By INCITES BY ED SILVERSTEIN
“Oh my God, he’s Jewish, too!” I am with two friends, all of us Jewish, all of us speechless. Which is strange enough in itself, but not half as strange as the scene before us.
It’s two bits shy of noon. We have just ducked into a local eatery to check the menu when one of the two trailer-park rejects, entrenched at the bar, ashtrays overflowing, sipping double whiskeys with another eight dead soldiers between them, uttered: “Oh my God, he’s Jewish, too!” But the source of the shock is not so much the exclamation, but rather that it was directed at the nine-inch television perched on the back bar. What had enthralled this pair of intellectually challenged reprobates was “The Bird Cage,” a remake of a French farce about a pair of aging gay men, one of them a flamboyant cross-dressing queen, who are having … marriage problems. And yes, “Oh my God,” one of them is Jewish, too.
Welcome to my new home … Montana.
But how does someone who spent his entire life in the teeming, solidly blue, metropolises of New York and Los Angeles end up in the rural West? Trout! Big rainbows, cutthroats, brooks and browns. But trout alone is not reason enough to give up four-star restaurants for a single menu — seemingly shared by every eatery — featuring red meat and potatoes or fried chicken as the healthy alternative.
There is a pivotal moment in every love affair. Such was the case in that began the ménage between my wife and I and Montana. It was during a horseback ride into the wilderness that we came upon a doe standing protectively on the trail along the edge of a willow swamp. A pair of wolves were tormenting her — repeatedly charging in, only to be chased off by the defiant doe, each time a little further, finally … too far. It was at that moment that a third wolf, crouched behind a bush less than 20 feet from our trembling horses, shot into the willows. An instant later we heard the mortal scream of a fawn secreted in the brush. It was an instant of pure natural savagery, as if National Geographic had staged the moment for our personal wonderment.
We were hopelessly smitten. This was Eden. Though one that has succumbed to the Serpent’s temptations and partaken of the apple, albeit probably a crab apple and a wormy one at that.
Montana, at times, seems totally overrun by a tribe of intolerant, pugilistic Irishman who, like gang bangers in South Central, are too quick to take offense at any perceived slight to their unjustified pride. And if you believe the old joke, that when God created the earth it tilted and everything loose rolled to California, then anything that took a funny bounce probably landed in the Big Sky State. And yes Virginia, the sky really is bigger.
But it is hard to define Montana. It is a place of stark contradictions and sardonic irony, something I was contemplating as I loaded a new manure fork into the back of my Mercedes ML 500.
Montana is truly purple. With a population of fewer than 1 million, Montana has only a single congressman. He’s a conservative Republican. The governor is a Democrat as is the majority of the State Legislature. The two senators are split, one Democrat and one Republican, but both were in absolute agreement when it came to taking cash from lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Though, to be fair, the GOP’s Conrad Burns received eight times more money and, upon receiving the cash, suddenly had a change of heart regarding all votes that related to the lobbyist’s interests. Montanans also voted for Bush … twice, but recent polls suggest that a majority have seen the error of their ways.
While the state is predominantly conservative, Missoula and Bozeman — or BozAngeles as the locals derisively call it — are both college towns and are relatively progressive. But even there troubling exceptions exist, such as when a Missoulian teacher, her lesbian lover and their infant daughter were nearly murdered when someone, whose “Christian values” were offended by their gay lifestyle, set the couple’s house on fire while the three were in bed asleep.
And, while not as psychotically religious as the South, Montana does have strong Christian underpinnings. For a “liberal Jew” it is disturbing to ride along the public thoroughfares and come across ubiquitous billboards sporting a Goliath Jesus with a caption that implies that “His” is the only legitimate form of worship.
But a far worse crime than being a non- Christian in Montana, is being from California. As the locals see it, Californians’ buy up the most beautiful pieces of the state, jack up prices until the dream of ownership is forever out of reach of the people who grew up there, then try to change everything that attracted them in the first place so it more resembles California. And of course they are right.
But while there are pockets of resentment and bigotry, the majority of the people are open and friendly in ways that are so typical of small towns. When you go into the hardware store there is always someone to ask what you need and who will know the exact location of that screw, washer or tool all without the fear of being crushed by a 500 pound pallet of Chinese-made toilet seats tumbling from 20 feet above. And if you get stuck in a snowdrift or ditch, almost everyone will stop to help, even if you had a knock down drag out fight at a bar the night before.
Without using even a dollar’s worth of gas, we can water, downhill and cross-country ski, snowmobile, kite board, hike, snow shoe, canoe and mountain bike. Every morning we wake up in a pristine wilderness. Countless lakes, rivers, streams and creeks are nestled in the surrounding mountains. The sky is a constantly shifting melodrama, loath to ever show the same face twice. Moose, deer and elk slip through the willows and woods outside our window as hawks, owls and eagles soar among the treetops above. (Ed Silverstein used to live in Santa Monica but has gained more insight since moving to Montana.)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 4, 2006. Read the original PDF.