DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: Sterilizing Sutton

2012-02-10T10:56:00.000-08:00

Chef deserves full credit for the house hunt that ultimately led to our acquisition of the home on the range - he was the one who found it. He’d been driving around the neighborhoods of Whitefish he considered suitable for about nine months before finally spotting a local broker’s for sale sign posted on the street in front of “The One.”

He might’ve been able to find his dream house sooner had we enlisted the house-hunting services of one of the local real estate agents, but my prominent position at the town’s only title office made taking that approach difficult, especially when there were so many pitbulls fighting over the same scraps. The catty fallout from giving the impression that I might be playing favorites with any of the area’s real estate agents I was dependent upon for business just wasn’t worth it. There was no doubt in my mind that the prudent approach in this circumstance was to circumvent any unnecessary big sky drama by finding the house ourselves, and simply contacting the listing agent directly when we were ready to view the property. As snipy as those agents were in the habit of being, there wasn’t one of them who could find fault with that.

The seller of the house we hoped to call home was a retired man in his late 60’s named Sutton. His wife had divorced him about two years earlier after bolting from big sky country with a younger hillbilly buck. It was obvious that Sutton had grown tired of living alone on a property that was too large for one old man to maintain, but it was the need to pay his ex-wife her share of the equity in accordance with the terms of their divorce settlement that really forced the sale.

When our purchase was under contract and put into escrow, Sutton invited us over to the house for a personal tour with the objective of educating us on how to operate and maintain the homestead. This would typically be unheard of in a big city home sale, but in rural Whitefish, it was commonplace. We were stoked, and didn’t waste a second in accepting his offer because we were all about doing anything we could to shorten our learning curve.

Obviously Chef and I had toured the house before making our offer to purchase, but viewing a property with the intent to purchase tends to have an abstract emotional detachment associated with it. For us, that emotional detachment had no choice but to quickly alter into attachment when the reality became hands-on, and that was the minute we pulled into Sutton’s driveway for our new homeowner instruction. With a copy of our home inspection report in hand, we emotionally embraced our new reality with ambitious anticipation.

As far as I was concerned, the inside of Sutton’s ranch house was an old man’s homage to the 1970’s. It was like a time capsule; replete with dark brown hi-lo shag carpet, wood paneled walls, yellow countertops, ugly wallpaper, and heavy orange Aztec print drapes that were always drawn. But I figured all of this was merely aesthetics, and not worth stressing over too much until escrow closed, when the house became officially ours to update.

Unfortunately, the whole décor thing took on a very disturbing dimension for me during that home tour with Sutton when he began to personalize the house by casually dispensing way too much information about his lifestyle for my sensibilities ... thereby reaffirming my belief that sometimes there is no bliss better than ignorance because once known, it cannot be un-known. And because his Suttonisms were intermingled with the important knowledge we were there to acquire, it made it next to impossible to stop listening altogether in case we missed something significant.

Consequently, I silently suffered through the tall tales pouring out of this pot-bellied Moby Dick in overalls who possessed the sensitivity of a caveman as he described for us just how easy it was for him to entice the casino chicks over to his man-cave (and my soon-to-be new home no less). Apparently all he needed to do to hit the jackpot on any given night was to dangle the irresistible amenities of his bachelor pad in front of some lucky lady tipsy enough to take the bait. Each room seemed to have its own salacious anecdote, but the topper was when we got to the large sun room on the east side of house. The sun room was home to the hot tub.

Hot Tub Sun Room on the right (east) side of the house

Let me preface this next part by saying, I’m not a big fan of hot tubs, never have been. I’m of the opinion that they’re basically gigantic, gurgling petri dishes, chlorine infusions notwithstanding; and besides, chlorine makes my sensitive skin burn.

When we eventually got around to the sun room, Sutton wanted to show us how efficient the on-demand hot water heater in his walk-out basement was when it came to filling up the hot tub. I was immediately bowled over by the hot, humid wave of chlorinated air that hit me like a wall when I stepped into the sun room. Sutton was already rambling on about the wild hot tub party he had last week while fast at work removing the hot tub’s protective cover in order to show us his fountain of youth percolating underneath. A steam cloud of concentrated chlorine billowed straight up into my eyes when the lid came off, and so it was through watery eyes that the unbidden dream sequence surged forth and did its damage …

... An image flashed before me of old man Sutton lounging naked in the hot tub with his arm around some shriveled big sky mountain mama; half empty wine glasses sitting on the deck behind them. Then I saw the soaking effects of hot, chlorinated water as it violently circulated through the unit’s jets, and exfoliated the dead layers of Sutton’s flaky skin from his body, only to co-mingle with the other body fluids seeping simultaneously into the churning cauldron. I watched the resulting brew of nastiness create a thick, oily film on the surface of the foaming bubbles that had frothed to the top. In horror, I blinked my eyes and snapped to like I was waking up from a horrible nightmare …

There wasn’t enough chlorine in the world to sterilize the ick of that unsolicited vision from my brain, and once the house was ours, I asked Chef to drain the hot tub right away. Draining it wasn’t even enough though; and when I ultimately told Chef I would never, ever use it, he decided to pull it out and sell it. Good riddance.

All procrastination aside, Sutton had too much stuff for one old guy to move, so he couldn’t manage to get himself moved out the house before we arrived with our first truckload. No surprise there, we were half expecting it, but we had people moving into our old house and were on a tight timeline.

In the end, Sutton left a lot of junk behind that we had to pitch for him, nor did he bother to clean up the house before we moved in. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve come to believe that household dirt is a personal thing – it’s never disgusting when it’s my dirt and grease, but when it’s someone else’s dirt and grease, it’s gross. And with Sutton, it was extra gross. So before I would let anyone even use a toilet, I put on plastic dish gloves, filled a bucket with some kind of sanitizing Pine-sol mixture, and wiped down everything in that house. And I mean everything.

By the time the sun had set late on moving day, those ugly orange drapes were in a heap on the driveway, and Chef had ripped out a hideous juniper tree in the backyard that had the misfortune of blocking his view of Big Mountain from the windows of our new living room.

The brown hi-lo shag carpet, on the other hand, ended up staying with the house until I left. It didn’t take me too long to realize that it did a phenomenal job of camouflaging the dirt from ten acres, a yellow lab, two cats and an adolescent daughter with a lot of friends. Replacing the carpet simply kept moving down on the home improvements priority list until it just never got done, at least not by me. That’s OK though, because it was our dirt the carpet was hiding.

Living The Big Sky Life^TM

© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: Home Improvements Impart EnLIGHTenment

2012-01-31T16:44:00.000-08:00

The incident surrounding the construction of “The Door” proved to be an irreversible turning point in my partnership with Chef. I can say in hindsight that it proved to be substantially more divisive than the now infamous hair affair. Yet unlike my unwavering long time stance on the subject of hair care, “The Door” wasn’t even a conceptual consideration until a year later - when our move from the Unabomber bungalow to the home on the range fatefully set the stage for the second act in my big sky life.

Courtesy of: www.Commons.Wikimedia.org

But there was plenty of other big sky drama to be had long before that curtain came up. Just dealing with the daily demands of keeping a house four times the size of our previous residence was dramatic enough, even in the mildest of seasons. Add to that the looming angst that came with constantly trying to minimize the perilous side effects of an unpredictable (and usually rising) water table, our lives basically felt like a simmering pot that was always on the verge of boiling over.

Living in a big house on ten acres meant there was always something that needed to be done; there was always something that needed to be fixed. We all have our strengths, and unfortunately for Chef, being handy or mechanically inclined wasn’t one of his. He was, in actuality, quite the opposite, and one of the several nicknames I affixed to him over the years was “the un-handyman”. His desperate desire to possess the kind of handyman skills one would think a prerequisite to live on a property like ours was evident, but he just didn’t have it. I can say with all sincerity, however, that it wasn’t for lack of trying. And Chef’s heavily dog-eared copy of “Home Improvement for Dummies” was, without question, a faithful companion for every do-it-yourself repair job he ever attempted. But alas, his honey-do list was infinite.

Perhaps a bizarre saving grace in all of this was the fact that my ex-husband had been a building contractor, and I had paid attention. It was not uncommon to find me standing over Chef in the attic with a flashlight, not merely because he needed light to see what he was doing, but because he needed me to provide him with step-by-step illumination on how to properly wire the new lighting fixtures we were determined to install.

This reminds me of one of my mother’s big sky visits. We’d been living in the ranch house less than a year, and had done quite a bit to open up the kitchen-living area because a 360˚ view was simply too good to waste with unnecessary impediments. By the way, demolition duty ultimately proved to be the perfect outlet for a very un-handy man to shine.

One fine fall afternoon during her visit, my mother and I were playing a game of cards at the dining table which happened to be unsurprisingly situated in the dining area underneath one of the new ceiling fans Chef and I had installed months earlier. At some point during our card game, Chef breezed into the kitchen for a little break from riding the lawnmower. He walked over to the refrigerator to retrieve an icy Heineken, then he bellied up to the kitchen counter directly behind my mother, and between sips, began to chat with us about some of the recent home improvements.

As the three of us conversed, one thing led to another, and eventually we got to talking about the off-center installation of the ceiling fan whirling with a muted hum right above our heads. From my seat at the dining table, I could see the faces of both my mother and Chef as we all gazed upward and silently stared with pondering mouths agape at the imperfection being contemplated.

Chef and I had been scratching our heads about the flaw from the moment we noticed it in the process of replacing the light fan fixture. Why any builder would intentionally install a prominent light fixture’s electrical box six inches off center when the room demanded it be dead center was a complete conundrum to us. And of course, once we’d become unavoidably aware of the defect, it became glaring, and then it was too late. We couldn’t not notice it now, for it was predictably the first thing we’d see the minute we walked into the room.

My mother, on the other hand, was unmoved by the problem. She casually offered up her solution without even batting an eye while looking up at the crux of the matter and saying, “Well, just move the box.”

The solution was so obvious that I was ashamed I didn’t think of it myself, and admitted as much on the spot. With some relief I might add, because moving the box was not only an “oh duh!”, but very doable with my skill-set.

Chef apparently didn’t hear the same thing that I heard because his face began to redden with anger, almost as if he’d been personally attacked, which I found puzzling at the time. My mother was oblivious to Chef’s reaction partly because he was standing behind her and she couldn’t see him; but primarily because she had no reason to be sensitive to his disproportionate reaction for she’d said nothing detrimental or critical. Quite the opposite, in fact. She’d merely offered what she thought was a common sense solution – and a good one at that. But did he ever let me have it that night in the bedroom when he directed his upset toward me as he dramatically re-enacted his interpretation of my mother accusing him of being inept by mimicking her remark in his snidest voice, “Well, just move the box, YOU IDIOT!” What??? Was I invisible, or did he forget that I was there and witnessed what really happened?

I suppose, when you distill it all down, we hear what we want to hear, and insecurities do have a way of filtering our perceptions and slanting in-coming commentary to fit those perceptions.

I think my mother’s “attack” that day somehow morphed into the mother-in-law equivalent of the old hair affair; and while it rankled Chef’s sensibilities almost as much as my hair commitment, it motivated him to get the box moved the minute she left town … indubitably with my help. What we learned up in the attic that day on our mission to “just move the box” was that some careless electrician didn’t measure out enough Romex during installation and lazily popped the box through the ceiling when the wire ran out, even though it came up short and six inches left of center.

When that melodramatic episode eventually burned itself out, it boiled the issue down to this final reduction: Hand me a screwdriver, and I could replace all of the electrical outlets, light switches and standard light fixtures within the house. Hand Chef a Henkel knife, and he could be deadly … Death By Chocolate that is. Trust me, it was a killer cake, but it was the fresh raspberry sauce that made it soigné.

Living The Big Sky Life^TM

© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: What About Steve?

2012-01-10T20:22:00.000-08:00

No sooner had the basement of our Montana Unabomber bungalow been stacked with the last of my moving boxes, when I got a phone call from a long-time girlfriend back in Huntington Beach. She steamrolled right over my obligatory “Hello” and got straight to the point, “You’ll never believe what I just found out about my cousin, Steve!” What else could I say to an intro like that except, “What about Steve?”

Now my girlfriend and I go way back - so far back that her nickname, ‘Mamasan’, has practically overridden her real name in my vernacular, and vice versa (her nickname for me is ‘Dudette’). She goes just as far back with Chef since the three of us grew up and went to grade school together in the “land of the beautiful people”. I always believed that Mamasan was in her own way one of the “beautiful people”. And boy, could she attract those beautiful boys to her like bees to honey – a true force of nature.

In contrast to her nickname, Mamasan came from a large Italian family. She had two pesky little brothers that we were known to beat up on occasion, and plenty of cousins, four of whom grew up and went to high school with us in Huntington Beach as well. The oldest of the four cousins was Steve, but many of us simply called him “Scope” instead. He was one of the “beautiful people” too.

My history with Scope goes almost as far back as my history with Mamasan and Chef. Scope was about three years older than we were, so he tended to hang with an older crowd, although there were some overlaps. One big overlap was my first husband, the deadbeat-cum-sperm-donor that the courts refer to as the father of my children. His name, by the way, was Steve too.

Scope was a highly skilled finish carpenter, a musician, and all around free bird who went with his own flow. He could build just about anything in my opinion, so when my first husband (the other Steve) and I were enticed to move from California to Colorado in 1978 during a Rocky Mountain construction boom, the free-spirited Scope wasn’t too far behind. He even stayed with us in Littleton for a while before eventually landing an opportunity in Vail, where he lived for several years thereafter … until the Colorado construction boom ultimately came to a crashing halt in the mid-80’s when the mid-west energy crisis hit, and interest rates bordered on usurious while property values plummeted, which pushed the banking system to the brink of collapse. Sound vaguely familiar? Scope ultimately made his way back to The OC where he managed to marry his wife, Kathy, and secure a nice job with a local university.

