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.
