The Boredom of a Montana Winter

8/7/2019 The Boredom of a Montana Winter

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Staving Off the Boredom of a Montana Winter

Staving Off the Boredom of a Montana WinterRonnie and Gay Bray

We cannot say that we were not warned. Boy, were we warned! We were warned, better warned, and well

warned! Everyone we spoke to had some good advice for us ranging from, Dont go! through, Its so very

cold there! to, You will not make it through the winter, and even, "If you dont die of cold youll die ofboredom! Which is what all the others meant even if they were not so unkind as to say it out loud. And so i

continued. The only people who were at all positive about our moving to North West Montana were Tom andJeanie Gentry of Troy Triplets fame who had lived there for nine years and had just about got the hang of the

place.

The Troy Triplets Deer on the Gentry homestead

Tom and Jeanie said that the Troy area was known as the Banana Belt because of its good mean annual

temperature. I wont say that we didnt believe them, but we put that bit of information on ourholding shelf

and figured that since Montana didnt empty for winter some folks must survive it and if they could do it, socould we, and that finally fixed our minds on the Montana move.

Leaving Arizonas desert landscape on the way north

We moved to Montana in June 2002 and in the second week of July, we moved into our rented double wide

trailer home on three acres at the edge of the Kootenai National Forest.

Copyright Ronnie Bray February 2003

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Three gorgeous acres a double wide trailer with all we need tomake it home

1900 lives like a king . And sleeps like a baby our Family Wall

Eastwards North eastwards Aalmost north

Northwards North Westwards Westwards

Westward ho Southwestward ho! Southward ho!

Westwards sunset skyblaze Westwards sunset skyblaze Westwards sunsetskyblaze


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Soft comes evening Night falls The last glimmer of day

Soon afterwards adopted out first dog, Shep, a noble and ancient aristocrat whose pedigree was largely BorderCollie with some perceptible Newfoundland. We rescued him from being a barn dog and took him home where

he went indoors and immediately transmogrified himself into a well beloved housedog except when there is

snow on the ground, when he likes to be outside rolling in it and pushing his snout into it, returning to the house

with maybe fifty snowballs clinging to his front legs and sides.

Shep and a little snow 1900s not-ready-to-wake-up face 1900completely at ease

A week later we adopted The Rock, a huge black and white Manx cat, whom we renamed 1900 or19 for shortand took him home where he largely pleases himself down to this very day.

Getting the grass cut down was the next priority. The departing tenants, Pieter and Pam, had not cut it that year

so it stood a proud yard plus high and harboured some noxious weeds. After struggling for a few days with a

push-along petrol powered rotary mower, Gay persuaded me to buy a ride-on, so we went to Sears in Libby andgot a special offer on a 42 cut contra-rotating double-bladed ride-on garden-tractor-cum-lawn-mower. I would

not insist on the lawn part, but it certainly did cut grass.

The mower man Man against grass! Howdy, Maam!

As it did, it found every rock and oversized pebble that was hiding in the long grass. So efficient was it afinding these large masses of minerals that by the end of the first cut of the grassed acre, the two new blades

resembled huge jagged combs. When it came to making the second and third cuts, I was past caring, and as the

combs did a reasonable job of cutting and mulching the rest of the grass I ignored the damage.

The worst part of mowing was driving over the mounds of earth thrown up by ground squirrels that dries into

dust as fine as sifted flour. The turbulence caused by the contra-rotating blades sucks up the dust and throws itall over the driver. Not only did I get covered by several layers of electrostatically charged dust, but it found its


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way into my lungs, from where it emerged under some pressure and with some velocity in the form of a

constant expectoration of adobe blocks.

With the grass down to a reasonable level, it was time to get ready for the long winter. The last hard winter

with several feet or was it yards of snow was seven years go, so it was time, said the locals, for another hardone. That meant getting in the wood before the price got hiked because when they were delivering loads of

wood the woodcutters werent able to hunt and so had to be compensated. The North Western Montana way is

to get your firewood from the forest and your meat off the mountain. That is one of the fundamental economic

principles of life here. We got several chords of pine and larch rounds and a whole lot of mill ends. We figurethat for all the money we paid for firewood, it might have been cheaper to run the electric hot air heater all

winter instead of burning the wood.

