Notes from Montana

The Devil meets me running.

Notes from Montana June 12, 2025

This morning the light was out before I was up. The birds woke me first. They do that in the summer. Long before even the sun you can hear the thick cacophony of chirps, tweets, caws, as the morning birds all decide pre-dawn is the best time to talk. Tree to tree, the sounds fill the valley. Also, long before dawn, light moves in. While in the winter it sometimes feels like the light does not arrive sometimes for an hour after the sun has crested the eastern ridge across the valley, so dark and low and dim in the sky, in the the summer its quite the opposite… long before dawn it is light. Somehow the light bends differently in the summer and arrives well before the show that is the sun breaking the ridge. Once breached, the days heat is instantaneous and swiftly descends into the valley. This morning was similar with regards to the light… it arrived much before dawn. I was sleeping in the backyard in my sleeping bag, as I do sometimes when it’s too warm upstairs. Our house, so well insulated, holds the heat in the summer as much as it does in the winter. When I awoke it was light, but the sun wasn’t up yet. I got up, stretched my legs, peed in the yard, made way into the quiet house and started making coffee, which requires only a few but loud machines. Coffee poured, I made a cup for my bride and carried it to her, she more reasonably chose to sleep in bed rather than join me in the yard. She smiled. I then took cup and carried it to the porch to watch as the star crested the ridge in the shape of sharp spikes downward across the valley, through breeze dancing tree tips, spruce, aspen, and pine, and landed certain rays in the steam above my cup, and on the wall behind, shadows.

I sat and let the light go into my eyes and into my skin. and sat while slowly sipping, pausing, listening to the birds and the few runners that motivatedly pass in the early hours. One let a fart and the other started laughing about it. They may well have heard me laugh too. I think I spit a little coffee…

It was hot yesterday, but today never reached it. Just as the temperatures started to climb clouds began rolling in. To the north and overhead, as seen from my office window, the clouds were reasonable and light. But when I stood and looked south I saw a different sort of thing, heavy dark, oppressing clouds. The sort that have been known to accompany winds, the last like this just about a year ago, when the winds brought down hundreds of pine and spruce around town, and filled my yard with an ancient ponderosa that took me a week to get power reinstated from, and even longer to clear. It made my entire back yard full with 5-8 feet of tree. My back took a couple months to recover from the clearing it required. But something in my gut tells me this isn’t that storm. It looks like it’s being held by pressure down to the south. It’s not moving in the right direction to hit here. When storms come here they hit with a swift wind out of the southwest. This wind is straight from the west. I don’t think it’s coming.

I decide to put on my running cloths and go out in it, regardless of what it brings. Just as I’m leaving the house, lightening crashes. A thick, beautiful bolt. I love being out in a storm, very likely it will be my undoing someday, but preferably not until I’m old. But I am wired to want to be out in it. Something about the more challenging elements. It’s the reason I swim in the icy creek in the winter. It’s why I’ll go out in the heat of the hottest days to bike or run. I love the push of extreme weathers.

The rain hits. It’s torrential rain. The temperature was 75 when I left the house (After years and years our outside weather gauge gave up the ghost this last week, and within a day I realized how much I missed it, so replaced it immediately with another and the new one has a barometric pressure sensor, which it still says is “learning” but it’s wildly entertaining) and it feel like it’s dropped about ten degrees. I’m soaked and it’s going to get cold but it feels good and with lightening crashing now in the canyon I’m in, it’s a little exciting. The trail is one part trail, and one part stream. But it’s short lived. As I suspected this is just the northern edge of the storm and it passes quickly. By the time I hit the steeper uphill it’s warming already. Foggy. Humid. Lush. I’m anything but cold. And I’m surprised my legs feel good after several days of not giving them a break.

I’m listening to the Master and Margarita while I run today. Have you read it? It’s one of my favorites, and I’ve read it a few times, but it’s been years so I decided to revisit it again but this time in audio. Books are my preferred listening while running. 1. they distract you from any physical discomfort 2. they pass the time with a benign, even keeled fashion. I don’t like listening to things that ramp me up or down when I run. The ramp up can work for a few minutes to get me going, but then I just want to sink into something with longer form. Over the course of weeks a book shared in running and biking time becomes its own aspect of my time. Here years after listening to Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, John Lecarre, Graham Greene, Peter Hopkirk, Michael Shellenberger, The Secret History of Twin Peaks, and Ben Milligan’s history of the Seals, I can recall specific stretches of trail for specific parts of books. The words and the places become intertwined. And over the years I focus my running in different areas depending solely on mood for the summer, but as a result certain books are featured in certain trails in my mind.

The Master and Margarita is proving just as good as any for running. Right now I’m at the point in the book where the Magician is performing in the theater to the wild bewilderment of the masses of Moscow. And I can’t help but think of Ai and all the people falling under its alluring charm. The Magician knows things about people in the audience he has no reason to know, and they are awed by his knowledge. Then he makes things happen that they certainly thought impossible and again they become drunk on the hysteria of it all. I feel like the audience is closely akin to the drunkenness that is happening at Ai videos… “can you even believe it?” the people in the crowd say to one another.

Then they go outside, and not only find they have been tricked, but that the whole thing was a lie, and illusion, a departure from reality. The devil has tricked them. And in reality, they wish it wasn’t a trick. The prefer the illusion.

When I’m running is when I have my most ideas. Sometimes I stop and make a few notes, but they always seem broken and incomplete, so more often than not when my ideas start forming I just let them keep going, go with the flow of them, like watching an incredible sunset without pausing to try to take a photo. Sometimes the fun of thought is just letting it do its thing and not attempting to capture it. I try to capture it later. Sometimes I succeed, often I don’t but if I’m in motion in the woods I rarely stop for long to record an idea. Maybe just a few audio notes. That is what I do tonight.

But then I turn off my book and let my mind wander a bit. I come p with a whole story in my mind about how a religion is born between two opposing sects, one that believes solely in the online world, and things of Ai as God, and the other, a more puritanical sort of hippy type that cedes from online life altogether and farms and worships the sun. Obviously there is a collision between the groups. It plays out like something in a Kurt Vonnegut novel and by the time I’m done with my run the idea has moved so far form it’s origination in the Moscow theater with the devilish Magician and his entourage that I laugh aloud at how far my mind carried it. It’s like I’ve just watched an entire movie, and I’ve only been gone under 2 hours.

Back home I’m greeted by Acre on the porch. He looks sad to not have gone with me, but he’s still recovering from his enflamed pancreas and I sit and pet him ears and explain to him why it’s for the best. In a few days hopefully he’ll feel right as rain. He agrees. I get him a snack and we toss the frisbee a few minutes. The wind is gone. The rain is gone. Now just some pleasant warm clouds lurk about. And it feels like a midwestern humidity, a rare feel for this mountain area. It’s going to be a beauty of an evening here. I won’t see the sunset because it will be behind these clouds, and it won’t happen until late anyways, and the light won’t dissipate until much later, for the same reason the morning has been playing out like it has, but the house is cooler today and I open the windows to let all the air move around.

It’s June and it’s a very beautiful month in this area.