The following article was written by Mrs. Peterson several years ago. It is a fascinating glimpse into a child's memories of "growing up" in rural Montana.
Far to the north and to the west, away from the cities and the freeways and the tall buildings, lies a special place called Montana. When I was a child, my mother showed me this place on the map, for soon we would leave our home in a large city in the East, and we would make a new home in the mountains of Montana. I liked the kind, craggy face of Montana on the map, with its long, bumpy nose and warm, gentle eyes, like a grandfather with many wondrous stories to tell. It seemed to me that this face would be smiling down on me in my new place so far away.
We flew to Montana in a silver plane, my mother, brother, and I. My father was there already and would meet us at the airport in the new truck he had just bought. He said that there were many such trucks because in the winter the great mountains blew down snowdrifts taller even than me. I saw Montana first from the windows of the silver plane, perched high above the rims of Billings, and it was a far different place than any I had ever seen in the East. There were no busy streets and bustling shopping malls, no skyscrapers outlined in the distance. Instead, there were wide-open plains with tall grasses that stretched all the way to the mountains. I had never imagined anything such as those mountains. They rose up from the plains and the hills and towered above me, covered with evergreens and jagged rocks and the snowfall of many winters past. With their snowy tops seeming to scrape the very sky, they looked as if they could swallow me up into their great blue depths, but somehow they beckoned to me, inviting and welcoming as if even then it was irrevocably home. And the sky! The sky in Montana was somehow different from any sky I had ever known. It stretched in all directions like an endless blue circus tent, finally disappearing into the craggy mountaintops or the sea of grass. I sat in the cab of the shiny green Ford between my mother and father, breathing the air of pine and sage, as we left the plains behind and the mountains drew us closer and closer, like passenger pigeons home to roost. And so began my life as a child in Montana.
We moved to our new home in the fall, just as the last vestiges of Indian summer were dwindling away, leaving the brilliant orange and yellow leaves a crunchy carpet beneath our feet. The frost of winter was in the morning air, and the smoke of woodstoves hung on the mountains' breath. I began second grade in the old schoolhouse down the road. It was older than anyone remembered, built from round and weathered river rock from the Stillwater, the worn and polished wood floor smooth under our stockinged feet. The schoolhouse had only one room and one teacher, a great tall man with no hair who wore red or green plaid shirts and rang a brass bell when it was time to come in from recess. Some of the children were small like me and others were almost old enough to ride the big yellow bus to the high school 25 miles away. My best friend was Shelly. She had a long tangled red braid and more freckles than we could count, and she could run like a deer and hit a baseball as far as any boy. From the very beginning, the mountains captivated and held me under their spell. I believe that my father felt the same way. We began exploring them when hunting season began, and even their names fascinated us - Sioux Charlie, Lake Camp. Horseman's Flats, Lightning Lake, Mystic Lake, Brass Monkey. I loved hunting with my father, rising before the sun to be ready at the first light of dawn, the sight of the early morning sun over the cliffs, the chili of the mountain wind, the warmth of the truck as the heater purred, the smell of coffee from the old metal thermos, the sight of deer and elk appearing from seemingly nowhere out of the burnt umber brush, and disappearing over the ridge to the safety beyond.
Soon it was winter and the mountains held true to their promise and blew down heavy clouds of snow, sometimes as much as two or three feet. Shelly and I would look up at the sky, gray now with impending storms, and open our mouths to catch the giant feathery snow on our tongues. We would lie on our backs in the cold whiteness of it, and make angels in the untouched fields. We built forts of snow and waged fierce battles with dragons and boys. We played "Fox and Hound" at recess, making long, twisting trails through acres of white, and on the weekends we slid down the great steep hill behind our house, clinging to our little round saucer sleds, and avoiding the implacable trees looming at the bottom of the slope. When we got too cold, we would trudge back to the warmth of the house, dragging our sleds behind us, where my mother would hang our wet clothes beside the stove and thaw our frozen fingers with mugs of hot cocoa, as rich as melted Hershey bars, with frothy melted marshmallows on the top. Sometimes the snow came down so fast and so deep that the snowplow could not even plow our road, so that the school would be closed, and sometimes we had no electricity or water. We would use candles for light and haul in water from the creek, and everyone would sleep in the living room near the fireplace to stay warm.
Sometimes during the winter, a warm wind called a Chinook would blow down through the valleys and melt the snow and remind us that spring was indeed on its way. We had a dog that we named Chinook because he was white and fluffy like the snow and he blew in from somewhere unknown, just like the wind.
As it grew closer to spring, there were more and more Chinooks that turned the snow into water and the ground into soft squishy mud to sink our boots into when we did our chores. The ice on the river and the creek began to break up in loud splitting cracks, and the water ran high and wild. Lambs were born, and the ranchers would call us to take their "bums" - motherless lambs that needed to be raised on a bottle. We brought them home from the ranches in the back seat of our VW beetle to a special shed and pen for them, where we fed them every few hours with nursers made from old Coke bottles and big black rubber nipples. We learned to hold two bottles in each hand and one between our knees so that we could feed them all and they grew and grew until they no longer needed the bottles. Once a year we took our lambs up to a ranch where they were sheared. The ranchers used special tools to shave the wool until it lay on the ground like big clouds of oatmeal, and our lambs looked skinny and bald, like the teacher at school.
