Over the last dozen years or so my wife and I have made an
annual road trip to Montana. For Western Washington folk, a trip to Montana is
a little like a trip to the Cape for New Englanders. We go ostensibly to fish,
though each year we have done less and less fishing as much as we enjoy it.
Mostly we hang out at a little streamside cabin we rent and go and do things or
visit people, and do a lot of reading. We take our two Blenheim Cavaliers and
they get to run about more than they do in the city.
We go to a little town in southwestern Montana, a few hours
north of Yellowstone. There are a number of good rivers to fish in the
immediate vicinity. The reason we go there is due in part to my wife taking a
three month sabbatical in 2002 and spending it in a camp on the Jefferson River
with a friend’s dog and the works of and a biography of Wallace Stegner. She
became an adopted citizen of the nearby town—the one we now visit—and in the
process became friends with a couple of people we both came to know a bit over
the years.
One you might know if we mentioned her by name, the other
was a local man who had a kind of crafts shop and did some weaving. We went to
the ranch the woman owned in 2004 to get married in a restored schoolhouse on a
bluff overlooking the Bighole River with the weaver officiating.
Last year is the last time we will have seen either of them
in Montana. Our minister/weaver had a heart attack the previous year and in the
process of recovery wrought some changes in his life. Last year his shop was
closed the whole time we were there.
Our other friend showed up last week in my wife’s office.
She was in town closing out some business about the sale of her ranch. She had
had it on the market for several years. It was not easy to keep it going and Montana
winters are hard. I wouldn’t want to face one in a small cabin miles from
anything, and she has a few years on me.
I think it is good for her to have sold it despite deep
attachments that must have made it very difficult. She will probably revel in
the freedom to go places.
She’ll miss it, too, as will we. Once this happened, I
realized that she has been a very big part of why we trek to that particular
little town in that corner of Big Sky country. We didn’t spend a lot of time
with her, but the time we spent was special.
And as if to put a cap on the whole thing, the couple who
rented us the streamside cabin we used for the last several years announced
their retirement this year. Someone else will be managing the rentals they had
so the cabin is still available, but it really feels like our annual pilgrimage
is over. Time to go somewhere else.
