Off the Grid in Montana

...awaking to your intuition

It’s late winter in Montana and as usual, gray on gray and snow on snow. Slush on slush on ice on ice. Some people live for this weather. All the frolicking about on skis, sleds, snowshoes. The human who loves snow more than anyone I’ve ever met, went suddenly and permanently out of his body last week. He and his family were my early, and ongoing, Montana education. It’s hitting me hard.

Today, I stumbled upon an essay I wrote in my thirties about them. I hardly remember writing it and if I had remembered, I certainly wouldn’t have stood a chance at finding it— somewhere hidden in the bowels of my computer or in a forgotten file cabinet. And there it was in a file I happened to click. “Happened to click.” I took it as a gift from him to me. And to you. Because this sort of fearless but specific subtlety was my friend’s way of communicating. I share this with you in hopes to share some of his, and his community’s, wisdom. And that you may find your intuition in a place you just might resist. Here is Off the Grid.

Fall, 2002

First day of hunting season. I awake at dawn to a crrrack that slices through the field. It is the same crrrack of split wood. In its echo, the same promise of winter fuel. Still sad to me, still new to Montana living.

It is not my neighbor that’s the hunter. He won’t shoot anything with eyelashes anymore. It’s got to be a poacher. I sit up in bed and think about this human, so lazy or maybe desperate for his buck that he has to sit illegally in my meadow in the dark, quite possibly in my driveway in the comfort of his truck, with his gun poised. Maybe he can’t stand the hunt, not unlike my neighbor. Just needs to feed his family this winter. This thinking is new to me, raised in the suburbs of Chicago.

It has been a stunning October. With sapphire skies everyday, like it thinks it’s August. The trees have taken their time, basking in their toward dormancy dance. The river birch first, and then the aspen and alder, and now flaxen larch needles fall in fair-haired rains. I take my two year old son down the stairs every morning, fling open the door and say, “Thank you,” to the day. And he says, “Tenk yoo,” and we ignore the infestation of stink bugs and cluster flies clinging to our house, betting their lives on the exact reverse of this weather.

This morning I add to our thanks, “It smells like snow.” Maybe I’m getting closer to actually becoming a Montanan.

“Snoo?” My boy doesn’t remember. Something tells me though, by the way he plays with everything outdoors, at every opportunity, that once he does…snow will be something he’ll never get out of his system. He is a native Montanan.

Inside I make coffee and listen to NPR. It’s supposed to be sixty-five and sunny today. Same tomorrow. I shrug at my lack of sixth sense, and overcompensate by making the best cappuccino this side of the Rocky Mountains. At least I can think so. And I take it out to the sun-flooded porch to absorb as much as I can before the weather turns.

Later, I am walking alone in the woods, despite the hunters. I want to burn the reds and golds into my soon-to-be winter mind which I know, from thin experience, will become seasonally depressed by mid-February. I want to seal into it the promise of spring— believe that the cold months might be full of good work at my writing desk. That maybe I’ll learn to love the gray that is our mostly socked-in, winter valley reality. To love the feeling of being land-locked and house-bound. I can only pretend that I like skiing so much. I don’t. I do like dormancy. And I do like snow. But not the gray. I don’t know who I am here in all that gray. And I want to. If only just to know that my intuition still exists. Isn’t fickle to color and movement and a visually rich world.

So I pick up handfuls of larch needles and throw them over me the way I did the oak seeds of my midwestern youth, wondering at them helicopter through the air. The larch needles helicopter too, in their own way— sifting through smoky ozone from burn piles and wood stoves, and land in my hair. And I leave them there. I have to make friends with winter. And…I insist, that it smells like snow. But I don’t trust myself. Chicago snow is different than this rarified air.

***

It’s the first sauna of the season “up the hollow” at my friends’ place. They have them most Sundays once the weather turns. Open house. Pot luc. Take off your clothes and walk through the cold night in bathrobes holding lanterns. Go into the octagonal cedar house with eucalyptus so strong your nose feels singed, take a seat on the top level if you dare, or acclimate on the lower level in the corner. Avoid the huge ticking wood stove with your bare body and greet the dim faces, flickering beards and peace/love smiles in the lantern light. Push yourself to sweat it out. Lie slack-legged on a towel. Modesty has no place here. Mostly it’s talk about a pie auction at the Grange Hall to support the new trail system, or the back country ski conditions up toward Blacktail, or about how two of them got lost out for a cross-country ski and spent the night in a snow cave until their husbands found them the next morning— sang songs all night to keep their minds off the cold.

