Field Notes from Montana
46 F & raining. The creek is back up again. Now down. And a plea to fk off to young people.
After a long, mostly cool spring with a couple hot days mixed in for fun, when Montana got to the actual line of Summer, it crossed politely, looked around, and decided to go back. Summer came, but Montana leapt back into spring.
This morning I wake up to the sound of not soft rain, but pouring rain. This was also the sound I fell off into sleep to last night. Steady, drawn out, dumping. One of our gutters has gone from having a ticking drip sound to sounding more like a small stream. There are places known for this sort of weather, but this isn’t really one of them. Not recently anyways. It’s been raining since last week, and the forecast shows at least a few more days.
While this feels unusual given the last few years and the particularly dry teen years of early 21st century, really the aughts through 2020, I recall several summers in the 90’s feeling just like this. Cool, wet. More wet. Some heat erupts, and then more wet. And it’s only just now July, so of course things could still dry out, and fires could easily erupt, but right now we are enjoying the opposite of fire season. The flowers on the hill side are still blooming, the grasses are long and wet, and as of this morning the creek is back up.
It had gone down over the last couple weeks as the snow finally had melted off and the things were beginning to dry, as to be expected. Even yesterday morning when Acre and I went to the creek to swim, my indicator roots and rocks showed the water had not come up - the rain up until then had been steady, but very light, and with intermittent breaks. Areas under the densest pines in the yard were still relatively dry even though I haven’t run the sprinkler in the garden for a week.
But then last night, a heavy drenching rain, and this morning the creek up an easy 6 inches. The small bench of a pool I like to sit on in the creek felt nice and deep again. The water was ripping in waves again down stream. Acre and I took it in and watched downstream as baby eagles flexed their wings on top of their nest. They are not little anymore. In fact I’m not sure all four eagles could even fit in the nest together right now. I haven’t seen them take flight, but it certainly seems like it may have happened or will at any moment.
It’s wet and cold here right now. And as a result it’s quiet outside. And outside, regardless of the cool, is a great place to be. I particularly love to run in this weather. I always think I’ll end up being alone on the trails, and certainly the local ones see far fewer on days like this, but I particularly enjoy those that I do inevitably end up passing. There is a smile those of us that enjoy shit weather share with one another when we pass on the trail during the shit weather. It stems from a shared understanding of the feeling that comes with being out in this weather, doing the active thing. In many ways I’d argue that I pursue fitness and health to be particularly able to be out in this sort of condition… cold, wet, and whatever is the opposite of miserable.
Acre loves it too. The beauty of a herding dog is that they require exactly 0 effort to get excited to go outside, no matter the condition, except maybe when it’s 100 F and sunny.
And he looks like a wild miniature wolf in these conditions.
The garden, while not requiring water, does not particularly thrive in this weather. The cold and lack of sunshine has stunted everything except the kale. The strawberries, which had been thriving, have completely quieted down. The tomatoes look like skeletons. The potatoes don’t seem to mind I guess. I assume they are Irish and accustomed to the cold and wet?
It’s Wednesday afternoon and the week is moving fast. Faster than I’m ready for. But here we are. The rain finally stopped. For a morning and mid-day anyway. And now around 7pm in western MT and the rain is back. Everything is humid, a word that rarely applies here. Humid. Moist. Wet.
But the creek is down. This morning down within just a few inches of where it was before all this wetness began at the end of last week. None of this is filing complaints and quite the contrary, it’s, well, it’s awesome. While the rest of the country is warming, we are cooling. We’ll dry out soon enough. It only takes about 2 minutes for Montana to dry out. By the time I’m finished writing this piece it could be drier than a whatever it is that’s super dry.
It’s Wednesday night now. I am trying to be disciplined and get this piece done but something is lurking around the edges of my mind that don’t seem to allow me to get to and then I do. It’s summer. And I know something about myself with regards to summer and it directly relates to how I think, work, and interact in the summer.
Summer is to the mountains, mentally. At first glance it’s retreat. And in some regards it is a retreat from certain aspects of life. More specifically it’s a retreat from social. Mentally I push into the perimeter. Mentally I sit in different places through different seasons, and sometimes I catch myself off guard with how solitary my mind can become when summer rolls around.
But then I remember, I built myself this way. It’s built upon a natural core that craves solitude, craves the quiet of natural space, the push away from societal obligations. In the summer I crave trails and trees.
And here is another thing about me. Sometimes I’m perfectly good at (and good with) fucking around too much on the computer. Some seasons it feels like the social place to be. I hop in more during those periods. I interact more. I poke around the internet corners on a whim. But this is not that season for me, so when I’ve found myself fucking around, I quickly put it down and retreat. Even photos, so many taken photos, so few I’ve dealt with in the last few weeks.
I don’t think I’m alone in this. But I do think it’s easy for many of us to overlook and even get a little confused by. Why do I suddenly want to be around abso-fucking-lutely no one really, but a single hand countable few.
I built this into myself. It was also built into me.
A note from where I grew up.
At the end of a quarter mile driveway off a dirt road, 30 minutes from where most of my friends lived. We were surrounded by fields and forest.
So when summer came around, up until I got my drivers license, it meant I wasn’t going to see many people until fall rolled around. Some, but not nearly as much. Absolutely not a complaint. Quite the opposite in fact. I very much appreciate all aspects of this arrangement.
