It was a border crossing I wanted to remember. I stopped next to a carved wooden sign reading “Welcome to Montana” to take my picture. Yellowstone delivered me into Montana alongside a splishy little stream running beside the road, pebble-bedded, cold, and clear, and a jagged horizon of mountains to awe any flatlander. I had just been through Cody, and nothing could make me want to go back. I flirted through the window at 35 mph with a couple of 4-H queens driving an old GMC truck around some worn-out Wyoming farm town, burned my brake pads to smoke coming down out of the Bighorn Mountains, and saw a sign I’d never seen before and don’t mind if I never see again, a yellow rectangle on a steel swing-gate standing ready to block the highway: “Closed for Snow-Return to Cody.” It struck me at the time as the most tragicomic mandate a highway department could issue. A Yellowstone ranger, concerned that fellow tourists might think I’d scavenged the skull from park grounds and follow suit, made me cover it with a plastic garbage bag. I’d used baling wire to mount a memento of home-a deformed steer skull, one horn curving up, the other curving down- to the truck’s grill. I left Houston headed due north, going the long way through the Great Plains, bisecting Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska-because I’d never seen Oklahoma or Kansas or Nebraska-and continuing up through Wyoming toward Montana via Yellowstone National Park. On top of the truck were two canoes and a kayak tied down with nylon straps that hummed in the wind and rubbed the paint off my hood in patches. I’d kept some clothes, a few keepsakes, a camera, some camping gear, a couple of paddles, and a life jacket. I’d sold most of my books and all of my records.

I packed a small green truck with two dogs and not much else. I had never heard the song and I had no intention of blowing anybody up. My mother dropped exploratory references to the Unabomber, trying to act casual. When I announced I was moving to Montana a decade ago, my friends in Houston hummed bars of Frank Zappa: Movin’ to Montana soon / Gonna be a dental floss tycoon. The first time I saw the Clark Fork I wasn’t sure I’d found what I was looking for. Montana seems to me to be what a small boy might think Texas is like from listening to Texans. From ‘Opportunity, Montana: Big Copper, Bad Water, and the Burial of an American Landscape’ Brad Tyer

Opportunity, Montana by Brad Tyer