Big White Truck
A mother seizes opportunity for her child
Violence is inherent to the state of nature. Yet, when are threats a peformance, and which ones are real? This OTGC Volley thematically responds to Since Sunday I have been deciding whether to kill my dog.
"I will fucking kill you," is how she put it to me, when it looked like I might take the table she was angling towards with her child. She pushed a brief smile across her lips, eyes flat, and placed herself and child with their backs to me in the big leather seats before the wide shop window. I grabbed a nearby stool and set my cup and scone bag on the narrow wooden shelf along the wall. Steam screamed into a steel cup somewhere off behind me, as the beautifully tattooed barista foamed another latte. I shoved some pastry in my mouth, and gazed over the child's head towards the river, trees, blue sky, anything else.
This space had once been a dry goods store, across the street and down from Montana's first major commercial river stop. Fort Benton had lived a lot of history for so small a town. Now it had a couple of small museums, a tattered book shop slash sporting goods emporium, a few bars, a big old hotel with a let's-be-fancy restaurant, and a good coffee shop down the way, run by a local gal who had moved to the city then come back.
This blonde mother's comment was likely not the first idle death threat this Main Street had heard this month, much less over the 150 or so years since the town's founding. She wasn't actually threatening me. Not really. Random gun violence only happens on freeways, or in grade schools, high schools, churches, discos, corporate offices, post offices, big outdoor parties in Las Vegas, and the like. Not small town coffee shops. Not yet. She just felt willing to threaten murder to get her preferred seat. No one would believe such a threat, not really, not from her. Not from little old her.
Her hair looked perfect, flowing straight out from under a brand new Stetson. Her child's hands and face were already covered in inky blue huckleberry goo and golden crumbs. She shoved more pastry in her little boy's mouth, then waved at a tall man pulling luggage from a big white Ram 2500 across the street. Matching Stetsons, oversized pickup, and a face full of huckleberries. I just knew they had guns and bibles tucked somewhere close, ready to fire at something they disliked.
Montana has become a tourist wonderland since I grew up here in the seventies, back when pickups came with the gun racks pre-installed. Now less than half the state's residents were born here. Already high property prices have nearly doubled since Covid, and our traditionally purple statehouse has flushed bright red in recent years. A flush largely bought and paid for by a wealthy immigrant wave. The whole state is being gentrified out from under the tribes and the pioneer descendants whose families have been hunting and farming and mining and ranching and trading here for three to seven generations. Gentrified by folks who may think hats make the cowboy and that respect is bought on a car lot. All as epitomized by a tech-money Governor who was born in San Diego, raised in Philadelphia, and once body-slammed a reporter on camera for asking a question he did not like. A whole tirade about locusts could fit here.
Montana knows locusts, and dust bowls, and depression. We vie with Wyoming for the nation's highest per-capita suicide rate1. Loneliness comes easy when the winds are whistling. It may be three to five hours to Costco, but only half an hour to the Mint or Stockman Bar.
It can be a bit uncertain what happens next here once your truck slips into the ditch, whether proverbially or otherwise. So, if you have lived a life wearing rugged individualism on your sleeve, will anyone be there for you when that happens? Will someone come along with a winch?
No one gets to spend their life using people or driving them away, while still expecting them to show up again once you really need them. All our trucks hit the ditch eventually. Every last one of them, one way or another, no matter how fancy the hat riding inside.
Which is why the "Yellowstone" floating out there in the populist American lens is a lie. A certain class of folks seem to think they somehow made it all on their own, and can keep doing so out in some overpriced trophy home on the range, when in fact they just struck it lucky at some point while hustling so hard they never learned how to be a friend, much less a neighbor. No winch on their truck.
Genuine Montanans know this: wide open places need neighbors. The kind who will show up when you hit the ditch, no questions asked. It's why we wave to each other on back roads, just to say "I see you." It's why we show up for potlucks even if we aren't church regulars. It's why we chat in the grocery aisle, and generally do not say things like "I will fucking kill you" just to get a seat in a coffee shop. Not because we are especially friendly. If anything, we tend towards cranky. But, we also know we need friendship, just as much as the rivers, the mountains, and our big wide open sky.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/suicide-mortality/suicide.htm