A Missoulian

What was it about Missoula, Montana? It was just a town, a small city. A third of a century ago, it was only a less expensive, less populous version of what it is today. It had generic shopping strips, a compact “historic” downtown, a few movie theaters, hotels and motels, a state university. By the time you read this, you’ll probably associate all of Montana more with your Grandpa Joe from Chinook than with me. And that’s alright. He’s a genuine Montanan. I was a sojourner for whom, for a couple of years in the eighties, Missoula was mightily appealing. And I’m still not entirely sure why.

One of the happiest days of my life was the day I arrived in Missoula, in June 1985. It was ridiculous. I’d fled New Jersey after breaking up with my girlfriend and walking away from my desk job. I was twenty-two, bearded, disabled, and nearly destitute, with all of my remaining money wadded up as twenties in my boot. I was a three-time college dropout who had wangled his way into a graduate program at the University of Montana. I had no prospect of fresh income until I was to begin a lousy $400-a-month teaching assistantship that fall. I had no friends or connections in town, and I’d never set foot in Montana before. I was on top of the world.

My first week, I hardly spoke to a soul. I found a cheap basement apartment with a shared bath in a Craftsman-style bungalow across from campus. I found a bookstore. I attended a service at the corner Episcopal church, just for the hell of it. In one of the most heroic physical feats of my life, I limped all the way up the trail on the face of Mt. Sentinel to sit on the stem of the giant, white concrete “M,” admiring the view, and then, half walking, half sliding by the seat of my pants, and somehow without breaking a bone, I made it back down again. I bought myself a pizza to celebrate.

Ten days in, I made my first friend. A tall, goofy guy with curly hair and spectacles who served sandwiches at the “Chimney Corner” asked me if I liked jazz. I didn’t really know. What kind of jazz? Miles Davis kind of jazz. I didn’t know Miles Davis. He gave me a look like I’d confessed that I couldn’t add and invited me to hear his quartet play at a downtown bar called “Mary’s Place” that night. His name was Matt.

That first summer passed in a haze. There, in the most unlikely of places, between all the cowboy joints and hippy hangouts, was my Jazz Age. Mary’s Place turned out to be a dark, upstairs dive haunted by musicians, alcoholics and local poets, who often amounted to one and the same. A block away in one direction was the square-jawed Stockman’s Cafe (“Liquor Up Front; Poker In The Rear”) and a few blocks past that the air was usually thick with Patchouli and Oolong inside Butterfly Herbs. Wander any other direction—more bars, more cafes, more poker places such as The Ox, plus a porn cinema where Tracy Takes Tokyo played. 

The whole town felt like a movie set to me: too compact, too small to be so complete. In northern New Jersey, despite the millions of us packed tightly together, most of our media and entertainment came from New York City, “The City,” as though there could be none other, but here, in this town of maybe forty-thousand, surrounded by nothing but sprawling, grassy ranch land, crop-top mountains, paper mills, and stands of lodgepole pines, they watched their own TV stations that logged off the air right at midnight, listened to their own range of radio call letters, read their own flimsy newspaper, bought books by their own writers, and divided up the world amongst themselves. 

All over the sidewalks that year, leftist students had stenciled, “SANDINO SAYS USA OUT!” while back and white POW-MIA flags, looking vaguely like Jolly Rogers, were displayed at auto dealerships, in the plate glass windows of cowboy bars, and hanging off of pick-up trucks and almost every Harley Hog. The most popular movie in Missoula that summer was Rambo: First Blood Part Two, yet in the shady yard behind the bungalow that I shared with four other renters, the evening air was thick with cannabis every night, and all the talk was of literature and Earth First. A sign over the communal downstairs toilet read, “If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, send it down.” 

Each midnight, when the TV stations signed off, Lee Greenwood vocalized over a picture of the proudly waving Stars-&-Stripes, and the side streets were mostly empty for hours. After being slipped free gin-&-tonics by the friendly barmaid at Mary’s, I often prowled the river paths and lawns with friends or alone. One night, wandering home a bit too drunk from sitting through back-to-back gigs by my new, Cool Jazz-worshipping musician pals, I spotted a classic Thunderbird with a teal-and-white paint job parked under a handsome maple. I liked the look of it so much, I lay down in the grass beside it and slept until dawn. No one disturbed me; no one complained.

Near the end of summer, Mt. Sentinel caught fire. It looked like a field of hell from the campus footbridge at night, thousands of glowing patches like the campfires of an army in the dark. Classes started. I began my improbable new existence as a graduate student and composition teacher. I made more new friends. I moved. I moved again. When winter set in early, I bought my first pair of Sorrels.

Around my twenty-third birthday, hinged between the fires and the fall, a good friend from New York flew out to visit me. I had no car but borrowed someone’s to meet her at the airport. (I’d wasted twenty minutes waiting for a taxi the night I’d first arrived myself. Finally, the flight crew walked out of the airport and asked me if someone was picking me up. I told them I was waiting on a taxi. They laughed and took me into town with them in their hotel’s van.) My friend, Terry, was immediately struck by the airport’s impressive display of taxidermy, including the bison, cougar, and rearing grizzly.

