For some folks, especially Montana folks, choosing the outdoors isn’t so much a choice as it is an expression of place. Even in modern Montana cities — Billings, Missoula, Great Falls, Bozeman — people remain closely connected to the outdoors.
That’s not where I grew up, however. Like many Montana newcomers, I was born in a coastal state, California, and moved to Montana as an adult. I’ve since moved away and returned twice, and I’m hoping for a fourth return at some point, but that’s not my point.
My point is that I grew up in a city three times the size of Billings, in a county with a population three times that of the state of Montana. I grew up in a city with a lot of people in close proximity. In my hometown, Riverside, going fishing was generally a weekend thing. We spent family weekends camping in the San Bernardino National Forest, which was a two-hour drive from home. Later, when I’d developed a taste for fly fishing, I drove 2 ½ hours to get to the closest stream with wild trout.
But the type of outdoor experience within a half hour of most Flathead residents, to get something resembling that required a six-hour drive to the Sierra Nevada range. The Sierra is drained by real rivers with actual trout, even some natives.
And it has those trees.
I’m not going to even start in about hunting. Hunting for even something as mundane as wild pigs was complicated and exotic. It’s not that the state is made up of woke vegans who’d rather starve than eat a bit of wild protein they hunter/gathered up themselves — though there are folks like that. It’s just that when I was growing up, none of the kids I knew or any of their parents hunted. None. My dad was able to recall a few trips with his brothers out to the desert to hunt rabbits, but I’ve never seen actual evidence of these trips. There aren’t any blurry black and white photos of the successful hunters showing off a limit of cottontails out on the Mojave.
My family legacy of hunting was just a couple of passing references my dad made over the years, and a hand-me-down 12-gauge pump shotgun, from Sears, that I keep because it’s the only physical evidence that there were hunters in my family tree.
Contrast that with the family hunting history of the Montana native family I married into. I’ve seen photos of my daughters’ great-great grandmother, decked out in a black dress, standing in the barn of the old family place. She’s holding a rifle, and behind her are three or four deer hanging from the rafters.
It was the 1930s and those deer (none tagged, of course) were the meat that would get that family through winter. It’s one of the greatest “Montana” photos I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure my ex ever quite understood how envious I was that her family’s hunting past was so much richer than mine.
I later learned I might be able to merge my favorite recreational activities with a job, writing, that paid some of the expenses.
Once I drove a few hours in the predawn morning so I could cover the return of pronghorn antelope to the Antelope Valley north of Los Angeles. Pronghorn had been eliminated from the region decades before.
While I was still learning the nuances of wildlife management, this project, returning namesake megafauna back to a place so close to the city, was remarkable. The postwar manufacturing boom that supported many in my extended family was cresting when I was a kid and the accelerating growth sustained by those jobs had consumed much of what was left of wild Southern California.
But there I was, watching pronghorn stot across Antelope Valley once again, realizing I was going to love this job.