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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 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.
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Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg

I was two years into living in the Holland Street house we’re in now, when I first read “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg,” by Richard Hugo.

It was eerie that I had already come to love a place that I would have been pulled to from afar with this poem alone, with its distilled lines about complete bleakness, following a walk Hugo took around town here in 1966, on “streets laid out by the insane, past hotels that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try of local drivers to accelerate their lives.” There’s a jail that turned 70 that year, Hugo describes, with only one prisoner, always in, not knowing what he’s done.

“The principal supporting business now is rage. Hatred of the various grays the mountain sends, hatred of the mill, The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls who leave each year for Butte …”

My whole life I’ve had a thing about dying communities. It’s not the fascination for ghost towns, with dedicated volunteers who revive these places once a year with apple-bobbing and gold panning demonstrations. It’s the towns that are just barely hanging on still; not quite dead enough to be romantic. It’s the towns that had boom-time glory years, with people packed into streets, looking up at the camera, from under hats and parasols; streets now bare,where the loveliest time of the day is at dusk, when the gas station sign is the only light that holds off the dark, and there’s just the faintest heartbeat of survival. The kind of towns where you wonder if might be wiser to keep driving, and hope that there’s another gas station up ahead.

My hometown came back from the grave because it has rolling winter-less hills with coastal fog hanging over the oak trees in the mornings, soil good for wine-making, and it’s only two hours north of L.A. Here, it’s more complicated. There is beauty everywhere in this part of Montana, and yet the towns still decay, because it is hard to price this beauty up unless you can ski it, mine it, or you have the fortitude to build on it.

This last week I looked up a book by Seattle writer Frances McCue about Hugo’s life, which she titled with one of the final lines from the Pburg poem, lifted for the cover – “The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs.” Pburg was just one of many towns that Hugo spent time in and wrote poems about. McCue describes how this was including a trio of poems penned by Hugo, Jim Welch and J.D. Reed after getting drunk in a bar in Dixon after a day of fly-fishing in 1970, and sending each of their competing verses to the New Yorker. They were published in October of that same year under the title “The Only Bar in Dixon” and got themselves into trouble with Welch’s line “You can have the redheaded bartender for a word…”

The redheaded bartender – also the owner of the bar – turned out to be a bit of a writer herself and fired back with a letter to the Missoulian that she herself was in the process of co-penning a poem with the mayor of Dixon and titling it “An Ode to Five-Bourbon Hugo.”

Hugo was more sensible when he wrote about a redhead in “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg.” She’s the final shred of hope that all may not be lost in this town after all in 1966, with her red hair that “lights the wall” despite bigger cities “of towering blondes, good jazz and booze the world will never let you have until the town you came from dies inside.”

Earlier this Spring, it seemed like most of Pburg was packed into the old Fire Hall to watch the premiere of Saving The Burg, which had video footage of Hugo walking around, towered by the empty buildings of Granite, with lines from his famous poem reverberating. The late Peggie Pahrman – to whom the documentary was dedicated – was in a clip, recalling how the town would have been bulldozed but there was no money to do it. It was moving, as we all crammed in, shoulder to shoulder in a sold-out event, to see what had been done to bring Philipsburg back and up and away from being a town, as Hugo describes in the first lines, as a place you’d only end up when your life breaks down.

Against the odds – and as the film’s subtitle points out, with a lot of love, sweat and beers – Hugo’s prophecy that all was not lost came true. It is a gray today. A shade specific to this time of year in a small mountain town. You go to the store to buy lettuce everyone at the check-out is trading stories of how the weather compared at this time last year, or even the decade before. It’s a spring afternoon with winds churning up dust that we turn our heads away from and scowl. There is snow still in the hills around us. But in bigger cities at lower elevations there are buds of green starting to erupt with white flowers on the streets and we know that we aren’t far behind, that June is pushing through and that soon the smell of lilacs will be everywhere.

The car that got us here still runs.

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