The fiction of childhood imagination and the complexity of place

My backyard was in Montana. Rather, my backyard was Montana.

In the summer afternoons of my childhood, I pretended the scrubby patch of lawn behind our Midwestern house to be the grasslands and rolling ranges of the Mountain West. I dodged tumbleweeds, heard the approaching rumble of wild mustangs, and fancied myself a cowboy-hat wearing, rope-wrangling cowhand.

The fictive scene was a Montana ranch, quite inventive considering the aforementioned backyard measured a quarter-acre and I lived in a small city in Wisconsin.

Imagination does that. Whether it’s the fancy of an 8-year-old dreaming of a West he’s never seen, or any of us envisioning a destination yet to be explored, our minds conjure landscapes more vivid than real geography.

Pretending also makes the trip shorter. I could walk out my back door and be in Montana in 11 steps rather than driving 1,100 miles from Eau Claire to Butte.

(As a sidebar, the weedy parking lot next to our house became Wrigley Field in my eclectic mind’s eye. Cracks in the pavement served as first base, second, third and home, and by throwing a rubber baseball at the paint-worn garage door, I could mark balls and strikes. Montana and Wrigley were but a short flyball apart from each other, another advantage of childhood imagination.)

I forgot about Montana after grade school until sophomore-year political science class. We learned about enclaves of libertarians who holed up in Montana and other sparse outposts. They loved individual freedom, limited government, and guns, more or less in that order.

Maxim Loskutoff wrote recently in the New York Times about that American West, the home of outcasts seeking refuge, wearing T-shirts that called Montana “The Last Best Place to Hide.”

The notion of Montana as “a wilderness of possibility” has beckoned everyone from David Letterman to the Unabomber.

Speaking of the latter, Montana-native Loskutoff appreciated growing up in a state that seldom made the news until Ted Kaczynski’s murderous exploits attracted national media. They usually showed up only for the annual Testicle Festival. (You can look it up.)

With the national spotlight comes caricature: Montana as retreat for entrepreneurs seeking simpler lives, as sanctuary for those trying to escape the past, as unlimited playground if you’re into fly fishing (probably not a caricature). And it remains a haven for the anti-establishment who make Montana as red as the ruddy falls in Glacier National Park.

All of this is prologue to the fact our daughter is getting married in Montana this summer. This is the daughter we didn’t imagine would ever live more than an hour from where she grew up in Milwaukee. Who craves quiet nights cuddled up by the fire more than hiking the Beartooth Range. (Or so we thought.) The daughter who lives to save every animal on earth, from an orphaned kitty to a broken-winged sparrow, who left for Montana hitched to a boy who hunts bear and elk and anything else moving and legal.

What Montana will we see when we travel there?

As with any visit, we’ll see it first through the eyes of our hosts. Or in this case, the love-crossed eyes of our child and her soon-to-be. They have extolled the virtues and vistas of Montana even as they lament the high rent and lengthy drive to the nearest Target or Culver’s.

They’ll start a new life together where mountain ranges and river valleys conjoin Glacier and Yellowstone under the vastness of what they call the Big Sky.

True, they could live more cheaply elsewhere, as the likes of John Mayer and Justin Timberlake move in and the fictional Duttons of Yellowstone attract real money.

They’ve left a state of 6 million people and zero grizzly bears to live in a state with 1 million people and 2,000 grizzlies.

The fiancé aspires to the Montana that captured my childhood imagination. The difference being he’s going after it and has the aptitude to do so.

I’m captivated by the West – loved living in Idaho for one summer – but I neither hunt nor fish. I’d be as out of place living in Montana as a cowboy living in New York City. (Maybe that’s why I liked the McCloud television show in the 70s.)

But the boyfriend is true Montana material. He hopes to work as a ranger, sheriff’s deputy or in fisheries & wildlife. He in fact shot a bear and brought it home for our daughter to cook. (“Why couldn’t he just hunt deer like everybody else?”)

He’s also a University of Wisconsin history graduate, so he’s not just about shed antlers and nymph flies. Neither is Montana. It’s too easy to caricature, remember? My handy Wildsam guidebook to Montana lists as many coffee shops and bookstores as it does fly shops and mountain trails.

Montana – if not the whole of the American West – somehow invites our real-life exploration without having to abandon our untamed imaginations.

For every fishing guide and rancher in Montana, there’s a poet or artist. Trout streams are plentiful, but so are urbane towns and historical landmarks.

As for our daughter, she’ll not only be marrying her love, but into the complex, beautiful, contradictory, not-to-be caricatured landscape of Montana.

Meanwhile, she’ll follow her passion to care for all living creatures. Montana kitties and puppies need saving, too. Maybe someday she’ll even save a grizzly bear.

Photo: EnjoyYourParks(dot)com