Memories of Montana

Dear friends,

Well, we be seeing new views and old friends this trip. We took a loop into Montana to visit Dave’s old memories and good friends of his parents. Montana is beautiful, somewhat like northern Utah valleys. It feels as big as Texas, very green, miles of natural pasture, some cattle. In the course of our drive up and the visit, we crossed the continental divide about six times and found snow patches near the road. There is still snow on the hilltops and of course the Rockies are still white.

John and Priscilla Wood emigrated from England in 1857 and for some reason none of us know, settled in Lincoln, Montana. Lincoln, situated in the Blackfoot River Valley between Great Falls and Missoula, is infamously known as the home of the Unabomber. The town looks very much like pictures from the early 1900s, a one-road, no- stop-light, dusty logging town of maybe 1200 souls. John and Priscilla homesteaded 1,000 acres or so out of town, up Stemple Pass; you can still see where they had a way station. Their son, Arthur, and his wife Anna, built a small cabin on the homestead and when they couldn’t live there full time anymore, they spent summers in this cabin. Arthur and Anna were Dave’s grandparents, and Dave and his sister Carole spent probably 10 summers at the cabin.

We found the cabin easily, up Rochester Gulch. it has been added to and raised, but is still being used, probably in summers. (Grandpa built the cabin without a ladder, so Dave remembers the door being really low.) Family lore is sketchy as to what happened to the cabin. Personally, I like the story of uncle Art losing it in a poker game. We left a long note with the family history for the new occupants.

(Just as an aside, I looked for the Unabomber’s cabin, but it seems to have gone to town, intact, as forensic evidence.) Lincoln still bears signs of being part of the last frontier of Montana: One of our favorites, “Residential area. No shooting.”
 From Lincoln we drove to Polson and checked in with Lyle and Ruth Baxter, friends of Dave’s folks. They hadn’t seen him since he was a youngster, but it was just like visiting family you see once a year. We’re grateful to Dave’s sister for keeping in touch with the Baxters, her godparents. The Swans, Buck and Dorothy, talked Lyle and Ruth into joining the Civil Aeronautics Authority in 1944 and going to Alaska to be radio operators at a remote air field in Tanacross. Dave has some memories of the place; Carole was born in Fairbanks.

Lyle and Ruth took us to a little campground they’ve been visiting since the 60s. Camp Tuffitt, on Lake Mary Ronan, is the most beautiful little piece of Americana we’ve seen in years, maybe ever. Lush and green, full of lilacs and wild roses, birdsong in the air, folks have cobbled up their little camp sites with love, and returned year after year with more cobbling and more love. Camp Tuffitt does not advertise and isn’t on the main road. There is a pool table in a room with a gravel floor and no door on the wall, a screened can full of “baby rattlers,” and a common area with chairs placed in a ring around a fire pit. Lyle and Ruth bought us dinner at the Crawfish Shack and we met a kid with a duck on a string from Bend, Oregon (!) (The duck was abandoned and the kid has imprinted on it but he says he’ll bring it back next year and let it go.)

This Western Montana country is staggeringly beautiful. The Mission Mountain range is close, craggy and snow capped. The rolling hills are a watercolor wash of pale green over pink. Fields of screaming yellow mustard are dotted with patches of bright lavender knapweed.

We treasure this visit to Lincoln and the couple of days we bothered the birds at Camp Baxter. It’s a really good thing to visit active, happy folks who are 90-ish when you’re pushing 70, to witness the importance of today, to cherish the moment and truly appreciate the rich fabric of our lives. We’re reminded that tomorrow will take care of itself; all we can do is make today count in a meaningful way. Watching Ruth tend tomatoes (enough for all the ladies in Polson who don’t grow tomatoes), and taking the tour of Lyle’s shop, seeing his great fence of raspberries, we feel touched to have such great role models.

We made it to Electric City, WA in one day from Polson. Our park is Steamboat Rock State Park on Banks Lake, which was formed for irrigation with water pumped from Grand Coulee Dam. The park is beautiful, but we have no phone service and no computer service here. We have to drive 10 miles to get service. We’re just about finished, though, and it has been one of our best jobs. We’ll leave Monday and head to Bothell, WA where Dave’s nephew has generously offered his driveway to park the Bird. We will have a couple of weeks with family and are looking forward to it. We will do three parks within an hour of Tacoma or Bothell, so will be in the area until mid-August.

We’re had two weeks of rain and wind, very unusual weather for this part of the country that only has about seven inches of precipitation a year. But today is sunny and warm and it looks like summer has arrived. The Grand Coulee Cruise-In is this weekend, as well as the Goose Bill Festival. We’ll have to check them out. Dave spotted a lot with about 10 old busted Hudsons on it and got pretty excited.

Love to all,