At a strip mall hair salon, pausing during a cross-country road trip, I’m in the chair under the stylist’s deft scissors. With little encouragement – a listening ear is often enough – ‘Kelly’ proceeds to unpack her life story: it seems she skated away early from Cleveland, tried Chicago which her boyfriend could not abide, and then drifted downstate to the college town of Bloomington, Illinois. Asked what a visitor should know about her city, Kelly replies, “Well, we have more restaurants per capita than any other place on the planet. Our eateries are in a kind of food fight, you might say.” She favors a popcorn chicken spot just down the road.
“But,” says she, “though I earn my living here, I actually live in a village south of town where my boyfriend feels less out-of-place.” That’s when a backstory snaps into sharp relief: he’s a member of one of America’s indigenous tribes, the Flathead Nation, who hold out in wild mountain country not far from the Canadian border in Montana. How he’d feel even a smidgen of ease in flatland Illinois is hard to imagine. As he’s wont to say, “Montana calls herself the ‘Big Sky’ state, but there ain’t any big sky like what’s hangin’ over the prairies.”
mountain West which contains spectacular scenes of raw beauty, and is home to many of
America’s indigenous tribes. These groups who had long experienced losses of land and
culture have recently rallied to defend their treaty rights and secure terms that promise
a better future. The author once worked as manual labor in the footings of a hydroelectric
dam north of this bend in the Flathead River. His tented camp was often visited by
scavenging bears. photo credit: pixabay
Kelly continues, “Let me tell you why life midst soybean fields, silos and machine sheds seems unbearably tame to him – barring tornadoes, of course.” After all, she seems to imply, what could match the rivers and mountain lakes, the snows of the continental divide, the thunder of bison and wild horses back on the rez*?
And then there are the bears – western creatures of uneven temperament that prowl campgrounds and settlements looking to upend trash bins in search of easy pickings. Flathead country is no different. Except those bears tend to be of the Grizzly persuasion. Come mornings, children slung with knapsacks and carrying lunches wait along gravel roads to catch the yellow buses that ply the reservation during the school year. They stand beside those trash bins rolled out to the end of long driveways.
And that’s where, says Kelly, children come face-to-maw with the Grizzlies. Engineers have long mastered the design of trash containers that lock securely from the outside to prevent, as they say, ursine ingress. But, for the risks run by children when meeting the shaggy sovereigns of mountain and forest, there had to be a further design innovation: a trash bin that would lock from the inside, affording children sanctuary from nature’s marauders.
Of course, when the school bus rolls up and a youngster emerges from his or her safe- haven looking like there’d been a terrible food fight in the back country, well, he or she might be forgiven that grunge look. Such is the story from Indian country the likes of which the children of the prairies only see on the big screen thanks to Hollywood wizardry.
Wanting to be sure that I had gotten my facts straight on this salon-chair story, I made some phone calls to Flathead country to confirm what I had heard from Kelly. My contacts there, while professing ignorance about such trash bin ingenuity, did concede that the story had high entertainment value. And maybe that’s Kelly’s purpose after all. As in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, travelers pause along the way to entertain one another with hometown tales, not as reportage, but as relief for footsore travelers, offering them a measure of laughter, mystery and diversion whose reward is that they see wanderers on to their dreamed-of destinations. ‘Big sky’ will afford you that liberty.
And what is the cradle of such tales? Well, wouldn’t every parent wish their child could be cocooned in safety while sending them out into a wooly world? And should it be any wonder that Kelly’s Flathead partner, accustomed to the majesty and drama of the Rocky Mountains, just can’t quite get past his restlessness in a quiet farming village?
*Shorthand for ‘reservation’ or ‘reserve’, land set aside by treaty for the First Nations of North America.
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