Showing my tree rings

Wendell: It’s a mess, ain’t it, sheriff?
Ed Tom Bell: If it ain’t, it’ll do till the mess gets here.
No Country for Old Men

That line from that great movie came to my head as I got up this morning and walked through our house. We are eye-high in boxes everywhere, and are eating off paper plates with sporks.

Tuesday morning the movers come, and on Saturday, we will wake up for the first time as Boulderites, Coloradans. I’ll still be a Montana blogger, but will slowly fade from the scene, and the 200 or so people who come here (who are you?!?) will fade out too. Hopefully there is as lively a community of Colorado bloggers as in Montana. But as a newbie, I’ll have to be withdrawn and observant and mind my manners.

Yeah. Right.

Some Montana observations:

People come here to slow down, and many of those who come from the bigger cities looking for for the quiet life often find that they don’t like the quiet life. It ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. But our group of friends here in Bozeman like it here, and none want to leave. It’s got everything – mountains and trails and coffee shops and restaurants, skiing, high-tech businesses and a college. And, it has a prominent and vocal far-right subset encircling a smaller liberal group comprised of college professors and adjuncts and granolas. The latter don’t like being represented in Helena by the likes of Roger Koopman and Scott Sales. Drives ’em batty.

If Missoula were excised from Montana, what remained would be Utah without those batty Mormons. It’s mostly a right-wing state, with remnants of union Democrats in Butte. For some reason, the Farmer-Labor movement never really took hold in Montana. The state voted Democrat one time in my memory – 1992 for Bill Clinton, but then only with 37.6% of the vote. A former blogger once observed how Montanans like Bill Clinton. No, they don’t, really.

I have often wondered about the future here, whether with climate change the non-pine-beetled forests are going to burn, leaving us with a Nevada-scape. But then, long before my time, western Montana was decimated by conflagration-like forest fires. Look back to 1910, 1914, 1917, 1919, 1925, 1926, 1929 … there’s a roadless area up by Missoula called the “Great Burn”, where forest fires decimated the area, and it reseeded, and forests fires decimated the saplings, and nothing was left. There’s been regrowth since -it’s a beautiful area.

The point is that we tend to think of good times as normal times. Drought is as common in this state as moist years, perhaps even more the norm. We were hiking last Sunday and came across a tree that was cut down to clear the trail. It happened to be about as old as me, and so I looked over the tree rings for good years and bad. Parts of the fifties and sixties were good, the seventies, too. But mostly those rings were sliver-thin.

It’s a drought-prone state. Eastern Montana is a poverty belt. It’s a resource colony, and the Republican majority seems to like it that way. They even once gave us a governor who begged to be a “lapdog” to industry. Until that attitude changes, until unions return, until Democrats put forward a new Thomas Towe, there will not be much change here.

But it’s a good place to be. It’s out-of-the-way, and the major problems of the cities are absent. Montana is far away from 9-11, smog and smug and traffic. Why we want to move away from the good and towards s&s&t – has to do with grandkids. Nothing more. Were it not for that, we would have stayed and had our ashes scattered somewhere in the Beartooths.

Still might.