The Montana Spectator: It's Hot
Croke, Bill
THE MONTANA SPECTATOR by Bill Croke It's Hot Back in the car, I see that the hay and Another scorcher along the Rocky Mountain Front. wheat fields along the Teton River Road are prematurely...
...I am learning Montana grizzly is under metabolic stress, the Other than such brief, violent thun- at the kitchen table...
...First the rain, roads, seeking grist for the mill...
...er prey: a dinosaur...
...finds me driving out to interview a local come out of the mountains and on to the The window of an insurance office worthy of a profile, this being a regular plains...
...I like Jack's most of all: tales of working the big spreads back in the forties and fifties...
...The subject might be fall (pre-hibernation) they have been "Life," "Farm and Ranch," "Fire," and a veteran wheat farmer or a fourth-gen- known to ravenously raid farms and ranch-"Hail...
...The boys tell stories, lies maybe...
...That is, one of the fos62 July 19 9 8 • The American Spectator silized kind that seem to turn up around here every time somebody backhoes a hole for a new septic tank...
...The boys speak of women only in the most chivalrous way...
...Just behind the back fence run the railroad tracks, and as I lie in bed at night, the building vibrates slightly with the passing of lumbering freight trains...
...And everyday the boots are shined...
...floor of the Great Plains without the usual pile up on the dark mountains...
...these guys are pretty beat up...
...the shirts and jeans neat and pressed...
...A stock killer is eventually a The mountain snowpack was only fifty New West that has inexorably altered Liv- dead bear, and a drought year is also a ingston, Bozeman, and the Bitterroot Val- "bad bear year...
...OM L acking Guthrie's breathtaking view, I live in an apartment building, flat-roofed and shoeboxshaped, that used to be a railroad hotel...
...In calendar year 1946 Doc was responsible for six automobile mishaps...
...I blasting in...
...I am rich, Lloyd," I say...
...The wide, shaded porch faces Main Street...
...There's George "Doc" Hansen, a white-haired former roughneck who returned from his World War II service in The American Spectator • July 1 9 9 8 63...
...Since natural forage in a drought year sand acres of green wavy wheat into a I sit and sip coffee and scribble with the is marginal, and a lean, pre-hibernation dead, matted mess...
...In eleven a hundred miles long and thirty wide in The Front is the only place in the years and 15o,000 miles, my Honda and I north-central Montana...
...These mounThe radio tips me off, and hearing distant relief of an air-conditioned newspaper tains can be reached by gravel roads run-thunder, I secure sheets of cardboard under office...
...The a.c...
...God knows they've earned it...
...Jack Blake helped build Grand Coulee Dam when he wasn't an itinerant cowboy working on ranches from Montana to Nevada...
...Choteau may be the world capital of dinosaurdom...
...In Mon- of snow, thrusting up 5,000 feet from the each afternoon as purple thunderheads tana this augurs a drought summer...
...All a retired cowboy or roughneck really wants after a lifetime of hard, dirty work is to be laundered and well groomed...
...BILL CROKE is a writer in Choteau, ley...
...Guthrie was a curmudgeon whose ranch out on the Teton road afforded him a picture-postcard view of Ear Mountain...
...The Front is wide open and hasn't Today I would like to come across largMontana...
...Sent Missy to college on that one...
...ex-oilfield roughnecks, cowboys, farmhands, and a railroad brakeman...
...The wall of the size of golf balls bounce off of my car...
...At the end of another scorching day I stop in the lobby for a chat...
...I work for the Acantha, Lloyd...
...When a woman stranger enters the lobby they slowly get on their feet, as hard as that is sometimes...
...The lobby is furnished with overstuffed chairs, potted plants, and (fruit of a recent renovation) a new, non-squeaky ceiling fan...
...Lloyd and I keep up an ongoing joke...
...A bad hailstorm can turn a thou- eration rancher still on the home place...
...mountains falls away to the north, the don't mind the dings on the hood and roof My beat is the Rocky Mountain Front: peaks seeming to shrink in the distance...
...Gettin' rich...
...And crash cars...
...This part of the state primeval temptation to take livestock is derstorms, there hasn't been much rain...
...Larson's Apartments is home to a few, well, characters: retirees and widowers in their seventies and eighties...
...They don't doff their hats, because to wear one indoors would be rude in the first place...
...The El Nino seems to be the culprit...
...He says: "Boy, what are you doin' here...
...As a stringer for the Choteau Acan- ping along the rivers: the Dearborn, the the car's windshield wipers and under the tha, I spend my days driving the back- Sun, the Teton, the Two Medicine...
...Pulitzer Prize notwithstanding, most people in town shrug their shoulders at the mention of his name...
...He occasionally came to town to drink in the bars...
...It used to be the hometown of the late A.B...
...His environmentalist's turn of mind (rare for someone of his age and background), his love for the marauding grizzlies, and his prickliness made him enemies among the ranchers.the South Pacific with a case of post-traumatic stress disorder (back then they called it "battle fatigue...
...Doc got married after that and began to live a quiet life...
...tape recorder on...
...The win- shield frames pyramidal peaks long bereft mercury hovers in the mid-nineties ter storms stayed far to the south...
...There weren't many people in Montana to run into back then, so he had to settle for fences, an irrigation ditch or two, a storefront in Great Falls, and the Missouri River...
...Aw, that's nuthin'," says Lloyd...
...Although it's broiling, I can't enjoy the transition-zone of foothills...
...Young fella like you should be in the city makin' money...
...Bud" Guthrie (1901-1991), author of The Big Sky and The Way West among other books...
...the prairie and pass through towering porthen the hail, ranging in size from a pea to in my car hasn't worked in years, so I ride tals of stone, the doors to the sublime a marble...
...To my left is the shrunken river and its wide bordering junI never thought a place this far north percent of normal over the winter, and gle of willow and cottonwood...
...They stoop and limp and all seem in some way physically crooked...
...Don't you wanna get rich...
...Through the afternoon they lounge in the lobby like sultans over their newspapers and gossip...
...He talks of horses and rodeos, and of memorable winters like 1949, when a three-week blizzard closeddown the railroads and destroyed millions of dollars of livestock...
...Of famous saloons like the Atlantic in Butte with its bar a block long, the longest bar in the West...
...changed much in a century...
...A life lived under the Big Sky has left them with spotted skin the color of finely grained leather...
...Lloyd Williams, at 84 the oldest of the group, was a Burlington Northern brakeman for forty years and now likes to talk up the trains...
...I leave big wiper on the hatchback...
...A typical day northern Rockies where grizzly bears have been through much together...
...of ranches, now non-existent, one-fourth as big as a county...
...Once or twice a summer, stones with the windows open, nature's furnace cathedral of the Rockies...
...as long as the glass stays intact...
...Once a rancher giving me a tour of his place casually pointed out "that draw in the ridge where that paleontologist fella from Bozeman found the T-Rex...
...The wind-could have such blazing heat...
...has so far escaped the rush to the so-called irresistible...
...I don't think his books are much read...
...All I did was drink," said Doc...
...wheat fields along the Teton River Road are prematurely tawny...
...In spring (post-hibernation) and downtown advertises "Home," "Auto," feature in the paper...
Vol. 31 • July 1998 • No. 7
