The Scenic Route

Solving our problems

After a brilliant, bone-chilling day, the sun has gone down in Heron, Montana, but across the river, Star Peak, Billiard Table, Sawtooth, Clayton Peak and Scotchman glow like burnished silver. They will soon turn brilliant pink, then deep rose and finally blue-white before darkness falls on the western Cabinets—the Scotchman Peaks.

I can say this without looking, for I have been watching this since I was old enough to watch, but I will go look anyway. I am writing in the room where Betty Ann Tillapaugh taught me to read. The mountains across the river have been part of my horizon for most of my life.

This week between Christmas and New Years is marked by crystalline. Slanting rays of the sun have come into my kitchen and office and through my goggles on Schweitzer’s ski slopes. The moon grows fatter each night, building itself up to the last blue moon of the decade, scheduled to arrive early on New Years Eve, depending on where on Earth you happen to be standing at the time. Orion takes all night to stalk across the southern sky. Cassiopeia hangs overhead at bedtime. Ursas both arrive overhead in early morning. Winter’s sky is turned upside down from summer’s skies.

Much of our world was turned upside down, too, during the now-dying decade of the Aughties. We sat through the end of the last decade, century and millennium in varying states of apprehension, but Y2K, that ballyhooed end of the universe, didn’t happen. But 9-11 did, for which we were as unprepared as a kick in the crotch from our best friend.

Before, we watched a presidential election come down to chicanery on an order not seen since Tammany Hall. After, we wandered in grief, rage and denial through murky months of posturing by politicians while decisions were made that have dumped thousands of lives and billions of dollars into the black holes that are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the meantime, Columbia burned up over Texas. We reelected a man who is judged to be the most incapable president in our history. On the greed of the few, we boomed and then, boy, did we bust. Our country became as divided as at any time since the Civil War, and remains split by self-serving ideologies and pundits who seem intent on keeping us from talking to each other. We should, by the way, tell them to shut up and sit down.

We are still in Iraq and Afghanistan. We are still digging out of a lingering recession. We are still tolerating hysteria peddlers, hate mongers and finger pointers disguised as “commentators.” But, we are also still here. We are still Montanans, Idahodians, United States citizens, North Americans, earthlings. We are still humans, which is the most in-common thing we have going for us.

We humans are a frail species with big imaginations. If we couldn’t think and had our evolution still made us what we are physically, something would have eaten us long ago. Naked, we are slow, weak and defenseless, but clad in and equipped with what we have wrought with our ingenuity, we are nearly unstoppable.

If we were only as intelligent as we are ingenious. We often invent things that, should we have any kind of foresight or conscience at all, we would burn their plans and have our minds erased so as never to think of such a thing again. Witness the atomic bomb. Germ warfare. Television in its current state of use. The Edsel. Billie Bass.

But we also think of new ways to cure old diseases, methods by which to get medical care into places where none has been before, ways to bring water to places long parched, incredible new ways to have fun, methods by which to get off this planet and into space and back again. We write new poems and sing new songs and find new ways to help each other every day. We are a hopeful species, as hopeful as we are ingenious and sometimes unintelligent.

So, I have hope for us humans.

In the past ten years, I’ve made many friends, and lost some too, some to the irrevocable processes of time and some to my own foolishness. I’ve learned much and much of what I have learned has taught me that I know very little. I have struggled with God and still not gotten my own way and even found myself grateful for that—sometimes.

I have learned that, if I let it, the world will continually surprise and amaze me in subtle and often not-so-subtle ways.

Last summer, I looked down at Heron from Star Peak for the umpteenth time and noted, to my surprise, that my vision of the town had been wrong for a long time. It’s not laid out in a neat east-west alignment, as I had always believed. The room I learned to read in doesn’t face due south. Heron and its buildings sit at right angles to the railroad that built it, which runs through at about 15 degrees south of east and north of west.

This discovery caused me to squint and go “harrumph,” and finally laugh. My prejudices and preconceptions, even about things as basic as direction, are sometimes pretty well set. Little revelations like this one (and many larger) give me pause and allow me to take a look at other things I believed to be “true” with a mind pried open by surprise.

So, I urge you, when the sun goes down in your neighborhood, even though you might have seen it a thousand or ten thousand times, to take a little time to go and look. Even my lifelong horizon has changed since I began to watch it. I am sometimes surprised by how much; sometimes by how little. You may be surprised, too.

Sandy Compton has contributed to The River Journal since 1995. He is the chief story teller of The StoryTelling Company and author of Archer MacClehan & The Hungry Now and Side Trips From Cowboy (www.bluecreekpress.com).