I follow a jokester on social media and the other day she posted this: “Now’s about the time the big-city girl starts having doubts about the small-town Christmas tree salesman she gave up her career for.”
Funny, and also a useful trope about the complexities of relationships, but I don’t mean boy-girl relationships. Instead, the Hallmark Christmas movie is useful to help understand our relationship with place, especially a small-town, rural place.
I moved from “big city” California to rural Montana — the Bitterroot — 30-plus years ago. It worked out fine. I met my future wife (also my future ex) and started a family. But unlike the Hallmark plot line, I didn’t give up a successful career for a small-town girl. I moved because I’d already decided I wanted to live somewhere with some elbow room. I met the girl later.
I’ve since come to understand my small-town sweet spot: big enough to support a Target, but not so large a Costco makes sense.
I realize Kalispell — which is about the right, Target size, for me — breaks that paradigm, but Kalispell is unique. It’s relatively isolated from larger, Costco-sized communities in Montana and the Idaho panhandle, and there’s that Canadian-shopper traffic. At least there was in the pre-tariff era.
So what’s the advantage of a Target-sized town?
There is a Target in the Great Plains community where I now live. No Costco, however. That’s a two-hour drive. The town, a city actually, is about the same size as Kalispell. It’s a lot like Kalispell, with a pleasant downtown and a lot of big-box development on former farm fields on the north end.
The only readily noticeable difference is the view from the overpass in the center of the city. The world falls away in every direction and the only signs of verticality are grain elevators. You can see quite a few grain elevators from the overpass, but not a single mountain.
I will forever find that disorienting.
Last week, my brother stopped by for a brief visit. We discussed going hunting on his one full day in town, and while he didn’t want to hunt, the thought of taking a long walk in bird country appealed to him.
Liverpool also faced Arsenal that day, and my brother and I both love football. So, if we were going hunting, we needed to go early to be home by the 2 p.m. kickoff.
This is where size matters. I don’t want to live in a town that takes too long to leave. Consider Missoula, a city I’ve longed for since before I first moved to Montana, first missing the Garden City by about 45 miles.
Missoula’s a great city, but if your exit involves Reserve Street or Brooks or Higgins, and it’s the wrong time of day, you’re not getting out fast. The same goes for Billings, where I lived for a couple of years, and I found underrated, despite an unsettling level of “big city” crime.
My brother and I weighed our options over coffee, then decided to go. The weather was decent in town, but not so much out in the fields where the wind laid the grass down sideways. We walked along a wind break, but birds are hard to find on days like this. My English setter Jade, however, was fine with the weather and had a blast.
We moved one covey but they flushed wild in that wind.
One covey turned out to be enough. We were happy we saw birds and ready to get out of that wind, though we still had time enough to hunt another spot.
I suppose the female equivalent of the Hallmark Christmas tree salesman is an artisanal sourdough baker. Maybe I’ll meet her someday. The good news is that I’m grounded in a small town, already.
Big cities are for visiting now, not moving back to.