Moving Back to Montana

by John Burbidge

My mother cried the day I moved away. In the driveway of our suburban Minneapolis home, as I threw what now seems like a small amount of baggage into the back of a stranger’s pickup, she clutched me. “I’m not ready,” she sobbed. 

But I was. So ready, in fact, I’d picked the University of Montana without even visiting Missoula on a map, much less in person. I was 18 years old that day in 1983, and not a scrap of reluctance remained on my adolescent plate.

When I arrived in Missoula two days later, I didn’t even unpack before I bought a six-pack and climbed to the ‘M.’ Sitting on the cool-white cement and gazing out over the broad, green valley, I slowly began bathing myself in the rapture of a new friend for all the years ahead. Not Montana—just Missoula. This spot, this exact place. Finally, at the end of all my high school insecurities, I had arrived at a certainty. 

* * *

I almost cried 14 years later when I moved away from Missoula. Well, let me amend that: I didn’t almost cry when I left Missoula as much as when I pulled into Helena on a stunningly dreary January day. As I drove down Sixth Street through Last Chance Gulch toward my newly rented apartment, my chest tightened with a distinct physical longing for Missoula’s vibe. The gray, alien air of Helena seemed draped with cobwebs.

Helena sucks, everybody knows that—especially everybody in Missoula. Helena has boring bars, a conservative community, lame skiing and no whitewater. My own Helena experience was limited to one pass-through in 14 years, but when I started telling my Missoula friends I was moving, their snide commentary cast a gloomy shadow on my plans. One who used to live there kept referring to it as Hell-ena. No job, he said, is worth the drudgery of Helena.

A job, yes, the real culprit; a desk job that required a degree. After a decade of post-college painting work in Missoula, I was tired. Tired of battling the natural elements outside and the chemical elements inside; ready to sit down somewhere and get paid to breathe easy.

But Missoula, as everybody knows, suffers a despicable lack of decent-paying professional opportunities. Like me, most of my college friends had collected their diplomas and then scattered into blue-collar occupations. The jobs allowed us to stay in Missoula and keep living the life: Skiing, climbing, kayaking, hunting, fishing, and drinking. Our devotion to the cause was hardly dampened by the fact that few single women existed in Missoula for early-30s guys earning a hard-wrought living and doing a lot of hardcore goofing off. 

I’d gotten lucky, though, and hooked up with a 27-year-old graduate student. Perhaps it was the way Claire fell so unashamedly in love with a housepainter that prompted me to respond to a job advertisement for an editor of outdoor books with Falcon Publishing in Helena. Falcon hired me, and that’s how I came to be driving through Last Chance Gulch on this depressing January day. Even Claire wasn’t there to console me; she had to stay in Missoula until May to finish her degree. May? If this real-job business proved to be a false god, I’d be back in Missoula long before May.

* * *

I did not come close to crying the day I moved out of Helena two years later, but there is no question as to my melancholy when I drove through Last Chance Gulch for the final time, headed for the interstate. I thought about the despair I’d felt on that dark, damp January day when I first arrived; now those thoughts warmed my face just a tiny bit with embarrassment.

If there is a debate over which city is better, Missoula or Helena, consider it settled. Helena wins. Missoula gets ribbons for hip bars, excellent restaurants, and a vibrant downtown, while Helena collects prizes for having nice neighborhoods, affordable homes and professional job opportunities. 

So why Helena? Start with the premise that any town worth living in has its own mountain. Missoula has Mount Sentinel looming above the UM campus; Mount Helena rises similarly from the city’s central streets. And the fact is that Mount Helena rules over Mount Sentinel as a peaceful, natural playground. Hiking trails wind pleasantly through the woods, as opposed to aggressively zigzagging up a bare face. Top that off with a superior summit—Mount Helena’s craggy limestone perch versus Sentinel’s rutted dirt road—and kerpow, ooof! Missoula just smacked the mat.

