BOOKPATHS

Missoula, Montana

Rick Bass explains why he lives in Missoula, Montana.

More than any city or town I’ve known, Missoula balances out-of-door attractions and the arts. Missoula has hundreds, maybe thousands, of artists and writers, in part—but by no means exclusively—because of the university. It’s got a great library and great bookstores: Fact & Fiction, Shakespeare & Co., the Book Exchange, to name but a few. There’s a symphony, a children’s theater and numerous art galleries. And yet there’s healthy dirt between the cracks. The nightly river-rushing winds of Hellgate Canyon keep most things scoured clean.

Montana

Andrew Rosenheim explains why A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean, is his “book of a lifetime.”

“When his wife Jessie died, Norman was for a time at sea – drinking too much, volatile. Then his children suggested he write down the stories of Montana he had told them at bedtime.” – from “Book of a Lifetime: A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean,” by Andrew Rosenheim, The Independent

Western Montana

The Blackfoot River, sometimes called the Big Blackfoot River to distinguish it from the Little Blackfoot River, is a snow-fed and spring-fed freshwater river in the American state of Montana. The Blackfoot River begins in western Montana 10 miles northeast of the town of Lincoln, then flows westward through the town of Milltown, Montana. It continues flowing westward, and enters the Clark Fork River approximately five miles east of the city of Missoula. – from Wikipedia

A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, by Norman Maclean (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001; first published in 1976)

Written at age 70 for his children “who wanted him “to put down in writing some of the stories I had told them when they were young,” Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It is about memory. Beautifully written, funny at times, but also poignant and tragic, Maclean’s novella recalls ties to family, fly-fishing, and the Montana rivers and creeks, particularly the Big Blackfoot River, where he often fished with his father and brother when young and alone as he aged. Readers leave the pages of A River Runs Through It, moving on to the remaining stories in the collection, a little better for having traveled through its pages.

Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters. – from A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean

Publisher’s Website

Yaak Valley, Montana

"January 20 -- A driving snowstorm, big flakes blowing past, crashing into the woods, swirling in the meadows. They are the currency of winter, and I am the richest man in the world." -- from Winter : Notes from Montana, by Rick Bass

Winter : Notes from Montana, by Rick Bass (Boston : A Mariner Book, Houghton Mifflin, 1991)

"We knew immediately that this was where we wanted to live, where we had always wanted to live. We had never felt such magic." -- from Winter : Notes from Montana, by Rick Bass

Rich Bass has written about his life in northwest Montana for almost twenty years. In Winter : Notes from Montana readers share his first winter in the Yaak Valley, "up in Montana's Purcell Mountains." We learn how he and Elizabeth found their "artist's retreat," far from their southern roots, and then follow their day-to-day lives in journal entries, beginning on September 13, "the first overcast day. Wonderful and gray and cold and heavy with moisture." The last entry is on March 14, with signs of spring, "snow still in the fields, but...patches of earth too," a warm sun, "almost hot." But, it is the Montana winter -- cold, harsh, challenging, beautiful -- that is at the book's center. As Bass learns about the winter valley, the people, animals, weather, he also learns about himself, "how to take apart a generator," "how to file a saw," and that he truly belongs in this "world of woods and of this valley."

"September 24 -- The town of Yaak -- the mercantile and the Dirty Shame Saloon, plus the two open-to-the elements pay phones (with a stump beneath each phone to use as a stool) -- is only six miles north of our cabin. Yaak itself is right up on the Canadian line, on the banks of the Yaak River, which is lovely and slow, meandering through willows and meadows." -- from Winter : Notes from Montana, by Rick Bass

March 14 -- Winter covers some things and reveals others. I admire the weasels, the rabbits, and the other wild creatures that can change with the seasons, that can change almost overnight. It's taken me a long time to change completely -- thirty years -- but now that I've changed, I don't have an interest in turning back.

I won't be leaving this valley. -- from Winter : Notes from Montana, by Rick Bass

Help Protect the Yaak Valley
http://www.yaakvalley.org/

"I've learned things over the course of this winter, this dream season, and have forgotten other things, old things that I'll no longer be needing." -- from Winter : Notes from Montana, by Rick Bass

BOOKPATH: Montana

In the Moon of the Red Ponies, by James Lee Burke (New York : Simon and Schuster, 2004)

James Lee Burke's In the Moon of the Red Ponies offers readers a compelling plot, characters that make the book hard to put down, and a captivating sense of place. Missoula is at the center of the mystery's landscape, but the story ranges beyond, reaching north into the Flathead Indian Reservation, south to the Bitterroot Valley, and east along the Blackfoot River. Rivers, mountains, lakes, valleys, give readers a sense of the expanse and beauty of this place. In the Moon of the Red Ponies is a surprising read; it's a mystery with a political conscience, social awareness, a spiritual thread, and a love of the land.

