Browsing Category | Montana

My boys of Summer

This was exactly what I had dreamed of: seeing the chipped, blue nail polish of my toes just slightly above me, framed by the mountains in the background, and the coolness of being suspended on a deep body of water, within an inflated pink flamingo doughnut and a beer dangling from my hand.
Somewhere on the banks of Storm Lake my husband was casting – I could hear the rhythmic whir, then the quick tightening of the line. Gabe the dog was patrolling the shore with great intensity and joy, exhausting himself by diving into the water to retrieve branches. The afternoon shower that had just swept through was gone, driving all but the determined and the already-camped-out away back to Philipsburg or Anaconda. On the way up we passed trucks slowly descending one gorged out piece of trail to tree root to rock like the dirt road out was staircase back down to paved easiness. But also life. And cell phone service. And routine. Stresses big and small. All the things we are up here to forget for an afternoon.
It is lush this high. I rolled the window down as we drove up, the rain already starting to work its way through the pines, making everything smell like soil and incense. The side of the road that stretches into the forest is covered in wildflowers in mid August, while everything below in town, around the lowlands, has gone dry and brittle. I’ve already learned that Augusts in Montana can be rough on the mind. It’s the panic of the last true long month of summer covered in smoke. Maybe not ours, but from somewhere where there is something on fire, a reminder of death and destruction. The smoke is confusing, full of unknowns. Threats are everywhere in the soupy, pink-tinged fog that covers the hills we are used to looking out to when we open the curtains. We don’t know what is out there. It’s unsettling. I have to push away resentment that the season I’ve been hanging out to be in is eaten away at – or outright devoured – by the fire season.
But up here in the aftermath of a summer storm, it is the best of August. Cool, with the sun just coming through the clouds above the ridge. We have an hour before it will disappear behind the mountains. That hour is enough. My flamingo tube turns slowly as the wind comes up, and it is like my eyes, behind sunglasses, are getting a sweeping, panoramic photo of everything around me: dog swimming, mountain ridge gleaming, husband fishing, tents being set up on the far side of the lake, and through all this, my toes gliding past each of these scenes as the water ripples turn me around and around and around. I feel like a queen taking a tally of her kingdom.
The smoke is far away and below us. The haziness is gone, at least for an afternoon. There is a reason we go up to get away. There is something about being suspended on a cool, deep body of water, where for at least an hour or two, we have clarity.
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End of the road

Greenie was never meant to go quietly into the night.  He was meant to go just like he did.
It happened where Skalkaho Road stretches out straight, aiming right for the Pintlers. It was a day out of a Tom Petty song. I even had my hand out the window. The moment I heard the sound, I knew it was the engine, and that at nearly 300,000 miles, this was the end of the road for us.

In 2014, I bought Greenie for under $1,499 in a dusty parking lot in central California, only hoping that he would get me as far as Montana – from there I’d get something more reliable, I told my dad, a mechanic. I had a hunch that Montana was where I was supposed to be. And I had just met someone. It seemed like a good omen that the used car salesman who sold me Greenie was a fly-fisherman, just like John, the guy I had just fallen in love with back in Big Sky. The salesman calmly left me to make up my mind, and pace the parking lot a few times before I  was finally ready to walk up the steps to the office and write a check in exchange for the keys.

Four winters, two lost keys, a flat tire, repeated maulings by an adopted 100-pound dog with separation anxiety issues, and more than 70,000 miles later, Greenie the 1999 Saturn SL2 coasted me safely into a patch of grass by the highway and let out one last smoky gurgle. He had done his job and then some. I was picked up by two morticians in a mini van traveling to Anaconda with a labradoodle dog in the back. Somehow, that also fit in with my time with Greenie: even at the end, he carried me to a story, one that I’d tell my dad later that week, describing the automatic door of the mini van slowly, painfully, opening to reveal an empty stretcher that I climbed in next to, the labradoodle beside me, as I was taken to a spot that had cell phone reception where I could call for a tow.

Greenie’s other role in my life was a secret storage unit, when my life started to overflow from our 1-bedroom house. It took five plastic bags and a box to get everything out, and back into our living room, where I had 24-hours to myself to sort through it all on my own later in the week.

It was like going through journal entries from the last four years since I came to Montana. There were old agendas and budgets from town council and hospital board meetings in one bag. Camping equipment and music festival lineups in another. One bag held all my roller derby gear and duck taped skates when I was the Gwyn Reaper. I found a wig, a green jacket and an 80s era felt jumpsuit from two White Front Halloween parties when John and I went as Maude and The Dude one year, and break-dancers the next. There was the first draft of a wedding invitation. Then two plastic wine glasses from our honeymoon road trip back to Montana, when sparkling wine was sent out to us as we swam in a pool overlooking Big Sur. There was a bag of walnuts from my parents’ backyard – wedding guest gifts – and a Happy Anniversary card sent last November.

Car break downs are always stressful, especially when you know it’s the end, and money has to be scrapped together for a new vehicle. But standing in my living room, looking around at all my loot, I just thought about what a life Greenie and I have had together. How he transported me from the coast to the mountains; from one season of my life, to the one I’m in now. I rolled the dice. And Greenie got me where I needed to be.

