Won'tcha Be My Neighbor? (cont.)

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Outside Magazine July 2001

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Won'tcha Be My Neighbor? (cont.)

ON LABOR DAY the skies opened and the fires of western Montana finally died out. In October more than twice the normal amount of rain fell down, and the drought seemed at an end. I figured maybe this combustible season in my relations with my neighbors might have ended as well. C. R. Copeland kindly offered to let us ride again at Copeland Land, if we would come to him for a key to the padlock on his gate. We worked on our fences and on a stone wall we were building from river rocks, and a sort of peace returned.

With no feuding duties to occupy me, I set out to get the official line once and for all about who has the right to do what in the Squalor Zone. But the Missoula County Attorney's office never answered my letters and lists of questions about the rules relating to dogs, fences, guns, and weeds. I was dismayed by this silence, but not surprised. It confirmed my lifelong belief that when it came to rendering services, the law preferred the Squalor Zone to render unto itself. I decided that in a perfect world a handbook of laws and customs would be issued to every address outside the city limits, a Fodor's guide to the Squalor Zone that your realtor would give you the day you moved to the country.

I had better luck getting answers from Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, which confirmed that folks in the Squalor Zone can pretty much do what they want in regard to the discharge of firearms on their own land; that bow hunters must get permission to chase bleeding deer onto private property; and that the state's Stream Access Law says you're not trespassing as long as you are a recreationist who confines your person to land below the high-water mark. Then MFWP's information officer scolded me for denying hunters access to Dark Acres. "You wouldn't be considered a good conservationist," he said. "Allowing an animal's meat to go to waste is hard for someone in my position to understand." He said that in Missoula County there are only two effective ways to control the deer herds—hunting and vehicle collisions. Without these governors, he said, the whitetail population would explode, animals would run out of food and starve, and the mountain lion population would also explode. Did we want to live in a place where dogs and children were no longer safe? Of course, the MFWP man doesn't have to live with the gaseous outrages of Radish, nor does he apparently worry about our horses becoming equine pincushions. But I got the point.

In these kinds of disputes, he concluded, "It is often the case that neighbors just don't like each other."

Winter approached, and I heard on the grapevine that Emmitt Hooper was planning a lawsuit intended to drain the calming and innocent water of the Mabel, which was about to harden into my favorite ice-skating pond. One chilled and rainy morning, I led Scarlett, my palomino mare, to the forest so she could browse on the last of the season's grass. As I passed by the Mabel I stopped to watch a mated pair of mallards swimming in the rain, growing fat and glossy before they winged south for winter vacation.

Then a shotgun blast shattered the peace. I put Scarlett back in her corral and ran toward the disturbance, ready for battle, not thinking straight even after all the steeling I had experienced from the conflict of the last decade. There on the river was a tiny island of reeds drifting languidly in the mist. Although I knew that what I was seeing was just a kid duck-hunting in a floating blind he had gone over the top to build, in the water-colored light this graceful vessel looked like something from a Viking funeral, a craft that ferries the soul. I had the sudden sense, which must come at last to everyone, that the days are truly numbered. Did I really want to spend this dwindling allotment of time feuding with my neighbors?

None of us should even be living here, I thought. The economic system that allowed individuals to own land in a floodplain was corrupt. These corridors along our rivers should be held in common so a person could walk unimpeded the length of the Missouri, or embark on a horse trip from Missoula to the Pacific without rednecks yelling to get the hell off. The only reason any house was allowed to be built at Dark Acres at all is because the original owners hauled in enough fill to build a terpen, an artificial hummock engineered by ancient Celts and used by the early Dutch to make sure their churches stayed above the North Sea when it flooded. And yet, even though the Squalor Zone is crawling with so many of the unglued they could pack an auditorium full of anger-management patients, this is the best place I've ever lived.

And until they pry my cold, dead fingers from the deed, I'll never give it up.

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