Montana 1948

Out of town I could simply be, I could feel my self, firm and calm and unmalleable as I could not when I was in school or in any of the usual human communities that seemed to weaken or scatter me. I could sit for an hour in the rocks above the Knife River, asking for no more discourse than that water’s monotonous gabble. I was an inward child, it was true, but beyond that, I felt a contentment outside human society that I couldn’t feel within it.

My mother feared for my soul, a phrase that sounds to me now comically overblown, yet I remember that those were precisely the words she used.

Women come and they want fresh paint.

But the wind has a different smell here. In North Dakota it always smelled like dirt. Even in the middle of winter with all that snow there could still be the smell of dirt in the air. As if the wind came from some open place that never froze. But here (Montana) the wind smells like the mountains. Like snow. Like stone. No matter how far away the mountains are, I sill fell them out there. I can't get used to it. I never will. I guess I'm a flatlander at heart.

You should have seen it, Gail,” he said. “By God, it was something. This Minneapolis big shot, this city boy, wouldn’t let up. Kept saying to Pop, ‘Mighty fine boots. Mighty fine. Just hope you’re not tracking in any cow shit with those boots.’ Wouldn’t stop.” “Shhh. Watch your language. David can hear you.” “Just reporting. That’s all. Just saying how it was. Finally Pop says, ‘You don’t let up, I’m going to stick one of these boots up your ass. Then I’m going to track your shit all over this bar.

Deputy sheriff.” He looked down at his shirt as though he expected to see his badge there. “Which I owe to your granddad and your dad. You know what your granddad said it means to be a peace officer in Montana? He said it means knowing when to look and when to look away. Took me a while to learn that.

People are leaving the bar right and left—probably afraid of these wild and woolly cowboys from Montana

Pop says, ‘Now you head on out of here and you better hope the snow covers your tracks because I’m going to finish this whiskey and then I’m coming

Out in Montana you wouldn’t be worth dirtying a man’s hands on. Or his boots. So we’d handle him this way. Nice and clean.

If you don’t like wind,” Grandfather replied, “you don’t like Montana. Because it blows here 360 days a year. Better get used to it.

Norwegian way of keeping all our earthly affairs from achieving too much importance.

was a phrase my mother inherited from her mother. I had heard Grandma Anglund use it for occasions ranging from a scraped knee (mine) to a family burned out of its farm.

On the western edge of the county and extending into two other counties was the Fort Warren Indian Reservation, the rockiest, sandiest, least arable parcel of land in the region. In 1948

Mercer County is in the far northeast corner of Montana,

Looking in the dead bird’s eye, I realized that these strange, unthought-of connections—sex and death, lust and violence, desire and degradation