Truth is, I’ve traveled a fair amount and seen beautiful places. But, damn, Montana is something special! Even with smoke from wildfires obscuring some of the views, it’s just beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. (Pictures below.)

Sunday morning, my hosts in Manhattan (west of Bozeman), Ann and Nick, took me to breakfast at a place that seemed so Montana, so untouched by time, that even I could tell when some “you’re not from around these parts, are you?” types walked in. After breakfast, we went to see the headwaters of the Missouri River, where the Gallatin, Madison, and Jefferson Rivers converge. The pictures in the slide show include the handiwork (or should I say teethiwork?) of some beavers who got discouraged when the water level dropped.

In the evening, we performed — Ann Tappan (pianist), Kelly Roberti (bass), and I at the beautiful home of Frank and Jirina Cikan in Bozeman. We had an enthusiastic audience and a lot of fun. After the concert, Ann, Nick and I went to the Pita Pit, the only place we could find that was still serving food after 10 pm; I mention this only because it was exactly the sort of place we’d end up eating after gigs during the years I was touring in Germany (well, there it’s the doner kebab joints), so it felt familiar, and right.

Back in New York, I’m reflecting on a memorable 10 days: volunteering at Project Vote Smart (PLEASE consider supporting the work of PVS with a donation), and then meeting up with Ann and Kelly in person (previously we’d only known one another online) and making music with them. I’m feeling very luck to have had this experience.

And now, more pictures: Vintage cars parked outside the 3 4Ks restaurant. People: Ann, Kelly, Nick, Jirina and Frank. Scenery at the headwaters of the Missouri. A few of the stunning sky taken from inside Ann’s car on the way to the gig.
Click to view slideshow.

I left Project Vote Smart this morning, a little sadly, though the spectacular drive between there and Butte made up for it. In addition to the stunning scenery, I saw some very good looking black cows; I’ve never seen entirely deep black cows before. Then something else I’ve never seen: a woman jogging, with a 9 millimeter tucked into her waistband (or are you supposed to write 9 mm?). Also: I didn’t identify it as a 9 millimeter (or 9 mm); I don’t know one gun from another, and the conversation went something like this:

Me: “Was that a GUN that jogger has?”
Rachel (the PVS staffer who drove me to Butte): “Yep. 9 mm. I’ve seen a wolf around here.”

After which there ensued an interesting conversation about guns, violence, cities, Montana, and several other things.

We got to Butte airport, and good thing I was prepared with the street address of the Budget Car Rental Office. [insert eyeroll.] The silver car in the foreground is my rental, and the peak-roofed building across the street is the terminal. The entire terminal. Two flights arrive and two leave each day. You can’t exactly miss the car rental counters. The nice young woman at the Avis counter saw me standing at Budget, walked out of Avis, and stepped behind the Budget counter. After taking care of my reservation she kindly pulled out a map and showed me how I could take a quick little car tour of historic Butte.

Butte certainly has an old West feel. Streets named Quartz, Gold, Iron, Platinum, Mercury, Granite, Porphyry, Copper, and so on. Victorian houses and mansions from the days of the mining boom. Here’s the former home of one of the area’s three “Copper Kings,” who tussled for control of the copper mining industry in the late 19th century.

The drive east, from Butte to Manhattan (Manhattan, Montana, that is) was just as gorgeous as the drive earlier. The population of the entire state is not quite a million people, meaning there’s a lot of undeveloped land and farmland. Lakes. Creeks. Hills. Mountain passes. It’s just beautiful. And I crossed the Continental Divide, the fact of which doesn’t really mean anything. But it’s nice to think, “Oh, right now I’m crossing this thing I’ve always heard about.”

Arrived in Manhattan a little after 2, and met Ann Tappan; later we drove to her studio in Bozeman to rehearse, with Kelly Roberti, for tomorrow’s concert.

Click here to continue to final Montana post ➸

If you’ve read my previous posts, you know that I’m here at Project Vote Smart as a member volunteer, and that PVS has created the Voter’s Self Defense System, which makes non-partisan, unbiased information on legislators and candidates available to all of us. For example, PVS “digests key legislation in Congress and all 50 states into easy-to-understand summaries, making it easy to compare what your representatives said during the campaign with how they actually voted on the record.” Find out how much money candidates raised, and who donated. Find out where they stand on issues that matter to you. If you’d like to know more about what PVS does (and I hope you will), THIS page provides a good overview

So. . . on my first day I did two things: I spent an hour or two in an envelope-stuffing-and-stamping assembly line. I know that doesn’t sound very glamorous, but what went into the envelope is pretty sexy: The Political Courage Test, a questionnaire sent to candidates inviting them to provide comprehensive information on where they stand on relevant issues. You can have a look at the current test forms here.