Until Mamasan’s phone call that day in Whitefish, the last I knew of Scope was that he’d left his job at the university and taken to the road. He and Kathy had decided to sell everything, buy a motor home, and roam the country like nomads for a couple of years. Apparently the last of Kathy’s two sons had graduated from high school, and they no longer felt any obligation to stay put. And with Scope’s skill-set, there was little doubt he could find work anywhere they chose to land along the way.

Mamasan couldn’t contain her excitement when she learned of her cousin’s coincidental relocation to Whitefish, Montana, and understandably couldn’t tell me fast enough. And he didn’t just settle in Whitefish, he moved into a house they’d purchased only two blocks away from the Unabomber bungalow – and all of this within a month of my arrival. Imagine Scope’s surprise when I showed up at his front door unannounced the next day.

Part of me was secretly relieved upon hearing Mamasan’s sensational news. Maybe I wouldn’t be so isolated after all. I liked the idea of knowing someone other than Chef in this remote locale. Although Chef knew of Scope while growing up, the two had never met. The same was true of Kathy and me. I’d heard plenty about her over time, but we’d never met either. Clearly Scope and I were the common denominators in this mix.

Scope did a much better job of blending into the cow town of Whitefish than I did, and with relatively little effort I might add. Maybe the time he’d spent in Vail helped him learn to better synchronize with the idiosyncracies of the small town mentality. I suspect it helped that he had always been in possession of a somewhat laid back nature, in a relaxed hippie kind of way.

Courtesy of www.MuseumOfGamingHistory.org

Six months down the road saw Chef working regular dinner shifts and Kathy working evenings in a retail job. Scope and I thought it would be fun to spend some of our mutually free evening time learning something new, so we signed up for weekly country swing dance lessons at the Remington.

Little did I know though, Scope couldn’t dance - not even a little bit. And here I was afraid I’d be the ball and chain who’d weigh him down on the dance floor since I knew for a fact that I couldn’t dance. Not the country swing anyway. I had a history of drunken cowboys storming off the dance floor at ‘The Little Bear’ in Evergeen, Colorado because I was unable to follow their lead without damaging both their feet and their pride. Well, dancing with Scope was like dancing with a big plank of wood, but his stiff moves didn’t seem to matter so much since he didn’t know how to lead anyway. In the end, those lessons did absolutely nothing to improve our swing, and it was hard not to get a little discouraged. At least no one got hurt…

Big Mountain from my back porch

…which is a lot more than I can say about snowboarding with Kathy up on the Big Mountain. Personally, I think the Big Mountain has one of the best bunny slopes I’ve ever experienced. It was the perfect place to learn a new snow sport, and what made it even better was the fact that access to the slope and its chair lift was free.

When it came to snowboarding though, the first thing I learned was that being able to ski well offered me no edge when it came to learning how to ride a snowboard. And believe you me, to know the agony of defeat is to barely tip the front edge of that snowboard with your big toe, and inadvertently bring all downhill movement to an abrupt halt, which unto itself is no big deal and to be expected. It becomes a big deal, however, when the signal to stop doesn’t reach the upper half of your body until your face smashes into the snow like a speeding missile plunging to earth.

Suffice it to say, my adventures in snowboarding came to a very ugly end one afternoon after finishing up what I thought was a pretty good day of bunny slope practice.

Kathy and I had decided to make our way to the car straight off the slope by gliding along the catwalks leading to the parking lot, because frankly, who would willingly walk that kind of distance with a bulky snowboard slung over their shoulder if they didn’t have to? Well, I almost didn’t make it to the car alive.

I was caught off guard deep in the woods by a sneaky patch of sharp ice which threw me off balance, and caused the edge of my snowboard to tip and catch. My upper body continued to propel forward unhindered at the speed of light until my face stopped all momentum with swift finality the second it slammed onto the icy earth beneath me. I literally saw stars … after I heard the back of my skull crack from the force of the impact, that is. No one witnessed my mortifying and quite undignified face-plant, but everyone got to see the damaging aftereffects all over my battered face for weeks. Nothing says “I’m done with snowboarding forever” faster than a black eye; a busted and fat lip; a scraped, bruised and bloodied face; and a concussion.

In reconnecting with Scope like I did, it wasn’t long before I realized that my big blast from the past was to play a big part in my future when we ultimately hired him to build our licensed catering kitchen. And what a fine and trusty co-conspirator he proved to be when I requested that he secretly build me “The Door”…

Living The Big Sky Life^TM

© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: Big Sky Christmas

2011-12-24T07:36:00.000-08:00

The thought of buying a pre-packaged holiday tree from the seasonal supplier who sets up shop in the Safeway parking lot after Thanksgiving always seemed to create a bean-counting conflict for Chef.

The Flathead Valley also had plenty of holiday tree farms to choose from. These farms grew enough trees to help fill the nation’s annual demand for Rocky Mountain Christmas trees, but acquiring a fresh-cut and beautifully groomed spruce tree directly from the farmer was again, an unacceptable expense in Chef’s ledger book.

So it was over the river and through the woods for us, for Chef was of the opinion that since we lived near the woods, we should go out into the woods to find our tree. And given his propensity to redirect household funds away from anything he considered frivolous spending, the fact that trees in the woods were free was considered a year-end bonus.

Shopping for the perfect Christmas tree in the woods was a lot easier said than done. After a full day of tree shopping on remote logging roads, we finally ended up with a free tree that looked exactly like we went out into the woods to find it. It smelled better than it looked, and I made the best of it.

Help NORAD’s 'Santa Tracker' out tonight by turning on your runway lights.

Best Wishes and Happy Holidays!

And may all of our dreams for the new year ahead come true...

Living The Big Sky Life^TM

© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: A Winter Mooning

2011-12-15T15:42:00.000-08:00

Punxsutawney Phil doesn’t live in Whitefish for a reason. The odds of a groundhog ever seeing a ray of sunshine during a Flathead Valley sun-free winter is just about nil. And shadow or no, everyone knows those winters will never end in six weeks or less.

By the time the local residents have flipped their calendars over to the month of February, the long months of sun deprivation will have visibly taken a toll on many. The distractions inherent with a bustling holiday season can only last so long, and in with the new year comes the cabin fever and depression. Unfortunately any time spent outside, such as on the slopes of the Big Mountain, can offer little in the way of light nourishment for those noticeably deficient in vitamin D.

The Big Mountain isn’t as big as its name implies, and from my experience, it rarely offered the skiers who graced its slopes with an elevation sufficient enough to place them above the foggy cloud that casts a perpetual shadow over the valley throughout the winter. Quite the opposite in fact, for when the resort’s chair lifts drop sun-seeking skiers off at the top of the mountain, it tends to plop them right down in the thickest part of the cloud. It’s enough to make your head spin, hence my personal Big Mountain nickname, “the vertigo capital of the world.”

Around the time Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania is preparing to celebrate the appearance of a groundhog named Phil in accordance with the region’s traditional German folklore, Whitefish, Montana is attempting to revive its winter-weary citizenry with an annual Winter Carnival under the auspices of honoring an old Nordic Snow King named Ullr.

Now old folklore doesn’t always make sense, which is probably why the tale of King Ullr never made any sense to me. Aside from the fact that it was “once upon a time”, I could never understand why any seafaring Nordic King would insist on making his Snow Queen and royal entourage trek inland 550 miles away from the nearest coastline to settle in a place like Whitefish. Just to say he was King of the Big Mountain? And while some would say it’s always good to be king of something, perhaps the legend was simply one of convenience. Even a good excuse to have a parade.

Whatever the story, February’s Winter Carnival in Whitefish is considered a local tradition, replete with surrogate royalty selected from the community’s most prominent socialites. The parade is one of the carnival’s main events, and its participants are recruited from every school, business, restaurant, church, and organization in the area.

I’ll never forget my first Winter Carnival parade in 1993. The skies were as clear as could be expected under the abiding cloud cover, and it was bitter cold, which I suppose was to be expected as well. It didn’t seem to matter to the gathering crowds who were appropriately dressed for the occasion. The Yetis in the parade that were heavily dressed in fleecy costumes were undoubtedly grateful for the freezing temperatures, especially since their primary purpose was to run along the parade route, throw candy into the crowds, and terrorize unsuspecting spectators with creepy Yeti pinches.

I reckon community obligation made it necessary for Whitefish High School to give its show of support by putting a “float” and the marching band in the parade every year. Accordingly, the town could always expect to see the football team, the team’s cheerleaders, and some of the student body notables riding in the back of a large flatbed truck (the “float”) with side panels decorated in the school’s gold and green like a Bulldog pep rally.

This is how the parade predictably floated along year after year … until the year of the winter mooning that is.

Unfortunately my parade position was on the sidelines during the year in question, which didn’t allow me to personally witness the sophomoric prank that gave the local morality police a god complex; but I heard all about it all the same. And then I read all about it every week for months thereafter in the "Whitefish Pilot".

What I gleaned from the numerous accounts swirling around town after the fact was that the high school students in the Bulldog float did exactly what I’d expect of most normal high schoolers - they freely expressed their opinions in a way they believed was congruent with the social consciousness of the time. In this case, it was the nation’s newfound awareness about the far reaching and fatal effects of HIV-AIDS. Several of the students made their point by throwing a few condoms into the crowd and holding up some signs that mentioned safe sex. Nothing disrespectful per se; until they chose to end the parade with a synchronized mooning over the side of the float.

The indignant old fogeys who’d apparently forgotten what it was like to be young and idealistic went ballistic, and unmercifully set out to make an example of the student with the most to lose. And it wasn’t a Bulldog on the football team. Their unlucky target was a senior honor student, and from what I understood, a girl who’d earned several college acceptances and had scholarships lined up for the coming fall. In the end, the powers that be showed her the kind of wrath that only the almighty can exact when they had her permanently expelled from the Whitefish School District without appeal three months before the end of her senior year.

Her tearful pleading and public apologies were published in the paper for weeks, but there weren’t enough mea culpas in the world to appease the hard hearts of the Whitefish morality police.

Having raised independent and free-thinking daughters of my own (and proud of it), I still can’t help but feel some sadness when I think about what happened to this young woman I never knew in person. My greatest hope is that she used her smarts to bypass those small town trolls on the bridge, and showed them all what real revenge can look like when exacted with the empowerment of success.

Chef offers me an unapologetic mooning at

Trestles Beach, Southern California

If all it took was a full mooning finale to irrevocably change the course of one young life, I can only speculate on whether or not Chef’s shameless mooning of my lens ever interfered with his long term prospects, especially when it came to his dream of slinging hash for the gourmands of the Flathead Valley.

Living The Big Sky Life^TM

© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: Geography Has Made Us Neighbors

2011-12-06T19:01:00.000-08:00

A continuation of “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors” …

It was a year and a half before we finally got around to having an official housewarming party to celebrate the acquisition of our new home on the range.

Fifteen months of country living had simply flown by in our consuming fury to finish up the construction of Chef’s licensed catering kitchen in the walk-out basement portion of the new house. By the time we had the final permit in hand, we realized that we’d better hurry up and have that fully catered BBQ we’d been talking about for over a year. And we’d better do it before the warm fall weather took an irreversible turn for the frigid.

Signs of Fall in our backyard around what's left of the duck pond

Yet with the unintended passing of time, went our original motive for having the housewarming party in the first place. It had now become less about inviting our friends over to see the house or getting acquainted with our inherited neighborhood, and more about introducing our new catering business. The reality was our friends had been hanging out at the house for more than a year, and we knew more about our neighbors than we ever needed to know thanks to the narrated updates regularly delivered by my daughter who enjoyed making frequent after-school visits to the households along our street, especially to those without young children.

The afternoon school bus routinely saw my daughter dropped off in the same place it picked her up every morning; namely, at the top of our street in front of the corner house belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Giesy. Mr. Giesy was a retired school teacher and former coach, which might’ve explained why he had that enormous asphalt ball court with a stand-alone basketball hoop in front of his oversized detached garage, and no one around to enjoy it. After we moved in, Mr. Giesy had a postcard-variety big red barn built on the back half of his property which always seemed strange to me. Not because it stuck out like a red sore thumb in that it aesthetically clashed with everything around it (including his house), but because he had no large farm animals or any apparent purpose for it.

I had little doubt that Mrs. Giesy probably preferred the retired Mr. Giesy to be out of her house as much as possible during the day, so there was rarely an afternoon when my daughter didn’t spend at least a few minutes chatting with Mr. Giesy who’d be predictably doing chores around the property when the school bus made its daily deposit near the front of his house.

It would seem that no neighborhood could be complete without at least one family like “The Cleavers”, and the “Ward and June Cleaver” of our lane lived across the street from us between the Giesy’s and Mr. and Mrs. Claus (Art and Tilly). We never called them Ward and June though. We called them Jeff and Bridget. They were Florida transplants who brought with them three small children, a substantial net worth from sources unknown, and eventually Jeff’s widowed mother who acquired the vacant lot at the end of the cul-de-sac where she built a custom house to live in whenever she felt the need to swap Florida’s humid heat for Montana’s dry summers.

The first neighborhood Christmas party we attended was hosted by Jeff and Bridget, and I found it hard not to empathize with Bridget’s ambitious attempt to bring civilization to the wild west as she struggled to be the “hostess with the mostess” under the party planning tutelage of her idol, Martha Stewart. It made me wonder if June Cleaver ever felt the same kind of pressure to be perfect from Julia Childs.

Living in the house on the other side of Art and Tilly were the Parkers. Like many of the men throughout the Stumptown community, Mr. Parker was a long-timer with the Burlington Northern Railroad, and would typically be gone for days at a time while working at riding the rails into eastern Montana and back again. From the many closings I performed at the title company in Whitefish, it became obvious early on that working for the railroad provided one of the best livings (above minimum wage) to be had in the area.

