Touring
Montana's Swan Valley
There are many more places that I’m willing to visit than there are places where I’m willing to dwell. The latter category never exceeds three, but the former is essentially without borders. I’d go to most places, even if only for dinner. Dwelling is different. I’m not as evolved as the average modern American Homo sapien, therefore the bulk of what passes for acceptable to desirable to the majority, such as roads and long lines and miniature golf courses and that malignancy of malignancies, cookie cutter developments, turns my blood to a black oleaginous goop. I need to be in the wild or else I’m as miserable as a mangy coyote.
And I don’t mean as someone passing through like a loose balloon. I mean I like to live in the middle of “nowhere,” a designation for rural paradises that really only accurately applies to airports and to interstates and to chain hotel lobbies. Probably my longest running fantasy is a fishing shack sat down in a meadow with a view of rolling mountains spritzed with tassels of mist, apple trees, a garden, big old deer who practically walk themselves right into the freezer, and a lake blinking blue through a green wall of trees and brush. When I’m down and out and prone to woolgathering, I can practically smell the musk of my lakeside fishing shack where live all my books and the paraphernalia of a life spent out of doors, say a dehydrated grizzly turd so enormous it makes visitors queasy with thoughts of traveling through the back end of a bear in fist-sized chunks. It happens. Bad taxidermy is welcome too as it makes for a fine conversation starter, not that I ever really want conversation, but just in case. Up to a point it is good to have options.
So I was feeling right at home when Miss FPJ and I threw down a tent on the forest floor of the Swan Valley—one of my favorite places on earth—over the weekend. A tent is not a fishing shack, but sometimes it must do. We explored the shores of Holland Lake, picnicking on cheese and crackers and meat sticks and swam in the minty blue waters. Dutch went absolutely berserk chasing sticks. Elsewhere in the state it was oppressively hot, but in the shade of the woods near the lake it was quintessential summer. It had been a long time since I’d relaxed by sitting still, a somewhat foreign condition for me, but the lake hypnotized us each. I settled in and did nothing, though I swore privately to myself that during my next trip to the region I’d cover some big miles in the nearby mountains.
At night deer barked in camp and the moon shone in the meadow where the tent was pitched, the alluring glow like a creeping ghost. Fear of grizzlies worried our minds. We tossed and turned, finally falling into a stone dead sleep. The first morning waking up in the forest, I meandered through tall grasses, a loon called, a sandhill crane flew overhead, a hawk alighted on the tip of a spruce tree giving me the stink eye, the golden barked trees glowed, and the trillions of needles warming in the sun wafted piney aromas into the air. It made me kind of mad with joy. I was hugging massive old ponderosa pines and larches, drinking coffee on stumps, walking decommissioned logging roads with Dutch looking for elusive ungulate tracks, marveling at the way the morning light sifted through the forest—a light that Miss FPJ calls “god light.”
It’s safe to say that the Swan Valley has my heart. It’s a lot like my homeland in the Adirondacks, only with elk, lynx, wolverines, glaciers, and a lot of bears. It’s a place that we haven’t totally pillaged, a place where a human can still feel the sacred power at the core of their being. As much as I would like to dwell there, I don’t. Pay dirt is scarce, it’s far from everyone I know, plus sometimes getting what you want is after all not what you needed, so who knows.
Anyhow, that’s about it for this week. I’m back in the maddening grind of five eleven hour days, my bosom swollen with glee from our camping trip, the course of my life redirected again toward the north star of my dream to live afar in the forest where with fierce burning attention I can occupy stumps and thickets. Below are some photographs I took of the many mysteries in the Swan Valley. It was high summer. It was lovely. The god light shone through. If you want to see what the place looks like in autumn, check out the still shots of Jason Savage. He’s an artist who captures the essential tranquility and grandeur of the Swan. In my fever dream I am the man in the canoe, my favorite shot of Jason’s. That’s where I long to be, moving over flat water like a loon, my head full of gratitude for this careening ball of mud and the chance to be. In fact I am that man. Many of us are, even if we have forgotten the long spell of our union. We are the world, the world is us.
Take care out there, and get outside.
