Welcome to Montana

“Hey lady, go home!” I slowed the car down and looked at the boy on his bicycle. Was he talking to me? Indeed, my car, with out-of-state plates, was the only one on the street. I was back in Kalispell after a 25-year hiatus and was on my way to visit my sister. When had children begun yelling at newcomers to go home, I wondered?

Then I remembered the summer of 1967 when my family moved here from Minnesota and my dad went fisticuffs with a neighbor who had wished we would just “go home.”

My mother, my four sisters and I rode Amtrak from Minneapolis to Whitefish. My father and our two brothers, drove the farm truck packed with our belongings and our beloved Shetland pony who won out over the piano. We arrived in the Flathead Valley and began looking for a place to live. The Libby Dam was scheduled to begin construction soon and men and families had flocked to the area in droves, making a rental impossible to find. Luckily, my father’s uncle offered us his cabin located 30 miles west of Kalispell while we looked for a home to purchase. The cabin had no running water, no electricity, a wood-burning stove to cook on, and a dilapidated outhouse.

My brothers, sisters and I loved living in the mountains. We collected wood for the stove, took turns carrying pails of water from the creek and explored the mountains we had never seen before. Within two days our mother had mastered the wood stove and had two loaves of bread baking in the oven compartment and a beef stew braising on the back burner. I’m not sure this was what my mother signed up for when she agreed to move to Montana. I’m sure it was difficult moving away from her family, her friends, her church, and her Victorian farmhouse, but we never heard her complain.

Our “most fun summer ever” ended soon enough, when after a month of looking for a house for a family of nine, our parents settled on a two-bedroom home on 5 acres of land. Our father immediately went to work adding an additional living room and two bedrooms. Since school wouldn’t begin for two more months, it was difficult to make friends, so we read a lot of books, mostly Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys, that we checked out from the bookmobile parked weekly at the two-room school nearby.

When school did start in September, our family would singlehandedly double the number of children in the upper room of the two-room schoolhouse. The two teachers had 17 students in eight grades, an enviable ratio by today’s standards. We had a baseball team and would occasionally play against other country schools. There were only two boys and myself in sixth grade, so I spent recess hanging out with my sisters. As a 12-year-old, I thought this was just another part of the big adventure that was living in Montana.

Our mother, for whatever reason, had another opinion. She had been a schoolteacher for just two years before she had her first of seven children and quit the teaching profession. So, it was no surprise that soon after school had started for the year, she began a campaign to close the two-room school and have all the children bussed to a larger school 5 miles away in Evergreen. We were not aware of this plan because our parents discussed everything behind their closed bedroom door, but some of our fellow students seemed to know about it as did the teachers whose jobs were at stake. Maybe that’s why the teachers decided to put on the play, “The Nativity,” hoping to bring the community together for a holiday celebration.

Everyone will remember this night, the teachers must have thought. They were right. The night was memorable, not for the teacher’s hard work and the students’ great performances but for the fist fight in the snow between my father and a third-generation father who had himself attended the school. He believed that he and his three daughters had been provided a good education and was against closing the school doors.

On the day of the play, my father arrived home with just enough time to eat a cold roast beef sandwich and change out of his work clothes. Now a union carpenter, his job didn’t allow for leaving early. No matter though, he was happier than he had ever been. Selling the farm and moving to Montana had been his aspiration since he was a teenager working on his uncle’s homesteaded wheat farm in eastern Montana.

It was below freezing outside when our family left our house to walk to the school. The coat room was double hung with wool coats, scarves, boots, stocking caps, mittens and gloves and the seats were filling up fast. My four siblings and I hurried back to the curtained off dressing rooms to change into our home-made costumes, while our parents and two youngest sisters found a seat.

I was changing in the girl’s makeshift dressing room adjacent to the coat room when I saw a fellow student slip out, grab my coat off the hook and disappear. I started to run after her, but the room went silent and I heard my classmate reciting the first words of the play, “When Mary and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem, it was crowded, and they looked for a place to stay.” Another classmate playing the innkeeper shouted, “There are no rooms left! Can’t you see how crowded the city is?” I stepped in line with the other angels and waited for our cue to come on stage.

The two teachers had been practicing with us for six weeks. We were reciting our lines in our sleep. There was no budget for a set but there were plenty of moms with sewing machines, and they turned out some impressive costumes. The play was amateur, but the parents loved it, and we received a standing ovation while we dramatically bowed for the audience.

The snow had started falling outside, thick, fat snowflakes floating down, covering the ground. There was an urgency in my father’s voice as he gathered us all to get home before the storm got worse. I told my father that I couldn’t find my coat and that I saw a fellow student take it. Thinking that it was just a misunderstanding or a prank, he found the girl’s father and explained what happened. Without even asking his daughter for a response, her father said his daughter didn’t take anyone’s coat and my dad said that I saw her take it and her dad said let’s take this outside and my dad said OK and followed him out into the snowy night. My mother told us to start walking home. We would miss the only chance we ever had to see our father in a fist fight.

Someone yelled out that the fight had to take place off school property, so the fathers along with the crowd kept walking until they were in the ditch. They stood there for a moment, both obvious amateurs, and then the other father swung and missed. My father swung and knocked the other father down. Without saying a word, my father turned around and began walking home, disappearing into the snow.

No doubt, he was wondering what just happened. He knew that our mother’s campaign had angered some of the residents, but he didn’t know how much trouble she had been stirring up. When it came to our schooling, he left that up to her. He had an eighth-grade education and our mother was a college graduate, but this was too much. Even the local newspaper, The Daily Inter Lake, wrote an op-ed asking everyone to just get along and ended with this plea:

“It is our public service duty to do our best to halt violence before it occurs or before someone is seriously injured. We hope those responsible will heed our advice to let peace and harmony prevail and to live together like good citizens.”

The two-room school, like most country schools in Montana, eventually closed for good. My siblings and I still talk about Mrs. Bodmer who taught sentence structure and how we all aced English in high school because of her lessons. After it closed, the school became a community center where, years later, the local community organized a luncheon after our mother’s funeral.

So, in the spirit of the Daily Inter Lake op-ed, I waved at the young boy on the bicycle and smiled. I didn’t blame him and his family for wanting to keep the Flathead Valley to themselves. It’s a beautiful place to live and I will do my best to live together like a good citizen.