But before and after the envelope-stuffing I worked at a computer; PVS invites all candidates to submit an issue statement, and I was asked to type up some of them for later input into the data base. I worked my way through a stack of pamphlets and letters from current candidates; several are running for Congress, a few for the Senate, some for their state Assemblies; there was even a statement from a write-in candidate from President.

Now, why the title of this post? Well, on one hand, the papers in the stack were from candidates in a number of states, many certainly first-time candidates, people of varied backgrounds and beliefs. The existence of those statements–the very fact of that stack of papers–is a philosophy, an idea, a political ideal made real. We live in a country where anyone can throw her hat in the ring. Anyone can put himself forward for public service because he see problems and would like to have a hand in solving them. People can form a society and decide that everyone living in it has the right to have a say in how things go. Obviously, we’ve never fully lived up to that ideal and, let’s be honest, throughout our history we’ve fallen far short. But the ideal itself, the fact that it’s our lodestar and it’s at play at all, well, that’s beautiful.

And so I felt sort of excited and joyful typing away at that computer. So why the despair? Well, as above, anyone can run for office and, apparently, anybody does. Even reading the most crackpot statements, or the ones that outline the opposite of everything I believe (and there were many of those), I was aware of the hopeful ideal of participatory democracy. But some of the statements were so poorly written, some made so little sense, and some were just so way out there that I couldn’t help but feel rather hopeless at the same time. These people might end up making laws in Congress next year?

I mean, honestly, this? “I support that, All citizens health care for healthy lifestyle to included, diagnosis, prognosis, treatment & therapy for physical & psychological well being.”

And this? “The BUDGET is BROKEN – We need to FIX IT & BALANCE IT.” (Sorry, but that’s a teenager’s capitalization, and I saw TOO MANY EXAMPLES Today of this KIND OF Creative capitalization! Plus exclamation points!)

How about this one? “What about Gibson Guitar, going on for 7 yrs: they get special wood from India for the neck of the guitar, workers at Gibson finish it here. Obama wants the work done in India -” (I think the candidate is trying to address the problem of outsourcing, and wonder why she didn’t say so.)

Well, I have three more days of stuffing or typing or whatever else they’ll have me doing, and I’m looking forward to every minute of it. The pictures, above show (top) the envelope assembly line and (bottom) my computer station.

Click to continue to part 5 ⇰

From what I gather (and there’s a lot I still don’t know), most of the staff, and all the interns who come for ten-weeks stints, are in their twenties. Then there are the member-volunteers who normally come for two weeks. The ones I’ve met so far seem to be retirement-age; I think I’m the “baby” among them. The ranch is surrounded by mountains. Around me are lakes, trees, birds with calls I’ve never heard before and whose markings I’ve never seen, fields, a stream with a consistent trebly music punctuated by a hand-drum sound, lots of sky, all kinds of insects (three of which have already wound up in my bathroom, and as some of you may know, I’m not so good with insects). The wind and sun are playing a game, a variation on the one in the old fable: one makes you put your jacket on, the other makes you take it off, and back and forth, back and forth; must be great fun for them.

This morning I took a walk with Cathy, mentioned in yesterday’s post; she’s been here once before, so she sort of knows here way around the property. We got only slightly lost, which was fine, because you don’t really get lost, and everywhere you go there’s plenty to see and hear.

Time to show you some pictures. The first one (if these are in the right order) shows the veranda of the building my room is in (I took the picture from where I’m sitting right now, as I type). You’ll see Cathy fording the stream, then me about to do the same. Carved on a bridge crossing the stream, a quote from John Adams: “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people”; pretty much the raison d’etre for Project Vote Smart. The white thing on a piece of log? A salt lick (I had no idea.) Oh, I almost forgot: Gopher holes. In the field. Tripped on one and went down like a ton of bricks (I’m completely fine).
Click to view slideshow.

Click to continue to part 3 ➾