Mountain valley ...

Today's photo is a shot of my very favorite part of Gallatin County ... the far north end of the Gallatin Valley, still a land of big farms and one-room schoolhouses and amazing views. The trophy homes have barely encroached up here, though I'm sure it'll happen someday.

Poetic art ...

One more post about Vachel Lindsay before we move on. Though Lindsay was best known as a poet, he was also a pretty interesting graphic artist, and many of his published poems were accompanied by some fairly intriguing line art.

The drawing below, from Lindsay's 1923 book Going-to-the-Sun, is a good example of his visual style. I think it's pretty cool, although from looking at it you might think that Glacier Park has volcanoes!

Vachel Lindsay ...

I imagine that only the English majors reading this have heard of someone named Vachel Lindsay ... but back in the 1910s he was one of America's best-known poets. He was as much a troubadour as anything, really, wandering the country and reading his poems aloud to eager audiences.

In the early 1920s Lindsay and a friend paid a visit to Glacier Park. He fell in love with the place instantly, of course, and the result was a 1923 volume of poetry and art called Going-to-the-Sun. Lindsay decided that he liked this part of the world so much that he moved into the Davenport Hotel in Spokane the next year, and a sequel called Going-to-the-Stars was published in 1926. The books weren't well-received, though ... the American public had apparently decided that Lindsay's style had become passé. He ended it all in 1931 by drinking a bottle of Lysol.

Here's a sample poem from Going-to-the-Sun, titled "The Bird Called Curiosity":

Round the mountain peak called "Going-to-the-Sun,"
In Glacier Park, a steep and soaring one,
Circled a curious bird with pointed nose
Who led us on to every cave, and rose
And swept through every cloud, then brought us berries,
And all the acid gifts the mountain carries,
And let us guess which ones were good to eat.
And even when we slept his sharp wings beat
The weary fire, or shook the tree-top cones,
Or rattled dead twigs like a fairy's bones.
The vulgar bird, "Curiosity"! When we
Were tired, and lean, and shaking at the knee,
We put this bird in harness. He was strong
As any ostrich, pulled our packs along,
Helped us up over the next annoying wall,
And dragged us to the chalet, and the tourists' resting hall.

And when once more we were young, well-fed men,
He'd beat the door to call us forth again.

The Bair Ranch ...

So among other places, yesterday's roadtrip took me to the tiny town of Martinsdale, Montana ... a place that's home to one of the most unique (and under-visited) museums in the state.

The Bair Family Museum is a sprawling, eccentric building that was once home to one of Montana's most prosperous sheep ranchers. The Bair daughters spent decades filling the house with original art and eighteenth-century French furniture ... and when the last of the ladies died the home became an endowed museum. The place has struggled -- Martinsdale is too remote to draw many visitors, and some of the big-city trustees tried to shut the house down and pirate everything off to the evil city of Billings. The Montana Supreme Court finally had to step in, but now there's hope that the family's legacy will be honored and the museum will survive.

It's a fascinating place, and I highly recommend a visit. If you don't head up there today, though, you'll only have one more chance on Wednesday before the museum closes for the winter. But with luck, they'll open up again next May.

Road trip ...

I'm heading out for a drive this morning ... there's no better way to de-stress, and besides, this could be one of the last really warm days of the year. So in honor of that, here's another roadtrip photo. I shot this last April -- it's US 2 a little west of Browning, and those mountains in the distance are part of Glacier park.

Air markers ...

Those of us who have just a little bit of seniority on this planet can remember when pretty much every small town had a building that had the community's name painted on its roof in huge yellow letters. The signs were relics of the early years of aviation ... in the days before radio (much less GPS), confused pilots could look down on those painted roofs to figure out where the heck they were. They were called "air markers," and most of them dated from the 1930s.

The air markers weren't just limited to towns, though ... some of them were far out in the middle of nowhere, in case a pilot happened to get really lost. Many of them included navigational tips that were written in a little language all their own. Like this one, which still exists on the roof of an old cattle shed in the upper Smith River country in northwestern Meagher County.

The code is actually pretty easy to decipher. The arrow on the left of course points the direction to Helena, which is 35 air miles away. The symbol on the right directs one to the nearest airfield ... in this case, the one at White Sulphur Springs, which is 21 miles to the south. And the numbers in the center are the latitude and longitude of the cattle shed, separated by a north arrow.


(Note that you can click on this and most other photos here to see a larger version, if you'd like.)

Monochrome ...

I know its unfair to use a black-and-white photo to illustrate this point, but in the prairies of eastern Montana there are times with the earth and the sky and the works of man all fade into a blurred monochrome, and the landscape seems to be without distinction. This is especially true in the early spring, after the snow has melted but before the land has started to return to life.

This is photo of the little McCone County town of Circle ... certainly not one of the more dramatic spots in our state. The shot was taken back in March 1942 by a federal photographer working for something called the Office of War Information -- whatever that was.

The great bowl of the sky ...

Montana has been known as "Big Sky Country" for decades, now ... and not without justification. As a result, the literature of the state is loaded with evocative descriptions of the quality of our sky. Here's one that I like, from the Larry McMurtry novel Lonesome Dove:

The cowboys had lived for months under the great bowl of the sky, and yet the Montana skies seemed deeper than the skies of Texas or Nebraska. Their depth and blueness robbed even the sun of its harsh force -- it seemed smaller, in the vastness, and the whole sky no longer turned white at noon as it had in the lower plains. Always, somewhere to the north, there was a swath of blueness, with white cloads floating in it like petals in a pond.