To be so happy again ...

Maybe it's just where my tastes lie, but it seems to me that a surprising amount of Montana poetry evokes images of long, empty roads and great skies. Here's one such work, a poem called "Once in the 40's," by an Oregon poet named William Stafford:

We were alone one night on a long
road in Montana. This was in winter, a big
night, far to the stars. We had hitched,
my wife and I, and left our ride at
a crossing to go on. Tired and cold--but
brave--we trudged along. This, we said,
was our life, watched over, allowed to go
where we wanted. We said we'd come back some time
when we got rich. We'd leave the others and find
a night like this, whatever we had to give,
and no matter how far, to be so happy again.

The best town name in Montana ...

I was looking through a little anthology recently called, The Arts in Montana, and found an essay titled "The Trouble with Town Names." The piece spent a couple of pages pondering Montana's preferences in that department ... and though I didn't really agree with the author's thoughts it gave me an excuse to consider what my favorite town name in Montana might be.

Didn't take me long to decide:

Lonely road ...

It's hard to think of an image more evocative of rural Montana than that of a lonely pickup truck, heading out along an empty dirt road through the rangeland. I took this shot a little over a year ago, on the road that heads west from Ringling towards Battle Creek and the old town of Sixteen.

Purple-shadowed coulees ...

One of my first posts here was an appreciation of Joseph Kinsey Howard, the Montana newspaperman and historian. Though it's been nearly 60 years since his death, Howard's works remain relevant and well-read ... especially Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome, his landmark history of the state. It's one of my very favorite Montana books, partly for what Howard says and partly for how he says it ... he had a gift for descriptive prose that seems to fit the state perfectly. Here's a sample paragraph from the book, introdicing the Missouri Breaks country in central Montana:

The trails are old wagon roads which get down to the river somehow -- twisting along an old water course or plunging wildly down an extended buttress of a long butte. Scrub pine, spruce, and cedar are scattered in the purple-shadowed coulees and on the hundreds of isolated hills which start up suddenly from the vast canyon floor; the sun, soon gone, rekindles briefly the centuries-old color in pre-glacial cliffs, and a distant mountain range turns violet, then black, against the blue-green sky.

Geraldine sports ...

One more photo from the Geraldine 6-man game today, before we move on to other topics. To me this is exactly how a football stadium ought to look.

Small-town football ...

I confess I'm not much of a fan of college or pro sports. I haven't been to an MSU football game since before a few of you were born, and when people mention the legendary Montana State-University of Montana sports rivalry I invariably just roll my eyes and snort, "It's only a game."

But despite all that, I went to a football game on Saturday.

Montana's still a heavily rural state, and close to half of Montana's high schools don't have enough students to field traditional football teams. Many of the smaller schools play in eight-man leagues, but the 28 littlest schools play something called six-man football, which is a very different sport. The field is only 80 yards long, it takes 15 yards to get a first down, and absolutely everyone is eligible to receive a pass. So the games are fast-moving, unpredictable, and a heck of a lot of fun.

To sample six-man football I drove up to Geraldine, where the Tigers were hosting a co-op team from Richey and Lambert. (The tiniest Montana schools will often bond together to field athletic teams -- otherwise they'd have no interscholastic sports at all.) It's 321 miles from Lambert to Geraldine, and the two schools sent a team of six starters and two reserves. Geraldine has a strong history of six-man football, and they had 13 players suited up ... not bad for a school with a total of only three dozen students. The weather was utterly frigid, and I think I was the only out-of-towner there.

And the game was a blast: constant motion and lots of excitement, the total opposite of the orchestrated military maneuvers you see in major-college ball. The ending was pure adrenaline, with a missed extra point, a successful onside kick, and a dropped pass reception that would have changed everything. When it was over, the favored Tigers had lost a 27-26 heartbreaker ... but the Richey/Lambert boys had something to celebrate on that long drive home.

I'm now a serious fan of six-man football, and I can't wait to go to another game. The playoffs start next weekend, and Geraldine is heading out to play the undefeated Hysham Pirates. It would be fun to watch, but I'm afraid the Tigers are going to get their butts kicked.

Geyser cutoff ...

The term "bucket list" is a popular one these days ... the idea is to create a list of things that you absolutely must do before you kick the bucket, and then get to work on actually doing those things. I think it's a great concept, and I have a mental bucket list that's a mile long.

I decided to head out yesterday to check one of the Montana-related items off my bucket list, and I'll report on my destination tomorrow after I've gone through the photos. This is a shot I took on the drive up ... a rainy day on the Geyser Cutoff Road. A gorgeous and thoroughly-Montana drive, but the Choteau County road crew really needs to dump some gravel up there!

Miles of land without people...

I posted a fragment of a Richard Hugo poem here last summer, but his work was good enough that I think another one is definitely in order. This is the final stanza of "Driving Montana," one of my favorite Hugo poems:

Tomorrow will open again, the sky wide
as the mouth of a wild girl, friable
clouds you lose yourself to. You are lost
in miles of land without people, without
one fear of being found, in the dash
of rabbits, soar of antelope, swirl
merge and clatter of streams.