A couple of days into her visit, Terry and I got on a bus and headed north to Glacier Park. It was the first time I’d left town since a visit with the jazzmen to Billings in July. Terry and I rode up in the back seats of a Greyhound, past Paradise and Flathead Lake. A middle-aged man with a Stetson and handlebar mustache decided he liked the looks of Terry and, as soon as he overheard her mention New York, began regaling her with wild animal yarns. She was too polite to dispute him when he claimed the mountain lion he’d killed and eaten had tasted pretty much like chicken. I rolled my eyes.

We got off at Kalispell and walked to a “Rent-a-Wreck.” The wreck itself we drove up Going-to-the-Sun Road. Here and there, we got out and wandered around. We didn’t have time or equipment to camp in the Park, but from up there, Montana looked grand. It looked a bit like Switzerland would, if no one had finished properly taming and tunneling it.

By the time we got back to Missoula, we were satisfied. Terry had seen enough to say she’d been there and enjoyed it. (As far as I know, she never returned.) I had seen enough to know I wanted to stay. When Terry flew back to New York, I was sorry to say goodbye to her, but for the first time in my life I was glad to not be the one flying away.

I finished my degree in two years. I learned a deeper appreciation of winter, of winter complete with brown ice and inversions and whole weeks of subzero. I wrote a lot of what I was proud to call poetry. I taught myself how to teach. I found out I taught pretty well.

When I finished, I had to leave. There was a professorial career and, first, a fat stipend at Emory University calling me South. I had turned some kind of corner. I was no longer a delinquent, a drop out, a black sheep. I wouldn’t ever be one again, not until about the time I started writing you these pieces.  

But for the next several years, Missoula, strange Missoula, visited my dreams. Over and over again, I would have some form of a dream in which I knew that I was dreaming but was enjoying it all the same and was determined not to wake. Always in that dream I had returned to a version of Missoula, even weirder than the original, usually much smaller and more remote, but recognizably the same. And each time I could stay. Then I’d wake.

The first time that I did, very briefly, return, I brought my Alabama girlfriend with me. She’d heard so much about the place from me, I was certain she would love it. I was delighted to show it to her, to finally be back. Then we spent a day in miserable rain, got stuck in traffic behind a downtown accident, and ate a lousy lunch. The forecast for the next few days was similar. We were in the middle of a massive, seven-week cross-country roadtrip, and my girlfriend was eager to move on to somewhere better. By the next day we were in Idaho, eating trout by the sunny Snake. It would be a decade before I came back through Missoula again.

On a May Sunday in 2001, I passed through on my way down from the Yukon to Salt Lake. The weather was crystalline. The town was quiet. For some reason, I chose to drive over to what had been my second residence back in 1985, an attractive, single-family brick Victorian where I had lived upstairs, splitting three rooms with two friends. We’d had a good ghost story there, when one of my roommates had shrieked that a solemn-faced little girl was staring at her through the second-story window late one night. On this fine spring Sunday morning of the new millennium, a pleasant-faced woman was out working in her yard. I chatted with her about the place, which she now owned. Had she known the previous owner, our eccentric landlady, I asked, a towering blonde named Sandra who announced one day that she was henceforth to be called Inge and began affecting a faux Swedish accent? No? We used to call her “Sandringa” among ourselves. The woman gave a little chuckle. She was interested in the ghost story, though. No, she’d never seen one, but she’d always suspected. 

After that, I revisited Missoula a couple more times on my own. I never did anything special other than rent a hotel room on the Clark Fork, stroll around campus, maybe take in a show at the old movie palace, The Wilma, where you could still order cocktails with your popcorn. Mostly I just went back to soak it in. The suburban sprawl had grown quite a bit and the neighborhood near campus had subtly gentrified, but the campus and downtown itself had hardly changed. For me, it was still a little unreal, like stepping into and out of an odd but comforting dream.

In 2008, I brought your mother to town with me. We were in love, and although she’d been all over the mountain west, she’d never been to Missoula. Again, I thought she’d be delighted, and again, as with my Alabama girlfriend, the trip did not go well. It was hot. There seemed to be nothing to do all weekend, and then we discovered that we’d just missed a free outdoor concert by one of her favorite musicians. All for the best, I guess. The next day we left to go exploring and ended up discovering Nelson, the town of your birth, although of course we didn't know that yet.

We did try to visit Missoula again, more than once, but largely because the town happened to lie on the shortest route between our winters in southern Utah and our summers in BC. I swear, every time we stopped there, something went wrong. One time we spent a night there when you were a nursing baby and had a lovely summer evening ruined when you choked on a piece of fresh melon our friendly restaurant server cut for you. For a second, we thought you'd choke to death. It was always something like that. Yet, whenever I passed through alone, the place still charmed me somehow, the light on the river, the off-key rhythms, the quieter streets.

Here’s what I think. There’s no good rhyme or reason for why we love a particular city or a landscape any more than for why we fall in love with a person or even just a charming face. Either that, or the landscape is secretly capable of loving us back, and we’re too small to recognize its jealous embrace. When I go through Missoula alone, Missoula is happy to see me again. But if I arrive with a human lover, that peculiar little city dwelling on what was once the bottom of a glacial lake is jealous and cold shoulders us. I don’t appreciate such pettiness, but I’ll confess I’m still a little crazy for the place.