End of an Era

Four years ago on an October afternoon, I was driving away from the Gallatin Field Airport in a purple P.T. Cruiser and into the curving gold of the Montana hills. I had a Montana highway map and a fat mug of airport coffee on the seat beside me, and my husband on the cell phone; he was following my route from his office back in North Carolina. The day was deepening, hills growing subtly darker, and as I drove the snow-capped Rockies began to engulf my little car. I felt free and fine as a bird in flight.

I started this blog because of that trip: I'd been awarded a full fellowship to the Montana Artist Refuge, an artists' enclave in a tiny, former mining town in Southwestern Montana called Basin, and I wanted an easy way to keep family and friends posted while I was there.

The fellowship couldn't have come at a better time. My husband and I had been married a little over three years, I was teaching as an adjunct English professor at a small, liberal arts college in Western North Carolina--a job I loved and poured my energies into, but one that took its toll on my writing (and our meager finances)--and I'd just begun to emotionally recover from a miscarriage that had occurred only four months before. An adventure was in order.

So many wonderful things came of my time at the Montana Artists Refuge, most of which are chronicled in my earliest blog posts from 2007 (see "Bring it On, Big Sky" to start). I wrote, and wrote; I slept alone for the first time in years. I hiked, and hiked, in some of the most incredibly stunning and patently visceral country I've seen in my life. And, I made a great friend. An essay I wrote about my time at MAR, "Deep Breathing Under Big Sky," won Third Place in the Santa Fe Writers' Project 2007 Literary Awards Program, judged by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler. But so much more than this came of that one shining month.


I felt like a writer. Sitting in that sparse room at my laptop, away from my world at home; hiking through the snow; talking and laughing with other writers; driving my ridiculous car to places I'd only dreamt about, like mysterious Yellowstone National Park and the haunting Big Hole Battlefield; floating weightlessly in the Boulder Hot Springs, talking of life with a friend and watching mule deer venture forth from dusk-lit spruce; buying groceries like a local in Butte; giving a novel reading at the Helena Book Festival; and doing it all courtesy of a fellowship: this was something BIG. It gave me hope.

Virginia knew what she was talking about when she said that in order to write, "a woman must have ... a room of her own."

Sadly, the place and the people that gave me my first true room of my own are closing their doors. These brutal economic times are taking their toll, and many are suffering, including the Arts and the Montana Artists Refuge. I can never repay their generosity, their hope in me, with neither words nor money--though I've attempted with both.

When I left the Montana Artists Refuge there was snow on the ground. Yellowstone National Park had closed to motorized vehicles for the winter, the highways and roads in the high mountain passes were littered with gravel, and I felt, driving away from it all, certain that I'd return.

I was, just maybe, a writer.

Bring it on, Big Sky!

Well, I made it to the tiny, former gold mining town of Basin, Montana, for my Writer's Residency at the Montana Artists' Refuge. I'm here for an entire month, which means that I've got to accomplish big things in Big Sky Country.

The adventure began last night in Greenville, S.C., when at the last minute my Dad suggested I check my flight plan. Suddenly, Delta had me flying all the way to La Guardia in NY, and not arriving in Bozeman until 9 p.m.--which would've had me driving across the desolate West in the pitch. Needless to say, Dad the Hero jumped in, Stuart (the other hero) drove me to Charlotte at 4 a.m., and I caught a direct flight to Salt Lake. In Salt Lake I arrived with twenty minutes to spare between flights, and so I high-tailed it through the airport in my hiking shoes, leaving little children and groups of traveling football fans in my wake. When I got to my gate it had been switched to another, and so I ran (large backpack atop my small back) to the new gate, where I discovered that it had been changed again. I hoofed it up the escalator to another gate, past a group of men at a bar who were really getting a kick out of me by this point, and made it with a minute to spare. I was so exhausted on the flight to Bozeman that I slept through the complimentary beverage... doggone it.

Then, I got my wheels: Hertz decided that I'd surely have a sense of humor, and so they gave me a purple PT Cruiser. I'll spend the next month driving through the Rockies passing tough-guy trucks and horse trailers, looking like Dick Tracy on estrogen. But hey, it works.

Southwestern Montana is aflame with the high gold of Autumn, and yellow and orange trees cover the mountainsides in patches, sometimes interspersing with evergreens. There are rocks everywhere--and "beware of rockslides" signs at every milepost--and they stick up out of the ground like the tombstones of giants, cast haphazardly down hillsides and across fields. The evergreens grow up and out of these rocks defiantly, and I like that.

Basin is just off Highway 15, and my home for the next month is a high-ceilinged room in an old brick building once used somehow in the mining biz. I unloaded my groceries and tried to make it mine the first hour I was here. Now my shampoo's in the shower, my Clemson hat is hanging on a nail in the loft (despite our recent disaster at GA Tech), my travel candle is lit, and my photos are taped up on the wall behind my makeshift desk: Cal and John David on the night of their engagement, puppy-aged Scout and me on Black Balsalm, Mom and Dad all gussied up at Cal's wedding, Scout (again) in black and white, and Stuart and me on the deck of the Gulf Stream Restaurant at sunset.

Now, all I have to do is open myself up to this gift of time and place. To fight off longing for my husband and the pull of my own mercurial mind, and to write. To create. To decide that this is it--the writing life in the here and now.

Wish me luck!