Coming Soon: 100% Slug-Free Big Sky Blogging

It’s almost time to go to Montana.

I simply cannot be persuaded that there is any better place in the world than the far northwest corner of that state. Even from far away, I can feel the arid afternoon heat and the chill of morning, smell the redolence of pine and taste the sweet tang of wild huckleberries. I can hear the lonely song of the loons as night falls and another day dies. And even after two years, I can vividly recall the acrid smoke from the Glacier wildfires stinging my nose and eyes. Pardon my mawkishness, but this place hijacks your senses and drives them screaming down the road.

It’s the rawness of it that I love; the bear poop we find deposited brazenly in front of the house, the wolf pack that moved in and took down an elk on the mountain just behind ours. When I arrive, I always ask our neighbors down the mountain, “What stories do you have for me?” And they tell me tales of eating breakfast one Sunday morning and looking out the window to see a coyote standing on the deck, gazing longingly at their meal. Or they tell me how their Newfoundland pup treed a bear last week, or how they were driving down 5th Street and had to stop because a moose decided that the middle of the road was an excellent place to spend the morning.

The people in Montana are equally interesting. Most of the people fortunate enough to live there seem unapologetically quirky. The house is in a small town containing almost nothing but a very nice grocery store, and the store’s parking lot is where most of the action seems to take place. On my first visit there, I watched as a man came out of the store and loaded his groceries into a VW Bus containing five kids and a goat. Ponder that for a moment, will you? It’s one thing to own a goat. It’s quite another to allow it to tag along on errands.

Another time when I was shopping there, an ancient woman with a cane shuffled about the store in positively arthritic fashion, gathering her items at a seemingly imperceptible pace. Hauling my own bags to the car later, I noticed her sauntering out to the parking lot with her purchases, and watched as she climbed jauntily into the cab of an enormous, jacked-up pickup truck. I suppose there’s nothing quite like a monster truck to make an old lady forget her aches and pains.

I suppose I find Montana irresistible because very little there is contrived or superficial. Things are as they are, and mostly, the people who live there adapt to it instead of ruthlessly subjugating the place into their own image. It’s a place that is allowed to be as it wants to be, a place that does not ask permission before it slams you up against your most primitive feelings and holds you there awhile. I find it alive in a way that nowhere else is.

But alas, there are no slugs. At least, I never see any. I shall have to content myself with mountain goats and bighorn sheep, I suppose.