Mrs. Parker was a homemaker who appeared to keep herself busy with arts and crafts projects, and caring for their three little terriers. She was very partial to my daughter, and so particular about whom she’d let care for her children, I mean dogs, that whenever she’d be gone for more than half a day, it was often my daughter who did the babysitting. In fact, one Friday afternoon she dropped by my office in town to see if my daughter could care for her dogs that night because she had to leave unexpectedly. When I told her my daughter would be spending the night with a girlfriend and wouldn’t be home, I watched my neighbor’s face sink with despair. She was so distressed that I felt compelled to offer to care for the dogs myself. It was only one night after all, and I’ve cared for many a child and pet over the years. I figured I could handle it, but Mrs. Parker didn’t seem to agree, and left me standing there, mouth agape, as she passed up my generous offer on her way out the door. All righty then.

In the cul-de-sac, next to Jeff’s Floridian mother, lived the Kanes. Mr. and Mrs. Kane oozed their New York roots from every pore. They owned the Par 3 Golf Course on the east side of Highway 93, just north of Highway 40 in south Whitefish. Mr. Kane was a fast talking east coaster who always had a sly twinkle in his eyes which seemed to go right along with his cheery, almost Gollum-like, quasi-toothless grin. Mrs. Kane looked as if she could’ve been the long-time wife of an old mob boss, and she appeared to fit into the Montana mountain mama scene about as well as I did. The Kanes seemed to really enjoy the way my daughter would simply drop by unannounced for no other reason than to socialize. I always liked that the Kanes never tried to hide or make excuses for who they were, east coasters gone west. Take ‘em or leave ‘em. No skin off of their brusque hides either way.

Between our ranch house and the Kane’s, resided a nice young couple, Steve and Sue Ellen. They moved in with several barking rottweilers and two young boys about a year after we did. They were Flathead Valley natives who were looking for enough space to have horses, and once attained, they expected to never move again. They began acquiring those horses as soon as they were settled in. Their boys should be all grown up by now, and there's no doubt in my mind that Steve and Sue Ellen are still living in that house.

The neighbor who lived in the house on the other side of us was Paige Ochenrider, with her teenage son, Mark. They also shared our large duck pond in the back. Paige was widowed shortly before we moved in, and I would venture to say that she was my daughter’s favorite neighbor because she’d often chose to spend her after-school afternoons just hanging with Paige. Paige was a nice lady who kept pretty much to herself, although we did share several dramatic episodes when my daughter’s cat decided to get aggressively territorial in territory belonging to Paige’s cat … a story for another time.

We had a well on the far front corner of our property, and it was a community well that provided water not only to our house, but to four other homes on the street including, Steve and Sue Ellen's, Art and Tilly's, the Parker's, and a nameless neighbor's house on the other side of Paige. I have to say, of all things to have to share, I was always glad we shared that well because whenever there was a problem, it became a community problem and expense, and not ours alone to bear.

The septic tank and leach lines were another matter altogether. Definitely a story for another time.

Living The Big Sky Life^TM
© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

2011-11-24T09:08:00.000-08:00

When our quest to find the perfect house began in June of 1992, we did what most people do when preparing to make a large purchase they expected to live with for a long time; namely, we prioritized our list of top three must-haves to include something for everyone. Everything else pretty much got thrown into the “we’ll know it when we see it” bucket.

Now anyone who has ever worked around the real estate industry for any period of time would’ve undoubtedly heard the three basic rules of real estate preached like a mantra from every professional’s pulpit. And while the timeless rules of “1) Location 2) Location 3) Location” have shown themselves to be typically true during my years in the business, I also knew that sometimes the rules needed a little bending, especially under extenuating circumstances.

I personally considered our need to evacuate the claustrophobic Unabomber bungalow as soon as possible to be an extenuating circumstance. This admittedly influenced our priority list enough to make it look more like this:

1) more room(s)/square footage (something for me);

2) a kitchen layout with potential (something for Chef); and lastly

3) Location - the essential rule of land acquisition, which in this case really meant ‘the neighborhood’ since we intended to stay in Whitefish (something for everyone).

It’s with this list that we ultimately found our new home on the range. The spacious 10-acre lot with a duck pond and circular views we ended up with were frankly bonus, not to mention a great place for the dog to play. Another bonus was the fact that the smallest lot on our long block was 5 acres which made unwelcomed peeping next to impossible absent a strong pair of binoculars.

Thanks, in part, to our urban-styled upbringing in “The OC”, Chef and I tended to be naturally cautious about who we invited to share in our private lives, and we weren’t inclined to quickly immerse ourselves into any neighborhood or community. Nor were we prone to make our neighbors part of our social circle or privy to our personal business simply because they lived on the same street.

My 5th grade daughter was of a different mindset, however, and this became evident as soon as I pulled my urban-mobile into our new driveway behind the truck packed with our moving boxes. She wasted no time in jumping out of the car and onto her bicycle to pedal her way back down the lengthy driveway to the street on a self-assigned mission to visit every house on the block. When she finally returned, breathless from a busy day of making the acquaintance of every new neighbor we had, it became clear that she’d generously shared our life history (as she knew it) with everyone on the block. And we, of course, got the unfiltered lowdown on them as well. All quiet cringing aside, I found this to be a true “out of the mouths of babes” moment that proved to be a nice blessing for her as time passed.

In spite of my daughter’s enthusiastic exchange of personal information at the outset, Chef and I tended to remain neutral and relatively elusive when it came to interacting with our neighbors overall. Obviously this wasn’t the case with my daughter. She’d managed to thoroughly endear herself to most of the neighborhood during that introductory bike ride, and many of them proved to be actively devoted to her during the years we lived there.

No man is an island, and I sometimes think neighbors are there to remind us of that, whether we like them or not. The problem is that we don’t really get to pick our neighbors - we inherit them because they come with the house. Our new house was situated in the middle of a long block culminating in a cul-de-sac which was lined with about a dozen other houses whose occupants had now become our inheritance. And like it or not, we’d become theirs.

The first neighbor we met was Art, an elderly retired man who lived directly across the street from us with his wife, Tilly. Art and Tilly were the poster-grannies of every child’s fantasy, and could easily have passed for Mr. and Mrs. Claus as far as I was concerned, if only Art had seen fit to grow a full white beard. Art was a rotund old fellow of medium height who securely belted his pants high above his belly button which thankfully spared us from seeing his low hanging apron of belly fat in the flesh.

Summer had just made its debut when Art walked over to pay Chef a visit one afternoon as he was out in our front yard trimming debris from a large spruce tree. After some precursory pleasantries, Art got to the point. He wanted to know if we intended to decorate our front yard with Christmas lights during the holiday season like the previous owner used to do, because it would be a real shame if we were the only house on the block to sit in the dark during December.

At this point, our boxes hadn’t even been unpacked, and Art wanted to know if we had the holiday display for our huge new house already planned out? Chef intentionally remained noncommittal throughout the conversation because lighting up the house for the holidays was clearly not a priority; the holiday was half a year away. We had no way of knowing in advance how devout Art was to the Christmas lights cause though, and that made his offer to come over in December to string the lights around our large front trees himself (if we weren’t going to do it ourselves) all the more puzzling.

Apparently a big black 10-acre hole in the middle of the street on Christmas Eve was unacceptable to Mr. Claus.

After Thanksgiving, we had the opportunity to witness just how far Art’s puzzling obsession with Christmas lights went when he set out to decorate not only his house, but his entire 5-acre lot which was rectangular in shape, and enclosed with a double-railed wooden fence that ran along the entire perimeter of the property. This was about 2,000 linear feet in border fencing alone, not to mention the fences that lined both sides of his long driveway or the fencing that encircled his house. And Art made sure that every inch of those fence tops and the house too were brilliantly illuminated by a mile-long string of traditional white Christmas bulbs.

It was a sight to behold in any kind of weather, and like Noah and the Ark, clearly Mr. Claus had some deep calling to create the kind of landing strip that Santa could see even in the worst of blizzards. Perhaps this was a classic case of “build it and he will come.”

The angular light show Art put on for the neighborhood every evening in December was simply too much for his next door neighbor to let pass without comment. So one night in early December, Jeff phoned Art and announced in the best pilot-to-control-tower voice he could muster, “This is Delta, requesting permission to land.”

And no, we didn’t make Art come over and string lights around our trees as offered. We did it our way, and never had a problem with Delta looking for clearance to land on our property.

To Be Continued … ”Geography Has Made Us Neighbors”

Living The Big Sky Life^TM
© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: Home On The Range

2011-11-11T08:11:00.000-08:00

The day I moved into the 795 square foot Unabomber bungalow with enough furnishings to abundantly fill a 3-bedroom house, it became abundantly clear we needed a bigger place to live, stat.

Our first little house was situated in downtown Whitefish, and was basically a cabin-sized box with five walls inserted to create two small bedrooms with a bathroom between them, an intimate living room with a wood stove which served to heat the entire cabin during the winter months, and a kitchen/dining area. This circa turn-of-the-century cottage also had a very dank half-basement located underneath the kitchen with, much to my surprise, a modern-day washer-dryer hookup. Something I never utilized for several reasons.

Aside from the fact that the basement felt like the stuff of serial killers, making that descent into the bowels of the earth was just too risky to involve a laundry basket. Best case scenario saw me with a concussion - worst case, a broken neck. It was one thing to have to duck and contort my head and neck to keep from knocking myself out on the low header beam at the top of the stairs, and quite another to navigate a dangerously steep wooden staircase that was as old as the house.

Besides, we needed somewhere to store all of my boxes. What didn’t fit in the basement after packing it from the dirt floor up to the sub-floor beamed ceiling, was strategically stacked inside of the house so as to create a sophisticated obstacle course that weaved like a maze throughout very cramped quarters.

The three of us lived that way for almost a year before we eventually bought a spacious ranch house located on ten acres about three miles southeast of downtown Whitefish.

Viewing front of Ranch House from the driveway

Finding a new house with a kitchen layout acceptable to Chef was no mean feat, and took far more time than we'd originally anticipated, but the ranch house on the range we eventually ended up with was worth the wait.

It was a two-level structure of approximately 3,500 square feet, and included a walk-out basement, five bedrooms, and three full baths. Having grown up with four sisters, I’m of the opinion that no house can ever have too many bathrooms.

We’d hardly been in our new house a month when the front page of the “Whitefish Pilot” featured a large photo of our old Unabomber bungalow with the unhappy young couple who’d bought it from us standing in the front yard. They had good reason to be unhappy for that local photo op, and while I couldn’t have been more sympathetic to the nightmare that put them on the front page, I would be lying if I didn’t own up to the huge wave of relief that swept over me because it could’ve easily been me on the front of the local newspaper.

The Whitefish sewage treatment plant located just outside of town, and not far from our new home on the range, had a complete system failure in the middle of the night, and proceeded to backwash untold quantities of raw sewage into the basements of almost every house in downtown Whitefish. The Unabomber bungalow did not escape, and the very same basement I had jam packed with the boxes containing most of my worldly possessions barely a month earlier was filled to the half way mark with plenty o’poo as a result.

While I’d managed to escape that monumental sewage backup by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin, unfortunately I couldn't manage to escape having the nasty experience altogether, for it seems that I was ultimately doomed to know firsthand the true unpleasantness of raw sewage backflowing through my basement. And since my raw ordeal occurred right before I put Montana in the rear view mirror once and for all, some might even call that shitty incident my big sky coup de grâce.

Viewing rear of Ranch House from backyard

Raw sewage aside, our new ranch house was without question Chef’s dream house. It was open, spacious and had an enviable 360^o view. We had the Whitefish Mountain Range to the West and North, including the slopes of Big Mountain; the edge of Glacier National Park to the East; and nothing but open countryside and big blue skies to the South.

The northern back boundary of our 10-acre lot was defined by Haskill Creek, which also fed the duck and beaver pond that consumed anywhere from 3 to 5 acres of our backyard, depending on the time of year. The risk of flooding increased significantly during the spring run-off season, and tensions in our household historically ran high as we’d helplessly watch the pond’s water levels rise with the swollen creek …. especially when the beavers did what beavers do best and build impenetrable dams with remarkable speed at the corner of our property, the downstream corner of course.

It didn’t take long to learn that a sump pump was the only thing that stood between us and the disaster of deluge from a rising water table. Yet when it came to the water in our world, electricity held all of the power; for without electricity, not only would the sump pump stop working, the well pump was also powerless to pump water from the well to our house. For starters, this meant no flushing toilets, no showers, no drinking water, no clean clothes, and a sink full of dirty dishes. All the things city folk take for granted.

At least we had the luxury of a backup water supply located behind the garage/horse stable outbuilding out back. It was in the form of an old fashioned hand pump installed decades earlier to service several horse stalls that we never used. The trips I was forced to make to that horse pump were innumerable, and I can honestly say that I have not one fond memory of braving the elements to pump water into a bucket after a brutal nor’easter had just blown down the region’s power lines thereby halting all water flow inside of the house, sometimes for many days until the power lines could be repaired. It was one thing to actually pump the water while standing knee-deep in the snow, and quite another to get it all the way up to the house before it became a heavy block of ice, or worse, sloshed all over me.

Our backyard during early winter on an unseasonably sunny day

About a year after I’d fled Montana like a caged dog bolting from the pound, I saw Andie MacDowell on the David Letterman show. She and her husband at the time were known to have a large ranch somewhere in the Bitterroot Valley, and I felt an unexpected kinship with this lovely woman as she walked Dave through what it took for her to get to his show in New York City from Missoula, Montana after a huge winter storm had cut all power to their ranch days before her departure. Still without power, she had to fly out of the Missoula airport unshowered, unshaved, and 'au naturel'.

I agonized right along with my new soul sister as she described the sponge bath she struggled to give herself in the plane’s bathroom compartment en route, and how she had to apply her makeup in the bathroom at the airport during layover - which was probably in Salt Lake City because everybody knew there were no direct flights from Missoula to anywhere but Salt Lake City.

