Polebridge

Ahhh... in the gorgeous escape of Polebridge, MT. This place came recommended to me a good, oh, 17 times in the last few months.

I'm sitting on a 70's couch, in a screened-in porch of a log cabin hostel, looking out on two teepees, a wood-lit hot tub, a rack of kayaks and some incredible purple-blue mountains, shrouded in clouds. Summer is over. The switch flipped two nights ago- we went to bed at 70 degrees and woke up in the 50's, thick fog obscuring familiar views. Even though there is some warmth in the sun, the air's weight is different and the aspens are beginning to quake yellow. Time for a retreat.



There's no electricity here, none from a distant source, anyway. We saw some huge solar panels on the way in and the electrical lights and wifi of this hostel run off of batteries, but there's no 'hum' anywhere. It's a filling quiet. When I used to visit my parents in Big Bend, I had to prepare for that type of silence. It was a void, so powerful your ears rang with all their leftover noise. It took me days to get used to, every time. But here, the quiet is gentle, filled with tree sounds and, if you are in the right place, water.

We slept in a loft of bunk beds made from tree trunks and read by the light filament of a gas lantern. I had very vivid dreams, populated mostly by people that I know and love; woke up grinning, their faces bright in my mind. We were going to stay in the Green Zucchini, an oblong trailer bug at the back of the property, with a poka-dotted rocking chair on the porch. But there's no heat and the loft was empty and so cozy... I think a summer night in the Zucchini would be perfect, but it's autumn now anyway.



It's seems a bit silly to demand a retreat from the national park, I guess. People come to us for just that- pristine, majestic mountains teeming with wild-ness. It's home of work for me, though, and a hundred people I know quite well (and love) and see all the time.

There's also a sharpness, a dangerousness to those mountains. And, I hate to admit it, now that the peaks are friends of mine, a claustrophobia. You are forever being watched by their snowy faces and there's very little horizon for your thoughts to skip down. It's almost an invasion of your mind's own privacy. Here, the mountains rest at a happy distance, and a fire in the 1980's has destroyed most of the trees. They are standing-ghosts in the national forest, but have been cleared for firewood in this private land, leaving wide-open-space. I don't know why that fuels my creativity or sense of peace, but it does.

I came with one other girl, Danielle. She is so comfortable in her own skin, our connection feels easy, an effortless flow of conversation and silence. And she has a great laugh. I'm grateful for the way it balances absolute solitude and a shared experience.

We head back to the Park today. I am hoping this short respite reignites a fire in these last couple of weeks, helps me to interact more genuinely with tourists and more embracingly with coworkers. This summer is a great journey with impermanence, of which the greatest lesson is savoring.

No moral to this story today an no great care in writing. Just a ramble of current place and time.