If you're in Missoula, you can tour the book's landscape, beginning with a walk in downtown Missoula where fiction and place interweave. In In the Moon of the Red Ponies, Billy Bob Holland's law office is in Courthouse Square; his son, Lucas, attends the University of Montana; and locals gather beside the Clark's Fork River. If you're hungry, you may want to stop in at The Oxford Bar, "whose doors," according to Holland, "have stayed open since 1891." You can climb to the "M" on Mt. Sentinel or follow a trail along Rattlesnake Creek where "Amber lived with her widowed father, the senator...."

Just north of Missoula is political activist and murder suspect Johnny American Horse's Jocko Valley in the Flathead Indian Reservation. You can imagine his house along the Jocko River, "tea-colored in the early spring, later boiling with snowmelt, in the summer undulating like satin over beaver-cut cottonwoods and heavy pink and gray boulders."

Travel south into the Bitterroot Valley at least as far as Stevensville, the fictional site for Karsten Mabus's shady doings at Global Research. Along the way, you'll pass through "the little town of Lolo" and enjoy the beauty of the "crest of the Bitterroots," the Bitterroot River, and the valley itself. Both the fictional Billy Bob Holland, along with his wife, Temple, and the author, James Lee Burke, call the valley home.

Heading back to Missoula, you may want to take a detour along Highway 12, following it as far as Lolo Pass at the Montana-Idaho border. Holland takes this drive in In the Moon of the Red Ponies, "along Lolo Creek through mountains and patches of meadowland that were a dark green from evening shade and the wheel lines spraying creekwater above the alfalfa. It was the same route Meriwether Lewis, William Rogers Clark, and the young Indian woman Sacagawea had taken to Oregon...." You'll see Lolo Peak, "massive and snowcapped against the sky." At the border, where fires cause for hazy Missoula skies in the mystery, turn around and backtrack to Missoula.

East of Missoula, Highway 200 follows the Blackfoot River out of town. The self-proclaimed "changed" Wyatt Dixon's house, set "on a grassy bench north of a sawmill and an unused railroad trestle," is easily pictured from the book's description. "Several years back," we read, "an ice jam had crashed through the cottonwoods, sweeping away the owner's truck, automobile, and machine shop, depositing great chunks of frozen flotsam inside the downstairs of the main house," but Wyatt moved in, stringing "canvass over the holes" and "mov[ing] into the upstairs." At the end of In the Moon of the Red Ponies, The Blackfoot is the place to fish "for German browns."

Travel a little farther on Highway 200, turn north onto Highway 83, and you'll pass other places important to the book's landscape, including Seeley Lake, the Swan Mountains, where Johnny American Horse had "built a sweat lodge...and fasted and prayed on the banks of a creek," and the Swan River. If time allows, plan to hike into The Bob Marshall Wilderness, where Johnny American Horse "wandered deeper..., climbing to the top of the Grand Divide, from which he could see Marias Pass and the ancient home of the Blackfoot Indians. Farther East, beyond the roll of the plains, was the home of the Crow, the Northern Cheyenne, and the Oglala Sioux...." And other destinations from the book's pages may pull you to sites I haven't mentioned.

In the Moon of the Red Ponies is a perfect summer read and bookpath. The book's sense of place alerts us to the landscape, while traveling through the book's setting helps bring the book alive.

So maybe this story is actually about the presence of courage, self-sacrifice, and humility in people from whom we don't expect those qualities. -- from In the Moon of the Red Ponies, by James Lee Burke

The river was low, the coppery color of tarnished pennies, the scales of hellgrammites wrapped like spiderweb on the great round boulders that jutted out of the current. Right at sunset the browns would take an elk-hair caddis or blond wolf with such hunger and force they would slap water up on the bank. But German browns begin spawning not long after Labor Day, so we kept none of the fish we caught and instead replaced them in the river, holding their fat bellies cupped in our palms, while they rested bursting with roe, their gills pulsing, waiting to reenter the current and disappear beneath the reflections of sky, trees, and human faces that can appear and dissolve more quickly than the blink of an eye." -- from In the Moon of the Red Ponies, by James Lee Burke

(Thanks to Jim for recommending this one.)