18 January 2022
First podcast of About Montana
Welcome to the first podcast of About Montana and the future of rural Western Montana as described through my lived experiences. As a person who is two weeks shy of being 75 years old and a former special forces combat medic, a retired secondary teacher, a doctor in education, and a retired adjunct professor. I also happen to be a Secular Franciscan who lives in Plains, Montana.
Plains Montana is thirty miles down the Flathead River from the Mission Mountains and Flathead Lake. The valley floor is half a mile wide, carved by the Lake Missoula glacial floods, which, at times, were 1,000 feet high and carved the Valley for the next million years. Following the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, 25,000 years ago, glacial Lake Missoula was 4,000 feet deep and held back by glacial ice dams in northeastern Idaho. The ice dams would melt and then break, perhaps 40 times, ending as recently as 10,000 years ago.
The water flowed through Western Montana across Idaho to Spokane, south to the Columbia River, and west to the Pacific. The floods removed millions of years of soil in Eastern Washington down to its 15 million-year-old basalt bedrock, created the Columbia Gorge, and filled 200 miles of the best farmland south of Portland with Montana soil. There’s so much Montana dirt in Oregon that we should at least get a thank you card from the good citizens of Oregon.
I have lived near the Clark Fork River for twenty years and fished in its tributaries for fifteen, ten of which were after two years of combat in Vietnam as a sergeant in an airborne unit. The Clark Fork itself is beyond my immediate experience. It’s too broad and too deep and too fast to bring out the deeper soul of a quiet wood or a small conifer valley. I prefer the small streams, tributaries that run into the Clark Fork where the water in the summer is shallow and clear, and where you can see the flashes from the flanks of trout feeding in the late afternoon. Norman MacLean, in the last line of his only novel, A River Runs Through It, wrote, “I am haunted by waters,” I understand his lived experience. It is mine as well.
Will continue with two or three podcasts a week for a while and then will have an interview every so often with other people who live and work and have families in Plains, Montana.
Thank you for listening. Will talk with you soon.
