Montana, 2000

I Dreamed I Was a Cowboy

by Beth Cataldo

"People here in Montana call Californians 'mush brains,'" a minister at the Bozeman airport told me while we were both waiting to pick up visitors from the Bay Area.

"Mush brains?"

"Because everything's always OK with Californians. They don't want to hear about hardships. They're soft. They come for a summer season and head back when the cold sets in and things get really interesting."

He'd just moved to Montana from Petaluma, and passed on some words of advice: "Get rid of those California plates as soon as you can. You're not going to make any friends that way."

I had left the Bay Area in the middle of August and headed to Livingston, Montana, in my big '78 Mercedes to return to a spot that had captured my imagination at a writer's conference in early June. Livingston is a small town of about 8,000 people in southwestern Montana, about an hour's drive from Yellowstone National Park, nestled between mountain ranges and home to the happiest fly-fishing aficionados in the country. As I drove, I kept wondering if I was serious about re-locating and whether I could apply my skills as a Web developer and writer in that secluded location.

I imagined that there would be plenty of opportunities to create Web sites - the remoteness of the place guaranteed that people would need a better way to distribute their goods. In one bleary moment, I even considered ranchers selling horses and steer over the Internet, cutting out the middleman, whomever they may be. What fueled my delusions was my desire to live in a vast and empty area where I could experience a slower, friendlier way of life without all the hustle from the newcomers who are taking over my old San Francisco. Maybe I'd even buy some land.

Granted, I have no problem with people who search out a new place to better their lives - hey, that's what I did ten years ago when I left Boston to work in Silicon Valley, closer to technology publishing and a more progressive way of life. I clearly remember an early California encounter: As I walked down Irving Street in the Inner Sunset, a man said hello to me and I ignored him and kept on walking. I'd grown up on the East Coast and had learned not to speak to strangers.

He stopped and spoke loudly at me: "Hey, who do you think you are? I just said hello to you."

I turned and looked him in the eye: "I'm new in town and don't know you."

"Well, I've lived in this neighborhood for 45 years - and my father helped build the park -- and people in this town are friendly to one another," he said.

I smiled at him, said hello, and continued on my way.

"Where you from anyhow?" he bellowed after me.

But this eccentric and parochial San Francisco is harder to find these days.

Don't think that I didn't have doubts about taking off for several weeks on this scouting mission: I feared my diabetic cat would take a turn for the worse and my relationships would dissolve with me out of the picture. More importantly, I feared that my favorite neighborhood eating place - a cheap, Chinese restaurant whose specials I never order because they are only advertised in Mandarin - would get taken over and turned into a fusion-sushi eatery with coy, sexy waiters in tight black T-shirts. But I chided myself that if I was going to give up on the city, I would have to forget about these things eventually anyway. This trip was a test of my willingness to throw in the towel on a home that I thought I'd never leave.

After settling in a bit in Livingston, a more complex reality began to emerge. When I began marveling at the prices for some homes -- $80,000? - a few locals quickly clued me in on their angle on the situation.

"I've lived here on and off for more than 25 years," one bitter man told me, "and I can't afford to buy a place. The houses in Livingston are worth $30,000-$40,000, and they're selling them for $80,000-$120,000. Worse, the new people bring their paranoid, monied ways, closing off their land so that we can't hike or fish. Ranchers used to always let me fish on their lands; now they don't either."

This same man took me around Bozeman, the nearby city of about 30,000 people. "This town has lost its neighborhood feel. No one says hello to each other anymore," he explained. "You may as well be in a big city at this rate."

We wandered down Main Street, past the old West facades that showcased expensive leather coats and shoes, hip jeans and jewelry, puma-patterned outfits, brewpubs and galleries galore. Carmel-not-by-the-sea.

We checked out the menus at a variety of restaurants, and the reality of the influence started to close in. Each one echoed similar dishes and prices of upscale restaurants in San Francisco: sea bass and mashed potatoes, sautéed red snapper, crawfish stuffing in the pork loin? All for about $23 a plate. We decided to head back to a local joint in Livingston and get a $12 steak at Stockman's. It wasn't so much the money as the principle.

"And this is just a footprint in the snow," my guide told me, defeated. "Where can I go from here? Montana is the end of the line."

The next day I headed out for a long drive towards Nevada City in Madison County, to a restored mining camp whose weathered homes, including a music hall full of automatic pianos and organs and an abandoned Chinatown with opium dens and laundries, housed ghosts from a west long gone. I stopped at a local café for a late-day iced tea, dehydrated from the 80-degree weather. An older man named Bill sat down and started talking to the owner, Joe, and me.

"I saw the most beautiful bear I've ever seen today," he told us. "He had come over to eat one of my calves that had died. It was a big calf, and by the time I came back, the bear had eaten the whole thing. He had the most beautiful coloring I'd ever seen - almost a red coat."

As we talked more, Bill told me he was selling his ranch. "Family troubles," he explained. "We need the money. I hope to get another piece of land, but I have to sell this one right now."

Without prompting, he started to tell me about the changing face of Montana: "There's big money here - not just Ted Turner. They're building an $800-million project in Big Sky. That's more money than has ever been spent in the whole history of Madison County." He had a wrinkled, sunburned face and tight, proud lips that reminded me a bit of my father.