And here I thought I was the only one who knew what it was like to live off the grid with a spouse who was always trying to sell me on his interpretation of ‘quality of life’. Apparently Andie MacDowell wasn’t buying the simple life sales pitch either because not long after that Letterman interview, I read that she too, bolted just like any proper city dog trapped in the country would.

Living The Big Sky Life^TM
© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: Velcro Gloves…Priceless

2011-11-05T20:32:00.000-07:00

Chef was on the hunt for the perfect fishing hole, and had invited us to join him for the day as he explored all of the rivers that run through it. The late afternoon drive home saw me staring absentmindedly out of the car’s passenger window as our tires sped as fast as safety would allow over the dirt road shortcut he’d decided to take through the Bitterroot Valley.

Given the huge dust clouds we couldn’t avoid leaving in our wake, I barely noticed the large yellow “Range Cattle” signs that were posted along the roadside like mile markers. It was impossible not to have my attention rudely returned to the open ranges surrounding us every time the car jerked and bumped over one of those ranch-dividing iron cattle guards set deep into the dirt road. And each time it happened, I couldn’t help but notice that in spite of all the warning signs, there wasn’t a cow in sight.

In fact, there hadn’t been a cow for miles. Where were all of the cows anyway? Frankly, I could see more cows grazing daily on the Voerman pastures bordering the backyard of my home on the range than I did on this particular day driving through prime cattle country. So when Chef finally made that turn onto Voerman Road more than an hour later, the tranquil cud-chewing herds in the northern fields before us did not disappoint.

I would be remiss were I not to also mention that the southern fields lining Voerman Road were populated by flocks of sheep as well. This is important only because of what happened next.

But first, let me offer up a little background on the subject of Montana men and their sheep. The most popular saying always seemed to be, “Montana: Where the men are men, and the sheep are scared.” Truth be told, it put an entirely new slant on the whole ‘counting sheep to fall asleep’ thing for me, especially when I witnessed so many lonely men living in a place where the female pickins are slim, and the value of a pair of Velcro gloves was never underestimated.

We had family friends with us in the car that day, and by the time we turned onto Voerman Road, everyone was quiet from exhaustion and more than ready to get out of the car. The silence was broken when Chef looked over at the sheep flocked together on the side of the road, and said out of the blue as he randomly pointed at several of the sheep while we were passing, “I had her, her, and her. Oh! And I had her too!”

Chef was known to have a comedic sense of timing, and did a pretty good job of bringing the group back to life. All I could say to my friends in the car at the time was what I’d been told upon my arrival in big sky country, “This is no Ireland where the sheep roam free, and the men wear Velcro gloves. This here is Montana where the men are men, and the sheep are scaa-aa-aa-aa-arr-rred.” Baa-Baa-Bulldogs.

Living The Big Sky Life^TM

© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: Cowgirl Coiffure

2011-10-19T14:16:00.000-07:00

All it took was one night of impartial observation while sitting alone at the bar in the Great Northern for me to put it all together. The signs had always been there, all around me. Until that night though, I’d been unable to wrap my mind with any semblance of clarity around the nudge that had regularly gnawed at the back of my consciousness. Like something wasn’t quite right, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Apparently it took an hour of disconnection for me to finally make the connection.

The Great Northern Bar and Grill was a popular establishment and a happy hour hot spot (I assume it still is), and I was supposed to meet Chef there for dinner on this particular Friday night. Since I’d arrived an hour early, I opted to wait on a stool at the bar and soon became distracted with watching how hard the happy hour crowd was working to unwind from a hard week of working.

Each passing minute saw the crowds multiply, and as the music became increasingly louder to counterbalance the conversation, the deafening din rose exponentially. While I casually watched the patron revelers grow predictably relaxed and animated, thanks in part to the flow of liquid courage as many prepared for the “will I get lucky tonight?” mating ritual, it hit me like an epiphany.

In that instant I became acutely aware of just how slim the female pickins were in Boy’s Town. The odds easily saw ten Jeremiah Johnson’s wrangling for the affections of one Calamity Jane. This was contrary to anything I’d ever known, except perhaps during that ski season I spent in Vail, Colorado back in the early 80’s.

Chef and I had both grown up in “The OC” community of Huntington Beach - A/K/A “The Land of the Beautiful People” … and one of the “beautiful people” I was not. My adolescent self esteem had sustained plenty of bruises while growing up in the shadow of those “beautiful people”, where the only spotlight I ever saw was the one shining on all of my flaws. The irony was that once I moved to Whitefish, my face soon became highly recognized by the local population, yet very few actually knew me by name. I was eventually told by a friend that many of the townsfolk simply knew me as “the woman with the title company who wore the lipstick”.

That being said, I was naturally fascinated by the plain-Jane mountain mamas at the Great Northern that night who freely flirted with confidence and deflected rutting suitors as if they were Venus incarnate; when, according to the standards of my formative years in “The Land of the Beautiful People”, the embodiment of Venus they definitely were not.

I sat on that barstool as a city girl who’d unwittingly managed to snag herself one of those mountain men, and wondered if the “beautiful people” city standards I’d known all my life could ever make the translation into my big sky life.

What I knew for certain was that I was no mama grizzly, and no matter how the local townsfolk perceived me on the street, I was no Bulldog with lipstick either. I also knew that I had some well-established grooming standards of my own, which included shaving my legs and armpits, waxing my eyebrows and bikini line, and regularly scheduled visits to the hair salon. And I wasn’t about to compromise my standards simply because I was living in the wild west.

Now that I was living in a cow town, however, it seemed a cowgirl hair stylist would have to be the one to do the do. Finding her was no easy task, and a true find she was. Joleen and I couldn’t have been more different on the outside, but when it came to my hair, we were of one mind.

I had made it very clear to Chef from the beginning that I would not give up my hair appointments for any reason. I even went so far as to say on one occasion that he wouldn’t eat before I wouldn’t get my hair done because I wanted to make sure he understood just how serious and non-negotiable the issue was. And still is, by the way.

Women everywhere know what it’s like to feel guilted into sacrificing their personal needs, wants, and desires for the greater good of their families, and I was no exception. There came a time pre-Montana when I had to finally draw a line in the sand which no man (or child) could ever cross, and mine was a hairline. Anyone who knows me has probably heard my mantra at least once, “change your hair, change your life”. A motto I continue to live by.

No matter how many times I warned him in advance, Chef either didn’t believe me or thought he was the exception to the rule, for he became furious one night when he learned that I’d used money that he assumed would be spent at the grocery store on my hair appointment instead. As annoyingly clichéd as “I told you so” may sound, I had to remind him that I had indeed told him so. This occurred during the honeymoon period in marriage month number two, and rankled Chef’s sensibilities for the duration of our four year marriage. He never got over it, and it was invariably thrown back in my face every time we had a serious, yet completely unrelated argument.

Chef wasn’t the only one who came to learn that there were no exceptions to this commitment I’d made to myself many years before. My escrow assistant immediately understood the priorities, and knew better than to schedule a closing during the hair appointment times I’d blocked off the closing calendar.

Chef grudgingly came to passive-aggressive terms with my hard line stance on hair, and tried another approach down the road when he suggested I go “au naturel”. You know, without makeup. Are you kidding me? He defended his audacious suggestion by trying to tell me how much better I looked without makeup. Not because it was true, but because he was cheap and apparently without pride when it came to his partner's appearance. The truth was he didn’t want money that he could use for his own pursuits to be spent on something he deemed frivolous. Evidently any investment in my appearance was considered frivolous spending and a prime target for reallocation. As if I didn't produce my own hard earned income, let alone ever expect him to pay for the cost of my upkeep and maintenance.

Whoever said “When money goes out the door, love flies out the window” knew what they were talking about. In all of this, I've come to appreciate that I am my best investment, and it's up to me to preserve and protect that investment.

Living The Big Sky Life^TM

© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: Dr. Jekyll Is Detained For Questioning

2011-10-06T08:58:00.000-07:00

Within six months of NAFTA‘s 1994 new year implementation, my father finally decided to make his first trip to Montana. Chef and I had left the Unabomber bungalow behind fifteen months earlier, and were now living in a large ranch house on 10 acres located three miles southeast of downtown Whitefish.

My father didn’t rent a car when he arrived that August. It wasn’t really necessary. As far as I was concerned, it was just as easy for him to drop me off at the office every morning, and pick me up at the end of the work day. I was going nowhere fast and usually chained to my desk all day anyway. He and his granddaughter would then be free to spend the summer weekdays doing all of the local sightseeing they wanted; and after living in big sky country for over two years, my young daughter had become a pretty good tour guide.

My parents had been divorced for 25 years, and up to this point, I would’ve sworn they had absolutely nothing in common except their offspring. But when my father declared early one morning that he thought it would be a shame not to take a day trip into Canada given Whitefish’s close proximity to the Canadian border, the overpowering wave of déjà vu that ensued, caused me to choke and sputter on my coffee.

Let me preface this particular morning with a little history about my father, also known as Mr. Hyde on occasion, especially when behind the wheel of a car on any winding mountain road.

Like Dr. Jekyll, my father was a very intelligent man, sometimes too smart for his own good. So smart, in fact, that he could be dumb. He unwittingly showed me at an early age that there are those who exist in this world who are so intent upon cerebral expansion and scholarly pursuits that they somehow miss out on the common sense part, and the street savvy that comes with it. He also had an innate ability to get caught, even when everyone else around him was busy doing the same thing without repercussions.

When it came to play time though, my father could emotionally retrogress to the mentality of a 15-year old in an instant; and like any 15-year old adolescent boy, his better judgment could often become clouded, with little thought given to the long term consequences that may result from his actions in the heat of the moment.

Case in point took place in the mid-1980’s when he went out for a day of four-wheeling fun on the eastern plains of Colorado with my brother-in-law of the time. It wasn’t enough for them to whoop and holler with exhilaration as my brother-in-law raced his truck across a limitless landscape covered in sage brush and prairie dog holes. Or even to spin the occasional dirt donut at top speed. No, they had to go extreme when my father, at his son-in-law’s suggestion, pulled a shotgun off the cab’s back window rack. The man who was supposed to be my parent instantly turned into a 15-year old, then proceeded to hang out of the truck’s passenger window while it sped over the erratic terrain, and began to excitedly shoot at the prairie dogs popping up and down from their holes in the ground like prairie dogs do, as if he were a kid at a carnival shooting gallery trying to win a cheap prize.

Fortunately prairie dogs are quick critters, and to my knowledge, no prairie dogs were harmed in this reckless pursuit. We probably have the Colorado Game Warden patrolling the area to thank for that. My father was promptly arrested, and my brother-in-law appropriately shamed enough to bail him out. He ultimately ended up with a felony on his record for the incident, and had some serious ‘splainin’ to do many years later when he made a career change that required specialized licensing.

Now back to Montana and my father’s anticipated day trip into Canada. Since I expected him to be back in Whitefish in time to pick me up at the office after work, I understandably felt it necessary to advise him about the challenges I’d experienced two years earlier when taking that day trip into Canada with my mother. I never expected there to be any complications as long as he didn’t travel too far north.

Well, the old guy almost didn’t get past the Canadian border guard at Roosville, and I heard the distressing details of his interrogation when he picked me up that evening.

He’d left Whitefish that morning with my daughter who, at the last minute, decided to bring along a girlfriend from school. They picked up the girlfriend on their way out of town, and the two girls sat together in the back seat of my urban-mobile as the three of them leisurely cruised north along Highway 93 to Canada for a fine day of sightseeing.

When they stopped at the Roosville border crossing, the border guard took one look at my father innocently sitting in the driver’s seat and the two 5th grade girls sitting together in the backseat (neither of whom bore any physical resemblance to him), and began probing suspiciously. My father naïvely tried to explain what he thought was obvious, and the girls corroborated when asked directly, but the border guard would have none of it.

Unlike today, it’s important to remember that back when this event occurred, the girls had never been provided any form of photo identification, not even a school ID card. And with NAFTA, passports were not a requirement for Americans crossing the Canadian and Mexican borders, and vice versa. Neither were notarized permission slips when traveling out of the country with minor children sans both parents.

In this, my father had done nothing wrong or illegal, but the border guard wasn’t taking any chances. He instructed the car be parked at the guard house and took them all in for questioning – in separate rooms.

My father tried to explain to the leery border guard why none of the surnames matched. His granddaughter (in the other room being questioned) had the last name of her father. His daughter (me) had remarried and now had Chef’s last name which was reflected on the Montana licensing of the urban-mobile he was driving. And then there was his last name, my maiden name, which was fortunately reflected on the Montana vehicle registration as well.

Apparently the little girlfriend was a non-issue in that everyone understood she wasn’t related and simply along for the ride. What seemed to bother the guards the most was the fact that they couldn’t find anything to support what they were consistently being told during questioning, something that would connect my father to my daughter and me as her mother.

After hours of interrogation, my father was asked once again to pull out the envelope I kept in my glove box containing my vehicle registration and insurance information. When he started digging deeper into the contents, he soon realized my entire registration history was kept in that envelope, and once he could produce an old California registration showing me as “first name-maiden name-last name of ex-husband/my daughter’s father”, that was it. They were free to enter Canada to see whatever they could with what was left of the day.

As would be expected, my father was still a little shaken when he picked me up that night and began to recount his harrowing experience on our ride back to the house. Like I said, he’s a magnet for getting caught. Knowing how he is, it was impossible not to see the humor in the guileless predicament he'd driven straight into that day...long after it was over, of course.

What I always wondered about afterward was why no one from the guard house had bothered to call me in Whitefish to verify their stories. If this had really been considered a serious situation, wouldn't someone have called me? My daughter had given them my phone numbers, and I would've welcomed, nay, expected a call under such a circumstance.

