When I left Virginia on Thursday morning, it was from Dulles International Airport. Out there the land is flat (aside for a few narrowly-enclosed hills the locals in all seriousness call ‘mountains’), and the suburbs of D.C. sprawl indecently across northern Virginia. Aside from the brief glorious burst of fragrance that is the area’s cherry blossom spring, the city smells of politics and bureaucracy, an odor perhaps fitting of the area’s history as a swamp, and real wilderness is nowhere to be found. Even Shenandoah National Park, a little over an hour away, is constantly in view of farmlands and other signs of civilization, and a day’s hiking through it means crossing a road several times. And when it snows, traffic shuts down to a crawling, petrified near-standstill. Newspapers talk about software firms, immense business developments, national politics, and the occasional gang crime in D.C.
When I finally land in Missoula and begin the drive to Hamilton, my hometown, there’s snow on the mountains, which tower much closer and higher than I realized growing up among them. Half an hour’s drive away lies an immense wilderness of pine forests, mountains, and old dirt hiking trails. Snow can pile up in drifts and people still speed, trucks are everywhere, and people will nod and smile when you pass them on the sidewalks. Then there are the stores: bit and tackle shops, tanning shops (that’s turning animal hides into leather, not sunlamps and orange twenty-somethings), gun stores (two for a town of 4,000), other stores that also sell guns (like K-mart), saddle shops, and “western art” shops with their paintings of bald eagles, bronze moose, and chainsaw-carved wooden bears. There are the rednecks, with trucks and gun racks and loud country music. There are the outdoorsy middle-class types moving in from California and the east coast for the skiing, hunting, fishing, hiking, mountain biking, and assorted other wilderness activities in the area. There are the local craftsmen, who might as likely as not call you at the last minute to tell you they can’t fix your plumbing problem until next week because they’re going to be flyfishing. There are the uneducated laborers who never went to college, not because they lacked the drive, but because out here, you don’t need nobody or nothing else. And as for our newspapers: today’s front page headline at the Ravalli Republic was “Mountain Lion Attacks Dog, Horse.”
These are all things I never noticed growing up, because for me, this was simply how the world was. Racism was generally limited to Native Americans, simply because very few other minorities had made it to our small town, and those who had were the fairly well off sorts who could afford to move there. It was perfectly normal for kindly and generous people to put up signs saying “we shoot survivors” as a joke, and to only be mostly joking. If you couldn’t safely and reasonably accurately fire a rifle by age twelve, you were probably from California (ie, anywhere outside of the rural northwest). Hunting wasn’t so much a hobby as a near-universal means of getting meat, and killing a first deer was a coming of age experience for most boys and quite a few girls. We had steak or hamburger two or three times a week, and nearly all of it we had killed ourselves or received from a friend who had. I don’t recall ever buying beef. Summer barbecues meant a collection of game, provided by each family: deer steaks, elk steaks, moose burgers, smoked duck and salmon, roast grouse, antelope filets, even the occasional bear sausage.
Then there were of course the outsiders/city people/Californians, universally (in our eyes) ignorant, and begging to be messed with. I recall a local high school teacher’s story about meeting a man on a bus going west through Montana. The man was born and raised in New York City, and the barren prairies of eastern Montana were utterly foreign to him. The New Yorker asked some of the cliched city people questions, such as whether or not we had power and running water, and if we still rode horses to school and work. The teacher, being fast on his feet, confirmed all of these misconceptions, and went further: see those patches on the outside of the bus? he said. Those are arrow marks from the Indians, who sometimes set up ambushes along this route. The man was visibly shaken.
When I left for college in northern Virginia, I began to learn the world was not in fact all like us. For one thing, for quite a few Virginians and other easterners, the Civil War was still important. We knew about it, of course–many of the famous Indian-fighters had gotten their chops in the Civil War. But to still be arguing about it? The idea was completely foreign to me: the sole content of “local history” in my home town, prior to 1900, are the Indians and Lewis and Clark, who camped along the river which now runs through town. That something over a century gone could still matter was fascinating to me. I was later to find, in Europe and the middle east, a wide collection of prejudices and controversies far older.
I also learned that even if men are created equal, they are rarely created alike, and the world beats them into different shapes according to their surroundings. I found the people of the D.C. area upper-middle class to be driven, ambitious, and busy. Clothing stores in the mall sold t-shirts for over sixty dollars (!) and jeans with fake holes in them (I’m starting to see these showing up in Montana, but mostly a hole means plenty of wear and a few too many barbed-wire fences). Education was more important, self-sufficiency less. People had a superstitious fear of nature, and the woods made them nervous, despite a pronounced lack of man-eating wildlife (the small, flighty, and far-between eastern black bears don’t stand much comparison to the western Grizzlies, I’m afraid). On the other hand, they’re also less likely to shoot squirrels, rabbits, stray dogs, tourists, and other wildlife, and less likely to see dynamite as a proper method for both fishing and logging.
All in all, I always enjoy coming back to Montana. There’s a lot of the local culture I don’t identify with–logging contests, anti-intellectualism, truck envy, young marriage, and country music, to name a few–but overall I find a lot to respect here. Here, it’s still fairly common for a growing boy to learn how to fix a car, build a building, chop firewood, shoot a gun, skin an animal, and sleep in the woods: skills growing rare in our increasingly urbanized society. Here, you depend on yourself, your family, and your friends rather than on your company or your government. Here, a boy isn’t a man until he can take care of himself. And that, I think, is something to be proud of.
To find my kind of alternative, go back to the good old days. No, not the good old days where everybody lived in a cabin in the woods. I mean back to the days when cabins were unheard of, and we humans ranged the earth with everything we owned on our backs and horses, and the natural world was still a dangerous place. In other words, when our sense of community and place was not defined by a physical location (cabin or otherwise), but rather by those we were with and the contributions we ourselves could make to the group. It’s hard to make a mansion from a tent, so one’s “place” in a community was defined by merit: the greatest hunter, the wisest woman, and the oldest members of the tribe, in a time when old age was only possible with wisdom, talent, and strength.