Stages in shed building Montana style Establishing the need

Then we had the problem of where to keep the wood so that it would stay dry and burnable. The only wayforward was to build a shed for the wood, that we would, when completed, call The Woodshed. The pressingquestion was how big should it be? I should have calculated the volume of the wood to be stored, and then

calculated the size of the shed required to accommodate it, but my grasp of the principles of mathematics

stopped the wrong side of long division, so I abandoned the Third Principle of Pythagoras and the FourteenthFactor of Archimedes in favour of the First Axiom of Ronnie, stacked all the wood in a more or less rectangular

block, and then built the walls around it, and surprise, surprise, it fitted! The wood safely inside the walls, apart

from a panic buy of two more chords after the price hike that still sticks in the craw, I hoisted the eighteen footlong eight inches by two inches cedar rafters, heaven-sent gifts from Karen Thorsfeldt, into position and nailed

on the metal roof panels another heaven-sent gift from Karen - before I was taken ill and had to abandon hard

work for a season.

You gotta start somewhere! The walls came tumbling up! Taking shape


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Making a better fall Rafters and stringers in place Metal sheeting in

place

All that remained, we told ourselves, was to get equipped to stave off cabin fever for those long months when

we were snowed in and couldnt reach the main highway. We had bought an electronic keyboard earlier in thesummer, had hauled the electric guitar and amplifier with us from Tennessee, procured a semi-automatic .45

handgun, then from the Internet we obtained a 25 inch television receiver, had a satellite television receiving

system installed, got an all format VCR, and purchased an all regions DVD player. Now we were ready foranything, we felt like Montanans, and we settled down to wait for winter to come and do its worst.

Entertainment Humane dispatcher Successful transplant!

The weather in June was splendidly sunny and hot. By July it had become unbearable, hovering on the cusp of

one hundred degrees, so we had a compact air conditioning refrigeration unit fitted into one of the windows.What we lost in light we gained in cool. August continued the heat wave and added mosquitoes who felt itnecessary to cool themselves down by drinking our blood. We bought gallons of stuff to rub on, and spray, and

poisoned thousands of the little perishers, but some got through to drink, most noticeably, from Gay. I think

they were after her drugs!

August hosted the Clawson Clan Reunion at Troy, where many members of the family gathered and had a

wonderful time. It also witnessed the first birthday of the Gentry Triplets, Elizabeth, Daniel, and David.


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Clawson descendants gather at Ross Creek Cedars

Kleinmans (Kleinmen? & Ellsworths


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Cousins Thelma and Gay Tom and Jeanie Sarah K, Thelma, and WayneMinton

Jason, Steve, Wayne, Thelma, Gay Kaye and Richard Steve, Chris,

Robert, Julie Anne

First birthday X 3 Left holding the babies So, whats all this fussabout?

Gay went into The Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane, Washington State, in August to have another heart valve

fitted and a double by pass. Her recovery was slow and painful, but being the pioneer that she is, she made

steady uncomplaining progress, apart from her usual round of setbacks that seem to be a feature of her life.

After open-heart surgery, Gay rest in and out of doors. Later she could takeshort walks

September and October were still sweaty hot although the temperature obligingly plunged to the upper eighties

and the mosquitoes were replaced by the very beautiful and endlessly interesting and ubiquitous stinkbugs.


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Aint I beautiful?

November brought Thanksgiving Day, Jason and Laura, and still more good weather. In the early part o

December, the temperature plunged again, this time to the middle sixties where it lingered until close toChristmas Day when it fell into the high forties and let the snow fall for a white Christmas. It seemed perfect

Daily the landscape changes according to cloud level or mist or haze or sunshine, so that the same scene never

looks the same twice, and every hour of every day is wonderfully new and inspiring.

Two days after Christmas, we were blessed with two feet of snow. Every twig and needle on every tree was

covered in what seemed to be soft gloopy icing, creating a landscape that seemed right out of Walt DisneysStudios. We held off from having the drive ploughed and when it was time for us to go to town, we got into the

all wheel drive Explorer and it just walked gently out, smoothing the deep snow with its undercarriage as it did

so. And then we knew that this was when the boredom would begin in earnest!