Thankfully, no house guest ever asked to take a day trip into Canada again. As far as I was concerned, been there, done that, and I was over it.

Living The Big Sky Life^TM
© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: Dragging Out The Dusk

2011-09-16T08:15:00.000-07:00

A continuation of “In The Beginning, There Was Light” …

In the months that preceded my move to Montana in May 1992, I noticed that those around me always seemed to have the same 3-word response whenever I’d mention my pending move. And those 3 words were never the expected, “it’ll be beautiful” (spoken with a *wistful sigh*); but a very disheartening, “long cold winters” (spoken in a ~gloomy groan~).

Not the case with my mother, however, who simply asked the question, “Does it get hot in Montana?”

Chef was quick to snort in disdain at my mother’s simple question, or at any suggestion for that matter that the weather in Montana might ever be less than perfect, let alone hot and miserable. It just so happened that my little urban-mobile came standard with air conditioning, but our 100-year old Unabomber bungalow in town clearly did not. It was nature’s cross-breeze or nothing.

Well, my mother got a real-time answer to her question the very moment she stepped out of my air conditioned car that first day of July 1992, and hit a wall of 100F-degree heat. In fact, the record-breaking daytime temperatures hovered just above 100F degrees her entire visit and beyond. It was funny to watch how quickly Chef swallowed his contempt for all things air conditioned as he volunteered to drive my car everywhere he went that summer.

Now that we all knew with certainty that it did get hot in Montana, staying cool became a top priority; and the only place to find relief from the heat was with the fishes in Whitefish Lake. My daughter had wasted no time in figuring this out, and she’d made it a point to spend those long hot days on City Beach swimming with every other kid in Whitefish.

Whitefish Lake City Beach

Now I don’t do lakes. The very thought of lake-bottom sludge oozing through my toes and tullies swirling around my legs gives me the creeps, and the only way I was getting into that lake water was on top of a floating device. At this point, there were only two plastic rafts left in town, and my mother and I found them in some back corner of the Ben Franklin store on Central Avenue. Side note: Several months later, that Ben Franklin Craft Store was completely incinerated in a 5-alarm fire which took out half of the west wide of the block between 2nd and 3rd Streets, including an attorney’s office. It was hardly a surprise considering that the store had been stocked like a poorly lit hoarder’s garage. Cause was later determined to be an electrical short that sparked and ignited surrounding debris. Oh duh.

Inflated rafts in hand, the two of us managed to push off from some rocks on the eastern shoreline and float out onto the lake far enough to consider jumping in without risk of hitting bottom or getting tangled in tullies. We realized, however, that the water was deceivingly refreshing only on the surface, and anything deeper than an inch was basically untouched by the beat down heat and the equivalent to glacier water. So we floated along the top to avoid hypothermia and did hasty limb dips when the heat on top became unbearable. Good enough for me.

Whitefish Lake courtesy of: www.NativeAmericanEncyclopedia.com

Because Whitefish was so close to the Canadian border, my mother thought it would be nice to take a day trip into Canada. Without any real plan, we casually left around noon one day expecting to be back around dinner time. My daughter didn’t want to go and stayed behind in Whitefish with her friends at the lake, while Chef worked at being a chef up on Big Mountain until midnight. We entered Canada on Highway 93 sixty miles north of Whitefish at the Roosville British Columbia border crossing with nothing more than a AAA fold-up map. That means no cell phone, no GPS, no access to anything akin to 21st century technology now considered commonplace.

The Canadian border guard asked us where we were going. I turned to my mother and asked, “Where are we going?” It was her idea after all.

She thought for a second, then leaned forward and said, “Banff! I want to go to Banff.”

The border guard leaned in to look at her before responding, “So you’ll be in Canada for several days then?”

“Oh no!”, I said, “We have to be back by dinner.”

“Not if you’re going to Banff.”, he said.

Oblivious to the cars lining up behind us, my mother, in classic form, started in on how disappointed she was about not having the opportunity to see Banff after everything she’d read about it. She kept asking the border guard if he was sure we didn’t have enough time to go to Banff and still make it back in time for dinner. Every once in a while, even now, the subject of Banff comes up with a little tinge of remorse in her voice. The border guard obviously knew his country and Banff was out of the question that day, so we settled for driving around the Canadian side of Glacier National Park, making only one pit stop at The Prince of Wales Hotel in Waterton.

After driving more than 9 hours, we barely squeaked back into Montana 20 minutes before the Alberta Chief Mountain border crossing closed at 10pm. The unnerving part in all of this was that we didn’t even know that the borders had a closing time. Chief Mountain was on the east side of Glacier National Park and the area very remote. Had we been locked out on the Canadian side, our only re-entry option would’ve been to wait until the border re-opened at dawn.

Dusk was in full swing when we re-entered Montana at Chief Mountain. By the time we entered Glacier National Park, the sun had disappeared behind the glacial peaks of the Rockies and put a permanent end to the daylight as we made our way home along the Going-To-The-Sun Road. It was 11pm when we finally pulled into the driveway. My daughter was watching a movie and had barely noticed our return. Chef was still at work and never even knew we were gone.

As my mother and I sat down to a late dinner that night, I realized just how subjective ‘dinner time’ could be when the dusk was dragged out late into the night.

Living The Big Sky Life^TM

© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: In The Beginning, There Was Light

2011-09-09T12:40:00.000-07:00

Right about the time the summer solstice was serving up its annual offering on the longest day of the year 1992, I found myself becoming irrationally upset when the evening skies had the nerve to go dark at 11pm, thereby forcing me to throw down the gardening trowel and call it a night.

No matter that it was a good hour past the town’s nightly curfew alarm. After living in Whitefish for only three weeks, I’d already grown deaf to the screeching 10pm ritual of that firehouse curfew alarm. I’d also grown greedily accustomed to the longer days my new northern latitude made possible.

A definite perk in my opinion. Of all things Montana, I think the long days of summer were my favorite thing. Those extra hours of daylight always had a pleasant way of giving me the illusion that I had more time at my disposal. Frankly, all it took was one winter consisting of seven interminable months of sun deprivation and long freezing nights that began around four o’clock in the afternoon to convince me that the extended summer sunlight was THE highlight of big sky country - Northern Lights notwithstanding.

It was the first of July, and five weeks into my big sky life, when I got a phone call from my mother who was staying in Salmon, Idaho. She had just finished up a white water rafting expedition down the middle fork of the Salmon River, and wanted to pop over to Montana for a visit – her first visit to big sky country. We decided that I’d make the 150 mile drive south from Whitefish to Missoula to pick her up at the entrance of the Missoula Mall where her rafting group would drop her off on their way through town.

Even in those days before every commoner had a cell phone or any efficient way of communicating while en route, it never crossed her mind that I wouldn’t show up, let alone have a problem finding her in a city that I’d never been to before. Her group wasn’t so confident and kindly waited with her until I arrived. They were visibly impressed when I drove right up to her as if by some kind of mother-to-offspring osmosis. And on time I might add. Only to turn right around and make the two and half hour drive back to Whitefish, and we still had eight more hours of daylight left to while away in the middle of a heat wave.

I learned early on that getting to Whitefish was never very easy, even in the best of seasons. Glacier Park International Airport in Kalispell was the only Flathead Valley option when it came to air travel, and there were just two airlines (Delta and Alaska Airlines) offering regularly scheduled flights that primarily included one departure in the early morning and one arrival at midnight. Basically, first out - last in, and a Delta Salt Lake City layover always sandwiched in between. Kalispell’s airport had the bad habit of getting fogged in like a San Francisco wannabe, which created frequent landing challenges for those midnight arrivals. When this occurred, Delta’s preferred resolution was to land its planes in Missoula, transfer all passengers and luggage onto several large tour buses, and bus everyone up to the airport in Kalispell. ETA was usually about 3:30am.

Although this happened to me the very first time I flew up to Whitefish pre-move, my mother got to know the routine pretty well in the four years that followed. Fortunately she was a seasoned traveler who took detours in stride. I recall her especially enjoying the one midnight bus ride she had with John Lithgow sitting across the aisle from her. Lithgow had a home in the area and was often spotted around the valley, so that same trip also saw her running into him again at the movie theater in the Mountain Mall.

The 4th of July fireworks celebration around Whitefish Lake that year seemed to be another one of my mother’s standout moments (she still talks about it), even though the show didn’t start until dusk, nigh 10pm. She seemed to like the way everyone casually meandered up to City Beach with their lawn chairs in hand to socialize and partake in the celebration of our nation's independence with a choreographed fireworks extravaganza launched from a barge anchored out on the lake.

I later realized how lucky she was to have actually witnessed the fireworks display on the day of the 4th since apparently it wasn’t uncommon for the show to be postponed to the 5th whenever nature's lightning storms insisted on blowing the man-made light show out of the water. Violent thunder showers on Independence Day had a way of dampening patriotic spirits with the prospect of getting struck by lightning, hail, and any other 'Henny Penny' deluge that might fall from a tumultuous Rocky Mountain sky in July.

To Be Continued ... “Dragging Out The Dusk”

Living The Big Sky Life^TM
© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: Bulldog Patrol

2011-08-09T13:39:00.000-07:00

Memorable Bulldogs on Patrol,

a continuation of "It Takes A Village"...

If I had to describe the temperament of Montana law enforcement during my 1992-1996 tour of duty, I would have to describe it as a cross between the Wild West's brand of vigilanteism, and a Southern-styled version of indigenous backwoods justice.

Usually all was well as long as you weren’t on the wrong side of law, or on the bad side of the man wearing the badge and the holster, or perhaps wearing the wrong skin color. And if you were a woman with the audacity to take legal issue with one of the Valley’s good ole boys, expect to be reminded of your proper place posthaste.

With that assertion, I’m reminded of the time I was asked to accompany a friend to the Flathead County Attorney’s office in Kalispell on her quest to spur a criminal investigation into the malfeasance of Charlie Daggett - something she had been a victim of. We were directed to wait in a back conference room until a small man wearing a dark business suit walked in with a yellow legal pad tucked under his arm. He introduced himself as the Assistant County Attorney. As my friend began to describe her reason for being there, I watched this man fidget uncomfortably while giving the pretense of taking notes. It was his expression, though, that said it all. His expression revealed, in no uncertain terms, how unhappy he was about being forced to waste his time listening to a woman he didn’t want to assist. Because I was focused on the man’s face, I failed to notice something my friend did – that he had deep scars running along the inside of his wrists which had been partly concealed beneath the cuffs of his shirt. Apparently Mr. Assistant County Attorney had experienced some personal trouble of his own once upon a time, and from where I sat, the experience had done little to improve his compassion quotient.

It didn’t take long for the County Attorney’s office to proclaim that it had no interest in pursuing the matter when it officially bowed out. No surprise there. Ultimately my friend’s legal pursuits grew to include the bank and its construction loan department. She was forced to search for an attorney on the other side of the Rocky Mountains because no Flathead County lawyer in his right mind would dare take legal action against Charlie Abell and the Whitefish Credit Union. As for Charlie Daggett, he never even got a good talking to. I later heard that he didn’t miss a beat in finding a new victim to prey upon, no doubt thanks to his lead position on the Whitefish Welcome Wagon committee.

Another personal experience I had with local law enforcement happened after a group of gang-bangers from the state of Washington landed in Whitefish one weekend, and proceeded to mark their new territory with a can of black spray paint all over the side of Safeway building. The following Monday morning, I received a phone call at my office from the Whitefish police chief who informed me that he was collecting contributions from all of the local businesses to basically put together a posse to run the gang-banging thugs out of town. He had his sources, and therefore had a lead on where to track the offenders down. He assured me that when he and his posse were finished with the taggers, no gang member would ever return to Whitefish. I managed to sidestep contributing to that cause, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t shutter when I felt the shiver trickle down my spine.

I will admit though, I think that police chief must've handled the situation as promised, for the town had no further issues with foreign gangs behaving badly on sacred Whitefish turf while I lived there.

With minimal observation, it would be easy to conclude that the Montana I called home during the 1990's had a somewhat contradictory perception of what it meant to preserve and protect individual rights under the law.

On one hand, the area simmered with a deep rooted distrust of anything that was different or threatened change. And newcomers had a habit of trying to change things. So if you weren’t from Montana (California being the worst possible place to be from), you were an outsider worthy of suspicion, and you had a choice: you could start doing things the Montana way, or face the unsavory consequences (which were usually designed to run you out of town).

On the other hand, the region proudly demonstrated a strong sense of patriotism that oftentimes bordered on the fanatical, when it became all about their interpretation of life, liberty and the pursuit of our second amendment right to bear arms. Oh, and owning an American-made pickup truck.

Nothing affirmed this more for me than the incident involving Bubba the building inspector, and the day he went out to do a routine inspection of a house on Lion Mountain reported to have an un-permitted room addition. Bubba had barely gotten out of his Ford pickup when a shotgun exploded over his head into the trees beyond. The homeowner ordered Bubba off of his property as he re-cocked and declared that no one would tell him what he could or couldn’t do on his property. Shaking in his cowboy boots, Bubba returned to town for police reinforcements. And with reinforcements, Bubba suffered through a repeat performance a week later, after which the matter was forever dropped. This was Montana, and frankly, the man on the mountain had a point.

None of this is intended to insinuate that the modus operandi of big city law enforcement is any better or worse than that of a rural police force. Clearly, they both have their propensities and shortcomings. It’s just that the idiosyncrasies of big city law enforcement are more publicized and anticipated, even diluted somehow by the desensitized masses it polices. Whereas small town justice tends to be a little too close for comfort, disconcertingly condensed, and intolerant of those who don't fit in, which makes it a lot easier to be personally singled out – especially if you’re an ‘individual’.

Although almost 20 years have passed since I witnessed firsthand, justice Montana-style, I have no reason to believe that anything has significantly changed, other than perhaps the local police chief, who’s probably long retired by now.

