Musings

Next Year Country. A few weeks back, my wife and I took a sojourn up to northeastern Montana. I was doing research for my latest book, Memory Lost and Found. I wanted to stand on the ground where my grandparents stood a hundred years ago.

It was late June and the rolling countryside was more vibrant and lush than I had imagined. The vast green fields of wheat that dominated the landscape during the Back’s era are still common but are now augmented by broad swaths of breathtakingly iridescent chartreuse, fields carpeted in small white-flowers, and acres of sweet-smelling buffalo grass, clover and hay.

We spent a day in Scobey, a small town several miles to the west of our destination, Comertown. Scobey was once the largest distribution point for wheat in the world and now hosts the Daniels County Museum and Frontier Village. We attended “Pioneer Days,” a popular celebration held each year during the last weekend in June. We started the morning sitting in an authentic wood-sided cook car like the one my grandmother managed a hundred years ago. We each had an eye-opening mug of dark coffee, although Sue would have preferred decaffeinated. We ate flapjacks drizzled with chokecherry syrup and saucer-sized patties of zesty country sausage.

After breakfast we walked among giant rusted threshing machines—all cranks and levers and chutes—their knobbed cast iron wheels anchored deep in tufts of prairie grass. I compared my height against the six foot metal wheel of an old steam-driven tractor and stared in awe at a sturdy sodbuster plow with six plowshares. We walked the boardwalk and explored the numerous buildings that had been moved to the museum’s pioneer village—a one room school house, a farmhouse, a mercantile and pharmacy, a blacksmith shop, and a saloon—among others. I was a little disappointed that they didn’t have a sod house, but they did have a couple of grayed and neglected, yet-to-be-restored, proving-up cabins (the small cabins built by settlers to prove their homestead claims).

I was amused and enlightened by the conversations I overheard—big-handed guys as old as me, wearing ball caps and faded blue jeans cinched tight with big belt buckles, talking about the weather. “We got some good rain but it’s not enough,” one said. And, “We didn’t get any up near us. But I could see them clouds go’en by. Maybe next year,” said another. I was told by a longtime local that northeast Montana is often called “Next Year” country. “Next year we’ll get more rain. Next year will be better.”

At one o’clock there was a reenactment of a bank robbery—gunshots and all—the area was known for hosting a number of cattle and horse thieves back in its day. Mid-afternoon, with a light rain falling that no one complained about, we watched a parade of restored antique automobiles and tractors. As the rain abated, we filed into the REX theater to watch the Dirty Shame Show—a burlesque show featuring music, skits, and dance performed by local talent. The show culminated in an enthusiastic and remarkably well-choreographed rendition of the Can-Can. It was all a hoot.

Late in the evening the clouds began to clear and, anticipating a colorful sunset, I drove to the western edge of town to a spot with an unobstructed view of the horizon. I wasn’t disappointed. As the sun dropped out of sight, the steel blue clouds overhead began to take on color, transitioning from a pale pink, then a rosy salmon, and then on to a bold iridescent orange crisscrossed with streaks of gold and purple. The horizon was flushed with a pure light, foretelling clear skies in the morning.