These are not people who are trying to prove anything to anyone, not even themselves. This is who they are. How they do things. These are people who want to keep their heads screwed on straight by keeping their fingers off buttons. They hate buttons. One of their daughters once said to me, “I love our outhouse— you don’t have to flush.”  They have no running water, all wood burning heat, no indoor plumbing, no electricity— which means no TV, of course, and most of the time, they don’t eat meat. Their son has a pet magpie that he rescued from the nest after its mother was killed by a raven, and he can whip your ass at any card game and stymie you with his very practical and somewhat mystical understanding of the way most everything works. Their daughter has read every Harry Potter book three times and loves her room because it has a canopy bed that she made out of birch snags and old tie-dye sheets. The mother makes soft instrument cases and other lovingly sewn products and the father is a blacksmith. He’s proud of his record of skiing 200 consecutive months, and a lot of it with his wife— his favorite skiing buddy, and often right out their back door. They hike and bike and canoe all summer and ski and ski and ski all winter. I have never left their home once without a bagful of something they have grown in their garden or made in their oven. There is nothing this family can’t do. And so I figure I might ask them what they think: does it smell like snow?

The sauna is hot and most of us go out to the deck to sit steaming and naked in director’s chairs. Some are braver and rinse off in a cold-water-filled claw foot tub a few feet away. We hear whoops from them and I sit back while the rest talk snow. No one is talking gray.

One says, “It’s a little early, don’t you think.”  This is not a question.

Another: “Oh, I remember snow on the ground on Halloween many years. And that’s in what— five days?”

Still another: “I think we still have some time yet.”

And another: “We better. I’m not done with my wood pile.”

“But does it smell like snow to anyone?” I say, in my smallest voice. Afraid I am going to expose the side of me that has been pushing buttons all my life.

I get a lot of maybe sounds. Err, mmm, eehh. It’s like I have asked a hunter where he bagged his buck.

Group consensus: “Doesn’t matter— it’ll come either way. Whether you smell it or not.”

They laugh, knowingly. Kindly. Intuitively. Natively.

I feel foreign— trying to read such a thing as winter. Mostly, I know not to admit to my gray-dread.

So it’s back in the sauna for those who can stand it. I take the top level. I want to bake my dread out of me while we’re still in the dying of autumn. The cabin fever. The vitamin D deprived blues. The months ahead without roses and soft earth. The trail rides over and the fishing reduced to auger holes in places where I can’t help feeling no human is supposed to stand. No strawberry stains on my children’s fingers. No wash up for dinner and seeing swirling dirt in the kitchen sink from an afternoon spent building fairy houses in the woods. No end-of-the-day dips in any number of lakes, coming up absolutely new. No loons flying over in the morning. No birds waking me up at all.

I can make it through New Years, I think, stalwart in the beautifully scorching, loving, hearth-giving heat. I can probably make it through Valentine’s Day. But I am scared of the rest. Less than seventy-five days of sunshine in the Flathead Valley per year. And we have been hogs this October. But this is a subject that any true local knows not to complain about. So I don’t. Not to them. Only in my mind. Which hurts in winter. If only I knew myself in this wild place they call home. If only I could find the light they know every day, no matter the weather.

***

The next morning, before I open my eyes, I hear a question in my head from a dream child. I do not know her, but she feels all mine. “When will it snow?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I’m not from here.”

“Yes you do know,” she says.

I bring back the sauna circle and borrow my friends’ knowing. Maybe I’ll grow into it. It seems like the kind of knowing that they can hold for me until I can.

“Soon, then,” I say. “Very soon.”

And I open my eyes, and the world is white.

(In honor of Dan’l Moore and everyone who loves him.)

If you want to find your intuitive knowing in your heart language, consider investing in one of my 2024 Haven Writing Retreats in Montana. You do not have to be a writer to come. Just a seeker. And a human who longs to wander in your words. Learn your craft. Find your voice. Haven truly meets you where you need to be met. I’ve seen it change lives over and over again. Email: info@lauramunson.com to set up an intro call.

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