Natal Homing
In a development that feels like the stuff of satire, I’m going to be a Helena resident before Montana’s millionaire governor—now in year three of his term—can be bothered to live there full-time. Now, take that piece of work out of my analysis on this bend in life and you get the storyline that I hope I end up remembering it for: After more than a decade away, I’m headed back to Montana. What’s more, in transplanting to the side of the Continental Divide where the water drains to the Atlantic, this feels like a kind of natal homing.
While it’s fair to say I’ve been putting a lot of will and energy toward this milestone over the years, it’s still unexpected. The particulars of it are especially surprising. The job change that’s dictated where I’m ultimately settling is a whole thing in itself that I might get into another time—there was lucky timing involved there, no doubt, but I tend to believe luck follows careful preparation for the infrequent moments when doors open. For now, suffice to say this was the seventh job in Montana I interviewed for in about as many months, the goals of it are very much in my bag, and it met all the criteria to make me feel comfortable with making a life transition. Housing was another piece of this that came together with surprising speed. Besides being terrifyingly organized and proactive when it comes to most life logistics, I’m also choosing to believe my good karmic energy around employment and housing in Helena owes to being a Gardinerite like Hannah Dean, who I hope still enjoys moderate celebrity status there on the strength of her basketball career at Carroll.
Getting back to the larger natal homing analogy, I’m also surprised by where I’m landing. I always assumed that the route back to my natal stream, as it were, from the western edge of the North American continent would follow the trajectory that our salmonid buddies took to find a refugia in my proper homewaters of Greater Yellowstone. Like the Yellowstone cutthroat, I assumed I would breach the Continental Divide from the Columbia by way of the Snake River—the body of water that defined the lives of my mother’s settler ancestors in southern Idaho. I also assumed that fully consummating my repatriation to my home area in the rain shadow of the Gallatins would be gradual.
That last assumption could still bear out. And I sorely hope to come full circle someday. If so, I may just be coming back from much closer range—dropping down to the Yellowstone from the reaches of the body it ultimately drains into, the long and storied Missouri River. At the risk of sounding cheesy, I often get verklempt at the invocation of all these rivers—for the lives they’ve sustained and defined for millennia, the landscapes and soils they’ve shaped through the ancient processes of force and time, the sense of identity and belonging they’ve given so many of us. It’s no wonder the likes of me spend years of our lives clambering to get back to them. There’s nothing like our formative rivers in the manmade world. Maybe there’s nothing like our formative rivers, full stop.
I’ll have, I hope, lots of time to test that hypothesis, so I don’t intend to linger on the topic of rivers much longer than I already have here. I do, however, want to reflect on the notion of feeling tethered to a place and choosing to return to it even when you’re best known to some there for your track record as a world-class jackass…because that narrative arc is certainly at play here, too.
Let’s start with the part about feeling existentially bound to a place and work our way toward the part about being an elite jackass, shall we?
Something I’ve come to believe with fervor is that most people mistake love for a place with feelings that, on their own, are signs of an idealized, conditional fantasy and not love that is necessarily complex and honest. Sentimentality, nostalgia, fetish, and uncritical affection are the hallmarks of this genre of misattribution. Something I think my years away from Montana have taught me is that love for a place has little to do with how you feel about it and much more to do with how you commit to learning about it.
To explain what I mean by that, I’ll allude to Port Townsend, where I’ve lived for the past four years. Have I been miserable here? As a whole, yeah. And sure, it hasn’t all been bad. But about two years in, it was clear there was no future for me here. This town has a particularly acute version of the malady infecting the entire American West—that hellish trifecta of crisis-level housing scarcity, suppressed wages, and a disproportionately high cost of living. Floundering in that without a clear path through or out is a recipe for defeatism and nobody’s built to function very long without a sense of agency around where they are and what they’re doing.
But living in that helplessness doesn’t mean I’ve shirked my sense of duty to pay attention. I’ve still made an effort to observe and learn about where I am. For example, I know the time of year when low tide coincides with the golden hour. I know where the Olympics and the Washington Cascades should be visible even on days they’re obscured. I know to expect the tsunami siren test sequence that cracks over the local PA system on the first Monday of every month. I’m accustomed to the practically arctic length of days around this time of year, and the conversely long nights of winter. I can tell when the migrating tree swallows are just encircling me to feed on material that I disturb while I’m running and when they’re dive-bombing me to protect their new nestlings. I also know those divine, maneuverable little bastards start packing up every August to commence their remarkable journey south. And once the swallows depart for the year, I know where blackberry bushes in town are starting to fruit and ripen. I know the cross streets of at least five monkey puzzle trees—pines brought up on old trade ships from the other side of the equator with their unmistakable spiral arrangement of leaves. They look every bit the survivors of the Jurassic era that they are.
