I’ve been avoiding writing this story because I’m still very much living it, and a part of me feels that I need an event to wrap, feelings to pass, and a respectable chunk of time to carry on to write something down. It helps me decide how I feel.
It confounds me how, physically, I got to Montana, landing when and where and with who I did. In the quiet air, amongst rivers and pines, in a very, very, small, small town with people who I didn't know existed just a few months ago. So much of life unfolds with this blind luck, if I study it close enough. I’m left skeptical of how much control I have in the matter, if any at all, and give up trying to solve it until something very good, or very bad, happens again.
Just last winter, I was uprooting my 8 year run in San Francisco in search of some space. I spent two months in the tropics of Indonesia with friends and family, in the ocean and heat and humidity, eating mostly plants. I came home and spent some time studying before road tripping with Emma through the Northwest, which is what this entire story is all about. It effectively swung the pendulum to the other extreme, driving miles on landlocked miles through rolling hills and the fields of Middle America, where meat and coca cola cravings abandoned any health habits picked up in Bali. People are kind hearted and traditional, not concerned with beauty and influence. Here, we experienced true space.
As fate would have it, I rainchecked a Montana trip two years ago to visit Africa with Emma. It became a dream deferred. I understood the magic of the mountains since high school, where Ms. Kirk, my art teacher and queen of cool, took fly fishing trips to the state in the summertime. To give perspective to her sweeping qualifications, this same woman proposed to Tom Petty via flower bouquet trebuchet-ed on stage, which he held up in victory during the encore. (“Did he marry you?” “No, he didn’t.”) In her youth, she left a unicorn ink drawing with her number in her crushes mailbox to treasure map him to her face, with the same unicorn next to it, in the yearbook. (“Did he marry you?” “No, he didn’t.”) As far as travel recommendations, Friday Harbor in the San Juan Islands had come with high marks on The Ms. Kirk Report as it was “romantic, with orcas.” I went there 3 years ago with Kendall, and found it to be extremely romantic, with orcas. Montana was all that was left. And with Ms. Kirk’s endorsement, it was a non-negotiable.
But this whole thing traced further back than that, in childhood patterns we don’t decide but just are.
There was the love of horses since I was a little thing that I rarely mention, with riding lessons spanning middle school before sports took over. Toys, plush animals, Pony Pals book series. If I care to expand - I was gifted a bridle on one of these young, preteen Christmases - horse not included - that rattled me to my core, finally feeling understood by my family who thought that up until this point, I was fucking nuts. The breakthrough led to a ballistic, yet cathartic, episode under the tree. Or darker, still, a princess party for Baby Kendall where I opted instead to be a horse, honoring the theme but with my own flare. I paper mache’d my own head that, once dried and hardened, carved into my neck, threatending decapitation for the duration of the soiree. I remained in character, bent but not broken.
We were not an outdoorsy family, yet us 3 girls, for my 13th birthday - trout fishing in Lake Shasta. A rational gift given my hours wasting away to mush in front of a computer screen playing “Trophy Bass” all summer. And then I grew up and studied Agricultural Business at Cal Poly, took beekeeping courses, equine science, and joined Charlotte at the student farm. I maintain a vegetable garden and prolific compost pile. My 30th birthday was spent at a ranch in Healdsburg. And during a sleep deprived epiphany on the Mara plains of Kenya, I committed myself to the pursuit of wide open spaces - the same ones I would leave the city to find a year and a half later - prescribing them as the antidote for any future problem of my life.
I acknowledge none of these things are that unusual, but woven together over the tapestry of a lifetime, helps me to understand why I get along so well in this place. If I go back in the years through journals - I find pattern, evidence, and trace - if not the name Montana itself - written down.
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