The Big Hole

Recently I withdrew an old crackled cassette case marked On the Road from Libby's library shelf. Later that evening as it spun it's story into my snug house, I found myself enjoying the world through the quaint perspective and kind voice of Charles Kuralt. I love southwest Montana, probably too much. As the book closed he began the final chapter with the words "a place to come home to" followed by a heartfelt description of a place he loved. My ears perked up. I'd been there, unintentionally, but there all the same. It's a place near Twin Bridges, MT. And though written about his place, I think his words could apply to the region as a whole. Enjoy...

"A place to come home to…
There’s a cabin in a grove of cottonwoods beside a western river. The cabin and a timber bridge across a creek to give access to the cabin are the only disturbances of nature along the river which runs as it has for centuries between deep cut banks leaving gravel bars on either side of its frequent bends. When Lewis and Clark passed a few miles from here in 1805, they sent one of their sergeants to explore westward up the river. He reported, “Tough going through thickets of wild roses on the banks.” The roses are still there a few steps from where the cabin now stands. They still discourage travel along the river. Every few hundred yards, a creek enters the main stream. These creeks are the homes of beavers whose broad tooth marks girdle every cottonwood within falling distance of water. The beavers are notoriously busy and very patient. They may wait for many seasons for a huge and ancient tree to fall…They know one winter a storm will come and seize the tree by its spreading upper branches and wrench it down across the creek and the giant will be theirs...Elk, migrating moose, and wandering brown bears are visitors to this place, but always move on after a few days. Sandhill cranes arrive in spring to spend the short summer in the meadows, and Canada geese claim the shallows of the river for a month or two.

I’m in this place now. I’ve been watching a pair of barn swallows. Every few daylight minutes for a week they’ve been feeding their chirping young in a mud nest on a porch beam. And today I watched the chicks leave the nest one by one, clumsily trying to learn to swoop and dart like swallows. It’s getting late in the year for them. They have to find their wings quickly because they have a long trip south ahead of them, all the way to Mexico. The sun will be going down soon and the big brown trout will be swimming out from beneath the log jam to sip their supper. A male pheasant in full plumage just strutted past the window without his harem. A white tailed doe and her two fawns have been passing every evening and I expect them presently. I hear an owl hooting from the top of a not-yet-fallen, beaver-girdled cottonwood. A coyote is moaning somewhere in the dry hills that look down on the small, green, river bottom Eden. The moon is rising. I love this place. When I am here I think I would be happy never to leave it."
~taken from Life On The Road, Charles Kuralt