Living The Big Sky Life^TM
© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: Bulldogs With A Bone To Hide

2011-07-31T11:04:00.000-07:00

Memorable Bulldogs With A Bone To Hide,

a continuation of "It Takes A Village"...

When I read about Enrico Ponzo, the Boston mobster who’d managed to create a new identity and fall off the grid for 17 years in a remote tiny town in Idaho before the law caught up with him last February, I could only shake my head and repeat what I’ve been saying for the last 18 years about Big Sky Country; namely, that the Unabomber lived in Montana for a reason.

I know my geography, and yes, I’m fully aware of the fact that Idaho is not Montana; however, let me elaborate further by saying that there’s no doubt in my mind that at least half of the participants in the witness protection program end up in Montana, Wyoming or Idaho simply because this tri-state territory offers dogs on the lam the ability to go underground and stay there with relative ease.

And contrary to popular perception, it’s also worth mentioning that this territory has historically shown itself to be a preferred mafia outpost. In Montana alone, gambling is legal, there’s no sales tax, and big bucks can be efficiently laundered through outlying ‘ranch’ operations strategically situated along the Canadian border.

If all of that isn’t enough, then let’s get to the scary part …. like when fugitives named on the ‘America’s Most Wanted’ list come sniffing around places like Whitefish on their hunt for a quaint community to call home, similar to Ponzo in Idaho. Or when you nervously realize that you’ll never really know (or want to know) who’s standing next to you in the check-out line at the grocery store because you’re living in the land of the Montana Militia; neo-Nazis and white supremacists; and a host of other secretive paramilitary and anti-establishment groups brimming with unbridled intolerance.

A small bungalow at 2710 Thomes Avenue in Cheyenne, Wyoming may be home to the shelf corporation capitol of the United States, but Montana, by its very nature, can attract more displaced bad dogs than a dog in heat.

Take Doc, for example. By the time I moved to Whitefish in 1992, Doc had apparently been working at Nelson’s Ace Hardware on Central Avenue for a few years. He was friendly, helpful, and considered by the towns folk to be an all-around great guy …. until the night his dated mug shot showed up on “America’s Most Wanted”. A couple of regulars were bellied up to the bar in the Bulldog Saloon one night when they recognized Doc’s face on the muted television screens playing behind the bar. They stood up and yelled to everyone in the bar, “Hey, isn’t that Doc?” They even alerted the local police chief who basically dismissed the allegation because Doc was such a great guy, and the man who did the vile and violent things they said he did on the television just couldn’t be the same old man the town knew as Doc (obviously not his real name). Suffice it to say, the county sheriff was eventually alerted and by the time the law showed up at Doc’s door in the morning, Doc had cleaned house and vanished like a thief in the night. He’s probably been living in Idaho or Wyoming under a new alias ever since.

Then there was Charlie Daggett - the building contractor who left scorched earth, nasty litigation, and unpaid bills behind in Oregon and Washington before showing up in Whitefish about the same time I did. Daggett was a cunning dog who figured out that if he served on the Whitefish Chamber of Commerce Welcome Wagon committee, he could be first in line to sniff out the new arrivals looking to build a dream home in ‘the last best place’. And since construction loans were critical to his grand plan, Daggett wasted no time in making an ally out of the Whitefish Credit Union and the King MOWB himself, Charlie Abell. I suspect Daggett eventually burned that bridge, and every other bridge in the Valley for that matter, before moving on to greener pastures in, say, Idaho.

The Flathead County seat of Kalispell made headline news about five years ago when it managed to attract a notorious new resident in neo-Nazi activist and white nationalist, April Gaede, and her "Prussian Blue" twins, Lynx and Lamb Gaede - and presumably everything that they stand for. All I can say to that is "like attracts like".

Up next, “Bulldog Patrol”…

Living The Big Sky Life^TM
© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: Bad Medicine Bulldogs

2011-07-11T18:11:00.000-07:00

Memorable Bad Medicine Bulldogs,

a continuation of "It Takes A Village"...

As despicable as the six-fingered man was in “The Princess Bride”, I think he was on to something when he saw fit to offer Prince Humperdinck the warm reminder:

“if you haven’t got your health, than you haven’t got anything.”

Apparently even scoundrels can be the bearers of wisdom, and with hindsight I can see that I hadn’t fully appreciated the wisdom of Count Rugen’s clichéd remark until I found myself living in a place where the surrounding medical community rarely failed to disappoint when it came to caring for the health of those I love, pets included.

In all fairness, I would venture to guess that having access to good medicine is probably not a top priority issue for most healthy 30-somethings when making the decision to move from the urban to the rural. And in the ignorance of youth, I was certainly no exception. I’d been fortunate enough to have very healthy children as well, and naïvely believed at the time that we would all remain that way. Suffice it to say, I never anticipated the possibility that any of us would ever have the need for professional medical attention beyond the demands of a typical cold and flu season.

I'd been living in big sky country less than three months when I was forced to re-examine my heretofore apathetic attitude in this regard. It all started with a simple fracture one Friday afternoon when my youngest daughter broke her forearm from an innocent stumble over a bicycle laying in the grass in the backyard.

The emergency room visit to Whitefish’s small North Valley Hospital that followed was as good as can be expected under the circumstances. In fact, the many experiences I had over the next four years were as good as I could expect from any emergency room visit, and they were surprisingly numerous. Although North Valley Hospital was the first stop for those seriously injured on the slopes of Big Mountain, the hospital’s emergency room and staff just wasn’t equipped to handle anything overly critical. Once a patient had been stabilized, said patient would be released with written instruction to promptly follow up with a local physician or ‘specialist’ for further treatment.

That follow-up visit could easily take a week or more to occur. Like all things that fall under the rule of ‘Murphy’s Law’, the emergencies I found myself dealing with often occurred late on a Friday or over the weekend, which made it impossible to even attempt scheduling the required follow-up with a ‘specialist’ before two, sometimes three days. The problem was not so much in the unfortunate timing for that problem is universal, but in the fact that there seemed to be only one ‘specialist’ of any kind practicing within a 150-mile radius. No options, no competition, no second opinions, no back-up .… unless, of course, I wanted to make the 550-mile trek west to Seattle, or even 300 miles to Spokane if desperation demanded.

The Flathead Valley did not have a shortage of doctors, but like its practicing attorneys, many of the valley doctors decidedly remained general practitioners so as to not limit their already limited patient-base with specialties. Those doctors who did profess to be ‘specialists’ were usually the only game in two or three counties, and knowing this seemed to provide them with an arrogant assurance that made for bad bedside manners. It was one thing to have to suffer the side effects of substandard ‘specialist’ care, and quite another to have salt thrown on the wound with bad bedside manners. I'm just saying ....

Given the valley’s propensity to attract dogs with something to hide, including those doctor dogs who can’t practice medicine anywhere else for whatever reason, there always seemed to be an underlying issue in my mind where legitimacy and licensing was concerned. Take my Whitefish OB/GYN for example, Dr. Richard Natelson. Four years into my residency, I was secretly told that the community leaders were investigating his medical credentials because it was rumored he had no credentials, yet somehow he’d managed to obtain a license to practice medicine in Montana. The hearsay was we had a “Pretender” in our midst, and if that really was the case, all I could say was, "he wouldn’t be the first, nor will he be the last." And then I said, "shame on me for not realizing sooner that there might be something suspicious about a baby doctor with a last name like ‘Natelson’."

As for pet care, there was one veterinarian clinic in the village and it belonged to a vetted husband and wife tag team. After my best friend boarded her cat there for several days where it contracted feline leukemia and painfully perished as a result, I realized even my own pets couldn’t afford to get sick and hope that the local animal doctors would save them.

Undoubtedly few can argue that the national face of healthcare has changed drastically since my days of living the big sky life. And not for the better I might add. In fact, the third world country healthcare experiences that appalled me in Montana almost 20 years ago is now considered common place throughout today’s 21st century American healthcare system, technological advances notwithstanding.

In the end, I’ve come to recognize that my compulsive fear of getting sick in Whitefish did me a huge favor because now I’ll do just about anything to stay healthy rather than voluntarily submit myself to the mercy of a broken healthcare system.

Living The Big Sky Life: Bizzy Body Bulldogs

2011-06-12T18:23:00.000-07:00

Memorable Bizzy Body Bulldogs,

a continuation of "It Takes A Village"...

Local business is critical to the survival of any community. And since knowledge is power, it is incumbent upon every local business person who wants to be a success to be in the know. Everybody’s business makes for a successful business.

At the top of my Bizzy Body list are the real estate agents. Having personally worked with most of them while serving my time as a "caged dog", it seemed to me that the overabundant agent-to-resident ratio was about 1 to 35. That meant a lot of real estate agents were fighting over only so many acres, and it was clearly dog eat dog out there. Often fighting over scraps, I watched some of them turn rabid when they believed their territories infringed upon. Frankly, many of them were really pitbulls in bulldogs’ clothing. Oh, the stories I have to tell.

In line behind the real estate agents fell the local attorneys. In order to eke out any semblance of a living in this small town, it was better for many of them to remain general law practitioners than it was to limit their already limited clientele with specialties. Some of the lawyers even had to supplement their income with side careers, real estate being a preferred sideline. What I resented the most was the Flathead Valley attorney calling me up and asking me to legally advise him on how to properly prepare an insurable document because he wasn't sure how. My only thought when providing my free advice was always, “and you’re getting paid how much?”

Montana is a state overflowing with good ole boys, and my crown for King MOWB of Boy’s Town goes to the crotchety old president of the Whitefish Credit Union, Charlie Abell. He was arrogant and ancient even back then, and is probably long gone by now.

I would be remiss were I not to mention Sam, the exuberant horse-trading jeweler of Tomahawk Trading on Central Avenue who knew just about everything about everybody. With his gift for gab, you’d a thought Sam had personally shaved a chip off the old block at Blarney and had it permanently set into that bollo tie always cinched around his neck. He sported a thick head of white hair, and his starched and pressed western wear was always finished off with silver bling in bulk and chunks of turquoise.

Living The Big Sky Life: Well-Heeled Bulldogs

2011-06-04T00:46:00.000-07:00

Memorable Well-Heeled Bulldogs,

a continuation of "It Takes A Village"...

Every town has a Mr. Fancy Pants and Stumptown’s Fancy Pants was Buster Schreiber, or more appropriately Mr. B.S. Worthy of his own write up which will likely be forthcoming (not that there weren’t plenty of those after he was indicted), suffice it to say that Mr. B.S. was always impeccably coiffed and expensively dressed in tailored suits, silk ties and tasseled loafers, weather notwithstanding. He drove the only new Mercedes in the village and there was never a question about who was in your midst when that pale yellow 450SL turned the corner. Mr. B.S. had his fingers into everything, and I mean everything.

There exists a large trucking company headquartered in Missoula, MT called Watkins & Shepard, and Carolyn Watkins was one of those “Watkins”. I suppose she was considered the closest thing to a socialite that a place like Whitefish could have. And like most of the local elite, Carolyn too had a house on the lake but her stays in town tended to be her own version of fashionably seasonal. When she wanted to formally entertain, Chef was often her caterer of choice and I usually helped him out with the service. After I’d left Whitefish, I was told that Carolyn had passed away.

The story I heard again and again during my tortured tenure in Big Sky Country was: “If you want to make a $1Million in Montana, you’ve got to bring $10Million with you.” In other words, no one comes to Montana to make money, let alone get rich. Newcomers would either need to bring their wealth with them, or they would struggle to survive. Rarely was there a middle ground that I could see. And a college degree gave little returns on the investment when one of the best livings to be had involved waiting tables for cash tips. Of course, this was long before the internet made telecommuting the viable option it is today.

Living The Big Sky Life: Celebrity Bulldogs

2011-05-30T08:26:00.000-07:00

Memorable Celebrity Bulldogs,

a continuation of "It Takes A Village"...

Mary Hart and husband, Burt Sugarman owned a big spread at the north end of Whitefish Lake. Their ranch bordered an immense forested wilderness which was predominantly owned by the government and managed by the US Forest Service. What the government didn't own, likely belonged to the Burlington Northern Railroad.

Word around town was that Burt intended to create a large land buffer between his ranch and everyone else; and he believed the only way to accomplish said buffer was to lease the surrounding forest service land from the US government for a pittance, thereby allowing him to fence the public out of public lands. The community was in an uproar at the prospect of being denied rightful access to open acreage that had been freely used by all for hiking, hunting, fishing, etc. At one point Burt tried to win local support by wooing the townsfolk with shiny new Christmas decorations for Central Avenue. Many considered the bribe, I mean gesture, an insult.

Maybe Burt should’ve considered doing what Bill Pennington did and just buy up everything in his vicinity at a fair price, albeit that 99-year lease from the US government was unquestionably a much cheaper deal. I honestly don’t think Pennington felt the need to be as frugal as perhaps Burt did, for it sure looked as if Mr. Circus-Circus had plenty to burn. Nor did he seem to me to be overly concerned about spending what was necessary to get exactly what he wanted...at least that was the attitude he projected when I closed that last transaction for him.

Bill Pennington had arrived in Whitefish after buying the enormous custom log "cabin" Kiefer Sutherland had built for Julia Roberts during their short engagement way back when. The lake front castle was situated in a small nook on the northeastern shore of the lake – it was said that the location was essentially perfect because Mr. Bill needed a nice place to park his cigarette boats after Nevada had outlawed them.

Before Julia broke off her engagement with Kiefer and Kiefer closed on his heartbreak house sale to Pennington, it wasn’t uncommon to find Kiefer and Emilio Estevez hanging out together at the Great Northern Bar. Emilio’s first house wasn’t on the lake though like Kiefer’s castle – it was off Whitefish Stage Road about three miles south of town. Sometime during Emil’s short-lived marriage to Paula Abdul, he decided to sell that house and exchange it for a house on the lake, perhaps to be closer to his buddy Kiefer who ultimately sold out and left town anyway. I closed both the sale and purchase transactions for Emilio. And yes, there is more to tell.

