Home sweet home

It’s always good to get back home to Montana.

I can’t understand why anyone would want to live anywhere else.

Sure, it was -22 the morning after we got back from Seattle, but it was a dry cold.

The lush green Pacific Northwest offers a pleasant respite from winter in Montana, however it comes with a price: swarms of people everywhere, and bumper-to-bumper traffic. Let them keep their fresh oysters, Space Needle, and Seahawks. I’ll take Montana any day.

I still honk when I return from a trip and see a “Welcome to Montana” sign just like I did last week after cresting Lookout Pass. Traffic was light on the interstate all the way into Missoula, lighter in fact than it had been anywhere since leaving the state a week earlier.

Barb and I spent the night in the Garden City and ate dinner at a McKenzie River Pizza there. The place was packed with folks wearing Grizzly gear and I was a bit ill at ease in my Bobcat T-shirt, but nobody accosted me.

The next morning we headed up Highway 200 toward Rogers Pass, following the Blackfoot River much of the way. We saw a couple hundred elk in three big groups grazing close to the road, there were whitetail deer everywhere, and the coyotes were cleaning up on roadkill.

The highway was icy up to the pass, but relatively clear and dry from there through Great Falls and nearly to Havre. Then it got a bit Western, the temperature dropped, the wind picked up, and it began snowing sideways.

We stopped for a bite to eat in Havre and ran into some Hutterite friends in the restaurant. Montana is, after all, just a small town.

Two hours later we were home. It had snowed during our absence and there were fresh deer tracks in the yard and along the unshoveled walk. Everywhere I’ve lived in Montana I’ve had critters in the yard – moose in Cooke City, bears in Livingston and Bozeman, deer in Malta.

I’ve always heard Montana’s cold weather keeps out the riff-raff, but I’ve been here for years now so that can’t be entirely true. Snow and bitter cold seem a small price to pay to live here.

Apparently, however, it’s too steep a price for most folks, and for that I’m very grateful.

A milder climate appeals to more folks than a chilly one. Good thing for me.

Parker Heinlein is at [email protected].