
All this to say, I believe my new friends at the bar misapprehend our yearning for freedom, as so many Americans do. It’s not a freedom from each other, but a freedom to actually connect with one another, in all our glorious differences, that we Americans crave.
My evidence for this is what I encountered once I’d left the near humanless Sand Hills of Nebraska, and came upon the nightmare that is Norfolk, the town in that state that is the sudden hub for long-haul trucks and heavy equipment, abruptly ending the peace of endless yet textured nothingness, and the point where begins the relentless sameness of big box stores and corporate franchises that spread across the land like a greasy film.
Encountering this monopolistic meaninglessness, mile after mile, state after state, all with the same highway signs depicting the same corporate logos over and over – and only so many, because anymore, there are fewer and fewer companies that haven’t been gobbled into the blob that is the lie of consumerism disguised as democracy, that is when I felt caged and cornered.
And even though all the while I was headed East, I was feeling lighter and happier, the moment I saw the first of many fast food strips, I understood what makes Montana so liberating a place to live. It is not because you can carry a gun and do whatever you feel. It is the freedom from monotony, the freedom from a forced lack of choice.
The explanation for why Montana has not succumbed to this violation is complex, but primarily because the land is owned, at least for now, in large measure privately by ranchers (although increasingly by private equity and other secret investors), and federally by various agencies. I also believe, having experienced firsthand its effect on my mind and psyche, that the land there exerts a unique power, a kind of forcefield, that repels such disrespect.
In Norfolk, truly, the majority of the people I encountered were obese. Obesity is far less common in Montana where, the way I see it, people aren’t coerced to accept the company store.
As well, people’s complexions in Nebraska became more pallid. They coughed more. They smoked more. I mused this was a form of self-medication against all the loss of agency, and because they have been stripped of healthier options that don’t make monopolies money.
The stark contrast between these two versions of America was so jarring, it felt like I’d left a free nation and entered an occupied territory, overtaken by hostiles with objectives utterly divorced from the needs of the people they’d conquered, as though maybe the invaders weren’t even human.
Maybe that is exactly what happened. It reminded me of something.
In the final scenes of Ad Astra, director James Gray’s sci-fi meditation on the existential crisis of abandonment, Tommy Lee Jones’s character, Commander McBride, goes mad from a combination of having spent decades alone in a space station on Neptune, and the failure of his mission to find signs of intelligent life elsewhere in our solar system.
McBride’s own son, a second-generation astronaut played by Brad Pitt, is sent to find and kill him after NASA and the powers that be determine that whatever it is McBride the elder is doing, it is creating havoc on Earth.
McBride senior meanwhile is unaware of the destructive shock patterns his mission to Neptune has caused back home. His only concern is to find connection to something superior to humans, presumably an off-planet god.
The son does not kill his father in the end. Instead, when offered the chance to return, McBride doesn’t. He confesses he never really wanted the responsibilities of a being a family man; he only wants to find what is “out there”. He literally disconnects the space-proof tether to his son and sends himself even deeper into space where presumably he dies, alone and quickly.
Like the tax-refugees flooding Montana, McBride wants to be free of commitments. Like the Apocalyptic cults that dot the wide-open spaces out West, McBride wants to be saved not by community, but by an off-planet superbeing.
McBride has lost his own humanity, and so who — and what — is he, really? Could his severance from Earth also have contributed to his emotional alienation? What mayhem is possible in civilization if it is not rooted in an appreciation and respect for community, for the Earth?
Ultimately, isn’t it that securing the freedom not to care for others, not to care for the land, simply means death by disconnection? It’s death all the same.
How disappointing will it be when it turns out we are all we have to rely upon? That Mars or Neptune or any other orb will never fully be supportive of our existence? How shocked will we be to discover off-planet superbeings aren’t interested in preventing our being shellacked with sameness? They might even support it.
To equate Montana with the freedom to be unburdened by others, to do your own thing, is dangerous; you might get caught off guard by the mountains or more. And then, alone, what will you do?
In my Montana, it wasn’t the disconnection from people that healed me, it was the unconquerable virility of the place, and I believe, the fact I respected that. Montana demanded my attention and got me out of myself so I could return to myself with a bigger perspective.
I didn’t intend to leave, but my orbit had reached its apogee. I was beginning to feel lost in all that external foreverness. Yet, Montana also reminded me how to skillfully navigate and protect my own interior space and confidently explore its many riches.
We don’t need Montana for us to be free. We need each other if we want that. If we choose to isolate, aren’t we really just on the precipice of death? We need Montana in order to teach us the sacred nature of our diversity, how to explore it, how to connect through it.
Peace,
Whitney
Whitney, Thank you for this! You bring your Montana experience and your healing journey to the page in all its raw majesty! You have mirrored Montana for us even in leaving it! Loved this! As I am on the integration edge of leaving an epic writers’ retreat weekend, I have been marinating in others’ gorgeous use of words. And yours are inspiring! Approaching the Aries Full moon I’m casting off and whittling down for the coming of whatever is next. Seems like you are too. Cosmic blessings to you! Allison
Whitney, this post is GORGEOUS, in every way. Thank you for writing it. And please write more, more, more! xo