The Garden City

I was hanging out in Caras Park with some homeless people one evening in August when we were approached by a one-armed missionary holding a stack of Bibles. He smiled. We smiled. The kid with dreadlocks, the acidhead, strummed his mandolin and the two girls took hold of their dogs.

“Hey man,” said V. “How’s it going tonight?” V. was an honest-to-God vagabond, he’d hopped trains and hitchhiked all the way from his college in New England, but he was embedded, he was secretly writing his senior thesis on transient culture. I knew for a fact that he had a tape recorder in his pocket at that very moment.

“Hi!” said the missionary. If I had to describe a hypothetical missionary, I would probably say something about white shirts and smooth chins. You know, squeaky clean. But this one, aside from the arm, was battered and disreputable, as if he’d only recently found Jesus. Possibly in prison. “Would you fine people be interested in a hot meal and –“

“How’d you lose your arm?” said V.

The missionary gave him a hard look.

“In the war.”

“Zombies, man,” the acidhead said. “Fucking zombies got it.”

“Anyway, we’re not hungry,” said one of the girls. “Thanks anyway.”

“Be safe then,” said the missionary, “God bless.” And he left.

I don’t think his heart was in it.

When I told a few friends this story, they said two things: “Wow, you couldn’t even make that stuff up,’ and ‘God that’s such a typical Missoula story.’

I don’t know if there really is a typical Missoula story, or a Maine story, or a Moscow or Chicago story. But it’s true that people tend to cast up in Missoula, like shells on the beach after a storm. They were going somewhere else and they didn’t get there. Maybe if they save up enough money they’ll make it to Portland. In the meantime there’s the river to float, the beer is cold, everybody has a dog and too many bachelor’s degrees. In August the smoke comes in from the forest fires in Idaho and haze gets trapped in the valley between the mountains and people start sneezing like it’s pollen season all over again. That’s one of the most obvious differences between Missoula and Bozeman – Missoula is hewed by the river and hemmed in by its hills. It has nowhere to go. It feels like a small town until college time when the kids come back and then suddenly it gets tight at the seams. Being a university town, most people lean liberal, but you certainly can’t take that for granted. There’s a healthy population of writers and artists and people who startle you with their bubbles of random knowledge. If you pick the right bar you can have some great arguments: one morning, around 2:30 AM, I found myself standing on a street corner with friends smoking endless cigarettes and shouting that Marxism is a failed ideology.

 When I walk through town every corner sends

Higgins Street

 me postcards from the past. Here on the Higgins Street Bridge, my second night ever in Missoula, we leaned over to watch the cliff swallows wheel over the Clark Fork. Another time under the same bridge I waded out into midstream, late summer-shallow, and my sundress swirled around me in the current. Once or twice or three times, alone or in company, I climbed the switchbacks up Mt Jumbo to perch for awhile above town and watch the trains go by. One dry afternoon I was in the Laundromat when a stir of voices startled me from my book.

“Look out there – “

“Has anyone called the fire department – “

The land between the railroad and the building had caught fire. From where I sat, I couldn’t see the flames, only their reflections flickering apocalyptically across the wall of glass-fronted dryers.

The Clark Fork

It was rainy earlier this year and the land briefly flushed green. I can’t be romantic about it though: most of the green on the hills above my house was leafy spurge, a noxious weed. Now the hills hump up like lions, grass-tawny. The lilac thickets in my neighborhood – lilacs high as houses, thousands of them lining the streets, have drawn back. The alley beyond my apartment was crowded with lilacs, and then raspberries and dandelions, and now sunflowers. Once or twice I even heard turkeys gobbling back there. My mint plant would like to run as wild as the rest of this landscape, but the planter holds it back. The dominant local predator, my neighborhood’s cat, is now so morbidly obese that he doesn’t hunt, he just lolls, and the pine siskins gather safely to feed on the sunflower seeds. The community gardens a few blocks away are burgeoning: more sunflowers, heaps of lettuce, late-season tomatoes. Every time I go by, morning or evening, people are there working their plots. The fruit trees around town are so prolific that nobody can keep up; my environmental science professor brings our class a basket of home-grown apples every morning. Some fruit lies in the street and draws bears down from the hills, particularly in the Rattlesnake neighborhood on the edge of the wilderness.

School has come around again in company with the fruit and the smoke and the goldening of the mountains. It’s been five years since I last returned to school in the fall, but this year, entering the Environmental Studies program, studying in the shadow of Mt Sentinel, going back seems perfectly natural, just another part of the circle.