He gazed upon the silent world, twas all that he could see; for nature had itscloak unfurled and laid its snow white sea


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Behold, I make all things new!

Icicles in all directions but still flies the Union Flag!

Yaak Falls freezes - but the wood is safe and dry! - and still flows the Yaak

amid the freeze

The snow on the high ground of the Cabinet Range lay so deep that it drove the deer and elk down to lower

reaches to forage for their food. Many of them ended up bleeding and dead by the roadside. This was when we

began to see bald eagles making themselves almost too full to fly as they fed among the crows on the carcassesof the deer, and at one time I saw three golden eagles at feast just past the twenty-eight mile marker on Bull

Lake Road.

A Bald eagle A Bald eagles dinner


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Another eagle feeding site this once was a deer!

Deer visiting our garden became more numerous and more bold no small thing for the timid creatures. I had

to clear a spot under the pines to put down the golden cracked corn that they enjoyed so much. Little families

came with their fawns, now changing into their winter drab, and groups of larger does and bucks whose antlershad shed for winter waited in the copse until one group had left before they went to eat whatever was left.

Sometimes we saw fourteen at one time circling the feed, and every deer we saw we looked upon as if it was the

first we had ever seen, such is our fascination with these creatures.

Our frequent visitors

All they want is cracked corn - lots of it - a salt block - and to be first in thequeue!

When Jason and Laura were safely aboard the Western pioneer to travel back to Portland, we drove round to the

Libby dog pound and picked up our second dog, a Border Collie crossed with a whippet judging by her speed.

She is little Frankie, who we want to call Belle, but she answers to Frankie, and so Frankie is so energetic


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and full of the herding instinct that we have, at times, been driven to call her Frantic Frankie, but she is so

sweet, and as petite as Shep is huge, so they complement each other. We get a lot of pleasure out of, and lovefrom, our dogs, and realize that we have gone a bit doggy, but we are getting quite old and so we are allowed

our mild eccentricities.

Our Homeys! Gay and Ronnie find a place to sleep eventually!

We finally had to put away the humming bird feeder as they tailed off on their journeys southwards, and the

Stellars Jays quit coming for the sweet sunflower seeds we put into as hanging basket on the verandah railings.The woodpeckers went away, and the chickadees seemed to follow right afterwards, but Cyril the squirrel

remained faithful with his paramour as they inhabited the two large blue pines by our steps next to the place

where the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes fly side-by-side, signifying what manner of people live here

Cyril was worthy watching. When he and his lady were not chasing each other around the big trunk in helicalcircles, he would sit atop the birdhouse some twenty feet up the tree and chatter. This chattering irritated the

dogs, who on hearing him, ran out to bark at him, but Cyril knew that he was fireproof at that height.

Occasional visitors bad cases of cupboard love

Cyril the tragic squirrel

We did not notice that the squirrel population in our house trees was one! The forest floor was full of their littleundulating darting shapes as they took the ground route from tree to tree so that Frankie would chase them, but

that there was only one was evident when Cyril left without saying goodbye. His leaving was on this wise. I

was in the house when I thought I saw something flutter down past the window at the side of the house. I


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looked out of the window to see the bird, but could not see anything, so I looked through the front windows

Justin time to see a beautiful but deadly brown owl lifting off in low flight across the grass towards the treesthat stand on the slope down to the flatlands by the creek. Cyril was clutched in his talons so tightly that he was

motionless, and could not speak or wave or otherwise signify his departure. Since that day, there had been no

squirrel in our trees close by the house and I knew that he had been a widower for some time, which mightexplain why he stole dry dog food to keep in his basket.

January saw the snow freeze where it had fallen and a few more inches added from time to time, but still our rig

crept everywhere we wanted to go without any slipping or loss of traction unless you want to count the time weslipped sideways into the mail boxes or the time when I missed the turn and ended up in the deep snow at the

side of the drive and had to dig down a couple or three feet to make channels for the rig to crawl out of.

Otherwise, it sticks to the road even when the road is ice covered.

