Won'tcha Be My Neighbor? (cont.)

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Outside Magazine July 2001

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Won'tcha Be My Neighbor? (cont.)

DARK ACRES, SO NAMED because it languishes all winter under a foggy gloom cast by Black Mountain across the river in the Lolo National Forest, had once been part of a fading cattle operation, a century-old homestead cloistered inside a mile-wide loop of the river, whose owners began subdividing their empire in the 1970s. Like Squalor Zones everywhere, this here's Trailer Country, friend. Most of the structures on our wedges of wooded bottomland were trucked in (I get snooty because our "modular" home arrived in two pieces). In addition to the usual farmy clutter of implements, everyone's compound sports at least three trucks, plus one or maybe all of the following: a four-wheeler, a snowmobile, a fake wishing well, a trampoline, or a collection of equines and the jumble of shelters and corrals they require.

Outbuildings in the Zone are thrown up without regard to covenants, because there are none, or to zoning. People keep goats and peacocks and guinea hens, and burn mattresses and ruined vehicles wherever, and lurk all fall up a tree with a bow and arrow, waiting for something tasty to stroll underneath.

For a long time the Zone's ranchettes were outrageous bargains—we bought our house and shop, plus 11 acres of marsh, pasture, jungle, and parkland, in the fall of 1990 for $69,000. Today Dark Acres would net us several times that, but we wouldn't move back to a city even if someone gave us a house there, and not just because of the organic pleasures of living with horses. The animal freedom to walk out the back door anytime, day or night, to howl at the moon or go for a swim has just become too addicting. Despite its headaches, this place is as close to the rhythms of daily life inside the natural world as most Americans are ever going to get. Once you're on the banks of the Clark Fork and are dwarfed by the palisades of the Bitterroot Mountains on the other side, you see nothing in any direction of the visually insubordinate work of mankind. It might as well be 1600 b.c. By day the luscious transparent river chatters and rolls stones and dimples in the fading light with rising trout. At night, under a Milky Way so showy you can actually see how it got its name, the leaves of the willows shudder in breezes perfumed with the tang of pine sap and sage.

But there was rancor in paradise the first day we moved in, when our dog Radish, a red heeler, wandered down the dirt road and beat up a chicken named Gary. (A detective at the Missoula County Sheriff's Department later told me that loose animals are among the most common causes of friction between people in these parts.) I tried to placate Gary's masters—two brothers named Bunker raising three small boys in a double-wide that looked like it had been dropped from a cargo plane—with a six-pack of Mexican beer and a promise that if the fowl croaked I'd buy them a replacement. When their eyes lit up I deeply regretted this offer.

"Gary's a hunnert-dollar chicken," I was informed.

"What!"

"Yeah," the other brother said. "Gary's a fightin' chicken."

I watched these two yahoos for a week to make sure Gary didn't have another accident and end up in a stew. But the Bunkers were telling the truth about raising gamecocks for a "sport" that's not legal in Montana—and the dumb bird pulled through.

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