Your Daily Miracle: Missoula, MT

The road in front of our friend's storybook cottage

Elspeth and our godson Corin, gamboling like mountain goats

I don't remember Missoula being so beautiful in the fall as it was last week.  It was like stepping into the elves' kingdom, Lothlorien--everything was cast in golden light.  Outside our friends' house, sunshine coated every blade of grass on the tawny hills. On the mountains, the larches were like golden rivers in seas of evergreens. We walked down a path, the leaves dense underfoot, and stopped by a wide, clear river.  Yellow willows bowed over the water and over us, the sunshine filled a huge sky swept clean.  The air felt rich and heady.  The kids were drunk with Missoula.

Of course there were lovely, dear friends, too, old friends with whom we feel we can unknot completely and be ourselves, friends who untangle us and fill us with goodness and courage.

Bea with her friend, Bertie, also known as B.  The sum total of these two girls: B & B.

And too there was this lovely child of my oldest, dearest friend since 6th grade in Kenya.  (There she is on the right, on Lena's first ecstatic every merry-go-round ride).  Merry held Lena Margaret Wren a great deal, and I looked at them and said, "Look, Kara!  Our two firstborns together!"  Life is full of really wonderful things.



On the way there and on the way back, Martin read Norman McClean's A River Runs Through It out loud. We drove away from the Clark Fork River, through the mountain pass, into Idaho.  We made Washington and the high plains with their bizarre outcroppings of black rock and the endless dry fields of the rain shadow.  The rain started close to Seattle and in the last vestiges of light, Martin finished reading:

Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise. 
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. 
I am haunted by waters.”

We were both close to tears.  The story resonated with us now more than it ever had before, as it must with anyone who has ever tried to help someone they love and find that the person they most want to help eludes them in the end.

I sent our friends a text, ala Norman MacClean:  "Rocketing down the highway toward home.  Bastards are proliferating at an alarming rate the further we get from Missoula."

Thankfully we made it home to beloved people who are not bastards, no matter what the narrator may have thought, and it was good to be home and good to feel the golden Missoula sunshine, warming us.  We gulped down plenty in three short days to last us through the Pacific Northwest winter.