Montana nights

Today marks 17 years since I lost my sweet mom. I wrote this piece about her, and the pic is from Upper Miner Lake in Montana, circa 1980-something. The first photo is my mom is in the red and white stripes and I am in the blue shirt. That’s Auntie Ann and my cousin Sheila with us. We were probably fishing or sick of fishing at this point.

Montana Nights

The campfire was the centerpiece to the Montana trips of my childhood. My family would gather each night to fry fish – brook or rainbow trout - over the fire. Us kids would take turns poking sticks into the flames, setting them ablaze and waiting for an adult to holler, collar us for it and send us off.

The beer would open for my aunt and uncle. My mother would produce a bottle of peach schnapps and a jug of OJ. My father never drank at home but a beer would appear on the picnic table in front of him, there, out West.

These hours were the golden hours. The day had been spent - fishing and hiking by the men, fort building and running by the kids, sunbathing and cooking by my mother and aunt. We were as one in this little campground, 20 miles down a dirt road, a road that led to a little town with only a mercantile, cattle and a stop sign. We were dirty, tired and happy, unleashed from the modern world of the 1980s.

“Get the kindling,” my father would say. That was our job. It was a game that took us farther and farther out from the campsite each night, the smallest sticks gathered up in an ever-increasing circle from our campsite. My father would use an ax to get the real firewood. My mother and aunt would prepare the trout - a flour batter of some sort in a cast iron pan over the fire. We ate every meal outside. Chipmunks became our friends wherever we camped.

After dinner, the kids pumped water from the hand pump in the campground, my mother heated it, and the dishes were done in an assembly line on the picnic table. We never used a paper plate that I could remember.

When the last meal of the day was done, my parents would shed their responsibilities, and we would get brave. We would venture off at dusk, close enough to hear the safety of our parents, far enough to to see ghosts and bears in the woods, scare ourselves, and run back to a world lit by fire. Every night, we would huddle together, the five of us cousins, and plot another adventure.

But it’s only now, years later, that I can appreciate my mother in those moments around the fire. She was an unconventional beauty - with wide rosy cheeks, a full mouth and blue eyes. She wore her brown hair short and modest, but always her eyes lit up with a laugh.

My mother was the most beautiful, in many ways, on those nights in the desolate backcountry of Montana, in a pair of blue jeans, bundled up in a quilted flannel jacket, bracing for the night air coming down out of the mountains. Without makeup, with her last shower a week ago, with dirt ground under her nails, and dust in the campground lifting with every step.

Yet, my mother sat there, sparkling. Always in the camp chair closest to my aunt, as the night fell and the laughter began.

It was like magic on those summer nights in the mountains, when my father relaxed and my mother got rolling with her sister-in-law.

The four adults would be howling with laughter, over something we didn’t get. But we didn’t need to get it. Instead, it’s the laughter I remember, the mood, the small family all alone in the wild woods. Something unknown to modern man for the most part, then and now. We were all stripped down to the basics, and it was plenty.

Now, years later, 40! - how lucky I was to curl up at my mother’s feet in the dirt on those long ago nights, to watch the fire warm her cheeks, to hear her laughter, to miss the story but reap the bounty of the punchline. To be with her in a way that didn’t happen anywhere else. To see her unwound, unkept, unhurried. To have seen my mother when she would say she was at her worst - at her best.