* * *

However melancholy I felt pulling out of Helena that morning, I could only shake my head four hours later when Claire and I pulled into Rudyard, a small town on the Hi-Line where Claire had been offered her first teaching job. “Rudyard,” the sign on the highway advertised. “596 Nice People—1 Old Sorehead!” Better make that two, I thought.

If a town with a mountain is what you’re looking for, then you couldn’t do worse than Rudyard. If, on the other hand, you want to be hemmed in on all sides by private land in the form of wheat fields—well, then Rudyard is perfect.

But it would be disingenuous of me to completely hammer Rudyard. I didn’t hate it; in fact I almost reveled in the desolation, the boredom, the wind and the cold. No more Missoula hippies drinking daddy’s money, no more Helena government workers and their cushy-job mentality. Rudyard embodied the “real” Montana; after 16 years, I was finally seeing it for myself.

And the people were nice. They welcomed us into their community, invited us to join the darts and bowling leagues, and proved to be well-traveled, intelligent conversationalists quite unlike anything I ever expected. And on the rare occasions when one of them would ask, “So, how do you like it up here?” I would say I like it a lot, the Hi-Line is a very nice place. They would smile and nod with complete understanding: You hate it here and you want to leave. I did not hate it. But I cannot deny my eyes were 100 percent dry two years later when I drove away from Rudyard in a loaded U-Haul truck.

Life on the Hi-Line had proved exactly as advertised: The population is draining away, the schools are closing and consolidating, and the small towns located every six miles along Highway 2 are dying because the best and brightest grow up and graduate and move away. Few ever move back. 

That said, the Hi-Line was good to me and Claire. I was able to take classes at MSU-Northern in Havre and earn enough credits for a teaching certificate, while also maintaining my full-time job with Falcon through the wonders of telecommuting. The school district supplied us with an almost-free apartment, and the end result was two full-time incomes going straight into the bank with very little to spend it on. 

We were saving for a house, of course—but not in Rudyard. Somewhere in the regular world. So as the spring of our second year approached, we watched for teaching jobs in Helena and Missoula. Nothing opened up, but one day we saw a job that fit Claire’s qualifications perfectly; thing was, the school was on an island in Washington, about two hours north of Seattle. From the dry, desolate view of the Hi-Line, an island in Puget Sound evoked green and luscious visions. We had a tangible thirst for something different, so with a what-the-heck attitude Claire sent in her application. Soon she had a job offer, and after a surprisingly small amount of discussion, we decided to move away from Montana. After all, we reasoned, Montana wasn’t going anywhere. We could always move back.

***

“Moving back is a mistake,” Glen said. It was four years later, and I had the fever bad.

“Why?”

“Because you’re romanticizing it, just like I did. But when I moved back, I kept thinking I just don’t fit in anymore. In your mind you’ve moved on, and you can’t move back.”

Like me, Glen had spent two decades in Montana as a young man. He scratched out a living as a freelance journalist. Eventually he tired of being broke and took a job in Miami with a saltwater-fishing magazine owned by a media conglomerate. He missed Montana, though, and when the opportunity finally arose to return, he moved back. Two years later he moved away again, and now he lives in New Jersey, writing online copy for a jewelry wholesaler. It made zero sense to me, but he sounded genuinely happy.

“Just do me a favor,” he said. “Before you move back, go visit. You’ll see what I’m talking about.”

Another friend, Jeff, issued a similar warning. Jeff had been the art director at Falcon but now lives in Seattle, working for a publisher downtown while his wife does contract work for Microsoft. 

“We considered moving back a few years ago,” he said. “Then we went to visit. I remember how we drove into Helena in July and it was so hot and brown, and nobody was around, and we were driving past all those casinos on the strip . . .” He paused. “It was sort of depressing, to be honest.”

* * *

As much as I did not want to see what they were talking about, I kept thinking maybe they’re right. I mean if you want paradise, we found paradise: Whidbey Island. We lucked into a comfortable house just up the street from a nice walking beach, and from our deck we enjoy expansive views of the water, the San Juan Islands, even the Coast Range in Canada on really clear days. The fact that a bum like me ended up with a view like that almost defies explanation. And mountains? We’re sandwiched right between the Olympics and Cascades. And then there’s Seattle a mere two hours away, where cultural opportunities abound. Why am I so obsessed with the idea that I need to be in Montana, I have to live there? What is it about that place that refuses to stop tormenting my soul?