"They tried to revive the economy with tourism," he explained. "But that hasn't helped. Look, it's September 17, and this café is shutting down because Joe doesn't have enough business. All the money here in Montana is in construction nowadays. That big money is keeping the economy going."

When Joe returned to our conversation after serving a large party, I joked to him, "Bill's trying to sell me his ranch."

Joe didn't laugh, and instead nodded at Bill, "You've got some of the most beautiful property on earth, Bill. I'd buy that property if I had the money."

Bill's face was stern and determined: "How do we do it Joe?"

Joe looked back at him: "We do what we have to Bill. We're surviving here. "

I looked at Bill's impenetrable expression and thought about how almost everyone I knew in San Francisco could quickly find a job writing, editing or marketing in a tech-related field for $70,000-$120,000 a year. I didn't ask Bill how much he wanted for his acreage. At that moment I felt that I hadn't earned the right to watch that beautiful bear traipse through the land, no matter how much cash I could dig up.

As I headed back to Livingston, I thought about the other issues I'd heard about: a suggestion that part-time residents shouldn't be able to vote on local issues; a debate about whether they should widen the two-lane road in Livingston to ease traffic problems; a conflict between newcomers wanting to create zoning laws to protect the land and ranchers not wanting to change the way they'd been doing things for years.

I was reminded of the current debates in San Francisco: Should we allow the dot-com companies to displace artists and musicians so that they can build large complexes? How do we curtail the current housing crunch and rising prices? How do we keep fair city one of diversity that all types of people can afford? What are we going to do about those obnoxious cell phones and SUVs?

It didn't take me long to realize that although Montanans are friendly and welcoming, there's a strong resentment against the many outsiders who have been buying up the best plots of land, raising the housing prices and imposing a new way of life. Montanans are feeling the pain of a booming economy just like everyone in the Bay Area. And now I was the interloper, looking for a new place to set up stakes with my relatively small stash of dot-com money. Perhaps one could even call me a mercenary of sorts, trying to hustle money from ranchers for a Web site that will probably never get visited.

All of this was on my mind as I drove my conspicuous car with California plates down East River Road. I was taking in the golden hues of hay and the green and patterned shades of brown that scale up the Absaroka Mountain range when I noticed a pickup truck following way too close for comfort. A thought suddenly shot through my mush brain: Why was this man tailing me - was it the plate? Does he think that I'm another big-city refugee driving towards Paradise Valley to buy up more land, build another million-dollar ranch and try to become a horse farmer? I pulled off the road, waiting for him to pass. Instead, he quickly took a left turn onto a dirt road and headed off towards the mountains.

I remembered an e-mail warning that I'd gotten from a Montana friend when I told him that some people were coming up to visit me: "Don't bring all of California up here unless you want to incite a lynch mob."

I stopped in a local café on my way back to Livingston for a soy latte, and the manager, a stranger to me, said: "Oh, you're staying up at Thomas's place, right?" I smiled, introduced myself, and said yes, even though I wanted to ask, "How do you know that?" On my way out, I reminded myself that there weren't any locks on the doors to Thomas's house.

After unsuccessfully trying to soothe myself, I got on a beat-up bicycle and cruised up the hill to watch the Yellowstone River wind its way through the horse pastures with the Crazy Mountains in the background. I passed magpies the size of my cat, workers fixing the road and a few cars. Most of the time, though, the two lanes were mine. I never got cut off or honked at by angry motorists. Instead of car exhaust, I was breathing the fresh Montana air, the nutty smell of rolled hay and, of course, horse manure. I could see the newly fallen snow on Livingston Peak.

On my ride that day, I decided that the tension between old-timers and newcomers is part of our American way of life - we are always pushing for change and growth, and seldom put limits on an individual's desire to better his or her existence. Yet, the go-getters always alter the face of the world we know. Why shouldn't I move to Montana? Approximately 880,000 people live in the entire state, which is 147,000 square miles large. That's about the same number of residents who live in San Francisco, which is about 47 square miles small. Is one more person really going to alter their way of life?

Just when I thought I'd settled on Montana, the god of change came along and dropped a little snowstorm on the town the night before I left. I'd never driven in snow, and when I woke up in the morning my frozen, pampered car offered me another perspective. The iced-up locks resisted my key, but the defroster worked and the tires seemed to be OK, though I did slide out of the gas station onto the wrong side of the road.

When I took to the highway, the trucks splashed slush onto my windshield so I could barely see. It was too late to clean off my frozen wipers and I just adapted to the precarious rhythm of the dirty glaze and hazy route. After about 20 miles, I was bold enough to take my eyes off the highway for a moment and notice how the trees looked almost embossed into the powdered landscape. >The car buckled down and didn't give me any more trouble until I hit Reno. Then, as if my car knew that we were just miles from the California border and ready for re-entry, it refused to go in reverse. Perhaps I hadn't made up my mind after all.

But whether I decided on Montana or San Francisco, I wasn't sticking around Reno. I got the car back on the road and headed over Donner Pass. As I did, my thoughts turned towards a tasty pile of Chinese broccoli and the sweet, salty smell of fog that wanders through my neighborhood, reminding me that change is never easy.