In the spring there were wild animals as well. We could see baby deer on the hills near our house and up on the cliffs in the mountains sometimes we caught a glimpse of the new mountain sheep. Once we found an injured baby hawk. My mother put him in an old rabbit hutch and we cared for him until he was able to go free. My father told us not to hold or touch him because this was a wild animal, who was meant to be free, never kept as a pet. We didn't mind this rule. The hawk had a nasty hooked beak that he would use to peck our fingers if we ever got too close.
As a child, my favorite time in Montana was the summer, when we were unencumbered by school and were able to roam as freely as the baby hawk. Shelly and I explored the woods, the hills, the mountains, and the river. We built treehouses and decorated a playhouse next to the chicken coop, where we mixed up mud pies and left them to bake in the hot summer sun. We floated down the creek on big black inner tubes, letting the cold water and the slippery, mossy rocks slip by our feet. We tried to catch the silvery fish with our hands as they whistled past in their underwater world, but we were never fast enough. We explored the Stillwater, icy cold even in the heat of August, and learned where the current was slow enough for us to cross, if we could just stand the cold long enough. We skipped rocks into the calm backwaters and sat on a log with our feet dangling over the water, dropping sticks into the lazy water, wishing them a good journey, wherever they were headed. We rode our horse in the long, hot summer afternoons; bareback, careful to avoid the clothesline so that she couldn't scrape us off by the neck when she tired of the game.
And always, always there were the mountains, beckoning to us to discover all the secrets they held. We found deserted mining camps, scurrying up stairs that went up a steep hillside to nowhere, now that most of the mine's buildings were gone. Shelly was fearless in exploring the deserted buildings, though we were certain they were haunted by the ghosts of the mine. The old hospital was still standing; its ancient operating table still patiently waiting within its gloomy haft lit rooms. We played Emergency Room, and had races to see who could give the fastest, most hair-raising ride on the table.
The mountains held secrets, which sometimes we were lucky enough to discover. Once, hidden deep within the pristine silence of the forest, we found a perfect swimming pool. It was a large square pool deep in the trees, nothing around it but the forest, filled with pure, crystal water, its bottom clouded with moss at the bottom. My father said that it was probably the old foundation of a mine building since torn down that had filled with snow runoff or perhaps an underground spring, but to this day I think of it as a magical pool, left there by landlocked mermaids for us to find, another of the mountains gifts to us.
Sometimes in the summer we would drive on the tiny gravel roads way up into the mountains, thousands of feet above the plains. These roads are switchbacks because they zig and zag across the face of the mountain, sometimes so steeply that my father would have to back up around the corners, each time going a little bit higher until finally we would be at the top where there were no trees and the wind blew cold even on a hot summer day. My father loved these mountains and he would take me with him while he worked clearing roads and trails and helping the geologists gather samples. We would pick buckets of wild huckleberries and raspberries, hiking for miles off the road through the sweet smell of pine trees until we found fruit that the bears had not yet eaten, the berries falling into our metal pails making a tinny thunking sound as they hit the bottom. My mother would make the berries into pies and jams that we would eat all year long, each bite a reminder of summer in the mountains.
In the summer many people were married, and there were wedding dances in the schoolhouse. There were potluck dinners and local bands would play loud honky tonk music so that people could jitterbug and two step and waltz. We children loved the Hokey Pokey, and would dance and watch the festivities until our eyelids grew heavy and our parents loaded us nearly asleep into the truck to go home. My parents loved to dance. At home they would put us to bed and push the furniture back against the walls so that the entire living room was their ballroom. I would creep down the stairs and hide behind the stairwell so that I could watch them dance and hear the notes of "Moon River" drifting out onto the cool summer night breeze. It seemed to me that "Moon River" would float up to the mountains to the deer and the elk and the hawk and drift down the Stillwater past the lazy eddies and the rapids, adding its own melody to the symphony of the mountains.
On the weekends, friends from the city would come to camp on our property. The other children and I collected sticks and branches for a huge bonfire after dark. We would roast marshmallows for S'mores and would savor each bite of the sticky goodness as it dripped down our chins. We played hide and seek in the woods after dark and scared ourselves in our tents telling scary stories about the mine ghosts who still roamed the mountains. We slept in our own tents away from the grownups where we felt deliciously big and just a little bit scared, though we would never in a million years admit it.
As summer drew to a close and the first hint of fall was in the air, we would return to the mountains to cut truckloads of firewood for the winter. We worked together with several other families so that everyone had help. I loved the smell of pine mixed with the scent of fresh cut wood in the thin mountain air, and the sounds of the chainsaw roaring and the crash of dead branches as the tree was felled. We packed a lunch to eat and even the taste of plain sandwiches was somehow richer while in the mountains.
Many summers have come and gone since those days so long ago, but even now I can close my eyes and still remember the scent of pine and the sound of the creek as it rushed by on its journey to the river and the sea. I can still feel the anchor and the pull of the mountains, forever rooting my heart to this place as long as it will beat, and perhaps beyond. I can still hear the bleating of the lambs and taste the huckleberries, and for just a moment. I can remember when I was a child in Montana.