* * *

But when you’re offered the same advice twice, ignoring it only cements the fact that you’re in denial. So I did go visit. And in my mind, I was fully prepared to feel disillusioned and disenfranchised. It’s possible I was even rooting for that scenario so I could kill this nagging notion once and for all. 

For two weeks Claire and I, along with our new daughter Catherine, traveled all the old roads. We visited Missoula, where a couple dozen friends threw a party. We visited Helena, where we hiked to the summit of Mount Helena and tried to find the exact spot among the sharp limestone where I kneeled seven years before and proposed to Claire. In the distance we saw the St. Helena Cathedral where we were married, and over in the other direction the meadow where we had our reception. And although Claire had always been lukewarm to my suggestions of moving back, I could tell she felt connected to that special time in our lives, and if the right job opportunities appeared she might consider moving back. She would not be a sucker for Montana, but Helena meant more.

From there we drove up the Rocky Mountain Front, and the jolt of seeing those mountains jut from the earth proved as soul-shaking as ever. In Choteau we found the city park where we’d camped free in the past, and it was there my irrationality started to make sense. It wasn’t just the friends, it was the familiarity. It was that I’d spent 18 years of my life becoming part of this place, and then I’d thrown it all away.

Go visit Montana, they said, so I did. And it made me want to move back more than ever.

* * *

It’s a funny thing when you move away. You start buying the Montana books, reading the Montana magazines, finally appreciating all that precious pontificating you didn’t have a whole lot of time for when you actually lived there. Move away from Montana and you fall victim to the myth, even though you know better than to make such a costly miscalculation.

And that’s the question—how much is Montana worth, in actual dollars and cents? It’s two years later and we still haven’t moved back. We have two kids now and we need to carefully weigh not only how much we will sacrifice, but how much they will sacrifice as well. We’re having a tough-enough time saving for college—what’s going to happen if we cut our wages back to Montana levels? You can’t eat the scenery, and you can’t put it toward tuition, either. And in exchange there is no guarantee I will be able to teach my children to love the emptiness, the openness, and the truly wild places that exist in Montana.

When I think about those things, I don’t want to move back anymore. I know it makes far more sense to stay on this idyllic island in our nice house—a house we can afford—and be thankful for our blessed lives.

* * * 

“What about Bozeman?” Claire asked one day.

I drew back in surprise. Bozeman? Please. Every trendy type who moves to Montana moves to Bozeman.

She registered my distasteful look, then shrugged. “At least there would be a lot of new things to do.” She walked away and left me thinking Bozeman? God save me from Bozeman.

My distrust of Bozeman goes back to the mid-80s when it was known as a redneck town with an agricultural college. Of course everybody knows Bozeman is different these days—different in a way that attracts trendy types. Meaning these days you can just forget about Bozeman.

But for some reason I didn’t forget about Bozeman. Claire wasn’t stupid, she knew about Bozeman. But she also knew that moving back to Montana was moving back in our lives, a direction that could easily yield a rotten crop of disappointment if not cultivated with care. Now if we could find a way to move back and still move forward, at least a little . . . well, that could be just the nourishment a dying idea needed.

So I started looking into Bozeman. No truly urban mountain, but many high peaks at close range. Dozens of fresh trails nearby, two ski areas to explore, floatable rivers running every which way; the more I found out about this place I’d always pointedly ignored, the better it sounded. Housing prices are ridiculous, of course, but not so bad when you’re riding into town armed with a hundred-grand worth of West Coast equity. You know, just like all the other wannabes.

Ah, what the hell. Sometimes the only solution is to become part of the problem. Slide over, Bozemanites, us newcomers want some of what you have. We’re moving back.

POSTSCRIPT: After this story was published we did in fact move back--to Helena! :)