Like A Freight Train Through Montana

Pology Magazine - Adventures in Travel and World Culture.

Photo: Chris Ryan

Photo: Christian Sawicki

Like A Freight Train Through Montana (cont.)

“It used to be all mining, logging and ranching around here,” he says, “but not any more. Most of the big mines are closed down, those that aren’t are about eight hours away, and anymore it’s hard to get logging work that doesn’t take you out to Washington or Oregon.”

This is why Frank’s glad he’s in the golf course maintenance business.

“The only real money coming into Montana these days is from rich folks from back east or California buying summer homes and retirement houses. If you’re a working man with a family, you better know how to take advantage of that.”

I grunt by way of agreement and take another drink of beer. He’s right; Montana is increasingly a playground for the rich. The old ways are fading up here. By per capita income of permanent year-round residents, Montana is second only to Mississippi in terms of poverty. According to Frank, families get by however they can. “Most folks,” he says, “take a deer or two or an elk to get through winter. It ain’t legal, but nobody up here’s ever gonna say anything.”

More than anything else, the silence of the place drives in upon me as I sit there watching the sunset. Every vehicle that drives through town below, and they are not many, can be clearly heard. A wind rustles the cottonwoods down by the river where a pair of ravens and an osprey dicker till the osprey flees with an indignant shriek and the ravens settle and grow quiet with only an occasional croak and grumble. Frank tells me of a pair of bald eagles who live in a great nest above the municipal golf course a quarter of a mile upstream.

Silence. More silence such as I never know back home. Several streets away a door bangs, a man whistles, a truck starts up and drives off, and then only the wind and Frank’s young sons at play in the yard before us. A dog barks out across the valley and a dust devil runs up the little street past Frank’s front yard and through an unpaved intersection and the rusting remains of an old truck with weeds growing up through the bed. Frank takes a deep pull off his cigarette and the two of us relax into our chairs on the porch, the stillness settles around us.

And then faintly, off in the distance, rolling up the valley, a long low horn blast from a freight train. I sit absorbed for a bit. Frank looks at me but goes along with my whim. Soon we hear a steady rhythmic clacking and rolling sound across the valley, a great rumble-thunking of vast machinery heading north to Canada. A few more horn blasts ten miles to the south, a period of steadily increasing fury, and then she rolls through Thompson Falls with one long blow and a great thunder of wheels and power sent echoing back and forth across the valley and up to the peaks on either side and back down again with a sound long, lonesome and drawn out.

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