This year marks my 20th anniversary of living in Montana and, in that time, I’ve become an adult. I’ve gone from college graduate, fairly clueless about what I wanted from life other a sight-unseen certainty to live in the Flathead Valley. I had no real job prospects and didn’t know anyone. My plans for Montana were confined to a summer job, student loan debt swiftly ignored. What I was after was a place — a landscape that loomed large in my imagination for years where I felt like I could finally grow up, surrounded by mountains and sustained by this elusive but undoubtably attractive notion of being a Westerner.
Most of my college friends moved for jobs or, in Jane Austen terms, connections. By college I was long used to be the odd ball, so my trajectory for mountains and the biggest freshwater lake west of the Great Lakes (an actual selling term I would offer my professors when inquired about my career prospects) didn’t seem unusual to me. I was an English major and nourished myself on literature that spoke of great migrations, and I had a particular interest in stories of the West and those authors like the late William Kittredge and Pam Houston ignited my obsession that my real life would begin once I breathed in the air of the Big Sky or found myself rowing a raft down a surging whitewater river. I assumed I’d figure out the steady pay, health insurance, and the other necessities of adulthood at some point once I got to Montana and my real life could finally start.
Two decades later, I’m no longer solo. I’ve become an adult: I have two kids, a house, a job(s) — it is Montana, after all, and I still cobble together writing and teaching gigs. Yet adulthood goes well beyond the traditional accomplishments of middle age life, and I reflect on what living here, transforming into a Westerner has taught me, beyond acquiring a raft and a quiver of skis. There’s a lot of space: millions and millions of acres of public land that allows you and your mind to wander, usually best stimulated while tromping down a trail to mull over your existence. For me, I needed these untrammeled wild places to figure out myself: who I was, who I want to be, and what I need from life. While the physical trail itself was a direct path without confusion, becoming an adult wasn’t. I made many mistakes and often questioned if I belonged in Montana or needed to move on. To recalibrate, I needed flowing rivers to remind me that paths change but motion doesn’t. I needed high peaks to remind me that what I’m looking at is only a small slice of what the world offers.
Adulting is difficult, and no, this isn’t just some trite elder Millennial comment I plucked from a social media influencer. Remember: my influencers are the original influencers: writers. Adulthood is challenging, and even more so as a married person raising two kids. While I may have had doubts about my place in Montana, particularly after nursing a wound of heartbreak, it is this place that has shaped me whether I was ready for it or not. Montana gives no quarter to idleness or complacency. Over the years, I’ve fallen deeply, madly in love with the terrain that gives me a sense of belonging. Who could say the same about suburbs? Or, more to the point, who would want to? As Mary Clearman Blew, another legendary Montana writer, wrote, Montana is where we find real earth under our feet and real sky over our head. Adult or not, isn’t that what we most want out of life?