I've always loved living in remote places. This is an essay I wrote about one such place I lived around 25 years ago, with my then-wife Gena.
UP
ON THE HI-LINE, MONTANA
The country house
advertised in the newspaper turned out to be an old hired hand’s shack, a small
gray stucco affair shaped like a barn. Weeds choked the yard and swallows’
nests lined the eaves, but the place had a big kitchen and a closet we could
turn into a pantry. It offered free natural gas, fresh spring water, space for
a garden, and a view of the Bear Paw Mountains crowning the southern horizon.
We moved in one dark
night to the eerie cries of the cat living in the basement.
Though the place was
more “country” than we’d expected, my wife and I were giddy with the prospect
of starting a life together beyond the confines of the city. A few months
earlier we were unmarried and trapped in the heart of Tucson, Arizona—poor
graduate students teaching freshman composition for poverty pay and pounding
out our master’s theses in a tiny, dark apartment with only an asthmatic swamp
cooler to quell the desert heat.
Tired of the city, of
the smell of scorched asphalt and of the perpetual batch of ungraded essays
piled on the kitchen table, we plotted our escape on a big map taped to the
wall. We were looking for the calmest, remotest place we could find. In August,
we polished our theses, completed a six-week tour of summer school duty, loaded
my pickup, Gena’s car, and a small U-Haul trailer, and climbed the map to the
Hi-Line in Montana, where cool autumn breezes wafted over the stubble fields
with the smell of wheat chaff.
Montana’s Hi-Line is the
area lying north of the Missouri River and just this side of Canada—“the middle
of nowhere” to most travelers passing through on their way to Glacier National
Park. It hugs Highway 2 as well as the Burlington Northern tracks. High,
rolling wheat country broken by small mountain ranges, it lacks the glamour and
drama of the Rockies, which is why the Saabs and Four-Runners haven’t overrun
the dirty, battered ranch trucks, and the Spandex and Birkenstock crowd hasn’t
moved in with its gourmet coffee shops and New Age bookstores.
Which is why we settled
here and I got a job teaching at the community college on the Rocky Boy Indian
Reservation.
Not long after we’d
moved in, a shaggy, burr-laden collie appeared in the yard, drinking from the
leaky water hydrant. We figured he was a drop-off or had strayed from a nearby
ranch, though no one claimed him and in time the crooked white stripe down his
forehead became a permanent fixture under my pickup in the yard. Ol’ Shep we
called him, and he led the way on every hike, a proud scout introducing us
greenhorns to his native coulees and ravines that creased the prairie and to
the creek curling through the distant breaks.
That first year it
snowed before Halloween. One morning at dawn I sat by an upstairs window with a
mug of coffee and the humming space heart, watching the cattle in the pasture
gathered and waiting for the farmer, Hanson, to bring hay. Above them, the
snow-covered mountains pinkened with first light.
The reservation lies in
the heart of those mountains, and when I drove into them later that morning,
plowing through drifts, the snow was deeper, the air bluer, the quiet even more
dense. Wood smoke plumed from the clapboard shacks and webbed in the valleys
between pine-covered ridges.
It was the smoke of pine
and aspen gleaned from the drainages surrounding Mount Baldy. In the brush
along the creek, an old man dusted snow from a sweat lodge and tended the fire
where several stones heated. I remembered those seasonless Tucson years I woke
mornings to the roar of traffic and the smell of car exhaust, and walked to
school, sweating and tight with city nerves.
All winter, Chinooks
blew the snow off between storms, but that spring the mountains around Upper
Bear Paw Lake were dusted with what the Indians call the Going-Home Snow. I
stood hip-deep in the black, numbing water, casting nymphs to cutthroat trout
while noisy squadrons of Canada geese practiced liftoffs and landings nearby,
and Chippewa-Crees preparing for their annual sun dance sang in the picnic
shelter across the lake.
In May, our neighbor
rototilled a garden for us, and our landlord worked in several tractor loads of
manure from his feedlot. Gena and I planted Early Girl tomatoes and nearly
everything else we thought would have a chance in these climes. We spent our
mornings sipping coffee and pulling mallow before the sun became unbearable and
the wind picked up. Mid-summer, the Early Girls resembled shrubs, the
sunflowers grew heads the size of dinner plates, and the pumpkins climbed the
barbed wire fence to hide in the pasture.
Wild berries were
abundant in the country we hiked each day, so in July we scoured the ravines
and coulees for juneberries and raspberries. When the chokecherries came ripe
in September and we’d finished canning and freezing our garden harvest, we
hiked in the mountains bright with turning aspens, filling milk cartons with
the bitter chokecherries and with rosehips we dried for tea.
The ridges Ol’ Shep and
I hiked above Miner’s Gulch were thick with mule deer, and we came upon elk
scat in the tufts of sage above the timberline. Along the creek closer to home
the chokecherries were even more plentiful than in the mountains. Gena and I
filled several buckets and steamed up the kitchen making syrup and jelly. I
brewed chokecherry wine, as well, and we used it to wash down venison and
grouse on cold winter nights when the raw wind howled off the Bear Paws and
across the stubble fields.
Midway through our third
year on the Hi-Line now, we occasionally long for the bookstores and restaurants
of a city, but we’re not going anywhere. Here, the deer outnumber the people
and the water’s sweet. The pantry’s stocked and the freezer’s full. The land
teems with new, little discoveries we need only hike the nearest draw to make.
A few days ago, for
instance, I came upon the fox that lives in the coulee, sound asleep in the sun
atop a haystack. Without discussing it at length or even thinking about it
much, we’ve decided to stay.