In February when Mavis van Poucke Crisp and Silva Crisp Scott came to stay for a week, we walked down to

the creek and saw the miracle of ice that coated everything in the creek as well as the rocks and fallen trees at itssides to produce a winter wonderland made of crystalline water that could not have been imagined. These two

English Roses were on a visit to America to attend Angela Liveseys wedding in Arizona, and honoured us with

a visit.

The only Crisps in Montana all the others are chips!

Theakstons Old & Peculiar (the drink not the drinker!) Mavis overheats

At Kootenai Falls


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We have not been snowed in, and do not expect to be, especially due to our neighbours, Tamia to the west andWalt to the east, who brought their snowploughs and cleared our dive just to be neighbourly unexpectedly

and most welcomed.

In the midst of all this snow, non-Montanans figure that we must be freezing to death. Emphatically, we arenot. When the temperature drops below 10 degrees Fahrenheit it does feel somewhat cold, but not chilled-to-

the-bone cold, Anything over twenty degrees is fine to go out in without a top coat, but when the temperature

soars to the thirties or the occasional forties, then it is no-jacket weather. We do not feel cold, and do notanticipate being cold. Our wood stove burns so hot that we often have to open the doors to get the temperature

down to a reasonable level, which is around eighty degrees.

We have some English videos and DVDs that we like to watch from time to time, and laugh at things we used

to laugh at in the Old Country. We watch videos of the shows that Norma and I were in, and enjoy seeing our

old friends as they make their entrances and exits on the screen, wallowing in good memories.

There is always some wood to chop, some logs to fetch from the shed to the back verandah, then to carry to the

hearth to be stacked next to the stove. We work hard in our church, teaching and ministering, and have an

expanding circle of good friends with whom we are making plans for next spring to hunt and fish, forage in the

forest for firewood, dine with, and talk the night away.

Gay and Adam George Sharon Carolyn Bob Trevor Shirley

Elders Murphy & Mitchell AdamBilly-Bob Davis Alex Albert

Breanna Brigham Carolyn


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Dana & Terry Don Patsy Karen 1900

Adam Harald Louis Gay Elders Anderson and Mitchell

Hans & Pek Hans Louis Thor

Pam Cliff Adam Listening to Shirley Brown reading

Terry Jack Catelyn Harald in the web!


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Chris Louis Thor RobertAnd then there is my next big project, which is to build a double garage and workshop, mostly from timber thatI will find and fell in the forest on our three acres or else drag old fallen trees out with the Explorer and lengths

of rope. These have to be sized and cut to length, mostly before spring hits so that I have a good start when

winter finally retreats and the dread threat of boredom has passed!

Woven through all our activities and adventures we have the fund we had with Gays broken rib, sustained

when she had one of her famous dizzy spells and fell hard against the vanity unit in her bathroom. She followed

this up with a dental abscess of such proportions that it was declared a National Treasure. Its failure to respondto antibiotics, unless significant growth counts as a response, necessitated an impressively swift referral to Steve

Mendive by our General Medical practitioner, the excellent John Wilcox, that resulted in an equally swift

extraction, which , in turn was followed by more significant growth in the abscess. The only thing enjoying thislengthy and painful process was the abscess!

Compared to Gays rib and abscess, my mystery illness and my three ingrown toenails, deftly removed by

David Neumann, pale into nothingness. Even my creeping arthritis and recurrent pangs of tempero-mandibularjoint disorder are not of the same order of her crippling sciatica now, thankfully, controlled by celecoxib

Whatever it might look like, we are not in competition with each other to see who will fall to pieces first, and

we feel that we would not have fared any better even if we had been settled in a warm climate. Whatever theconveniences of city life we have traded off for our idyllic existence in the Last Best Place on Earth, we count

ourselves more than blessed daily to see the grandeur of Gods beautiful outdoors and the fascinating and

seemingly endless variety of creatures that populate it.

And when our friends and family those who still remember us ask what we are doing to stave off the

boredom of a Montana winter, we either tell them how deucedly awful it is, to maximise what sympathy theymay gather, or else we will come clean and confess, while trying hard not to break out into grins, that it never

happened, that it is impossible to be either bored or cold in a Montana winter, and we cannot imagine that it will

ever be different. Which leads to the final question: When are you relocating?

Ronnie Bray Copyright

17 February 2003

All Rights Reserved

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The Boredom of a Montana Winter

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