Love Note To A Montana Trail
Richard Manning is an environmental author and journalist, with particular interest in the history and future of the American prairie, agriculture and poverty. He lives in Missoula, Montana.
The trailhead is hopelessly thronged this morning, and I blame the pandemic for this, an evidence-based conclusion. On normal mornings, to the degree I can recall normal, there’d be a car or two here at midmorning. I know, because I am here every day about now. But this morning, maybe a dozen cars. As I say, thronged, fifteen people or so spread on a network of maybe four or five winding miles of trail. Some calibration may be necessary here for those accustomed to denser population. I am not. This is my world, and these few cars are enough for me to invoke Yogi Berra’s most carefully crafted non-sequitur: “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.”
No matter. I happen to be wealthy beyond all imagination, and we wealthy folks have options. More calibration is in order: My wealth is untrammeled by cold, hard cash. I am a writer by trade and am, where balance sheets and profit-and-loss statements are concerned, pathetic. But I live in a Montana city peopled by 100,000 or so mostly like-minded folks in a house well within city limits in a Brady Bunch subdivision. There’s a public trail a half block from my house that jumps straight up a mountain to open space four blocks away. From here, my boots can find a connected skein of foot trails that might take me as far as Canada if I so wish, a couple hundred miles away, walking public lands, most of it wilderness, legally, formally, blessedly designated so, all the way. Rattlesnake National Recreation Area and Wilderness, Mission Mountains Wilderness, Bob Marshall, Glacier Park, gems threaded on a single string of trails. Wealth beyond imagination.
Pay no mind to the throngs. I know there is an empty trailhead a mile from my house, empty because the trail itself runs straight up a shaded gulch. Our Northern Rockies spring is this year capricious (a statement as meaningful as saying our water is this year wet) and has left this gulch trail looking like a professionally iced luge course, wind-polished to a shine, so nobody goes there anymore.
I snap a set of crampons over running shoes, and presto: superpowers to transport me to solitude. Worth the trouble, I know, because at the top of the ridge, after maybe a mile of ice, the April sun has stripped the south-facing slopes of winter’s burdens. Bunch grasses poke from the duff below a colonnade of ponderosa pine. Two turkeys flap over me scouting nest sites. A few bent yellow fritillaries and buttercups offer precocious blooms. Below, in the city, the pandemic pall covers our town like all towns, like a suffocating glacial sheet, but here life emerges. It is spring. It is normal. Is this what I have come for? Succor derived from bunnies and Bambis and such? Look again.
Pay attention. This is the first rule of the wild. (The writer Roberto Calasso says prayer is another word for attention.) All around, the landscape is shrouded with majestic snags, deadfall, detritus, beetle kill, fire scars, the dead and dying in decay. Spend enough time in living forest and you come to realize most of it is dead. So why do I come daily to this place draped in death and dying to settle myself from the mortal fear now general among our people? It’s a good question, and one that can only be answered over the course of a lifetime of wandering wild places on public lands. Spend long enough here and one comes to accept that death and life are not separate states of being. It’s not a matter of life or death; it is a matter of life and death. It requires a lot of trail miles to grasp the wonder of this idea, maybe sixty years or so of walking, but it’s worth the trek. The answer confers wealth beyond imagination.
So many of our country’s parks and public lands written about in these love notes would not exist but for the Land and Water Conservation Fund. It’s why Congress should fund the program permanently. Follow the movement along at #FundLWCF. Learn more here.
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