Inversions are a particular and peculiar meteorological event in northwest Montana and also strike me as a metaphor for what we’re all experiencing during these languishing days of a pandemic. A time when we’re also facing a host of other challenges, such as soaring housing costs, frontline health worker resignations and burnout, and a general anti-public-servant sentiment. It feels like we’re stuck in the low-lying fog, swallowed by gray and dense air, wondering if there actually is sun and blue sky on the other side. No matter how many years I’ve lived here, the seemingly endless days of dreary mist take their toll.
Last Sunday, I was offered a chance to physically and spiritually break through the inversion and I took it. Although I’m recovering from a fractured shoulder as the result of a bike crash in December, I was itching to strap on my Nordic skis for a one-pole propelled ski. My friends invited me to ski with them, even made me lunch, and as we drove from Kalispell to the Blacktail Mountain Nordic Trails we moved through the dirty gray clouds and into the brilliant blue skies of a higher elevation, squinting our eyes in the blazing sun. It felt like we’d traveled through time, burrowing out of the dark and into the gleaming light, the Swan Mountains looking proud and happy to the east. I’m not sure there’s another kind of physical journey that could best capture what I felt as I moved through the inversion layer and then, basking in the sun and snow, moved slowly across the groomed track.
Relief. Joy. Release.
We all need a physical, spiritual, and emotional reset, especially when we’re seeking joy, decency, and goodness in our daily lives. I’m not the first to pen about the natural wonders Montana boasts. What an honor it is to seek refuge and pleasure in a landscape that we all share, a place where we can set aside our grievances and worries, and be restored. It’s a reminder that we can be stuck in the inversion, dwelling in the fog, feeling trapped in the blur of gray, but we can also move upwards, journey higher and seek a place that’s more open and inviting.
My friends kindly waited for me as I shuffled along, periodically checking to see if my arm was OK. I couldn’t help but smile because I was doing what I loved: sliding on snow, with friends, in the mountains with the extra blessing of the sunshine.
Like an inversion, we too can be trapped below the clouds and it can feel like we’ll never escape. Or we can allow for both physical and emotional change, which can easily coincide in Montana, rising in elevation to find a place where those trappings give way to expansiveness. In order to do our best work in life I believe we need these inversions to show us where the dark and light lie, and how we can move above and below, and between it. As Flathead Valley residents, these teachings are readily available in our surrounding wild places, and aren’t we better off for it?
Maggie Doherty is the owner of Kalispell Brewing Company on Main Street.