Like A Freight Train Through Montana
By James Morgan

From Coeur D’Alene I drive east through the Idaho Panhandle mining country and wind down to the Clark Fork, miss my turn-off and eventually reach Missoula at the head of the Bitterroot Valley, a good 102 miles southeast of Thompson Falls where I am expected by nightfall. 

In the event, Missoula and the Bitterroot are not entirely unwelcome.  The town itself is a sort of sprawling mess of shopping centers, parking lots, fast food establishments, hotels, a university and single-family residential neighborhoods spread out across the flat of the valley.  I haven’t been here for over a decade and as I drive south into town, sunset and a soft gray dusk settle across the valley in a wide sweep of sage and squared-off agricultural fields. 

Certainly I am back in Montana.  I am too tired and too little acquainted with the area to grow sentimental about it, but I am not unhappy; the old guy who checks me into my motel with his flat and straightforward voice, his jeans and boots and huge rattling key chain, pleases me immensely. 

The next day I drive back north, call my friend in Thompson Falls, make the appropriate turn onto M135 to M200, and roll up the Clark Fork through a broad U-shaped valley sparsely inhabited and sundered about its edges with crags and stands of aspen and lodgepoles rising up to distant elephant-backed ridges.

It is fire season and I drive through several long bends thick in smoke and even catch the orange of open flame high up on a ridge.  Forest service trucks and tractors slow my way, though eventually I make Thompson Falls in decent time, there being little in the way of speed limits or traffic in this part of the world.

Thompson Falls is a quiet dry little town with no traffic lights and not much more than a few roughly paved roads winding off of the main thoroughfare to either side.  There is a bar, a grocery store, some shops, a gas station or two, and before I know it I am almost through with only the post office up ahead.  I pull over there and call Frank.

Frank’s house is an old washed-out-looking clapboard uphill a few roads from the main.  I pull my truck into the dirt driveway next to his hulking and thunderous F-250 full-cab, get out, mumble something about the size of his truck (which after all is considered de rigueur in most of Montana) and am told confidentially that his monthly payments for the truck are more than what he pays for the house.

In the house, once the dogs and kids are negotiated, we settle down with some beer and a capital chili that Frank made the night before in honor of my visit.  I reacquaint myself with Frank’s wife who is preparing to leave for her job down at the local grocery, and who, though I do not like to admit it, strikes me as singularly melancholy, as if it had not been in her vision of the future to end up living a quiet and matronly life in this remote corner of Montana.  Her oldest, Frank’s 12-year-old stepdaughter, is gone for the long weekend, down to Las Vegas to visit a grandmother. 

It has been something in the neighborhood of five years since Frank and I have last seen one another and we celebrate our reunion with beer.  The house is modest, yet it has much in the way of potential and has a bit of a front porch built on a concrete slab that lends itself admirably to sitting and drinking as it includes a view across the valley in addition to commanding the front yard and gravel street beyond the gate.  Frank has it in mind to make a variety of improvements and we discuss these for a while though he freely admits that money is hard to come by this far north on the Clark Fork.

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