Montana 1948 Quotes

Out of town I could simply be, I could feel my self, firm and calm and unmalleable as I could not when I was in school or in any of the usual human communities that seemed to weaken or scatter me. I could sit for an hour in the rocks above the Knife River, asking for no more discourse than that water’s monotonous gabble. I was an inward child, it was true, but beyond that, I felt a contentment outside human society that I couldn’t feel within it.

My mother feared for my soul, a phrase that sounds to me now comically overblown, yet I remember that those were precisely the words she used.

If you don’t like wind,” Grandfather replied, “you don’t like Montana. Because it blows here 360 days a year. Better get used to it.

It’s not so much

was a phrase my mother inherited from her mother. I had heard Grandma Anglund use it for occasions ranging from a scraped knee (mine) to a family burned out of its farm.

Norwegian way of keeping all our earthly affairs from achieving too much importance.

Pop says, ‘Now you head on out of here and you better hope the snow covers your tracks because I’m going to finish this whiskey and then I’m coming

after you.

People are leaving the bar right and left—probably afraid of these wild and woolly cowboys from Montana

Deputy sheriff.” He looked down at his shirt as though he expected to see his badge there. “Which I owe to your granddad and your dad. You know what your granddad said it means to be a peace officer in Montana? He said it means knowing when to look and when to look away. Took me a while to learn that.

Out in Montana you wouldn’t be worth dirtying a man’s hands on. Or his boots. So we’d handle him this way. Nice and clean.

On the western edge of the county and extending into two other counties was the Fort Warren Indian Reservation, the rockiest, sandiest, least arable parcel of land in the region. In 1948

Mercer County, Montana.

Mercer County is in the far northeast corner of Montana,

Looking in the dead bird’s eye, I realized that these strange, unthought-of connections—sex and death, lust and violence, desire and degradation

You should have seen it, Gail,” he said. “By God, it was something. This Minneapolis big shot, this city boy, wouldn’t let up. Kept saying to Pop, ‘Mighty fine boots. Mighty fine. Just hope you’re not tracking in any cow shit with those boots.’ Wouldn’t stop.” “Shhh. Watch your language. David can hear you.” “Just reporting. That’s all. Just saying how it was. Finally Pop says, ‘You don’t let up, I’m going to stick one of these boots up your ass. Then I’m going to track your shit all over this bar.