Now, do I have warm feelings about these things? Do I recognize the aggregate of the attention to my surroundings through multiple seasons in my years as an Olympic Peninsula resident as love? Rarely. Nonetheless, I think the commitment to observation and to understanding my place in the world is more substantive and effortful than any natural feeling of affection. This is the kind of sense-making I’ve had to do all of my adult life as a transplant to places where I have no roots. It will surprise nobody who’s ever interacted with me at length to know that comes a lot more easily to me in the living world. It’s so much harder to square your own sense of belonging and identity in the manmade world—something I wrote about almost three years ago and absolutely stand by to this day.
My point in taking stock of all this accrued awareness of life through the seasons in Port Townsend is to say that any affection I have for this place, I have come by honestly. I feel that way to an even greater degree about my home state, and I know my devotion to it has only become more informed and more critical in the years since I left.
When it comes up in conversation that I’m from Montana or that I’m moving back, some people say things like, “Love that state!” with a zeal that I find suspicious. In reference to Montana these days, that sentiment makes me cringe. I suspect that anybody who can say that unambiguously has a very different definition of love than I do. In a lot of ways, that state—those arbitrary political boundaries that encompass mountains, prairies, evidence of prehistoric beings, intact glaciers, and legendary waterways that drain into the two largest oceans on this rock—is hostile to some of the most important and interesting people in my conceited opinion.
As I’ve been writing this, 16 young people (ages 5-22) are in court alleging the state has violated their constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment. The state’s legislative body denied 11,000 constituents a voice in the legislative process and made national headlines when they barred Rep. Zooey Zephyr from the House chamber for the final days of this year’s legislative session. Acting as Montana’s so-called Superintendent of Public Instruction is somebody just as famous for her incompetence at her job as her terrible driving. Its governor signed a rash of anti-LGBTQ+ bills into law that his own nonbinary son lobbied against. That same governor’s unexplained four-day absence during last spring’s historic flooding earned him comparisons to Ted Cruz in national news once it came to light that he was vacationing in Tuscany the whole time. This is the same guy who flouted state certification requirements before killing a wolf in 2021. And yes, this is the same guy who body-slammed a member of the press on the eve of a special election for Montana’s at-large congressional seat in 2017. In short, he and his state Superintendent are both known for doing more arrogant, stupid shit than most of us will ever get to try. Anyway, moving on: The infrastructure in small towns like West Yellowstone is so overwhelmed by tourism that they’re reappropriating land purchased to create desperately needed housing to instead build new, even more desperately needed sewer infrastructure. People who make above-median wages cannot afford to stay in towns they’ve lived in for 20+ years. White nationalists can strike and kill young Native women in broad daylight without facing immediate criminal charges. I really could go on.
Youth. Public schools. Queer lives. Residential housing and infrastructure. Indigenous sovereignty. This litany doesn’t even cover the lasting harm being done to our greater than human relatives, but I think you get the picture. It’s all under siege in Montana and I’d like to say it’s unprecedented but the truth is the settler colonial traditions of violent dispossession and extraction run to subterranean depths there.
It feels profane to me, in the face of all that, to utter the words “I love that state” without heavy disclaimers. And yet, I’ve been clambering to return on a permanent basis to that state since leaving in 2011 for undergrad. Chalk it up to insanity, masochism, willful indiscretion, or some twisted combo of the three. But it’s not an exaggeration to say that finding a symbiotic way back to Montana has been the defining project of my adult life up to this point. If not forefront, it’s always been my underlying wish and anybody who knows how often and willingly I’ve gone out of my way to show up for and support creative and civid endeavors happening there may have correctly assumed that I’ve always felt quite tethered to Montana, for better or worse.
Now, as promised, I would like to dig into my origins as an elite jackass. The hammer and anvil I find myself between looks like this: Montana is still sometimes described as one big small town with really long streets. Two strangers who’ve lived there for 10 years or more can probably identify a mutual acquaintance in the span of a passing conversation. For a big state that’s seen its fair share of population growth, it’s still a small world. Taken at face value, I love that quality! But, what does it mean for those of us who are potentially one degree of separation from every permanent resident when everyone who knows you, knows you from a time when your prefrontal cortex was still developing?
In other words, I’ve struggled with the notion of returning to a place where I’ve been young and thereby a moron in a deeper sense.
A few things have afforded me some solace on this point. First, I’ve learned that the people whose opinion you can put some stock in easily forgive the errors of youth insofar as they’re relatively harmless. That epiphany started to take root for me through two separate interactions over the past few years. Back in a September 2021 visit to my hometown, I met up with an old teacher for some beers. Originally from New Zealand, he taught and coached in Gardiner for years and now does so up on the Fort Belknap Reservation. His spouse still works in youth education programs for the Park Service and lives in Gardiner, where he generally returns on weekends when teaching, coaching, and vice-principal-ing responsibilities allow.
