Miles From Any Town
Bruce Newell, Helena
Throughout this last month I’ve been driving Montana installing AEDs (Automated External Defibrillators) and AED cabinets in libraries, bringing to completion The Trust for Montana Libraries’ two-year project that benefits twenty-nine project libraries and the communities they serve.
Motoring about, I was repeatedly reminded of Richard Hugo’s poem, Driving Montana. Like Hugo, I was …
… lost in miles of land without people, without
one fear of being found, in the dash
of rabbits, soar of antelope, swirl
merge and clatter of streams.
Spring is the beginning of Montana’s second season, the first being Winter and as everybody knows the second being Construction. While I was slowed or halted many times for road work, I never was inconvenienced one iota by the having to stop for a flagger and smell the sagebrush.
My travels took me over 7,260 foot Skalkaho Pass, where roadside snow still blanketed. Further on, winding downward dizzyingly above Daly Creek, Skalkaho Falls was a seamless sheet of white sound and water.
On the HiLine, obscuring my view of the Sweetgrass Hills, magisterial rainstorms scuttled eastward. Further along, crossing from Big Sandy to Winifred, I wheeled over a vanishingly graveled bentonite roadbed, chased by rain while I climbed out of the Judith River Breaks. Dumb luck is better than no luck at all.
Near Miles City the Tongue was full and chocolate brown, its riparian Cottonwoods garbed in the freshest green leaves ever to bedeck a tree. The Yellowstone at Forsyth was bank-full and rushing toward New Orleans — sans brakes, sans parachute.
My trip’s most reliable source of pleasure was visiting Montana libraries and talking with Montana librarians. Librarians are a resilient, resourceful, optimistic, can-do bunch. Every library had something good going on in anticipation of summer. Every librarian had a smile on their face and a nice thing or two to say about their library and their community.
To cheekily continue and conclude by corrupting Hugo’s poetry,
Never has my Toyota
found this forward a gear. Even
the chicken salad in Cut Bank is good.
For that matter, so too is the Strawberry-rhubarb pie,
and a terrific Helles style lager in Hamilton.
Thank you all for your kind welcomes, and in particular for your manifest quiet love of Montana, Montanans, learning, and libraries.
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Bruce Newell is a retired librarian who served Montanans at Helena’s Lewis & Clark Public Library and at the Montana State Library. He is currently a board member with The Trust for Montana Libraries.
