Thinking About Moore, Montana

Moore, Montana is a town so small that if you were to put a motorcycle ramp on either side, Evel Knievel could've jumped it. He would've crashed, of course, but not until after clearing the town.

If you were to take time-elapsed photography of the town of Moore and wait patiently for the next hundred years, it would still not grow into a large city with large streets where crosswalks are abused and pizza and whores can be delivered during Good Morning America.

And maybe that's why I still love driving over the paved loneliness from Missoula to get there—my original home town. I especially like the view of the Rocky Mountain Front offered on the east side of Roger's Pass. To counter the natural beauty, there are the chained linked fenced squares of ugly gravel covering the many Minuteman missile silos along the roadside. The silos remind me that our state's tiny population makes us expendable. But I don't mind because they are wrong—as goes Montana, so goes the world.

It is a drive where at almost any point you can stop the car and get out and be physically moved by the incredible distance you can see and the immense silence. It is so quiet you can hear a hawk slice air. Feathery knives in buttery air. The sound is a scalpel cutting through anesthetized skin. The hawk operates. Cutting and cutting, but before big sky blood can spill, the wounds heal—the beak slices and the tail feathers sew. Cutting and stitching as it flies, opening and closing in a sterilized sky where the ground's the limit.

When I arrive in Moore I head to the bar. Cows moo in the distance. The greatest sound. Moose stole the perfect name from these animals. They moo about it, but don't really seem to care—that's a cow for you.

With drink in hand, I stare out the window at Montana and wonder why the world doesn't allow more of it to go on. Forget the map with its political boundaries—why can't Montana stretch all the way to California? Cover Los Angeles in Montana. And continue with San Diego—definitely cover Tijuana.

I want more Montana. I guess I'm greedy. I guess that's it. And I wonder if I don't hang out in this piss-ant town of Moore for the symbolism alone. I take a long drink and finish my beer. The bartender smiles at me and says, "There's more where that came from." And this makes me think how that statement works for beer but not for Montana. I realize, in this case, it's simply not true—Moore is all there is.

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