This old teacher of mine, now a friend, is Māori and used to teach us all a haka when he introduced us to rugby in his P.E. classes. As an adult, I’ve thought a lot about his generosity in that—in sharing part of an Indigenous culture with settler kids in his adopted home on another side of the globe. So, I felt compelled while I had the chance to apologize for being an asshole and not taking that more seriously. He laughed and basically said, “You were kids. Of course you thought the haka was funny.” He elaborated that the kids up in Hays laugh when they’re learning it, too.
More important than absolving me of any residual guilt, whether he meant to or not, he made me realize something about my impulse to feel shame and regret for a younger version of myself. Namely, there’s probably a misplaced hubris in thinking that your attitudes, behaviors, and choices as a child were already tainted by a western settler culture’s prejudices and biases. That Native and settler kids alike react the same way to learning another culture’s ceremonial dance seems to indicate that to some degree, kids are kids. Sometimes, the unfamiliar is just funny without cultural judgment having to enter the chat.
In a similar interaction last July, I ran into an old coach in Livingston. She was quite literally born and raised around what’s now the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, which I mention because her aging father was involved with grassroots efforts in the 70s that led to its wilderness designation. Nowadays, he’s in assisted living and she was looking in on him after he had taken a bit of a spill. We talked for a while—first about her dad’s contribution (a story mostly about her late mother) to a beautiful book about the A-B Wilderness, then tripping out on the fact that her youngest kid who’s 10 years younger than me is a grown-ass adult, and finally griping about the pittance we pay public school teachers and what it signals about what we value (her oldest, who’s four years younger than me, teaches at Shields Valley now). I don’t remember exactly how it came up, but similar to the interaction with a different teacher the previous summer, I expressed some shame and remorse for being a flaky asshole when she was coaching me in junior high. Like my other old teacher, she laughed right away and assured me that even if I had been an asshole, no reasonable person would hold it against me and she certainly didn’t.
Those two interactions with people from my early life who are, in my opinion, objectively cool as hell and singular and admirable were really precious to me. And maybe those conversations alone should’ve been enough to make me feel like my idiocy and lack of empathy as a kid isn’t the stuff of legend that I think it is back home. But I don’t think I accepted how comparatively innocuous my childhood trespasses were until this spring.
That brings us right up to the second thing that has afforded me some solace around my history as a young jackass of mammoth proportions: Seeing what some grown-ass adults were capable of saying, doing, and codifying into law during Montana’s most recent legislative session. The most depraved example that comes to mind are the comments made on the House floor about a bill banning gender-affirming care for minors (CW: Suicide. Don’t feel like you have to watch that clip and re-expose yourself if you already know the gist of what Seekins-Crowe said back in March. Also, FWIW, the child she was talking about is alive and well today.).
Another astonishing but maybe less caustic example are the comments made at the end of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on a bill banning drag performances in most public spaces. If only for a cringe-laugh, do familiarize yourself with that hearing if you haven’t. Before this then-22-year-old from Columbia Falls insinuated that all the Montanans who testified against the bill are unemployed, he essentially outed himself for being unfamiliar with the text of the bill he was sponsoring (your sure sign that the bill wasn’t an inside job, fam). What makes that comment on the employment status of concerned citizens truly unforgettable is that this is the guy we have to thank for making us all aware that there is indeed such a thing as a jerky industry nepo baby. What a time to be alive.
As upsetting as it is to revisit what these two lawmakers said, as negative examples, they’ve woken me up to a significant distinction. Namely, operating as an adolescent jackass in isolation with little resources or power is one thing—I have to believe you can make amends and live that down. Legislating as a jackass in coordination with a nationalized political agenda, on the other hand, and using state resources and power to harm people you’ll never meet is—I would hope—considerably harder to live down. I’ve never done the latter and don’t intend to. So I have that going for me. To the likes of the state’s GOP supermajority, I’m sure I’m also an unwelcome addition to statewide voter rolls since I’m queer, a full-fledged Marxist, and a generally inquiring and empathetic person to boot. So I have that going for me too.
To be sure, there are lots of things I emphatically DO NOT have going for me. For instance, generational wealth. Which is why I know being back in Montana in this late stage of capitalism won’t be easy. And I fully expect the fascists who are finding a foothold there to come up with some fresh hell above and beyond what I’ve enumerated here or as yet dared to imagine. Even so, I choose to believe there are less jerky industry nepo babies than garden variety jackasses like me trying to redeem ourselves and bring something worthy back to a place we feel fatefully tethered to.
Photo: Section of the upper Yellowstone looking south from the Pine Creek Bridge, July 27, 2013. This is downriver from my proper natal stream at the confluence of the Gardner and the Yellowstone, but it’ll have to do for our purposes. As the crow flies, this spot is about 100 miles southeast of where I’m setting up shop later this month.
