Livingston, MT

You can’t walk by the river past 4 pm in the spring time in Livingston, Montana without the fear of being charged and trampled by a leggy mother moose, and in school we took field trips to Yellowstone National Park. Small dogs might go missing if left outside for the night on the outskirts of town and city trashcans and plastic bags are in equal measure tossed by the katabatic winds. Livingston has what seems to be an equal number of churches bars and both are used for serious religion. Livingston isn’t an incredibly small town, 6,000 people or so, but it is quiet and the dark seems to fall early year round as the sun plunges behind the barricade of mountains that surround it like a bowl. It is lonely here.
Livingston itself is known for its arts, something that it will never neglect to tell you. Painters and writers and musicians of supreme accolades flock here for the seclusion and the sounds of the night, they swear it’s a creative sanctuary. Celebrities build grand houses in the valley just south of town, where the mountains stand beautiful and strong, and they claim that they’ve found the only place on earth that could still be good to them after all that they’ve done. Mostly, I still don’t really know what that means to them. My parents are outsiders themselves: they’re not from Montana. They moved west from civilized New England, feeling romanced and humbled by the rugged beauty. My mom says that the night I was born it was 70 degrees below zero with wind-chill, and that the cows in the pastures near the hospital froze solid where they stood. She says that without me, she would’ve let that winter kill her, that she’d finally understood her simple fragility in the Montana cold. It was in my cold and quiet childhood that I found my ability to create. I could only kick up the prairie dusts and curse my rural life for so long before I saw the way the powdered earth sparkled as it swam through the air on its way back down to the ground. It was not by choice that I created, it was as natural as running and breathing; I had to do it. Growing up in Montana, I was wild and ferocious. My mountains guarded me and the river guided me. I am brave and strange here, and the unforgiving earth has carved me new, just as the mountains and rivers and valleys here before me. I belong to this little piece of Earth just as much as it belongs to me. I am here and I have been here, always.