“Montana isn’t Republican: it’s Libertarian,” said Matilda, the woman driving me to her cabin on the Canadian border. “The bastards who move in from California, they’re the Republicans. And the people south of us, in Idaho. But no, Montana’s Libertarian– we’re playing a different game.” Matilda was an anarchist who owned houses on the Canadian border, the kind of anarchist who’s ready to shoot a grizzly bear if need be.
“There are more guns than people in Montana,” said my ride up to Columbia Falls. “Me, I have twelve.”
“Twelve?!” I asked, laughing. “Why on earth do you have twelve guns?”
“Well,” he said. “There’s my x and my y and my z…” he said, mentioning the different kind which to someone like me sounded like nonsense. To him, it seemed, that was an explanation. “And my xyz for grizzlies.”
I think the first time I understood viscerally and not just intellectually the desire to have guns was in Latvia. Me and my friend were walking on a path, it was getting dark, and we spotted three wolves. And suddenly my vegetarianism was a foreign concept and the idea of animal rights seemed ludicrously condescending. There was a wild beast in front of me that could kill me, and I wanted to kill it back.
And in Montana there aren’t just wolves: there are grizzly bears, black bears, belligerent moose (yes, that’s actually a serious thing), wolverines (ditto), wildcats, and rattlesnakes. At the cabin we were warned to always wear shoes, because something called hobo spiders came out at night, and one bite meant a trip to the hospital (which was two hours away?)
At the cabin we could only go wandering in pairs, and Matilda had a gun casually tucked in her back pocket, and another gun in her cabin.
“That gun doesn’t have a safety,” I heard her explaining to a small child. “Remember it’s right here by the door.”
Let me explain that the cabin we staid in was sandwiched between the Canadian border and a National Park, half of which was literally on fire. As we drove through it we saw enormous fields of past forest fires, where the corpses of thousands of dead trees stood and a new five-foot layer of forest was pushing through. The roads were rough and breakdowns were frequent: it’s the kind of place where you call your neighbor, not AAA.
“We were at the store the other day and my daughter asked me who owned it,” said Matilda. “I said hunny I’ve no idea; I don’t learn anyone’s name unless they’ve been here ten years or more. Most people romanticize this, you see. They come from the cities and want to retreat to nature; what they don’t understand is that it’s hard out here, and all of their neighbors are antisocial alcoholics. My name goes a long way here, because my father lived here and his father.”
The cabin we staid in was small and lovely. The last person who’d lived there had gone out behind the cabin and shot out his brains.
Basically what I’m getting at is this is an environment that breeds rugged individualism, one where family name matters more than your first name and the hospital’s hours away.
As Matilda drove us up the dirt rode, we only passed by one car.
“That’s Larry,” she said. “There’s few people I hate in the world, but he’s one.”
As it turned out, according to Matilda, her godfather had left behind a large estate, and had given it to her in an un-noterized will. Larry was the deputy sheriff (“They don’t even elect the deputy, he’s just appointed, and Larry was only appointed because his father was sheriff before him”) and him and his crew refused to recognize the unauthorized will and went back to one from ’69. They “decimated” the estate, going through his stuff and burning books.
“Why would they burn his books?” I asked.
“Because they’re puritans,” said Emily. “My father had sent my godfather a Playboy magazine for decades. That was history. They just saw it as smut. I don’t even care about the 100,000 dollars I lost– I cared about all that history. A friend of ours wrote a book which mentioned that my godfather had left this estate to me, and Larry said ‘If you publish that you’ll get no help from me ever again.’ He would have lost a business connection he needed. So he took it out.”
My point in mentioning this story is this: history is thick here and people are thin. If you’re wondering why Matilda didn’t dispute this in court (and to my knowledge she did not) this might help explain it:
As we were driving by an estate Matilda pointed her finger.
“My friend Bob lives there. A few years back another guy lived there, and he and his crew were real assholes. Well, one night they got drunk and decided to have some fun: they went out and shot a whole herd of elk, out of season. It had snowed, so all the sheriff had to do was follow the tracks, and sure enough, led right to their house. Well people were pissed— I mean, that’s people’s food they’d destroyed. So they just went to them and told them to pack up. And the next day they drove them to the Montana border. Said ‘Your estate’s now for sale and we’ll send you the money.’ No police, no judges, nothing. People handle things here themselves. There’s been one or more wife-beaters that have just one day disappeared.”
You had to admire it, really. It seemed comforting in a Tarantino kind of way. There is nothing swift about justice in America: I mean people often spend two years in jail just waiting for a sentencing, and sometimes a situation that seems clear enough to an individual becomes clouded in legal translation.
But could someone have gotten away with burning someone’s property if the court system was involved? I really wonder. It seems to me that American Democracy is the best kind of government not because of its efficiency in ideal circumstances, but because it’s the system that prepares for the worst possibilities, and is therefore most stable.
But I digress.
The point is that only six years ago did Montana start having speed limits, making it the last state to do so.
“It’s at 70 now,” said Akshay, and Phd student who introduced himself as ‘The only Indian in Missoula.’ “And if you go ten miles above nobody does anything. Twenty, and it’s a twenty dollar ticket, and you pay it right there– doesn’t go on your record or anything. They’re already talking about raising it to 85. But to get a speeding ticket at all the Federal government had to pressure them.”
“When we were driving to this cabin I was staying in,” I replied. “We kept seeing speed signs with bullet holes through them.”
Akshay laughed, clearly having seen much of the sort before. “Yes, people don’t like them. It’s a very Libertarian place. ‘Government leave me alone,’ you know?”
Akshay mentioned something else very interesting: that Montana was vastly white, but he’d experienced a lot less racism than when living in Michigan.
“Here if they see you look different than them, they go and talk to you. In Michigan, they’d stay away. According to the government Montana is a hotbed of white supremacists. But I have friends in these organizations, and you know if they’re friends with me they’re not racist.”
“Well couldn’t it be that they’re not racist to you, but might be racist to, say, black people?”
Akshay shook his head. “They’re not racist– just anti-government. They’re organizations that want people to know the law, to be aware of their rights and what citizens can and cannot do.”
And in Montana one thing you can do is carry a gun, as long as it’s not concealed.
“My friend said, ‘Why don’t you buy a gun?’ I asked him why I’d need a gun, and he just said, ‘No, just because you can.’ Even I can, and I’m on a student visa.”
It’s really a different world. Back in Chicago, where I’ve been living for the last four years, people would say it’s not safe because everyone has guns. Here people say they are safe, for precisely the same reason. And for the first time I see they’re perspective, since I see the lifestyle behind it. This is the only place I’ve been where it’s mostly women hosting on Couchsurfing.com. It’s a place where people casually have boxcutters in their cupholders, and guns in their pockets. If I saw those in Chicago I’d think I was in danger, but here they’re more like tools.
I could go on forever but I’ll end here– this place might as well be another country, it almost puts Texas to shame.
this is real this is fiction 