My own private Montana

When Sunday evening arrives and I’ve had a particularly rough weekend––whether I’m feeling a touch threadbare or entirely spent––I hop in the car and drive up the east side of Flathead Lake. Somewhere along Highway 35, past Finley Point and Skidoo Bay, the black asphalt emerges from snow-covered cherry orchards and drops down out of the wooded foothills to run within mere feet of the lake. Three or four wide spots in the road provide access and vistas that go on forever, but my favorite has to be the pullout at mile marker 12. Ten feet down a slippery path from the road, a thin sliver of loose rock fans out from a tangle of downed tree branches and a miniature waterfall waxes and wanes with meltwater runoff.

Tonight is the kind of night that takes me to mile marker 12. Between legitimate obligations, a head cold, and my general proclivity for overcommitment, I haven’t found enough free minutes to scrape together to plan a proper excursion this weekend––but the need to breath fresh air and not think about my to-do list is real, so I fill my car’s petrol tank, shift into drive, and only stop to think once my boots are six inches deep in water and the roar of the cascade drowns out the sounds of the occasional passing car. 

I have a book in hand but I’m not sure why. The sun is already well on its way down and I can see headlights flickering across the water from the far side of the lake as vehicles rush between Polson and Kalispell during the dinner hour. A snowflake touches down on a flat black rock beside me and vanishes, and seconds later some pernicious overhanging tree dumps a pocket of icewater down the back of my neck. Everything is wet; snow is still falling, but unusually warm temperatures have melted much of the snowpack and turned the whole beach into one single horizontal waterfall. I cross into the middle of it and sit on a fallen log, studying the eddies and whorls of water over rock, studying the fingers of fog reaching down the mountains behind me and the textured clouds hanging over Matterhorn Point, and studying the constellation of lights marking Blue Bay Campground as they emerge from the deepening dusk. 

My own business seems unimportant out here, only twenty minutes from home. In this one corner of Montana, where I can go on grand adventure after grand adventure every weekend for years without repeating a single hike, it’s comforting to have a favorite spot close by. This roadside curve of slick rock and dark water has been mine since I first moved to Montana a little over a year ago; on my way back from walking the Swan River Nature Trail in Bigfork, I pulled over to read a couple of text messages, found a gap in the highway railing, and the rest is history. It was winter then as it is winter now, and I know from the occasional broken beer bottle and the exposed root I use for a handhold climbing down––worn smooth by other peoples’ hands––that I shouldn’t really call this place mine. During daylight hours in summer there is almost always a car parked on the highway shoulder nearby, and the forces which drive me out of the house leave me averse to sharing my hideaway with others. 

Any sense of ownership I feel is built on myth, but I feel it nonetheless. There is a certain sense of pride in having found myself a hideaway, and in knowing that certain places hold the power to hurt, or heal. A certain sense of rightness. And on days or weekends when we feel low and miserable, maybe all we need is a touch of rightness in our lives.

My own private Montana