It’s about 9 in the morning and I’m sitting on the stoop of my hostel in Missoula, Montana. It’s probably about 70 degrees in the sunshine but I’m in the shade of the hanging porch.
Yesterday I drove up from Boise. There isn’t really much of a direct route so I took a lot of roads where the speed limit was 30mph or 45mph. It’s surprisingly hard to maintain that speed when you’ve grown accustomed to 75mph. It feels like crawling along. Thank god for cruise control. Still, I got pulled over when I was coming down a mountain near Grangeville, Idaho. Seems I was doing a whopping 72 in a 65. The guy was nice and gave me a warning. We had to pull into somebody’s driveway in order to avoid being hit on the narrow road.
I spent most of the day navigating mountains. Sharp turns, lots of trees and a river that followed me most of the way. There were small towns that had seemed to be deserted. Big buildings that never had anybody parked outside. Weeds grew up over fences and there only seemed to be a hint left of what had once been. But every now and then I’d catch someone walking out of a building I was sure was abandoned. Saw open signs glowing in a window. Funny what we cast off as dead that is home and plenty to others.
The men I saw wore hats of one kind or another, baseball or cowboy. The women, the few I saw, wore practical cotton and often had serious faces. Actually, the majority of the women I saw en route were construction workers driving big machines, holding signs, directing the traffic. Their white faces were deeply tanned and creased and often their hair was cropped short and spiky. Lesbians? It’s hard to tell in this part of the country who’s a lesbian and who’s just practical.
I stopped to pee in a tiny town full of bars, churches and a general store called Buckshot Mary’s. I found myself thinking, ah isn’t this cute?! And then I spent the next 100 miles thinking about how patronizing that is. I was listening to a mix of old coal mining songs that a friend of mine made and wondering where I learned how to feel about towns like that. Seems folks that live there are either romanticized or cast aside. Either a charming piece of heartland to snap a photo of or bigots and bible thumpers. The problem with America.
For me I found myself interacting with them, with their towns, like they were ghosts of something. Of America’s past, of mine. Of what existed before corporations dominated, of mutual aid, of a simpler way of being that required harder work. But by treating them like ghosts I’d stripped them of their agency. Their value in today’s America. I made them something I’d created instead of allowing myself to listen and learn authentically. Those towns are not some set in an amusement park, though that is my main reference for them, these are their homes. This is their everyday. And it may or may not be charming to them.
I felt safe in those towns. For the most part. Like I didn’t need to lock my doors (though I did) or worry about my body being hurt or judged (with perhaps the exception of armpit hair). There has only been once on this trip that I’ve felt worried and I just walked away from the two men who seemed to be looking at me in a way that made me shiver and kept driving. There’s a lot of privilege in this. In my whiteness, my ability to pass as straight and gender normative. This would be a much different trip if I weren’t driving among people who read me as similar to them. I doubt that small town in Idaho would have felt as safe to a persin of color. I wonder if that man at the fruit stand would have been so sweet to me if I was a womyn who was noticeably trans. Instead I fit. I get, ah honey’s and ‘afternoon’s.
The man at the fruit stand felt so good to me. His manners, his hustle, his tone of voice. I new how to do that dance. Knew how to meet him there. There is something that has felt like home living among the white working class again. There’s something that I’ve really been missing in San Francisco. And I find myself wanting to claim Ohio as ‘where I come from’ and conceal the embarrassingly fancy car I’m driving. I want to be read as one of them. I’m only now starting to unfold all the ways that I am and all the ways that I never will be.
After arriving in Missoula and checking into my hostel I went over to their local co-op, The Good Food Store, and got myself a tempeh sandwhich with lemon aioli and artichoke hearts. As I sat in front of the store eating a blissfully vegan meal and looking at the mountains I overheard a familiar conversation. The young womyn next to me met an older womyn’s frantic tone with a calm, “I’ll believe it when I see it”. A young blonde haired boy climbed up and over the chair next to hir as they spoke about his father’s intervention. The older womyn, the man’s mother, was trying to convince the younger womyn that he was different now. That he’d finally gotten the courage to get help and now was when he really needed his family. I could hear the pain in the younger womyn’s voice when she said, “I really feel like I need to be strict here” and chased after hir son. They talked about the man’s recovery plan and how he’d done this before. His mother kept pushing for him and the mother of his child stood just a few steps back. It seemed like his mother had been waiting outside the grocery store for hir and cornered hir into a conversation. I was so proud of hir for staying steady in hir resolve and wondered about the levels of hurt and sadness that had brought hir to that place. Made me think about those conversations in my own life, where I’ve played both sides. My mother, my friends, my lover. I think most often I played the part the older womyn did. The quiet pleading that something was different, throwing all my faith behind that and someone who, perhaps, just wasn’t ready to change yet. It felt strange to be sitting there listening but also felt like a gift. A reminder of how different my life is now and a reminder of where I’ve come from.
Back at the hostel I chatted with a few of the other travelers staying there. One womyn was from San Francisco, Darcy. I cut off a piece of my peach for hir and shared some of the blackberries I’d picked from the side of the road in Idaho. As the living room cleared I went out to sit on the stoop to eat my sweet roadside dessert and listen to the train whistle. I felt so calm. So full of home and love and happy. I was so glad to make it here.
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