Jim Nabors was a long time Whitefish resident, considered a local by many. He was quite friendly and seemed well liked. My interactions with him and his companion Stan were always pleasant. Jim had a large home off of Big Mountain Road which had been put on the market right before I left in 1996.

I’d been asked one day to open my title office on a Saturday morning to conduct a private closing for a high profile client who didn’t want to attract attention. That client was Jill Clayburgh. She had paid cash for a large parcel of vacant land northwest of town where she planned to build a vacation home. I can only assume she accomplished her goal long before passing away because I never saw her again. I found her to be a lovely, gentle woman.

Courtesy of 'Time Magazine' 05-31-1993

Living The Big Sky Life: It Takes A Village

2011-05-26T14:48:00.000-07:00

It’s always seemed to me that the movers and shakers who invest in keeping a community in motion are often cut from the same cloth, or to put it another way, dogs of the same breed…..regardless of where that community is located. Whitefish, Montana was certainly no exception, except of course, for a few exceptions.

While any community would naturally have a unique collective culture or personality of its own, one might rationally conclude that the personality belonging to the smaller community would tend to attract a special kind of resident; namely, someone who was predisposed to a cozier way of life, and who distinctly felt a level of comfort with the community’s particular culture.

The phrase “it takes a village” can take on a whole new meaning for many native small town residents when confronted about their socially intimate upbringing, especially since those doggies born and bred from within will historically fall into one of two very opposing camps.

First is the “contented canine” camp – these dogs smile pensively when they reminisce about home, hearth, and the village that raised them. Many who leave after high school yearn to return to that warm and fuzzy village when they’re ready to settle down and squeeze out a few puppies of their own.

Then there’s the diametrically opposed “caged dog” camp – these are the dogs who begin foaming at the mouth with an obsessive need to escape the minute they realize that they feel trapped like a dog at the pound. The very thought of returning to that suffocating village sends them into a hyperventilating chase-your-tailspin.

Native dwellers aside, I believe Whitefish had a similar polar aspect to its personality which caused it to attract a choice selection of notable newcomers who seemed to find their place within two categorical extremes as well.

The first extreme I call the “leaders of the pack” – these are the diplomat dogs who are skilled at aligning their personal agendas with the synergy of the community. These sly dogs are fast on their feet, and can usually be found throwing their power around in an attempt to influence local public policy and opinion in order to synchronize the community’s objectives with their highly prioritized personal objectives.

Some would call that making their mark. In Whitefish, it was usually more like marking their territory.

The opposite extreme can only be described as the “lone wolf pack” – these are the loners, the bad dogs with something to hide, and anyone else who’s decided -willingly or not- to fall off the grid.

When I think about those big dogs making their mark on Whitefish territory in 1995, the first thing that comes to mind is a kennel klatch of slobbering, snorting bulldogs – it is the town’s high school mascot after all.

The more memorable bulldogs I’ll be posting about next run the gamut, from contented canines to caged dogs, diplomat dogs to lone wolves. Some of them I either worked with or for, which wasn’t hard to do since I was a local business person and closed a large portion of the area's real estate transactions. Others I knew personally, or simply knew of because I lived there and it was unavoidable. And some were never really acknowledged or talked out loud about but everyone knew they were there, part of the backdrop, lurking.

Where was my place in all of this? It didn't take a local dog long to realize that this city bitch had no place to go but the “caged dog” camp, and I don’t even like camping.

Living The Big Sky Life^TM
© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: The Lay Of The Land

2011-05-01T08:25:00.000-07:00

The Whitefish I knew in 1992 had a year-round population of about 3,500 - half of the full-timers resided within a mile of the town’s main drag aptly named Central Avenue; and the rest were scattered out over the surrounding 30,000 or so acres somewhere between the sheep, cattle, hay fields and the woods. It wasn’t unusual for the resort’s population to swell to 4,500 during the summer season, especially after Brad Pitt starred in those two blockbuster films strategically staged to make Montana look so idyllic that anyone dreaming to be like Brad was seduced into selling out in order to pursue a life of fly-fishing in nature’s big sky backyard.

There exist certain similarities in small towns across America in my observation, and I found Whitefish to be no exception, no matter how hard it tried to reach beyond its small town status.

When driving north into splendiferous Stumptown via Highway 93 - just north of Highway 40, and past the Par 3 Golf Course-Driving Range and Jack’s Diamond Back Casino on the east side – was the Mountain Mall, a commercial development disaster that always ran at least 70% vacant. The mall’s only saving grace in my opinion was the cineplex it housed because it was hardly worth taking your life in your hands by driving 15 miles south to Kalispell on the 2-laned “pray for me, I drive 93” just to go to the movies, particularly in the winter. Boy's Town also had its own video rental store. We did have a VCR after all, not to mention the biggest TV satellite dish known to NASA in our front yard. Whenever I'd watch that satellite dish monotonously reposition at a snail's pace with each push of the remote, I couldn't help but wonder if I was innocently beaming up otherworldly messages to infinity and beyond every time I changed the channel. It's no wonder alien abductions seem more prevalent in the outback.

Adjacent to the Mountain Mall was the Food Depot, the biggest supermarket in town. Yes, there was a Safeway in town too, it was across the street. Frankly, I’ve yet to see a small western town that didn’t have a Safeway, but for whatever reason this Safeway could never attain the popular prestige enjoyed by the Food Depot.

Next to the Safeway was the bowling alley slash pool hall slash 24-hour greasy spoon called the “Pin ‘N Cue”. It had been eloquently nicknamed the “Spin ‘N Puke” by locals because it was the only place to eat after last call when all the taverns closed down. Traditionally the 24-hour restaurant in many smaller towns is Denny’s, but Whitefish didn’t get its first Denny’s until 1994, and my young daughter got all caught up in the grand opening frenzy with the rest of the villagers who were lined up around the building at dawn to get Eggs Over My Hammy - as if she’d never been to a Denny’s before. It had certainly not been a place we went to by choice and here she was, begging me to take her to the Denny’s grand opening as if it we didn’t live with CIA Chef, the king of sauces, French cuisine and anything else she could’ve possibly wanted not cooked in lard.

Further up the road, on the very edge of in-town was the Dairy Queen, definitely a small town requisite. Sing with me: “Let’s all go to D-Q Dairy Queen! The food’s more fun at D-Q Dairy Queen. We’ll have a D-Q sandwich. Maybe two or three. The food’s just great. And what va-ri-e-ty!” And no, my daughter never worked at the Dairy Queen nor did she wear frosted lipstick (an obscure “Baby Boom” reference, sorry, couldn’t resist).

After the Dairy Queen, the “93” assumed the now-you’ve-arrived name of Spokane Avenue. While the official Highway 93 would hang a sharp left due west at 2nd Street before once again veering north outside of Whitefish on its way to Canada … just beyond the cemetery, the fancy full sized golf course, the ever elite Grouse Mountain Lodge, and Lion Mountain; it was the happenings on 3rd Street that influenced my stumped town life the most. Whitefish Title Services, the escrow/title office I managed was located at the time on 3rd Street between Spokane and Central Avenues. The famous Buffalo Café was next door; and the infamous (and formerly known as) Mountain Bank was across the street and across the alley from the Frank Lloyd Wright office building where my first title office had been located.

Viewing north up Central Avenue from 4th Street. Big Mountain in background.

Central Avenue proudly boasted a few local landmarks such as the Bulldog Saloon (in honor of the Whitefish school mascot, the Bulldog), The Remington saloon and dance hall, the fashionably favorite Great Northern Bar and Grill, even the Black Star Brewery.

Central ran the length of six short blocks, yet was considered the community’s downtown hub. Many of the saloons, bars and restaurants were there; the galleries and kitschy tourist shops were there as well. The street dead-ended at the Stumptown Museum-Whitefish Depot from where Amtrak and the Burlington Northern Railroad ran regular routes. The only thing that stood between my back porch and the railroad tracks east of town were about 500 acres of hay fields littered with grazing cows. When I was at home, it somehow seemed sacrilegious for me not to stop whatever I was doing simply to savor the regular railcar processions that would glide silently across my distant landscape behind a lead engine's billowing smokestack en route to the depot.

Whitefish understandably required its own Post Office 59937; and it also had a small hospital, two small medical clinics, and the unquestionably MOWB-ish Whitefish Credit Union for which I closed loan transactions almost daily.

It was the Baker Avenue bridge that offered access to the other, resort side of the tracks, namely Whitefish Lake and Big Mountain. After Baker turned into Wisconsin Avenue, it quickly offered up a fork in the road. To the left was Lakeshore Drive, which followed the lake’s eastern shoreline until it ended abruptly at the edge of a vast forested wilderness managed by the US Forest Service, just beyond the Mary Hart/Burt Sugarman spread on the north shore. To the right went Big Mountain Road, which predictably switch-backed half way up the mountain to the ski village of Big Mountain, and the usually fogged in all winter vertigo capital of the world.

What few outsiders knew was that the town had an evening curfew and every night, at precisely 10:00pm, the curfew alarm would sound from the fire station at deafening decibels and reverberate like an echo for miles through the night skies. It turned out to be a rude, and quite symbolic, wake up call for me.

Coming up next on the “T T” Channel: Who was who in good old Boy’s Town.

Living The Big Sky Life^TM
© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: As The World Turns

2011-04-18T14:34:00.000-07:00

If all the world’s a stage, then drama must be the name of the game.

And far be it from me to argue with Shakespeare on the subject of drama, especially when I myself had once been typecast as a headliner on Big Sky Broadway in the post-deliverance dramedy now known as “Living The Big Sky Life”.

Once I’d managed to put enough distance between me and the cow town of Whitefish, it became easier to see one major reason why the story played out as it did: the more I persisted in playing the part I thought I was supposed to play, had been trained to play; the more dramatic the surrounding acts of my life seemed to get. Talk about not fitting in, and going against my own grain instead of with a more natural personal flow. And the fact that I felt captive and basically powerless to skip beyond the scratch-in-the-record script spinning around in my head didn’t help my cause either.

My final curtain call on Big Sky Broadway was promptly followed by a turbulent departure with little more than the clothes on my back. The subsequent 2-year intermission I endured in obscurity left no room for anything other than mind-numbing survival and life-altering retrospection, during which time I recognized that I was probably better suited to writing my own scripts and directing my own performances than I was to reacting to the manipulative directions of others as I lived out their dreams at the expense of my own.

Upon my exodus, the only parting glance the Flathead Valley got from me was in the rear view mirror when I exited off of the “pray for me, I drive 93” highway for the very last time. Yet, like all things Montana, even that backward glance was thoroughly obstructed because the backseat of my little urban-mobile was packed solid, floor to ceiling. At that point, it didn’t even matter that I’d arrived in Whitefish with a 3-bedroom household four years earlier. I believed myself lucky to escape with my life (and whatever else my little car could carry), and the emotionless exhale I eventually emitted a la Zoloft must’ve camouflaged the dull sense of relief I'm sure I felt. Something I wish the migrating flocks of ducks and geese flying in the opposite direction had been able to say.

As my world turned on its axis in 1996, it shattered most of the youthful illusions I’d once held about what my life should look like and how things were supposed to be. I guess when the drama gets old and boring, it’s time to cancel the show. Just ask the former cast of “As The World Turns”. Another approach, however, might be to simply change the channel to something more amusing, like a "Twisty Travel" Channel tour through "T T" Territory.

Coming up next, on the "T T" Channel.

When Nature Calls, All I Get Are Flashbacks

2011-04-04T21:24:00.000-07:00

Childhood memories can be a funny thing. Or maybe not, depending on the memories.

Like most people, there are times when things happen to me in the present moment that trigger surprising and unexpected memories from my past. Sometimes the flashbacks are so strong they leave behind a residue or a lingering feeling that’s difficult to shake off. It’s hard to predict just what kind of feeling might be left behind too because it can run the gamut…from happiness to heartbreak and everything else in between. And then there are the times when nothing's left but an empty ache because some gaping hole in my life has just reminded me that it hasn’t yet been filled.

When old memories opt to superimpose themselves upon my present-day reality, I’ve had to remind myself more than once that “that was then and this is now” since there’s nothing like a blast from the past to catapult me right out of the here and now. Where my childhood memories are concerned, things really were a lot different “back in the day”. Social structures were different, priorities and values were different, belief systems were different, normalcy was different. You name it, and it was probably different.

I grew up in a big family and like most large families, it always seemed as if there was never enough to go around. Never enough money, never enough food, never enough underwear. We competed for limited resources and our right to take up space, and I suppose in the end, we all got what we needed for none of us seem overtly worse for the wear.

My point? Well, in a previous post titled “Living The Big Sky Life: Been There, Done That”, I’d indicated that my childhood camping flashbacks had posed a few personal challenges for me during the time I spent in Boy’s Town Montana, and then asked the following question to give evidence of their origin: where do two parents with little money to spare take Grandma King, five daughters barely a year apart in age, and occasionally an older brother they called uncle on an affordable family vacation every year?

The King’s answer was, of course, camping. Nature’s drive-in where you don’t pay per head but per car load. And the dirt was always free.

For obvious reasons, this King family never had the fancy wheels I’d see driving through Whitefish year after year. Many of our camping trips saw the eight of us tightly packed into a first edition white Datsun station wagon with no air conditioning, only to pour out of said Datsun when we reached our campground destination like a bunch of clowns climbing out of a clown car.

We’ve also been known on occasion to take the “T T” approach to problem solving when necessary…like that time we drove through the Mojave Desert in August in the Datsun without A/C, and decided to replace the luggage in the back with a solid 12” x 12” block of ice which we promptly encircled and smothered with sweaty, swollen body parts in desperate need of cooling – quite the opposite of roasting hotdogs around a campfire. Side note (for those who might not remember): Datsun was the predecessor to Nissan, and there was no such thing as a seat belt law.

