All posts by Gwyneth Hyndman

An end to an endless summer

summer, poolside

 

It was a late start to summer this year, but once it arrived for me, I gripped and then chased it like it was the last summer I would ever live through.

I slouched into the season at first, leaving Montana, and my job, in the second week of June for two weeks in California. I was tired and still preoccupied with work at the newspaper I had just left behind when I arrived at LAX at midnight on a Monday, my fingernails bitten down to the skin. I had wanted to be filled with a sense of release as the plane descended over the city lights that night – the precise opposite of the landscape I had just taken flight from – but no dice. My mind was stuck in that dense, dark puddle of navel-gazing that I back myself into when I’m worn down. Getting up and out of it is just wheels spinning in mud until traction is found.

A few days after I got back to my hometown – with days of late sleep-ins, long mornings of coffee on the back porch, nights in my parents’ hot tub under walnut trees in the backyard – I was house sitting for friends who live on top of a hill that looks out to one of my favorite mountain ranges. Doing breaststrokes in their pool is like swimming towards Figueroa Mountain; in the morning when I walk down to feed the horses and collect The Wall Street Journal at the bottom of the long, winding dirt driveway, a cup of coffee in my hand, the morning on my eyelids as I pass under the shadow of oak trees, every fourth step is a prayer (Thank you. Thank you. Thank you). I have looked after this house and its occupants – kids, now grown; beloved spaniels, now passed away; horses, forever on guard in the front corral; rose gardens, miraculously still here in the blistering Augusts – during summer and winter vacations, down times between jobs, and long weekends since I was 15. I am 39 now. This house on the hill has always been a place of rest. I dreamed of that long walk down the driveway when I was working late nights on the third floor of a grey building at a city newspaper in New Zealand, during the long, dark winters when the coastal winds ripped the car door handles from my fingers as I’d be loading groceries. Now the house is, for the most part, in my time zone when I arrive from Montana, but the sense of distance from my own life is still there every time I arrive.

I always underestimate the power of that distance – as well as sleep, sun, and a portal into a fictional world – to give me just that little bit of grip that I need to pull myself together. I took this photo towards the end of my second day, feeling like I was drunk with the time I had on my hands, but also, I realized, just plain drunk. The friends had left an opened bottle of Champagne in the fridge for me. It was a Tuesday – normally my hell day at the paper as we prepped it to go to print the next morning, with last-minute decisions and judgement calls to make; errors to search for when your brain was already shaved off into a hundred paper thin cheese slices to care for all the details that begged for your time, followed by board meetings that night. The day before I had cycled down to the Book Loft in Solvang to find a novel I had been thinking about, and the fact that I had all this time to make such a leisurely decision about how I was going to spend my leisure time seemed so reckless. I swam and read, swam and read; ate peaches with Greek yogurt; then read some more. I decided to have a small glass of Champagne after napping in the sun. I read and sipped and watched the sun change. It seemed like a fine idea to have another glass to celebrate hitting the halfway mark on the book by 3 pm.

As I stood a little while later, setting the book down in the pool chair to have one final dip in the pool, a cautious voice in my head asked: Have we had too much Champagne to go swimming?

I sat back down on the pool chair, put another layer of sunscreen on, and then my shades, and lay there, grinning. Have I had too much Champagne to go swimming. What a glorious day, that this was the only significant question I had to ask myself.

It was Tuesday, and it was the beginning of my summer. I think I’m writing about it to remind myself how good that day was.

Today is Thursday in October and I woke up in Montana as the sun was just coming up over the ranch land outside the living room window as the heater crackles to life. Two mornings ago, I parted the curtains to snow falling. Since that Tuesday in June, I’ve swam in rivers, lakes, and two oceans, mowed my weed-laden lawn three times, returned for one last stint as editor before turning over the job to a young, bright journalism graduate. I’ve become deft at swiftly changing white linen tablecloths so the table never shows, delivered margaritas by jeep to guests as they pan for sapphires, cycled like mad across an island for my first Atlantic lobster, and sat at a desk in a white room with white-washed floors in an old whaling town for two weeks and wrote until the made-up world I had whipped into existence – marching it along each morning that summer before my 6:30 a.m. breakfast shift started – finally awakened and began to shakily walk along towards an ending all on its own.

It has been the longest of summers. Sometimes you have to grip that season of great freedom and happiness while you have it, give it one last tight squeeze, then release it to make room for the good things to come. I’m ready.

(Also: Put Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter on your reading list, by a pool, by a fire, on a plane, on a train, wherever. It took him something like 15 years to write the novel and it was one of my favorite reads in the last five years. I finished it in a bar on Flathead Lake, crying, the night I came back to Montana.)

