Meet Montana: Story Won’t Save You

Part 1 of Story 2

When I talk about Montana, I want to be really clear that my mind doesn’t go immediately to its people. There’s a layer before that which I connect most to and feel primarily. This is what I mean when I mention Montana.

I think of the land, the sky, the air, and the energy that occupies the space we call Montana.  

It’s almost like a personality, or an archetype, but with less specificity than those two classifications connote. I don’t sense male or female qualities or personality traits  - that’s too granular. I sense the ambiguity before any human-like characteristics take shape, where form is nebulous.

It’s a felt sense of intangibility which governs everything that becomes home within it.  

From outer space, I realize that all land on this big, blue ball is part of the whole, separated only by water and all belonging to mother earth. From up there, reality is fundamental - universal - in its non meaning-assigned truth. 

Down here - in the realm of humanity -  reality is also fundamental and universal in its non meaning-assigned truth. But, insert humans and there is now story, layered on top of reality. 

Born of the evolutionarily unique frontal lobe of the human brain, meaning becomes interpretable and changeable. Unlike deer, for example, who have an imprint of exact meaning for each circumstance they’ll encounter, humans get to decide if something is desired or undesired, evil or good, right or wrong.

And so, down here - in the realm that we play as humans - where the earth looks flat in our horizon view, and we’ve drawn lines on the map and called the land inside those borders continents, countries, and states, I sense that each has their own story. 

One type of story is the historical, cultural story. The story of its settlers, its conflicts, and the people who built it.

The other story is the one the land holds. It is essence. Fundamental. In its base form. It is what meaning is made out of.

It's not a story in the traditional, structural sense. There’s no beginning, middle, or end. This story built into my reference of “Montana” is really just a placeholder for essence. A unique, identifiable presence. 

In my mind’s eye, I see this story’s signature imprinted in every particle of matter and non matter from the sky all the way down into its earth.

I imagine that other states have their own essence, too, and it seems that the land and space and air within their own boundaried lines have their own unique signature. Some states, I sense, are mutable in their energy, and like Tilapia - are willing to take on the flavor of whatever lies on top of it. Other land seems more malleable, allowing ideology and culture and the people who are given its air to breathe to dictate its essence. This is seen as neither better nor worse - just simply a function of being.

There’s probably something to that from a physics perspective - the coastal states land is in constant relationship with moving, ever-changing waves of water. It is porous and open and allowing by virtue of its place within the greater Mother Earth design map.

But Montana? It is immoveable in its essence. It is incapable of being persuaded. It resists human-driven reinterpretation. It is essence of original source.

This is the Montana that I irreverently joke told me to f$ck my stories while giving me reality. And, I am so eternally grateful. 

You’ve got to be ready for this type of non-welcome welcome. You’ve got to be either already tuned to fundamental reality, or be ready to sit with the discomfort of being stripped back to it.

Many move here from other states and feel immediately unwelcome. They arrive with a story of what this place will be like, many times informed by a film or television production. Often, they seem to come from states wherein the culture was permitted by its land to dictate more so, its willing and shifting essence. Without consciously realizing it, they may move with the assumption that all land sits in servitude to the stories its inhabitants want to build reality from, and once moved, they are struck by the immediacy of the end of such allowance. 

The distance between their story of Montana and Montana’s essence is what creates that unwelcoming feeling, which then gets interpreted through every interaction - with the land, with the people, with the culture.

They then construct a new story about Montana, based on this dissonance. Story based upon story. None of this is reality. 

Notice the danger? The tangle? 

This story-shaped perception will direct their decisions through their first few seasons, and generally by the completion of the 4th season will send them packing and moving to a place “nicer” or “better” or “more like them.”

And Montana won’t care that they’ve misinterpreted its essence. It won't try to convince them otherwise. It will let you leave having never understood its truth. 

Montana exists in a consciousness so self-governed that validation isn’t even on its radar. It makes no difference if the world loves it or hates it - it remains in its glorious, embodied sovereignty. In reality. Fundamental, un-storied reality. The one in present tense only. The one without assigned meaning or judgements of “good” or “bad” or “welcoming.” Montana is pre-narrative.

Here, story must be constructed only after a lived experience. It must be utilitarian in nature. It must be a transporter of earned wisdom. A tale of survival and the practices that particular present moment lent to achieve it. Story must be recalled and kept contained as a resource of information, not an overlay of doctrine that we outsource our embodied experience to. 

Because story - despite all of its beautiful features to capture moments and provide a vessel within which they live forever -  creates distance between you and the reality of the present moment.

Reality is always first principles. There are no environments where story replaces consequence. Only places where consequence is delayed.

Any life organized around narrative rather than what is actually happening will eventually produce distortion, and distortion is dangerous, even when it looks functional for a time.

Story can soothe, motivate, and organize behavior, but when it is mistaken for reality, it becomes a buffer against truth.

The bill is paid later - through bodies, relationships, children, systems, or land itself.

Montana doesn’t create this dynamic. It exposes it. By collapsing the distance between action and consequence, it reveals what was already true: reality does not negotiate with story, and it never has.

Story won’t get your car unstuck from the fierce, swallowing snow storm that came in out of nowhere.

Story won’t save you from the bear that surprised you along the ridgeline.

It won’t protect you from the mountain lion perched behind the larch stalking you in an untamed, wild form. 

And it has no utility when your car breaks down in a stretch of land with no cell reception, and nothing but land and big sky in sight.

The only function story serves at these junctures is to inform action for survival, or to create meaning one can escape into to feel less of the pain of the present moment.

The flattened brush in the woods may be indicative of a stretch of land more travelled by humans, but broken trail is not inherently “safer.” It’s story that makes us believe it’s safer - the one that says where more humans have been, less wild animals are.

But that, if taken as reality - as a replacement for YOUR present moment -  will distort your lens with a layer of illusion, and that my friends, can be and is, many times, catastrophic. 

The idea of safe “places” in Montana is a falsity.

Safety is a state of being, expressed through one’s practiced ability to see reality as it is, in its wild, unstoried essence, and respond.

It makes sense, then, that the kind of welcome Montana offers be that which sets the inhabitant up for success. 

After fifteen months of withholding premature conclusion - of resisting the urge to construct a story that would have brought relief without truth - I can finally see what Jason, the transplant from Seattle, meant when he said in my fourth week here: Montanans will watch you struggle and struggle. And only when it’s clear you will drown will they save you.

What I once interpreted as the cruelest, most inhumane approach to relating to others now registers differently. Viewed from the beginner’s mind - the place of observation before story hardens perspective - this response runs cleanly through first principles and cause-and-effect thinking. It is profoundly attuned to the essence - the story - of the land.

Story won’t save you here. Resilience, sovereignty, and earned wisdom might. And in a place where you are often truly alone, having anyone waiting at all while you earn your wisdom is no small thing.

And speaking of being saved… (click for Part 2 - Two Bear Air Rescue)

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