by Michael Hofferber. Copyright © 1996. All rights reserved.
It's been an exciting week in Montana. First the FBI surrounds a bunch of anti-government white supremacists holed up on a remote ranch near Jordan at the eastern end of the state. Then federal authorities at the other end arrest a hermit at his primitive mountain cabin on suspicion that he might be a notorious mail-bomber.
Both events attracted intense media attention from around the world as armies of reporters from all over descended on small, rural communities with microphones and cameras and motorhomes and helicopters.
One political cartoon that I saw depicted a lone FBI agent with a megaphone shouting to the occupants of the ranch, "Come on out! We've got you surrounded!" All around the ranch are RVs and buses and vans from the world's major television and radio networks beaming live reports from their hood-mounted satellite dishes.
It's been a tough week to be a native of Montana, as I am, especially if you have a beard and look faintly radical. Only the "mad cow disease" in England rivals kooky revolutionaries for the world's attention and some Montanans have taken to wearing T-shirts proclaiming "At Least Our Cows Are Sane!"
Montana promotes itself as "Big Sky Country," but now some folks are calling it "Big Psycho" or "High, Wide and Wacky." There's some truth to all these labels.
Lonesome places are attractive to lots of people, but some drift into rural communities like Jordan (pop. 494), to escape scrutiny. Many of the town's earliest residents were outlaws.
The mountain men and trappers and intrepid explorers who opened up this country weren't your ordinary citizens. They constantly tested the American ideals of freedom, self-reliance, and the right of every man to worship the god of his own choice and to pursue his own kind of happiness.
At Lincoln, near the rustic cabin where the alleged "Unabomber" was apprehended, gold was the god that lured the first settlers and wealth was the happiness they pursued. Nowadays, the chief pursuit is the elusive trout that swim in the Blackfoot River of Norman Maclean's fly-fishing classic, "A River Runs Through It."
Montanans tend to mind their own business and allow other folks a lot of latitude. There's a local saying that "40 below keeps out the riff-raff," but that's obviously not always accurate. Blame it on Polarfleece and double-paned windows.
Too many people look upon wilderness as an unclaimed, lawless place where anything goes. Too many people have the mistaken idea that being rural and remote will let them remove themselves from society and its responsibilities.
In reality, the only wilderness that remains is intentional and managed. Every acre is mapped and owned and committed to some use. Even the wildlife is tagged, monitored, counted and controlled.
And while rural life does afford access to a little more freedom and space than can be found in cities, it would be a challenge to find a place without access to phones or television or UPS deliveries. As Montanans learned this past week, no matter how deep into the woods or how far out onto the plains you go, it's all out there for the whole world to see.