Tomorrow I’m off to Butte to pick up my next gamble – a 1990 Pontiac Bonneville for $1,350.
I’m hoping it can just get me to work and back until the end of the summer. But there’s a part of me that’s hopeful.

You never know where – and how far – a used car yard gamble is going to take you.

 

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Kids and Dogs

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Wet grass soaked my shoes as we made our way through the valley, the hum of the highway fading behind us. Gabe darted around from the scent to scent, his fur still damp from plunging into Flint Creek. John was a little way in front of me, calling him back when the dog disappears into the trees for too long. When he emerged, panting wildly, waiting for John’s blessing to carry on, he embodied a blissed out state that we humans have a hard time wrapping our heads around.

There’s that familiar adage “Do more of what makes you happy” – but I’d say there are times when you don’t always know what that is. Especially when you’re weary and the motivation to live fully in the beauty of an area outside your front porch isn’t there. Sometimes it’s easier to find distraction.

My body was achy, but it felt like a long exhalation to be tucked into the woods, saying nothing except to comment on scat, or the tracks we are walking over. We stop and examine them. Then we carry on. There are the sound of birds I wish I could identify. In the hills behind us, there are smears of yellow. But here, deeper into the trees, the colors become more varied. White and purple. A solitary Indian paintbrush in the grass above a creek. I remember that when I am not doing so great in life, one of the first things to disappear is my curiosity. Out here it stirs. I want to be able to identify the sounds and smells around me. To know if I’m passing a cottonwood or an aspen.

There is the sharp smell of wild onion and I stop to pick a few of the green strands that come up on the banks, thinking of the bags of morels John’s twin nephews handed to us earlier that morning. They were fresh from camping and mushroom foraging at Moose Lake for the weekend. Their feet were still caked in dust, their arms and legs covered in bumps, bruises and scratches. Each mark was an illustration to a story about an adventure in the last 48 hours. These two 3-year-olds are my teachers on how to make the most of the long days we have, days I dreamed about in January when all of this was hidden in white.

The valley opens up before us again. We can see the truck and hear the highway. Gabe rushes for the vehicle with longing that is so pure it makes my heart hurt. He comes to life on these adventures, but he whines with happiness when we pull onto our street, leaping up the steps of our house and collapsing on the cool wooden floors. Out there in the wild was beautiful for him, but it is seven minutes in a past he’s moved on from already. Now he is back home. This is beautiful too. He slumbers peacefully, knowing how to rest his body after exertion.

We’ve only been gone for two hours, and we’ve barely driven ten minutes from our house. Sometimes doing more of what makes me happy isn’t as far off, costly, or as complicated, as I think it is. Kids and dogs understand this best

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So this is Spring

Suddenly, after weeks of coming and going, it is nearly June and we are back at our house in Philipsburg, teetering on the edge of summer, with no intention of going anywhere outside Montana. I put a calendar up on the wall just outside our kitchen last weekend. It’s hung there, completely blank as May comes to a close, stretching out like an empty, calm ocean.


The sun comes up early and bright through our white curtains. It is still barely there when I come home from work late at night, with windows down so I can smell the pine trees and the fresh rain on the dirt road, as I pull onto Skalkaho.

Late April and May had been about suitcases and packs laid on the bed or the dining room floor. It’s been 4 a.m. starts and dashes to the airport and seeing sunrises through bloodshot eyes, from a cramped seat, thousands of feet up, flying above the clouds.  It’s been dragging a suitcase up the steps of our house after midnight and falling into an unmade bed, feet still sandy from the beach I had one last run on that morning. It’s been a gift to see old friends and family this Spring. But there is a huge part of me that wants to wake up and curl up under heavy blankets, turn on music and watch the newly green hills and listen to birds and cattle being moved. To only go as far as the hardware store for eggs and a new hook for the back yard hammock. This little house and ramshackle yard, with a kitchen sink that looks out to Discovery Ski Hill is the longest I have lived in one house as an adult. In August it will be four years.

I look out to our neighbors’ tree in full white bloom, above a fence built almost 40 years ago, that might just make it through one more summer. That tree is a transplant from the mountains around us. The frame of the hammock I bought last August for my birthday is still a skeletal outline above the grass that is almost brushing my calves when I take coffee and toast with me into the yard. I wake to the sound of lawn mowers starting up. That purr is the sound of summer beginning, something I never thought much about when I was growing up in the temperate California climate. But here, it is as tied to this new season as the sound of Rock Creek rushing at the banks when I go to my car at night. Two months ago, I was still trudging through the dark in my boots, sloshing through potholes of muddy snow. Now, there’s just the sound of my flip flops and I’m walking along in a t-shirt, the night breeze like a cool balm on my bare arms.

This time last year the first wildfires of the summer were starting. Now we are eating the morel mushrooms that exploded with the new growth from the scorched earth, our eyes on the clear skies, not taking the air we are breathing for granted so much. There are music festivals and river floats to plan for. Our camper is already de-tarped and parked in a clearing by a creek in the Big Hole, where my husband will be fly-fishing through much of June and where the dog and I will be spending weekends, drinking percolator coffee in the mornings and reading by a fire, dusty feet in sleeping bags.

That’s about all the adventuring I can muster right now. That feels just fine to admit that.

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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.

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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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