 

 

 

One long drive for a bear claw

WordPress Image Gallery PluginI’ve been wanting to visit Polebridge, Montana since I was in my early 20s, when I first heard about this off-grid utopia on the fringe of Glacier National Park, at the end of a long gravel road; an electricity-free place cupped by mountains where people drove from North Dakota for the views and the town’s huckleberry bear claws from the Polebridge Mercantile Bakery.

Eighteen years later, John and I were finally planning a quick trip to Glacier – a place that both of us have only brushed the edges of – and Polebridge stuck out as a place to base ourselves within a five minute drive of the park entrance, without being at the heart of the tourism storm that was bound to hit as summer came to an end. We’re not marathon sight-seers to start with – and we didn’t feel like we were under the gun to absorb the entire 1,583 square mile park stretching into Canada in 48 hours. We were happy to start with a small patch and take it from there.

This patch ended up being a tepee in a front yard of the North Fork Hostel that we rolled into just before 10 p.m., after a slow, starlit drive from Columbia Falls, with pines reaching up on either side of the road. Fall had barely started to touch the trees in northern Montana but it was still a warm night. With the windows down, that pine-baked smell of forest and soil was everywhere. If we went slow enough we could hear the waters of the North Fork on our right, but the landscape outside the truck  was still a half mystery to us.

Our headlights found the turnoff sign to Polebridge. The truck crept slowly towards a cluster of buildings and cabins that were nearly all pitch black. If we had aimed to find a place that was in the middle of nowhere, we had gotten it just about right on the town’s main street. Above us, the stars were crazy.

Thirty minutes later, drinking Yaak Attack IPA out of mason jars at the Northern Lights Saloon, having found our tepee by headlamp just down the street, we got more of a feel for where we were as a generator hummed somewhere in the back. The dimly-lit bar we had stumbled into was built in 1912 as a cabin where early homesteader William Adair and his family lived while setting up shop at the Polebridge Mercantile next door. The store has been a social hub for the families that homesteaded the area for more than a century; the cabin was converted into the town’s one drinking establishment in 1976 and continues to pull in locals and tourists, who can sit shoulder to shoulder at the bar or sprawl outside on picnic tables to watch the sunset with a whiskey and a meal of grilled trout, mashed potatoes and a slice of huckleberry pie to finish.

The next morning we opened the flap of the tepee to the sound of the creek and watched the morning come up over the mountains while we made cowboy coffee on our camp stove. John grilled up bacon for breakfast burritos and I lazily chopped up avocado on a cutting board in my lap thinking that the smell of coffee percolating and bacon frying in the middle of this kind of scenery should be how every weekend should start, forever.

The tepee I had just climbed out of was one of two on the front lawn of the hostel which was once part of a homestead established in 1918 by a Canadian pioneer named Charlie Wise, who famously trekked for two days to Columbia Falls in the dead of winter with his baby after the baby swallowed button, only to have his child die en route. Adding to the tragedy, Wise found that his wife had died of influenza by the time he returned to the homestead. Stories like this abound in this part of the state. While life for the roughly 70 year-round Polebridge residents is considerably less harsh than it was a century ago – the 35 miles of highway to Columbia Falls is kept ploughed in the winter – it definitely requires a hardier breed to find this refreshing in all four seasons.

Later that day, armed with fishing rods, beer, and leftover cinnamon rolls and bear claws from the “Merc,” we stopped an hour into the trail that winds along Bowman Lake – a recommendation from  saloon owner Will Hammerquistthe night before – to scramble down a clearing to the lake beach to get a feel for the fishing. We had passed three or four couples since we started out, a surprisingly small number considering the beauty of the place, less than an hour from the park entrance. The water was cold and lucid, calm enough in the late afternoon to reflect the peaks above us. I soaked my feet and the beer and watched the mountains. John waded in to check the depth. A lone yip and howl went out from forest across the water. Moments later, from another part of the mountains, a chilling response. We sat there for a long time listening to the wolves talk to each other, and then just took in the silence, as the day began its downturn.

We took our time on the winding gravel road through the park and back to Polebridge; John explored a few fishing spots along the river just outside the entrance before we made it back, pulling into the saloon as other travellers were also wrapping up their day on the lawn. We ate trout and steak with salads and homemade bread, followed by huckleberry and pecan pie, then drank with a couple from Iowa who were also exploring the park for the first time, moving inside to the barstools when the mosquitoes became too thick in the darkness. Tomorrow we will get one last gooey cinnamon roll from the bakery, grab a strong coffee to go, and drive towards Glacier’s more touristy areas like Lake McDonald and Going-to-the-Sun Road; RVs and selfie sticks. But tonight is for enjoying this remoteness.

As the saloon door is held open, and the warm glow of the bar begs for a night of more history-telling and lively conversation, I get that one last glimpse of the mountains’ silhouette as the day is done for good. It’s reminder that we are still on the periphery of a great wilderness.

