I Need a Change of Scenery!: Riding the Rails with Amtrak, Day 2 Part 2: Montana

Fire on the horizon, near Havre, MT

The part of Montana that the tourists flock to visit is in the west where the mountains rise, the breathtaking landscape of Glacier National Park. It is indeed a majestic place. But you won't find many pictures of that part of the state here. As I explained in an earlier post, the train was running late and the sun had set before we got there. But take heart, dear reader, there will be other pictures of other mountains in other posts as this journey continues. In the meantime, let me tell you why I love this leg of the journey.

I've been a reader since I first figured out the alphabet and set to reading cereal boxes and soup cans as a tot. Literature was the refuge of my adolescence and the path I took through university and stuck with as a teacher. Like all serious readers, I have a few books that I hold on a different plane above all others, the books that I have read and reread and that have left their mark on my soul. High in my personal pantheon is the novel Winter in the Blood by Native American author James Welch (Blackfeet/Gros Ventre). The novel is set in this part of northern Montana, where the author grew up. The first time I read it, I was stunned by the author's ability to so powerfully and lovingly evoke a landscape that many travelers might find unremarkable, even boring. The novel made me understand in a way I never had before how deeply a person's identity, history, and perception of the world can be tied to the place they call home. For me, thanks in large part to James Welch, there is a stark but powerful, almost magical beauty to the plains in the eastern half of the state.

In Winter in the Blood, the unnamed Native American narrator struggles with feelings of grief, abandonment, and alienation. He describes himself as being "as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon." He finds himself in a series of threatening, hostile situations as he makes his way through the bars in the towns that skirt the northern edge of the Ft. Belknap Reservation. The train passes through those towns: Malta, Dodson, Harlem, and Havre. From my perspective as an aging white woman who has spent her life in big cities and is just passing through on a train, these towns look charming and picturesque, rather than places that the narrator describes as "a great earth of stalking white men." Nevertheless, I feel a thrill of recognition at their very names. Here is a town that James Welch knew and wrote about, and here is a town where the narrator was afraid, confused, taken advantage of. It's a good lesson in perspective. Since I didn't leave the train platform and go in search of seedy bars, I'll end this post with a few pictures of the more picturesque aspects of those and other towns along this stretch of railway: