A River Runs Through It

I ended the Thanksgiving weekend watching the movie "A River Runs Through it" on hulu.com. It wasn't planned. I was looking at hulu's new movies and saw this title, remembering seeing it the year it came out in 1992. I couldn't remember the plot nor what it was about. All I could remember were the beautiful river scenes and the mountain backdrops.

So I sat in front of my computer and watched the movie. It was as if I had never seen it before.

And what a beautiful movie it was. It made me long to see Montana, its endless skies, its lush green vallies, its snow-capped mountains. And then memories of all the books I read in Iraq that somehow were about that part of the country that has me mesmerized: southwestern Montana, northwestern Wyoming, Idaho, came back to me.

When did my fascination with Montana begin? I don't even know for sure. It was while I was living in New Jersey and borrowed a few books from the library, travelogues and childhood memoirs of Montana; John Steinbeck's "Travels with Charley"and Judy Blunt's "Breaking Clean."

John Steinbeck described Montana simply with "I love Montana" and left it at that. I wanted to learn more about Montana that made John fall in love with that state, and years later I'm still dreaming that some day, I will.

Somewhere I also read the Corps of Discovery and the Lewis and Clark expedition across the northern states in 1804-1806.

I also read David McCumber's "The Cowboy Way" about the San Franciscan's year on a dude ranch, describing the daily toils of life on a large-scale ranch in Montana, tending to ornery cattle, fixing broken barbed-wire fences, bundling up in snowstorms. The descriptive narrative of his days on the ranch kept me glued to the book for three late nights, reading until early in the morning while occasionally hearing incoming fire from around our Baghdad perimeter.

But the most beautiful story I read was by Ivan Doig, "This House of Sky," his bittersweet memoir of life in Montana and his relationship with his grandmother and father who sacrificed everything to give him a good life and to send him off to college. It was perhaps one of the few books I've ever read that made me shed a few tears in the end.

I don't know when I'm ever going to see Montana. It won't be next summer, when I'm most likely going to be in Indiana with the new baby. I don't even know if Erin wants me around that much, nor do I think I could handle a newborn exclusively for six weeks. I'll find out in May, I gather. And if Eric's OK and heading out to Boston for the year next summer, then I'll just take the long way back to Arizona via the northern Plains, through North Dakota and Montana. It would be the trip that I've been scheming in my mind for several years now. I wonder what kind of thoughts will be racing through my head then while driving the lonely roads of Big Sky County.

I don't know how I'm going to do the trip with school still my primary goal, but life does tend to throw us all surprises. I can look back at this year and regret the trips not taken or the dreams still unfulfilled.