'MO SKY, 'MO PROBLEMS — Stillman Meyer Co

Originally published September 2, 2011 for The Gentleman Tramp

HAPPY LABOR DAY! As summer draws to its close in the Northern Hemisphere and backpacks fill with books, Midwesterners head to the lake, the Europeans lay bum to bum on Mediterranean beaches while East Coasters sit bumper to bumper on Highways 27 and 6, I’ll be perched upon a mountain under the big skies of the American West. The view here is––in the strictest Kantian definition––sublime, the air as crisp as a gluten free bagel chip and fragrant with sage and pine and just a hint of smoke from a forest fire in some distant valley. This is the land of purple lupine and purple mountains where the rainbows flash brilliantly in the sky and glisten off scales in the river; where the atmosphere is thin, the sun is strong and the breeze is stronger.

My Grandfather’s ranch.

I don’t consider myself much of a Western enthusiast, but somehow, through generations of environmental genetic mutation, it got inside me. It all began with my grandfather who in 1948, quit his job at the family company, packed up his wife and three kids, and escaped the jailing privets of Cold Spring Harbor for the rolling Wolf Mountains in Southeastern Montana. Ranch life was hard, but oh so romantic those first few years. When my grandmother was due to deliver her fourth child sometime in June of 1950, she went to stay with her mother in Chicago, leaving my grandfather alone––and by alone I mean with only a governess to buffer him from his three children.

Pioneer life is exhausting. To the right, his brand: W lazy T.

Phone lines didn’t yet reach the ranch so, clever war vets that everyone was in those days, they arranged for the hospital to phone the nearest airport who would then scramble a plane to fly over the ranch and deliver the happy news via a dropped rock tied with either a blue or pink ribbon. Great plan, only June came and went and no airplane. The first week of July passed, then the second, then the third, nary a stone in the sky. Finally, on July 25th, with a permanent kink in his neck, my grandfather heard a distant buzzing and quickly found the rock in a field, its pink ribbon catching the sunlight. My Aunt Margie had finally been born.

That story makes the four-bar reception on my iPhone seem wrong, but such is the West today, replete with paved roads and cell towers. Incidentally, when my great-grandmother heard about the rock incident, she complained to her friend, the president of Bell Telephones, and a man was out the next day. Even still, my West is a suburban fantasy in comparison, and with suburban conveniences come suburban problems.

Things looking quite civilized by ‘79 and Gram still quite proud of getting the phone installed.

It’s a pure sort of irony: the more land one has, the greater your isolation, the more hemmed in you become. In our cities and suburbs, everything is walled off, the land is gridded by sidewalks, hedges, and fences––invisible, picket or otherwise. It’s pretty difficult to casually trespass, indeed even the tonal shift in green between adjacent lawns can stop us dead in our tracks. So one might reason that in a place where millions upon millions of acres of Federal land border millions and millions of acres of ranch land, that people would be a little more lackadaisical about trespassing. I mean come on, so what if you cut across a field, drive down an empty dirt road, climb a hilltop to see a view. Who cares? Where’s the harm?

Sunwest Ranch at rush hour

Let me put it this way. In the West, to step foot without permission or reason onto land that doesn’t belong to you, is roughly equivalent to a New Yorker barging into their neighbor’s apartment uninvited, taking a stinky dump in their bathroom, forgetting to flush, and leaving without so much as a how do you do––impolite at the least, felonious at the extreme. You would think all that land would act as a buffer, instead its a territorial superconductor. Your land is your kingdom and the borders are no joke.

“It’s like the Gestapo around here,” a neighbor said to me the other day while waiting for the mail to arrive down by the front gate to Sunwest, a ranch turned vacation development in Southwest Montana where various branches of my family have built homes. “Show me your papers,” I responded in jest. We were joking, at least I thought we were joking about new car stickers required to drive on Sunwest Roads, but I quickly realized she was dead serious. A new electronic gate was to be added as well. “It will cause a massive snow drift,” continued another neighbor, also peeved at the added security. “I hate the design,” said another. On a different part of the hillside, crowd control on the “busy” Sunwest streets is long overdue. Apparently, all sorts of unsavory looking people have been cruising around and one can’t expect the ranch manager to flag down every car. The gate is the only reasonable solution.

“Up Top” the lupine in bloom.

“God, if she had said that to me, I’d have clawed her eyes out,” I overheard at a dinner party the other night, not a gate related comment, but also not an uncommon paroxysm when discussing Sunwest politics. A Grisham novel of political intrigue and ideological sects, gossip in this valley ranges from the pernicious, “The shepherd nearly shot me!” to the comic, “There’s arsenic in my water!” (There’s trace amounts of arsenic in almost all water.) It makes Washington look civil. Shit, it makes Syria look civil. It’s an Arab spring out here with tyrannical dictators and angry mobs. The architectural review board would just as easily tear down your house as hand you your lungs. In lieu of camels we have bears, moose and wolves.

Okay I exaggerate––not about the animals, it’s a zoo around here––but what the drama boils down to really is what my friend’s father calls, “The Happiness Ceiling.” The phenomenon exists at vacation destinations the world over. You have some money. You build your dream and then your head goes thump against a glass ceiling. Leaf blowers, loud music, hurricanes, unsightly house colors, whatever, the universe dictates that happy places can allot only so much happiness.

With that in mind, tonight, my last night, if I’m lucky I will watch the sun set down behind the pine covered Gravelly’s and ignite the mighty Madison range in glorious shades of pink and purple and I will make sure to strap my helmet tightly. No one said the ceiling can’t be broken.