The Datsun does Mammoth

Then there was the classic two-toned emerald green 1957 Chevy 4-door in mint condition we inherited when Grandpa King died. Grandma King (who couldn’t drive but could never turn down a chance to go fishing) would often be along for the ride and she always rode shotgun on the front bench seat while clutching a brown paper sack to her side like a wino with a bottle of ripple. But instead of periodically lifting the bag to take a nip of the formaldehyde nectar as one would expect, she would pull down the top of the paper bag just enough to unscrew a brass lid covering the mason jar hidden inside, and then proceed to spit a huge glob of brown snuff juice into the glass jar, mile after mile after mile...

The Mustang does Mount Hood, Oregon

One summer even saw eight of us packed into a 1967 convertible Ford Mustang for three months as we traversed and camped every inch of Oregon and Washington.

We had a father who’d turn into Mr. Hyde at the prospect of driving fast on any winding mountain road as if it were a rollercoaster. He’d return to his senses with irritation only when several of us would turn green in the backseat and he’d be forced to turn off the road so our mother could do damage control. While other tourists at those lookout turnouts were busy gushing on about the breathtaking views, we were busy puking our guts up in the gravel. Good times.

Getting from one campground to the next invariably saw us arriving at our destination around midnight, half asleep, cramped and cranky. You haven’t really experienced the King’s kind of camping until you’ve learned to set up camp in the dark. It was hardly ever worth pulling out those annoying Coleman lanterns since the unreliable little silk bag-bulbs used for illumination never failed to dissolve into a useless fine ash at the slightest provocation, and always when you needed the light the most. We ultimately became quite skilled at balancing a flashlight while stringing up an orange glow-in-the-dark tube tent between two trees. Side note: There was no fancy canvas tent with spikes and poles in our trunk. All we had were neon orange plastic tube tents. They were cheap and compact, and if they were good enough for the Girl Scouts, they were good enough for a King girl. BTW-The materials used in today’s fancy gore-tex tents with bending fiberglass frames weren’t even a glimmer in some hiker’s waterproof dream.

Late one midnight we set up camp somewhere around Lake Shasta. Early the next morning we were rudely awakened by a cacophony of loud honks, and we all scrambled out of our vibrant orange tube tents rubbing the sleep from our eyes to see what all the ruckus was about. Queued up in front of us was a long line of pickups pulling boat trailers waiting to launch their boats into the lake. The problem was we’d unwittingly set up our camp in the center of the lake's only boat ramp. Clearly we were the hold-up. Good times.

The summer we covered the Pacific Northwest saw us spending many comfortable nights on the mossy turf of Oregon’s lush rainforests. As harmless as they were, those slimy rainforest slugs took some getting used to. They were Jurassic Park huge, and we couldn’t help but get squeamish every time we’d have to string up our tube tents around mucus covered trees hosting mongo snails without shells. Condensation dripped onto our faces at night as we laid in our sleeping bags and involuntarily listened to the death squeals of those doomed slugs getting squished in the middle of the road every time a car passed by. The sound of a dying slug squeezed of its last breath was scarier than any ghost story we could’ve ever heard around the campfire. As far as haunting memories go, it’s a toss-up between the crying dying slugs of Oregon and the earwig colonies of Lake Cachuma. Good times.

Our Tube Tents give the Rainforests of Oregon a hint of color

A traditional King postcard scene would show our father propping up every lakeshore we ever graced with a line of little King girls holding fishing rods baited in goopy pink salmon eggs. The fishing rods on the lake as little girls eventually evolved into backpacking out of Bishop (Mammoth) where once I had to catch a rainbow trout from a running stream with my bare hands like a Paiute Indian. That was after the time Grandma King got third degree burns on Lake Mary (Mammoth) because she had hit the just-been-stocked fishing jackpot and refused to get off the lake while it was “hot”. And the time we caught a bucket full of crawdads later boiled for dinner from a mountain creek by dangling an opened safety pin from the end of a line in between the rocks lining the creekbed.

The times we were stranded on lakes and rivers in boats with engine failure are too many to count, but that time we went bobbing to the point of sea sickness on the sticky waters of the Salton Sea under a scorching sun for three hours was especially memorable. Yep, good times. And honestly some of it really was. In fact, the more time that passes, the softer and fonder some of these memories seem to get. Fortunately for those of us who were there, we're still laughing about it.

Childhood memories can indeed be a funny thing, yet do any of these flashbacks make me want to honor nature by roughing it in the woods and catching my own dinner? No, and hell no. Like I said ... been there, done that.

Living The Big Sky Life^TM
© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: Been There, Done That

2011-03-12T17:25:00.000-08:00

Not unlike many kids who grew up in the 60’s, “Green Acres” was one of those weekly T.V. shows that I rarely missed. Never, however, in a million years could I have predicted that as an adult I’d actually come to know first hand how Eva Gabor’s character and uprooted city dweller, “Lisa Douglas”, must’ve felt when she was convinced to move to Hooterville because her husband, “Oliver Wendell Douglas”, craved the simple life.

Chef doing ‘an Oliver’ in the backyard …

Impartial observers would be hard pressed to find any outward similarity between me and the likes of Lisa Douglas, yet when I made the big move to big sky country, I could’ve sworn her hillbilly universe had somehow intersected my own; for here I was, just like Lisa Douglas, loyally compelled to live out my husband’s dream of ‘quality of life’ which was appearing more and more each day to surreally coincide with Oliver’s definition of the simple life.

… or maybe just his best 'Forrest Gump'

My Hooterville, as it turns out, was called Whitefish, Montana - a resort town named after its own lake (or perhaps it was the other way around) and nestled at the base of the Big Mountain ski resort. Whitefish is 25 miles west of Glacier National Park, 25 miles north of Flathead Lake, and about 60 miles south of Canada’s BC/Alberta border. Considered to be a vacationer’s paradise by many, and historically nicknamed "Stumptown" by the local community, I secretly came to call the place “Boy’s Town” instead because it was where all the boys came to play, and well, live the dream of being one with nature, even if that meant hunting nature down. Yep, it had it all, and anyone who heard the call of nature and yearned for the Big Sky Life after seeing “A River Runs Through It” or “Legends Of The Fall” knows what I’m talking about.

Now I appreciate the wonders of nature and beautiful country as much as the next human being, but living the dream for me at this point simply did not include camping, fishing, hiking, or hunting, because frankly, I’d been there, done that (except for the hunting part…never gonna happen).

One look at my childhood and a typical King family vacation can only beg the question: where do two parents with little money to spare take Grandma King, five daughters barely a year apart in age, and occasionally an older brother they called uncle on an affordable family vacation every year?

Camping is where. Out into the great outdoors where the dirt is free. And as the nature spirits prepare to take the stand in my defense, I swear there’s probably not a campground in California, Oregon, and Washington that the King family hasn’t camped in, a lake or river it hasn’t fished in, and a waterfall is hasn’t hiked or packed in to. The Colorado, Utah and Arizona territories were covered when I got a little older. Then, of course, came Montana.

So when those vans, trucks and campers would come rolling through Whitefish every year over-packed with the latest roughing-it regalia, fishing gear, and loaded rifle racks, I confess that I wasn’t quite prepared for the strong level of boring distaste that would sweep over me every time I'd hear “isn’t this the life?” The ensuing flashbacks of a childhood rife with camping trips and bright orange plastic tube tents didn't help my attitude much either. Undoubtedly some of those memories will make their way out of the closet in a continuation post I feel compelled to call “When Nature Calls, All I Get Are Flashbacks”.

Anymore I find it intriguing how often people tend to confuse the whole communing with nature thing with ‘quality of life’ - which typically translates into living a lifestyle that induces an overall sense well-being. Achieving that sense of well-being is a very personal thing, and what ‘quality of life’ feels like to one person can be completely different for another. And as I heard those Boy’s Town die hards chronically bleat on about ‘quality of life’ as if I didn’t get it, I couldn’t help but wonder…who were they really trying to convince? Me or themselves.

Frankly Dah-ling, just give me the sea, because the mountains don't do a thing for me.

For more of “Living The Big Sky Life”, learn what I should’ve known by “Reading the Signs”.

Living The Big Sky Life^TM
© by DK King

Living The Big Sky Life: Reading The Signs

2011-02-12T07:59:00.000-08:00

Born in 1899, my Grandma King was a simple country woman whose formal education ended sometime during the sixth grade. One of the fondest childhood memories I have revolves around hearing her backwoods southern drawl call out to my sisters and me for a little lovin’ when she'd warmly declare, “come and give me some sugar”.

It’s funny how young minds can innocently tie things together that don’t necessarily belong together, and even funnier how that intermingling can oftentimes become so integrated that a lifetime of decision-making can be subconsciously influenced by these misconnections. For me (and who knows if Grandma King really had anything to do with it or not), I think equating love with sugar must’ve been one of those obscure childhood misconnections.

Case in point takes me back to the early ‘90’s, to a time when life was busy pelting me with lemons, and I was sure that love was the sugar I needed to turn it all into lemonade.

Apparently that subliminal belief set the divine stage for me to reconnect with an old OC friend from grade school who’d been living in Montana for about ten years. He was passing through Orange County (yes, That “OC”) on his way to Baja for two weeks of surfing as he did regularly in the fall. A reunion of mutual OC friends ensued, and the rest became my Big Sky Life history.

Naturally I visited Montana to check things out before actually marrying Chef or agreeing to move my family and 3-bedroom household up there. I'm generally pretty open to new experiences, and it helped a lot that I was keen to get far away from Orange County and the arrogance of a deadbeat ex-husband who refused to pay child support. Had the deadbeat unilaterally opted out of supporting his own children, yet had had the intelligence to understand that he couldn’t have it both ways, the location situation might’ve been sustainable. Be that as it may, my particular deadbeat staunchly believed it was his right to go behind my back and hang out at the house I struggled to pay for in order to spend his 'free' time with the children he decidedly felt no obligation to financially support while I was away at work. And that was just for starters.

The week of the wedding arrived…and a sign of things to come.

It started off with an urgent court summons smugly delivered over the telephone at 7:00am by the deadbeat himself who was convinced that I had no legal basis for taking the children he vehemently declined to support out of California. After paying two thousand dollars I couldn’t afford to an attorney and enduring incalculable levels of distress, I spent the day before my “happy day” in a courtroom, sans Chef, where the judge practically tore up the deadbeat’s audacious petition in front of all parties present, his own parents included.

Chef, on the other hand, had spent most of that week alternating between surfing (stress management he said) and reception dinner preparation. Since Chef was in actuality a bona fide Chef and graduate of the Culinary Institute of America (CIA)-Hyde Park, NY, no one (me especially) wanted to ever hear him complain in the follow-up years about the food served at our reception attended by more than 100 well-wishers. The rest of the preparations and arrangements had been entirely mine to handle, and the day of the ceremony saw me completely numb from exhaustion before the wedding march had even sounded. If all of that wasn’t enough, my body had gone to the extra trouble of reminding me that very morning (and ten days early no less) that I wasn’t getting married because I HAD to.

And then there was the honeymoon. Well, more like “what honeymoon?” because the “honeymoon” saw us cramming my 3-bedroom household into the biggest U-Haul truck we could find, and taking to the highway on a grueling 1,800-mile 36-hour road trip to Big Sky Country and my new home.

The first half of the trip was long and dry and relatively uneventful. Everything changed when we pulled into Pocatello to gas up. One of the back dually tires had apparently gone flat sometime after Salt Lake City. Not something that could be easily fixed, especially with a full load sitting on top of it, so we waited several hours in some empty parking lot on the outskirts of Pocatello for U-Haul to send a repair truck.

After the tire had been repaired and the tow truck had long gone, as if on cue, the U-Haul’s electrical system went on the fritz. The cause? It seems the truck had been packed so tightly that one of my couch cushions had smothered an overhead light fixture long enough to not only burn a smoky 6” round hole into the cushion, but to comprehensively blow out the truck’s entire electrical system. Although we were lucky the over-stuffed contents of the truck didn’t explode into flames somewhere on I-15, the already white-knuckled drive became even more dangerous when it began to intermittently pour rain and hail as we traveled through Montana without having the use of our windshield wipers or headlights. But in the true pioneer spirit (or maybe it was more like the Donner party spirit), we carried on. That, and Chef was homesick and wouldn't hear of another delay, even if it was for repairs.

And then there were my California license plates. The engine on my little urban-mobile hadn’t even cooled down from the trip before Chef ushered me back into my car and off to the DMV to change the car’s plates and my driver’s license. He insisted that everyone would give me ‘stink-eye’ if I dared to drive around town with any smell of California on me. Frankly, I think he was more worried about getting the ‘stink-eye’ himself. Something about guilty by association. Whatever. I deferred to his anxiety on the matter and hid the evidence within two hours of arrival. The rest got handled with a hot shower and a bottle of lemon juice (for scrubbing the tan off, oh duh).

They say that hindsight is always 20/20, and so it was for me - even if it took a few years to come into focus. I suppose things might’ve been different had I better read the signs during one of the longest weeks of my life. Oh well. Live and learn. And what I learned that May day in 1992 was that when you move to Montana, you need to hide all evidence of your past and move into a house that looks just like the Unabomber’s. That way you blend in with the rest of the pack, and save yourself the notoriety of becoming an open target for the ole 'stink-eye'.

For more of "Living The Big Sky Life", you might want to start with "T T Territory".

The first Montana house I moved
into had the same floor plan as
the Unabomber's.

Living The Big Sky Life^TM

Cabin of Unabomber
Theodore Kaczynski
in an April 6, 1996 file photo
(AP Photo/Elaine Thompson).