Following the Beeline

HOW STORY CONNECTS US

Life hangs on a narrative thread. This thread is a braid of stories that inform us about who we are, and where we come from, and where we might go. The thread is slender but strong: we trust it to hold us and allow us to swing over the edge of the known into the future we dream in words.

Story — the abundance of it, and the lack of it — shapes us. Story — the abundance of it, and the lack of it — gives us place, lineage, history, a sense of self. Story — the abundance of it, and the lack of it — breaks us into pieces, shatters our understanding, and gives it back over and over again, the story different every time. Story — the abundance of it, and the lack of it — connects us with the world and outlines our relationship with everything. When the power of story comes into the room, an alchemical reaction occurs that is unique to our kind: love or hate, identification or isolation, war or peace, good or evil can be stirred in us by words alone. The power of story is understood by the powerful, yet the power of story belongs to all of us, especially the least powerful. History is what scholars and conquerors say happened; story is what it was like to live on the ground.

The ground where I was born is the butte country of western Montana, a land of reds and oranges, sweeping wheat fields and brown tufts of cattle grass. Here the days begin with a pinkening line along the flattened east horizon like a great eye opening, and the days end with marauding sunsets that disappear like ghost riders into the western crags. I was set down in this landscape, placed into the arms of family, community, nation, and nature.

I have traveled far, but come back from time to time in search of some elusive sense of origin. Driving west out of Great Falls on Interstate 15, the one freeway that dissects these plains, running north like an artery to Shelby and Sweetgrass and the turnoff to Glacier Park, I join a bloodstream of tourists, ranchers, Indians, all going to the sun. Just north of the junkyard, truck stops, and cattle yard I swing onto Trunk Highway 21 — Vaughn Junction — where the roadbed follows a path as ancient as buffalo, as tribal migrations, as the sure-footed Sacagawea, who led her band of white men into the same vista that lies before me unchanged. Unchanged, as soon as my back is turned to the slash of interstate. Unchanged, as soon as the sun hits the pavement on a slant that transforms the road into a shimmering ribbon that might be grass, might be water. I drive half-blind into glint and shadow until the road catches me up and I follow it as mesmerized as a deer.

Beyond Vaughn Junction, there is nothing in the way. Nothing to break the sight line. The first ridge of the Rockies rises beyond the buttes, the Continental Divide drawn invisibly along the upper crest of peaks, deciding what flows back toward me, what flows west toward the sea.

My immediate sight is filled with the shape of Square Butte, an overturned, brown-wrapped box of land sticking straight up out of gullied pastures and wheat fields. The terrain around me is tucked away this October day in tidy strips of harvested grain and baled hay. I am heading toward sixty years of age and this is the first time I have seen my birth lands in any season other than high summer. The land waits for winter, though this afternoon is cool breeze, bright sun, a cheery day to find myself sitting on a pink marble headstone with my name on it: BALDWIN. Here lie Leo Elmer and Mary Hart Baldwin, my grandparents; Grace Baldwin Ho, Dorothy Baldwin Humphreys, two middle-aged aunts brought back to the bosom of the family to lie. My feet sink ankle deep into the thatch of grave grass.

Fatherland

My father's father, Leo Sr., was a Methodist circuit rider in the butte country of Montana in the early decades of the twentieth century. First by horse and buggy, and later by Model-T, followed by an assortment of farm trucks, he drove the valleys of the Sun and Judith rivers east and west of Great Falls, tending to the spiritual needs of pioneering homesteaders, farmers, and ranchers — marrying, baptizing, burying. He was a smallish man, wiry and strong, with deep-set blue eyes, a strong nose that is still coming down the family line, and composure based on faith and practice. He preached a straightforward gospel of deep reverence for God's creation, not too rigid, not too brimstone. My grand-father loved the Lord, and believed the Lord loved him and his flock in return.

Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.

— Rita Mae Brown

I didn't know him during these early years. By the time I came along, fifteenth out of twenty grandchildren, a caboose born after World War II with cousins nearly old enough to be aunts and uncles, Grandpa was a settled presence in the tiny town of Fort Shaw. The town was barely a bump on Highway 21, the back road to Helena, or a sneak through the mountains to Missoula. Over the years, to support a large family, Leo had become a beekeeper six days a week and a preacher on Sundays at Simms Methodist Church.

I was born here in 1946, in Great Falls Deaconess Hospital, in the same ward where my father had been born in 1920, the seventh of Mary's eight children, his birth the first time anyone thought to drive his mother into town.

There was no question that they'd drive my mother to town. She was young and skittery, enough like her mother-in-law, Mary, that I wonder if tensions blossomed that spring after the war as wildly as flowers. In a time when all civilized births happened in hospitals, women drugged into half slumber, my mother studied a book on natural childbirth and panted her way proudly through contractions, producing her first child — which happened to be me — after only four hours of labor.

Though my parents soon moved and I grew up in cities a thousand miles east, we made frequent summer pilgrimages to the Sun River valley homestead. Heading out of the driveway on the west suburban edge of Minneapolis, we'd drive straight into the eye of the sun, nearly twenty-four hours on road that was two-lane blacktop most of those years: the summers I was 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 14, 16, and 22. We didn't stop except for breakfast until Square Butte filled our vision and we rolled over the foothills. Home.

For decades, a passel of kinfolk, changing crews...