Montana Romantics Have the Blues

In this week's Time Magazine, Livingston-based novelist and critic Walter Kirn writes that "red-state" Montana is losing its "smoky, boozy atmosphere, unfit for sensitive, rigid, allergic types" to "blue-state" sensibilities:

The outlaw Montana that I moved to 15 years ago and that my Eastern friends had apprehensions about--many of them quickly dismissed once they visited and fired a few rounds from the target pistols I own or took a pickup down to a local bar with a poker table in its back room--is setting like the evening sun. Ragged former cow towns like Bozeman are turning into suburbanized high-tech meccas for Ph.D.s who like to go rafting and snowboarding. These immigrants have brought with them an exotic culture of dining spots that feature formal wine lists, bookstores that sell titles besides the Bible, sports that don't center on the killing of animals and taverns whose air is as clean and clear as the expensive vodka in their martinis.

Kirn's essay might be called Montana-Romantic, lamenting the loss of an era when cowboys errant drunk-drove to a smoke-filled bars, which for Kirn existed about fifteen years ago when he arrived here.  He has a point: one recent travelogue in a glossy lifestyle magazine compared Kirn's hometown of Livingston as Brooklyn to Bozeman's Manhattan.  You couldn't write that fifteen years ago.

Like Kirn, I was not born here:  I mostly grew up in Minnesota, went to college Out East, and have adopted Montana (though I also inherited it, in a way, from my Montanan parents).  Having suffered attacks by some who jealously guard their conception of a birthright, I imagine Kirn will catch some flak from native-born Montanans simply for daring to share his adopted Montana with Time's readers.  That's unfortunate; non-native Montanans are among our state's most insightful celebrants.

Where I differ with Kirn is that I am more of a Montana Classicist, looking to the essential Montana that weathers the fads.  Whatever their policy merits, bans on smoking in bars and driving with an open beer draw on a deep progressive (or prohibitionist--your pick) tradition in Montana politics that has ebbed and flowed in some form since territorial days.  And just down the street here in Helena are dozens of extravagant mansions with ballrooms that a century ago hosted parties befitting Park Avenue (the Park Avenue in Manhattan, not Helena; the Manhattan in New York, not Montana).  I know at least one lady from Livingston who has been drinking martinis for almost seventy years.

So despite much recent commentary, Montana has never been susceptible to being stamped "blue" or "red" or any other label-of-the-day no matter how much ink is spilled in trying.  It always has been a vibrant swirl of prospectors and bankers, homesteaders and stockmen, union and company men, journalists and cowboys, naturalists and lumberjacks, and always will be.  That should come as some consolation to a Montana Romantic.

Comments

[david]

Wow -- excellent analysis, Anthony -- thanks.