If you go

From Columbia Falls, take Montana 486 – or North Fork Road – for 35 miles. The road turns to gravel a few miles outside town, about the same time you start to lose cell phone reception. Make sure you gas up and stock up on essentials before leaving. While the Polebridge Mercantile stocks last-minute necessities, it’s a limited selection – you will want to do the bulk of your grocery shopping ahead of time, especially if you are travelling further into Glacier National Park. The entrance to the park is about a mile from Polebridge.

Where to stay

We loved our tepee stay for $60 a night at the North Fork Hostel and Square Peg Ranch – but that kind of accommodation isn’t everyone’s style. There was a full-size bed and a cot, as well as a fire pit in the center of the tepee for a fire if we had wanted to start one, though guests are asked to bring their own firewood. When it rained in the middle of the night, I felt a few drops from the tepee opening at the top –  a surprisingly nice sensation to wake up to, actually –  but otherwise it fell on the fire pit and we stayed dry. Toilets are long drops with eclectic decorations and band posters at the back of the property and were kept very clean while we were there. We had access to the kitchen, but chose to cook on our own grill for breakfast in the morning outside the tepee. Other intriguing options on the property included the Goat Cabin and the tiny Green Zuccinni caravan/cabin “for the financially challenged.”  Polebridge options on nearby properties can be found on VRBO – there is quite a range.

Where to eat

A night out at the Northern Lights Saloon is worth the drive in itself. The food is better than your average bar meal – but it was the scenery, the company and the evening dinner crowd vibe that really made it a memorable dining experience that made us want to linger until closing time. In a landscape of huckleberry desserts, the pecan pie chased with a local whiskey may have been the best thing I tasted all weekend. Just down the road, the Home Ranch Bottoms at Glacier Park is known for its Texas style barbecue ribs and barbecue and boasts “the coldest beer in the North Fork” – it also has a campground and cabin rentals. And obviously, hit up the Polebridge Merc’s famous bakery in the morning. The earlier the better to get the freshest pastries.

What to explore

Where to start? You are at the edge of one of the wildest areas of the state and trailheads are everywhere. At the saloon on our first night, we were told about Bowman Lake and Kintla Lake as great day hikes. We opted for a rather stroll-like hike along Bowman Lake that didn’t require too much energy and allowed for plenty of time for photography and fishing on the way back.  When we return with more time and ambition, the 38-mile horseshoe hike starting at Bowman and ending at Kintla would be my pick.

 

Two years

horses.thesehomefires

So the last two years: Snow shoeing with jacket pockets crammed with elk jerky, summer thunderstorms, learning to cast into rivers to keep up with a guy I liked, rodeos, sleeping in the back of a truck, documenting life in a Montana ranching town as a weekly newspaper editor, more adventure, winter, more winter; distilling long, long-held opposing views that have nothing to do with what I initially thought I was writing about; long nights chewing on a pen and looking at a blank screen, late meetings, early mornings, a single lamp light on in an office to get a paper out the next day; falling in love, sunrises that make my heart burst, walking to work in the snow with a cup of coffee, huckleberry margaritas and spa music in a clawfoot bathtub after town council meetings; crying of stress, crying of happiness; homecoming football games at dusk, lines of yellow school buses going to prom; plunging into lakes in the dead of winter, more love, more snow.

In 2010 I started a blog I called Homefires, based on the lifting of this one line in a song by the Canadian band, The Acorn – Not looking behind to ensure the homefires aren’t shrinking – because those words seemed to bring together everything I wanted to write about at that time in my early 30s. About going between New Zealand and California. About leaving places when leaves started to golden. And mostly that sense of being torn between mountain towns and coastal communities that I had come to love, of forever being an interloper where everyone else seems to have a cemented role. Of leaving pieces of myself all over both sides of the equator. Of balancing restlessness, with an acute longing to just belong somewhere and have a garden and a dog and a slow-cooker.

Homefires morphed into a weekly blog for stuff.co.nz  – Sweet Home California – when I came back to the States in 2013 and wrote about adjusting to life in my homeland and travels through the northwest and east to an island in Michigan  before moving to Montana for the winter. That next summer I took at job as the editor of the Philipsburg Mail in the southwest corner of the state and moved into an 1890s house once owned by the town midwife, Mary Morrison who, I’m told, helped more than 30 babies be born in my living room a century ago. Homefires became the title of a regular column I would bash out on deadline mornings in a poetic fit, about adjusting to seasons, the beauty of autumn in cattle country, that old, unsettled longing for a 13-hour plane trip somewhere with crashing waves; assembling a lawn mower for the first time in my life and the ache of love I have felt for this tiny house with peeling paint when I wash dishes and look out past snow-covered roofs to the Pintler ranges.

There’s too much to tell about the last two years. But maybe the highlights of all these seasons in a small, Montana town – that has been just enough of a safe harbor, balanced with a dying, old west wildness that I have come to respect and grip onto myself a little bit – are just better in photos.

Here are a few.

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