Montana – the wild west
Wednesday, 26 July 2023I often insist I’m not a list ticker, someone intent on claiming they’ve been to every country on earth although I do keep track of where I’ve been. I am, however, much closer to having put a footprint on every one of the USA’s 50 states. After my visit to Montana in May I only have five – Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri and South Carolina – to go.
▲ Dan Bailey, West St, Livingston
I stay in Livingston with writer and all around adventurer Tim Cahill. East-west Livingston is more or less in the centre of Montana and it really feels like far too busy and with far too many art galleries for a town of less than 10,000 people and way out west.
▲ North 2nd St, Livingston
I wander around Livingston, bookshops, art galleries, old neon signs, art deco touches, trad American architecture and drop into Montana Watches, Swiss movements, local cases, they produce about 50 a year from around US$5000 to the sky’s-the-limit. Close to the river I note the statue of Sacagawea and her baby, she was a guide to the Lewis & Clark exhibition and quite apart from her ability as a guide the fact that she was native-American, a woman and with a baby all underlined that this was a peaceful group. Elk River Books has lots of interesting second hand books and is very much the Montana bookshop, but Wheatgrass is also an excellent bookshop. There are two mountain ranges, the Crazies and the Absaroka Range visible from the town.
▲ Tru North Café – apart from everything else in Livingston here’s a café where you can get a café latte and a sign suggesting that if you want fast food it’s 1.6 miles to the nearest McDonalds
▲ Yellowstone Ballet Company – and would you believe ballet in central Montana? Or theatre, after very good sushi in Neptune (how did Livingston end up with a seafood specialist this far from the sea?) we went to see Mary Parker Marlowe in the fine little Blue Slipper community theatre, which could easily be a horizontal (wide and shallow) version of vertical (narrow and deep) Red Stitch in Melbourne, Australia.
▲ Well this is more like the Livingston, Montana I expected, two skeletons fishing from the verandah.
◄ Brutus the Bear – this wall mural in Livingston was the closest I came to a bear in Montana (I didn’t see any in Alaska either, not even in Kodiak which is real bear country), but I did pick up this good piece of bear advice: You’re chased up a tree by a bear, how do you know if it’s a black bear or a brown bear? If the bear climbs up the tree after you in order to kill you it’s a black bear. If the bear simply stays at the bottom and shakes the tree until you fall out it’s a brown bear.
▲ Tim Cahill’s cabin
We drive out past the falls at Natural Bridge on the Boulder River to Tim’s cabin in the woods, where we don’t encounter any bears although Tim reports he even had one barge inside the cabin once. And scoff down a bowl of berries on the kitchen table, the bananas were ignored. Tim set up Outside Magazine with Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone and he has written a series of very popular books including
• Hold the Enlightenment: More Travel, Less Bliss
• Pass the Butterworms: Remote Journeys Oddly Rendered
• Jaguars Ripped My Flesh
• Pecked to Death by Ducks
• A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg
• Buried Dreams: Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer
• Road Fever
Driving back from Tim’s Cabin, with assorted fine views along the way, we passed by Big Timber and Springdale (now why was that notable?). Boeing 737 fuselages on a train pass by, heading west to the Boeing factory in Washington state.
▲ Those 737 fuselages on the freight train pass through Livingston – Montana is definitely railway country, as Jonathan Raban points out in his book Bad Land.
▲ Raw Deal Ranch, near McLeod
▲ another ranch near McLeod – from Livingston we drive along Paradise Valley to Yellowstone Park it’s amazing how many flash ranch houses we pass. Many of them fronted by big ‘ranch gateways’ It’s clearly a thing, whereas once upon a time it would only have been farm houses out here, In the small settlement of Pine Creek we pass the red house where Richard Brautigan lived – Trout Fishing in America, suicide in Bolinas and shooting off guns outside his place – a ‘lead Disneyland’ somebody commented. Peter Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg and many other familiar names have had homes in central Montana.
I’d been to Yellowstone back in 1994, so nearly 30 years ago, when we drove coast-to-coast (and back again) in a 1959 Cadillac. Most of Yellowstone is in Wyoming and we didn’t venture into the northern part of the park and cross the state line into Montana. This time we entered the park at Gardiner and drive down to Mammoth Hot Springs with its informative visitors centre and a little further east towards Tower Roosevelt and then a little further south, to Swan Lake past a waterfall.
▲ Beefburgers, Livingston – and finally this retro burger take-away that’s been going since 1954, I just loved the sign.
My favourite Montana encounter was the distinctly weird CUT – The Church Universal & Triumphant – headquartered at a small settlement which was called Emigrant and then was renamed Glastonbury, just outside Yellowstone Park. It was set up by Mark somebody who decided to rename himself Prophet so his wife Elizabeth became Elizabeth Prophet. Then he died and she took over the church and started making all sorts of pronouncements about menaces from extraterrestrials and Communists and assorted other anti-American dangers.
Next she started predicting the end of the world which would follow a Russian nuclear attack which she was going to happen on 15 March 1990. So Church Universal & Triumphant followers – by now there were thousands of them – were encouraged to build fallout shelters and stock them with 7 years of supplies. There were CUT fallout shelters all over the place including a huge one under Glastonbury/Emigrant. All the followers retreated into their shelters as the end of the world approached and then on 16 March re-emerged to discover the world was still around. Many of them, as the lengthy Wikipedia story on the cult reports, decided to ‘reappraise their beliefs.’
The problem now was that many of them had sold up everything, gone deep into debt, maxed out their credit cards – well nobody was going to come after them if the world had ended? So all they were left with was their fallout shelters and 7 years of survival rations. Despite which there is still a much smaller CUT church in Glastonbury/Emigrant. Tim would know weird cult groups, he wrote about Jim Jones and the Kool-Aid (which in fact was some local concoction, not Kool-Aid at all) and the mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana for Outside magazine.
On the way back to Livingston I note a sign announcing ‘Protect our Children – Vote Republican’
