Dar Sangre MetaZin: Montana Memories

At the 20th reunion I had been knocked out by the flood of unexpected memory, particularly the encounters with classmates I'd known in elementary school. This time was similar, the faces diminished but including many from those early years, many who have remained in the Bozeman area.

While we signed in and looked for our nametags I turned to the attractive woman behind me and inquired if she was part of the reunion. "Yes, I am," she smiled happily. "Anne Caprio!"

Do you know that you were the first girl of my age I felt attracted to? Anne was an exceptionally pretty second-grader, brown eyes and full lips, an olive complexion and a friendly manner, but what really hooked me were her boots.

At 7:30 am in the north entrance mudroom of the Longfellow school, it's a madhouse of noise as fifty children stomp and then simultaneously unsnap the buckles of their black rubber galoshes one early winter's day. Half melted snow sprays everywhere. Above the chaos Anne is walking away from me, her calves burgeoning elegantly in a pair of leather knee-highs topped with rabbit fur. I think this was the most sophisticated thing I had ever seen to that point in my life. Over the years this pleasant memory has returned to me, not obsessively, but surely dozens of times. Thank you, Anne!

The Steves ride again! I was reminding Steve Teslow, who now drives trains out of Sheridan, WY, that in third grade there were probably five of us kids with the same name. It was as though our parents had never talked to each other to iron out this confusion in advance. I'm pretty sure that Steve Blockey, who also attended the reunion, was there too. One or both of the Steve Greens...

By third grade only a few of us were still eating paste. This was the golden year before we were instructed in the arts of multiplication. We lived in a plodding, additive universe only.

I saw a shadow pass over Rick Fellows' face when I asked him about his brothers and sisters. "yes, Craig and Lee-Ann live nearby." Unnamed was the other sister, Connie, whose life may have come to a tragic end. Another proto-erotic memory, wrestling bare chested with Connie in the itching grass of that second-grade summer until we were informed that girls and boys don't play together that way. Actually, they do, quite a bit, but we were never really friends again. Later I remember, Connie became a beautiful teen, a wild spirit, the victim of a motorcycle crash.

Moving along to a new school, the institutionally red brick Emerson school. Here Joana Kirchhoff and I both remember being read to in the free period by Mrs Harrington--"The Lion's Paw," by Robb White. I recall my desk placement in that room on the southwest corner of the second floor. Here we participated in the SRA reading improvement program, its color-coded levels offering me an early chance to excel, learn exotic new colors like "aqua" amd "tan."

We had visited the Emerson school before, it's always funny to walk those halls, remembering especially that, like the mudroom scene, each traversal of those wooden floors was in the company of sixty or eighty other students, crowding and squeaking urgently to their next periods. And a certain social tension in the north corridor which I avoided even during my second year at the school. Ha ha, there was also the gym--a man was kneeling on the floor at the far end of the junior-sized basketball court, effecting some repairs. You could see the line of an enclosed curved tier of built-in seating that once enclosed "the pit." This is the place where many a dodge ball was intercepted with a stinging ass, where many a lad learned early of his mortality.

In terms of death and moving on, I remembered first Laurie, those early kisses, later forgotten. We visited Dorothy and Henry, her parents, spoke of her early passing. I had reconnected with Laurie only a few months before her death--we could have met where she lived in Washington, but never did.

And a lot more like that. I'm not going to eulogize everyone. Alistair, of coure, whose ashes we buried with my father's at the Valley View Cemetery.

It's pretty appropriate name, Dad's buried not far from the bluff on which you look out over the expanse of the Gallatin Valley, it was good too that we finally chose the mountain called Sacajawea to climb while we were there--its bare peak surveys all of the empire from the other direction.

No, it's not exactly like the state, the land being in my blood, but something close, training and knowledge that was picked up over a long time. I almost forgot to scan for antelope as I drove by the Canyon Ferry, when I did I instantly spotted a singleton off in the far sage. This is the three-hundred fiftieth time I have looked here for antelope, in a place a hundred miles from my old home, in Montana you can range over a lot of land with the eye, all this topology, all these species are keenly there for me.

I love the drive from Townsend towards White Sulphur, it slants across the Deep Creek drainage, rolling hills, enters the Helena National Forest. The last time I was here Montana was on fire, the road threatened with closure, I had guided my rental car through burning debris, today you can still see the limits of that blaze along the roadside.

Then, blam, a turn to the east and nothing but the endless flats of central montana, trees an impossible memory. Far far off is White Sulphur Springs, notable I think for neither its springs or its sulphur, which are small and scanty, but named after these only features of existence. We turn right instead, the truck tiny in a vast jumble of hills, the Crazy peaks becoming a jagged hazy boundary to the southeast, the backside of the Bridgers to the southwest. 26 mi to Wilsall, 54 mi to Livingston.