I wanted to make sure my children had it better than me, so I made sure they were born in Montana.
My daughters know the place I grew up and they have some idea of what that place is like. It might not be the opposite of Montana, but it is very different. I will always have deep affection for where I grew up, but as the adult me began to emerge in my 20s, I had an uneasy sense I wasn’t living the kind of life I wanted to live. I felt excommunicated from nature in Southern California. I didn’t fit in with that place.
It was partly about hunting and fishing. I had to drive hours to do either, and while those journeys were exciting and adventurous, they also heightened my disconnect between the urban space where I survived and the outdoor space where I lived.
The arch I followed moving from California to Montana went a long way toward addressing that disconnect. Hamilton, bless that little town. It is surrounded on three sides by a bend in the Bitterroot River. As the river slides down out of the south valley it curves gracefully around Hamilton, steered west by the higher ground of town until it runs up against the toe of the Bitterroots, past the old high school football field, then past the concrete smoke stack for a sugar beet processing plant that was never built, before the river tucks in the town as it passes under the old, since-replaced Old Steel Bridge, and continuing its journey toward Missoula.
The Bitterroot River was a short walk from our home there. I kept my fly rod strung up and ready in the garage all summer. This seemed to me the way to live. Where I grew up, the nearest trout stream was a two-hour drive, and closest legit river where we could fly fish for wild trout — the Owens River — was more than a six-hour drive.
That river was worth something, at least the parts that hadn’t been run dry by the City of Los Angeles, which, in one of the great heists of water in the arid West, bought up Owens River water rights and redirected the river south to make the Los Angeles we know to today, possible.
In the upper reaches, upstream from Crowley Lake for folks who know that country, it’s every bit the river that the Bitterroot is. Too small to float, but a damn fine wadeable trout river.
The California home I grew up in was part of a subdivision carved out of orange groves and surrounded by hills with California quail, red-tailed hawks and coyotes. In the late ’80s, when the continent-wide recovery of Canada geese was in full bloom, the skies were filled with wild birds. I used to watch those geese in the evenings, returning to their roosting sites along the Santa Ana River, black ribbons of waterfowl furling in the wind until they drew close enough to make out the individual, honking birds.
So, it wasn’t as though I lived in a post-apocalyptic concrete jungle, but still the natural world seemed exotic — the other — rather than a place that is a part of you, the way it is in Montana.
There’s another advantage Montana has over my old Southern California home: in all the time(s) I lived in Montana, it never took me three hours to commute 40 miles because the Interstate was backed up with traffic.
As 3-year-olds my daughters were well familiar with the sound of a noisy flock of geese preparing to take flight, and both could identify a male cinnamon teal, and understood that no matter what the calendar said, in the Bitterroot it wasn’t spring until we’d spotted one of those gaudy drakes on our pond.
I was pushing 30 before I had any of that down.