Then came the post college years. Very good years to be sure. But again, it leaned into seasonal solitude. From planting trees to trails and fire tower, summers took me away from most everyone and into the mountains. The first few days I’d tend to notice it, but by the seasons end the return felt a bit of a shell shock.
Even when the kids were little we managed to push into some summer solitude, regardless of the business and potential business that comes with kids in the modern age. For many years they didn’t seem to care that we’d leave pretty much every night we could sneak out, be it one overnight camping, or three weeks on back mountain roads, they never really pulled away from this until more recent years. And still we manage to get out a good bit. But in the peak of it, it was 70 some nights in a tent between snows. And some nights in snow.
I’m built and wired for some summer solitude. And it feels like a predicament when I don’t find it. Or when I even get roped into something that is so mentally distracting from it. If I can’t be in the woods when I’d like, I try to see it through the eyes of a young zen in training. I want the thing so badly but that’s the point. The Master says, you have to be able to give it up before truly getting it. So I try to truly let go of it. Patiently. Patience. Wax on, wax off. Or something like that.
When I hear conversations between young people about how bad life is, and almost always there is a “here in America” tied to it, I am given so much pause. I look at the opportunities I had, and that I went for, and I was so eager, so stoked, and so truly appreciative to get to go do these things. Some experiences were short, some turned into longer, but all of them, a whirlwind of possibility and something new. Building cabins. It didn’t last long. I fell of a wall and nearly broke my back. Then trails. Tree planting. Landscaping. Fire crew. Trails. Fire tower. More trails.
I was a professional nobody in my twenties. I had plenty of family and social pressure to “quit fucking around” but I had one thing I hope desperately my kids adapt from me. I had confidence. Confidence, perhaps even overly, that I could go do whatever I wanted. I could do it with little to no money. And I could be happy about it the entire time. I’ve had a propensity for thinking that way. And thank god. Why not? It’s a short life. Reasonable expectations may be the result, but why not push into the doing the things you want to do? And, as I’ve written before, sometimes you end up doing some things you didn’t expect, and don’t want, but if you know how to deal with it, and make things work towards bigger goals, eventually you come out of those experiences not only stronger, but surprised at how well it actually fits into your evolving and bigger goals.
Two things I hear a bunch: But I need to make money. - False. You need to take care of yourself. You need to go get experience. You need to truly create your path. But you don’t necessarily need to make money. Not yet. It’s not wrong if you do, but it need not be the drive, the center line of focus.
And two: those opportunities don’t exist anymore. To which I say, bullshit. Doing cool jobs and not making money are absolutely still available. And when it comes to cool jobs, you are doing it for the wrong reason if you are doing it for money. The ones whining about it are missing the point. Some things you do for experience, and the reward when you do, far outweighs anything those worried about the money realize.
This could be a whole discussion but it’s not going to be, not here. But I my sincerest experienced word: Your twenties are better spent learning and experiencing awesome things. If you work it hard, you will find your way into making money naturally. The world works that way. The hard work pays off. It takes time. When you realize the Instagram overnight success stories are usually fiction, and more than often have much more backstory and history, and real life moves at a different pace for most of us. Go with it. Envy no one. You get to build yourself and your history, piece by piece, inch by inch.
When I hear the ever-so-common doomsdayers at this point I just feel bad for them. Brainwashed. When you mix and mingle it’s so obvious who is wrapped up in the internet and who is not. Those that are often lace their greetings with “well, you know, with everything going on” and the likes. The ones that aren’t wrapped up in it are more like “fucking huge cloud system moved over just after sunset and the tops of the cloud, must have been like 30k feet up, just bursting with pink while everything else was going dark. You catch that?”
Hell yeah, I caught that. Looked like it might have had a little lightening in it. Looked like it was flashing a little, but so far away I never heard any thunder. Enormous cloud.
That’s why I push back into trails. That is why we pack the truck and go. Back. Into mountains. Into the woods. It’s why I find myself lingering longer and longer at the creek when I wake up and go swim. Acre likes it. We just sit there looking for things. Any things.
You know, I’ve never seen a salamander in Montana. I know they are here, but I’ve never seen one. I moved here in 1994 from Indiana where we’d find them with regularity. But not here. Same with lightening bugs - I’m not sure I’ve ever seen lightening bugs in Montana. I miss seeing those tremendously.
Do you all still have those in the midwest or did the glyphosate kill them all? I hope we didn’t kill them all. I hate the thought of some younger readers being like, “what is a lightening bug? Were they even real?”
I wouldn’t be surprised though. I find myself telling my kids that there was a time when you maybe saw one or two satellites after watching the night sky for hours. That is how rare they were. Now you can not look at the sky at any given moment without seeing at least a few at a time. I have the photographic evidence. Every year it gets worse. Small grievance I know. But one that I have.
I want the best for the kids. I want them to know that money is important for living, but its not everything. I want them to know you can go do things. Somehow this underlying message of doom and gloom took over the school system and the ideas of opportunity and optimism got overlooked. I want to help change that.
It’s a hell of a time to be alive on earth. The grass is not greener in other times or in other places. It’s just different.
It’s dark outside now. The sky is relatively clear, the first night like this in a week. It rained again tonight, but then cleared. Damn pretty out. I think I’ll go out in it.
