His Name is (still) David

Small town life and a big city lens

This is one of the first pieces I wrote for Old Truck Good Coffee. I saw Dave again last night, knit cap and all. We offered each other our usual “friendly glance & nod” as we walked by one another.

We were at the Holter Art Museum for a presentation by Montana Poet Laureate Chris La Tray. Dave works at the museum. Chris works at Fact & Fiction Books in Missoula. The event was sponsored by the Montana Book Company. All four are anchors of Montana’s contemporary cultural scene. The scene which invokes the protective fear I discuss in this essay.

If you have not yet had a chance to glance at this earlier piece, perhaps you will give it a few of your minutes today.

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Towards the back of the brew pub, on the right of the wide open wood slab stairs, he is sitting there again, perched on a stool along the wood slab wall shelf, near the wood slab bar. A slender man with an odd beanie cap he wears year-round, helping keep his old body warm. It looks like grandma's knitting. He looks older than the cap, about seventy, and bright as an incandescent bulb, if such had wrinkles. He is paging through a book, as always, a glass of porter by his elbow for it is after five o’clock. His daily book selection is collected in a tote bag on the shelf nearby. Making space. He sips slowly, absorbing the pages, long fingers running over the lines.

His name is Dave. Earlier in the day he was settled similarly at a large communal wood slab table in the coffee shop two blocks over on the Gulch. We had a chat. I only interrupt him from time to time. Interruptions with Dave are a journey, pleasurable when there is time. Time which may involve a run to the used (not new) book shop down the way, to ensure you have something you must read in hand. His recommendations are often spot on, inspired by a thought you have forgotten, from the conversation before the last time you saw him. Dave also works at the local art museum front desk, folding flyers, selling mugs, and avoiding your attention unless you approach to ask about the show. He will tell you. It's worth listening.

Dave confessed to me recently he is worried about his flooring. He lives upstairs in a creaky old subdivided Victorian, on Rodney Street, near the book and coffee shops, and breweries, and one small art museum, that form a circuit for more complex cultures in our tiny Capitol city. I have never been to his home. I have never been invited. I expect few have. Book hound that I am, I worry about his flooring, too, because he worries enough himself to say so. Books are heavy. He lives on the second floor.

I have known hoarders and one can hoard worse things than books. One could go so far to argue that book hoarding is not in fact hoarding at all, but library management. I might make that very argument myself, though will not here. I'll keep talking about Dave. Again, his books are heavy, and many, and it is a true fact that old west Victorian homes are often prettier than they are sturdy. At least Dave does not smoke.

It could be easy to think a Montana town of about 36,000 - a populace we deem a city hereabouts - might not have space for such a man, what with his odd hat and book bags and all. We do tend more towards cowboys and truckers and a few too many red caps. Yet when Dave wound up at St Pete's Hospital that one afternoon last fall, the town went red with alarm. At least three different people brought it up with me that week, apropos of nothing in particular, other than the assumption that of course we all know Dave. Who doesn't know Dave, that guy with all the books?

I hate telling stories like this. Or, I love it, but am afraid of it. Afraid that some aging banker in a city with more people than our state, which has more cows than people, will find the thought of Dave charming. That Dave might remind them of that quiet life they wanted before making a career of selling other people's money for more than most can afford, because that's the whole point for the monied class: making money with someone else's money, instead of making value. Instead of making anything but financed debt. Value is expensive. Finance is cheap, if you have a capital base in place, inherited from your dad or whomever. Who cares if debt financing drives up prices when you are personally surfing that curve. Debt financing is almost poetic for those capitalized and in the know. Too bad for the rest.

So, I worry that some banker or agent or lawyer or boss will remember that one night they wrote a poem. That they will read something like this essay and decide they want to write another one, somewhere inspiringly beautiful, with just the right bit of lonely. Because now they have money, and time, and land in Montana looks awfully cheap compared to New York condos, or that damned second home on yet another golf course down in Scottsdale that you visit all but twice a year.

At viral peak, every campsite and cheap hotel across Montana was packed, on the assumption we had too much space for a virus to spread. But, it did. Car to car and camp to camp. Bar to bar. Church to church. Covid infected our tax base, too. Property prices rose forty to sixty percent across nearly all Montana counties over the Covid years. Wages did not. Local workers can now no longer afford a first home out here in the Big Sky Country of second homes for the wealthy. We have thousands of acres of ten acre “ranchettes,” all packed full of folks living their Wild West dream, shitting into septic tanks buried over the dropping water tables they pump dry for their lawns, showers, coffee, and pasta.

Montana has earthquakes. Earthquakes are how mountains and lakes are made. We have both, lots. What could possibly go wrong?

A forty to sixty percent property price hike over the course of two years is an earthquake, if you rent your house while working at the prevailing wage, dreaming of someday owning one of your own. Which is an awfully greedy thought to hold dear, when there are aging bankers out there, shopping hard for a second poem of their own.