T.D. Mischke
There were cousins in Circle, Mont., and the freight trains were heading that way out of St. Paul.
Lay of the Land: A series of essays on the spirit of Montana
I was 17, and it was the final summer before adulthood would crest and flood my carefree world.
Just writing this sentence now brings a sigh and a long stare out the window. It’s a sigh filled with more layered emotion than can be sorted out here. It’s a sigh Huck Finn might have managed with his old man’s paunch and gray thinning hair; Huck as a married man, with grown children, looking back on his years along that river.
In fact, Huck might have been my role model at 17. I can’t recall. I know I wanted to live in a similar manner, especially in the summertime. By that, I mean free, without employment or debt, without duty or the poisoned draw of the dollar. I wanted adventure, with the absence of supervision. And like Huck, I too was stationed on the Mississippi.
St. Paul, Minn., was home but, as with so many boys over the many years, the West had been quietly and seductively seeping into my late teen-age daydreams. The East had no home in my imagination. It was never a draw. If I’d known how to sneak aboard a river barge, the Deep South might have beckoned, but what I understood was how to get aboard a freight train, and that made things simpler.
My older brothers had gone before me, and I’d listened to all their stories of the rails. It was always that northern high-line, and always the race toward a setting sun. Now, at 17, it was my turn to have this low-cost excursion west, piggy backing on some snaking steel beast, heading to where the rugged land was wide open and railroad security wondrously lax.
I learned from my mother of some cousins living in Circle, Mont. There was a young couple, with a large ranch, as well as a pair of brothers, just a few years older than I, living right in town. I looked at a map and saw that a freight train could get me as close as Wolf Point, and I soon set out to visit these people, hoping every tingle atop my peach-fuzz skin heralded the holy thrills waiting out there.
I had never before been on my own like this. I was at the beginning of a kind of boy-manhood. I didn’t long to be a man in full, not any more than Huck must have. I wanted to be a boy-man. That was the sweet spot; the sacred tether between past and future that allowed one to swing blissfully, in the great in-between, where a last blast of childhood freedom met the first breath of adult independence. I felt this even then. My older brothers had taught me well.
I still recall the late June afternoon when the clanging train slowed briefly in Wolf Point, allowing me just a few moments to toss my backpack out of the boxcar and leap to the hot gravel below. I hadn’t been on board 24 hours; barely enough time to grow weary of the endless rocking or swirling dust, but I already had the sense of arriving in a foreign land. I looked quite different from the mysterious brown faces staring at me. Back then, I wondered if people who didn’t look like me could ever be OK with me. I saw myself in the gas station mirror and thought, not only was I one skinny, pale white boy, but sweaty and filthy to boot; no candidate for the chamber of commerce welcome wagon, that’s for sure. I figured I’d best walk away from town and get my thumb out in the direction of Circle. Family was waiting there, along with a hot shower. I thought I’d feel at home once I cleaned up and sat with my own kin.
What I didn’t know was that my kin would seem as foreign to me as the Native Americans who watched me traipse down the shoulder of the road out of Wolf Point.
When I arrived in Circle, my cousins didn’t seem like anyone I knew back home. They had Montana chiseled into their very mugs, their accents and their bony limbs. They looked lean as the land. I felt alien and exposed; green like the lush land I had just left, not the brown land I now stood upon. Who could have predicted how quickly I’d be seduced by their contagious free spirit, or how I would need to be almost dragged home by my mother that September, when school burst this last bubble of liberation.
I remember that first horseback ride at the ranch, riding the way I thought all horses should be ridden, free from all trail guides, suffocating regulations and that slow single-file nonsense. It was just me and a muscled mare that morning, tearing across the dry, undulating, sun-drenched land, going faster than I had any business going. I was scolded for bringing her home soaking wet, but I knew I could never again ride behind some paid hand.
In every way, I was tasting a new kind of freedom. Even the cousins in town seemed set loose. They took little heed of law enforcement. They did as they pleased, stopped for red lights when they felt like it, fixed headlights or taillights only when they were in the mood. They had a feral edge to them, with their scarred, tan skin, angular faces and unkempt curly dark hair. They believed every gathering after a workday called for cheap, marred, acoustic guitars, old kitchen chairs on the dirt in the yard, and something called a rack of beer. They kept their shirts unbuttoned and they didn’t care that their front door wouldn’t close all the way.
I remember a fight they got into at a dance, and how half the town talked about it the next day. And I remember them talking about a wealthy man who they said had the mayor under his thumb. He lived up on the hill and they called him “Old Doc.” One night, in an inebriated state, I lost track of my cousins outside a bar and ended up with Doc’s 22-year-old son and two college girls who were clearly competing for his affections. He drove us up to his dad’s house, which had a swimming pool glimmering in soft patio lights. The son, who seemed like he’d been given most everything he’d wanted in life, asked the girls to join him in the water, which they promptly did, frolicking in their skimpy underwear. Holding a can of Rainier, I stared from the poolside, wondering if this were a life I could ever own. My guess was Doc’s kid got the prettiest girls in town, and not just one, but the pair. They all kept calling me “Minnesota” and telling me to jump in, but I was out of my league, in every way. These three people were the most foreign of all. They were good looking and well-off and said funny and clever things. I was inexperienced and unsure of myself and content to just observe. I had never before seen grown girls in their underwear and certainly not wet underwear, and between this and my baptismal horse ride, I wondered if Montana could possibly be the best kept secret for young American males.
Doc’s kid didn’t seem to care if his dad or mom were asleep or not, nor if the drunken laughter of the undressed co-eds might upset them. He was as carefree as everyone else I’d come to know. There just didn’t seem to be the same rules here as back home. Maybe everyone was making up their own. Or, perhaps, rules formed only when more, and taller, buildings formed first.
Today, now in my 50s, it’s still that wondrous unfettered feeling that burns brightest in my memory when I daydream about 17, and Montana, and that renegade summer: We were all on our own. We were all free. In a way I never would be, or could be, again.
T.D. Mischke is a former columnist and radio talk-show host from St. Paul, Minn. He currently lives in his car, where he runs his own online video and podcasting site called The Mischke Roadshow.
Editor’s Note: More contributions to this series may be found here.
