Natalie Helser: An exuberant learner

Natalie Helser settles herself on the seat of a horse-drawn plow and clicks her tongue. Arnica and Lucy, two big, broad-shouldered Belgians, step slowly, calmly ahead, churning dirt as they go. Natalie handles the big steads with ease as they loop around the field of her family’s farm, north of St. Ignatius.

The 17-year-old Mission High School student, a recent winner of the Winslow Nichols Leadership Award, exudes confidence and exuberance. In nominating her, St. Ignatius High School Principal Shawn Hendrickson describes Natalie as “one of the most inquisitive learners I’ve ever encountered.”

For a child of the 21st century, she finds pleasure in surprising places. Weeding her garden, for example.

“I love touching earth, with the bugs and the animals. The cats and the chickens come, the birds are singing, the wind’s blowing. It’s just the best,” she says on a breezy April afternoon. “And I think it’s really valuable. A lot of kids don’t get to experience that, which is quite sad.”

Unlike most contemporary kids, Natalie was raised to appreciate simplicity.

Her parents, Katie and Micah Helser moved their young family to a 40-acre alfalfa field 12 years ago after her dad completed a stint in the military that took them from Alabama, to Colorado, to South Korea. They moved to Montana from New York, with their belongings – including a draft horse named Ginger, chickens, rabbits, cats and a dog.

“There was actually nothing but an alfalfa field here. No trees, no shrubs – just a big apple tree in the middle and a ditch,” Natalie says, gesturing around her. “Everything here, my dad and mom built.”

The four of them, including her younger brother Jake, lived in a shed their father cobbled together that first year, as the family began to plant a new life not far from the base of the Mission Mountains. They built a house, barn and greenhouse, grew and sold organic produce through the Western Montana Growers Co-op, and tilled their ground with draft horses.

Natalie, inspired by the Mission Falls Market that her mom helped establish, asked to create a youth market with more affordable annual rates, so she could sell her hand-sewn stuffed animals and offer face painting.

The adult market “was $50 per season, which for a 7-year-old is quite expensive,” she recalls. “So I started the Mission Falls Youth Market where it’s $20 a season for 15 and under.”

The Youth Market boasted close to 10 vendors at one point. “There was a 5-year-old selling ice tea, another girl was making birdhouses and painted rocks, a lot of kids sold eggs,” she said. “It was really sweet.”

Tragically, the family’s life was upended when her mom was diagnosed with lung cancer and died a year later.

“It was the worst sort of luck possible,” says Natalie, adding that her mom had never smoked, and they lived on an organic farm.

The day her mom died, the grieving family went to Sloan’s Bridge, west of Ronan – her mother’s favorite place to walk.

“She died in mid-February and so it was still winter that night,” Natalie recalls. “Everything was just dead, and there was a patch of buttercups right next to the river and I have never seen buttercups bloom in February. Just that one day she died.”

She distills hope from that image, and the cycles of death and rebirth that happen all around her.

“I see my mom in so many places and things. It just sort of makes me feel more at peace,” she says. “She left her legacy through the farm and through her love of draft horses and through my brother and I as well.”

These days, her life is brimful. An aspiring writer, she’s had articles published in the Small Farmers’ Journal and the Montana Naturalist. She also writes poems and is at work on two novels.

“I feel like there are so many things swarming around in my head I just need to get it down, no matter what it is,” she says. She usually carries a notebook to jot down poems, words, ideas.

“I just love that concept of collecting words and stories kind of like a magpie or crow – collecting snippets from here and there, just gathering them up into a story.”

Her education has been somewhat unorthodox, with her time at St. Ignatius public schools interspersed with home-schooling and a few years at the private Glacier Lake School. She’s now president of the student body at Mission High and took the lead in organizing Homecoming Week activities. She’s sewing her own prom dress – another aptitude of hers – and has participated in cross country, wrestling and tennis this year.

She enjoys musical theatre and has performed in student productions, as well as winter and spring concerts with the Mission Valley Choral Society. One goal, she says, is to be a touring actor with the Missoula Children’s Theatre.

Her mother was a botanical illustrator and shared those skills with her daughter, who continues to paint and draw.

As to her leadership skills, “I’ve always been pretty bossy,” she says. She attended the Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership Seminar and Montana GEAR UP Youth Leadership Academy. During the pandemic she planned and made meals for the nurses at St. Luke Hospital in Ronan. Another project entailed designing stickers and selling them to benefit refugees from Ukraine.

Her curiosity about the world appears to be unquenchable. Natalie visited Ireland last year as part of the Irish Life Experience study abroad program, and she returns this summer for nearly a month as a counselor. In preparation, she’s taken two years of Gaelic, first through the Montana Digital Academy and again this year in a dual enrollment class with the University of Montana.

During last summer’s visit she was told, “you speak better Gaelic than most of the locals.”

After graduating from Mission High, she plans to take a year off and is already lining up adventures. First, she’ll join her Spanish class for a trip to Costa Rica, then head to Ireland a month later. From there, she plans to work her way across Europe with the Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms program (WWOOF).

When she returns home, Natalie intends to churn out rough drafts of her books while offering private tutoring for elementary-age kids. “I love to teach,” she says.

But more than that, she loves to cultivate plants and ideas, to write, and to work with her hands, heart and brain.

“It sounds quite cheesy but you really only have one life so why not live it?”