Grizzled ...

I rent a cabin at Long Gone Ranch. My oral lease agreement states that I'll do chores around the property. I've cut grass and raked the stables. Fine. My landlady gave me my next duty: chop her wood for the winter. "I got the axe sharpened a few weeks ago, it's in the back of the garage, should be good." I wish we had a written agreement ...

Babb ...

Written July 2008; edited August 2009:

My hand gently quivers as it grips the cup, a nervous-type tick. The three-quarters gone beer washes back and forth against the walls like waves rolling up on a lake shore, gently. I'm drunk, again; I'm unable to control it. It's a nightly ritual, a daily holiday. Blue eyes lose in Babb, ten miles south of the Canadian border. It's a town of dirt and dust, skin tanned from birth, winters twice as long and three times harder than any you've ever known. It's a lawless town; it knows only two colors, snow-white and brown. There's a bar, Charlie’s, a general store, Thronson's, and a steak joint, the Cattle Baron. I'm foreign in Babb, especially on a Monday night when I'm in Charlie's, the only non-native patron. "I’m a little nervous," I tell the Native woman who's sat next to me at the bar and asked me what I do, "I’m the only blue-eyed person here." I tip well, my peace offering, yet I feel like I'm always last served at the bar. Charlie's is a windowless bar, a barn sheathed in tin-colored sheet metal. Most buildings are windowless here; the winters are too windy and harsh for glass. The bar stretches for half a football field. The carpet is bright-red, it's unnerving.

The fry cook in the back, that bleach-white-haired girl from Valier, a small plains town fifty miles east, population less than five hundred, has somehow made me feel like shit again. She's why I'm here, to reconcile. I'm doubtful. She's helped me accept, finally, at twenty-five, that to some degree, I'm bipolar. I don't need medication, though, it's just who I am. My feelings -- happiness vs. sadness -- will always be an up and down, in and out, always-swaying ocean. I'll never flatline emotionally.

About her, I've never said it before, and I hope I'll never say it again, but I think she just wanted sex. I'll never forget that night we spent together in the bed of her mid-eighties, Chevy pick-up somewhere out there on some dirt road in the moon shadow of Chief Mountain. We outfitted the thing with a twin mattress we'd stolen from the hotel storage closet and hung makeshift mosquito netting she'd bought at Thronson's. We sat on the tailgate, drinking wine like desperate water-drinking, desert-dwellers, and watched the sun sink into the western horizon. We were drunk, running our mouths, laughing, learning. The mosquitoes buzzed above us and around us, but they were blocked out, perfect. We had sex twice and passed out, naked. The clouds glowed eerily yellow as they blew by the moon. It was cold -- June nights here are like March nights there. I was the happiest I'd been in a long time, and I'd been happy for a few weeks. We were awoken at five a.m. by horrible noises; I'd never heard anything like it: a loud, guttural moaning, like a large man slowly, painfully dying, alone. I sat up slowly, half-too-scared to look: the truck was surrounded by free range cattle, at least fifty of them. They weren't cows, they were beasts. We'd learned as kids that dogs go woof, cats go meow, and cows go moo, but it wasn't true. What else did they lie about?

We'd spent a few more days together, and then she fell off. That's why I'm here, to find out why. But I know why ...

I finish my beer, not knowing whether she saw me sitting there or not, and go. I buy a beer-to-go, because it's Montana, because I can, because it's legal, because it's a nine-mile drive home and it's dark. It's much darker here than it is there.

I stopped at the gas station on the way home to buy a six-pack. The man in line in front of me was buying a case of Steel Reserve. A case of Steel Reserve ...

It’s the sounds, not the sights, that remind me that this may not be haven nor heaven. Bulldozers, clearing land for condos, are less than a quarter-mile south. Monday was Labor Day, I had the day off, but the men there did not. I could hear them, their machines pushing dirt and clearing trees most of the morning. I can’t see them beyond the trees and high grass behind my cabin, but I worry that any day now I might. I’m twelve miles from the middle of town; no cell service, Internet, or television here. I love it. If I’m not in the city, I don’t want to be in town, and since I’m not in town, I don’t want to be anywhere near town. The cars that speed past on the road, also out of sight, annoy me. What right do they have? I'm trying to read ...

How strong does the wind have to blow to knock a six-foot, one hundred fifty-five-pound person to their knees? Not once or twice, but over and over again? Cody was over-confident on the way up -- he hopped from rock to rock effortlessly, his low center of gravity kept him below the worst of the wind, his four feet on the ground balanced and braced him like a table. I was like a flagpole, awkward and unstable. We got two-thirds of the way up, to the shack, but didn't dare go any higher. (I didn't dare go any higher; I could tell Cody wanted to press on.) I dropped my pack on the wood-plank floor and immediately the at-least-twenty-pound-bag loaded with a night's worth of supplies rolled over three times, blown by a gust. The shack has eight windows, but no window panes; the roof is missing two planks. Every real-heavy gust, the shack's tow lines, weaved through the ceiling supports and anchored into the rock, bowed, making that eerie, creeking sound, like a guitar string pulled too tight, about to snap. The shack gently rocked, but achored structures aren't supposed to rock at all. Visitors carve their initials and the date into the floor, wall, ceiling. I found a 1978, thirty-one years ago -- if the shack had stood this long, it could stand one more windy night. Be tough, build character, only ten hours to sunrise, I told myself, verbally, like the Old Man and the Sea, but I was the Young Man and the Mountain. By 6:30, though the sun was still peaked in the sky, the windchill was so low that I was in my sleeping bag, all the clothes I had -- wool cap, three layers ankles to neck -- were on, yet I was wishing I had gloves (You won't need those, you wimp, I'd told myself hours earlier, leaving them on the kitchen table). The sun wasn't going down for another two hours -- it would get colder, probably much colder. Building a fire in the wind would be impossible -- and we were above treeline, anyway, nothing to burn. Cody looked nervous, his eyes were half sunk, his pupils huge. I tried to start my cooking stove, heat some soup, warm my soul. It wouldn't stay lit. Fight or flight, only nine hours to go ...

We started back down as the sun was beginning to set and got back to the car just before that dark when you need your headlamp. We slept in the car. The wind rocked all night. I drank enough wine and ate enough soup, New England clam chowder, to sleep heavily.

Ohhh, Montana.

I've been applying for a lot of teaching jobs all over the state. Amazingly, there seems to be plenty of jobs up for grabs. I've come across of a lot of schools that seem to be anti-union and, vaguely, what I consider "anti-teacher" ("You may not apply for this position if you are currently contracted as a Montana teacher without written permission from your district superintendent."). I've come across applications that more closely resemble an application to scoop ice cream at Dairy Queen than a $35,000-a-year, contracted position as a second grade teacher. Not being native nor a current resident of the state is not helping matters. I assume to them I'm just another eastern kid with big dreams to "discover himself" in a remote place. I am qualified, if not over-qualified, for all of the positions I've applied for. Montana -- with the exception of probably Missoula and Bozeman, both college towns -- is a state that doesn't seem to take kindly to outsiders, transients, and non-natives.

Wish me luck. July is the hopeful departure.

I decided months ago to only update this with Montana-related ideas. The weather in Pittsburgh today is "Montana-related" -- it was -9 when I rode to work this morning, a windchill around -25. I loved it, I'm just not sure if I really loved it or if I just loved the novelty of it. Can I do this with a smile for three months straight? It's hard to separate reality from romanticism. I've begun to cull together schools to apply to in Flathead County, Big Fork north to Whitefish.

The best part about this is that the high in Babb today will be a balmy 38. Remember, global climate change, not global warming.

Once again, I can't wait to get back.