How to learn where we live

I was driving on Montana’s Highway 89 just as fall began showing up at one of my favorite spots for walking, a turn onto a two-lane country road. If you don’t know busy Highway 89, it travels north from Yellowstone National Park to Glacier National Park, a 400-mile haul.

Making my way through a tree-heavy section on the highway known locally as “deer alley,” I saw wild turkeys in the road just ahead of me.

I immediately put on my emergency lights as I always do when I see wildlife on the road and stopped to watch two adult turkeys and about a dozen small ones running all over the place—maybe a first exploration away from their home territory.

It was a comical sight. But the car behind me, going about 60 mph, whizzed right by, pretty impatient judging by his irritated honk. Then a second car came from the front without slowing even a whit.

The result was, of course, feathers blowing up and around in the breeze like a sad celebration of lives that ended too soon.
English writer John Ruskin said, “There is always more in the world than a man can see walks he ever so slowly. He will see no more by going fast, for his glory is not in going but in being.”

I often think of that maxim on my daily walks when I’m on my rural road. Even on it, some people speed by me as if I’m an inconvenient pothole. Several drivers, to my delight, slow down and wave. And a few stop and roll down a front window to shoot the breeze. When they move on, I look around to take note of what we see by simply going slow, not to mention that there may be time to spot the black bear cubs said to be in the neighborhood.

I see the daily change in the color of emerging grasses, old seed pods clinging to canola, pointed out to me by the local farmer, one who rolls down the window to chat. There’s also the flock of annoying crow-esque grackles, every coming-to-life thing giving thanks for the rain, and a growing number of ponderosa pines that are getting noticeably red and won’t be long for this life.

It’s not much to brag about, but a lot to notice. Slowing down teaches us where we live.

The joy of observing also strikes me when I think about having completed 19.9-mile Bridger Ridge Runs outside Bozeman. The glee of being with fellow runners, some of them neighbors, also charging up the trail, could well be something I remember in my last breath. It’s more of a group experience than a race.

Bu now it seems, mountain ranges everywhere and anywhere are getting crisscrossed summer and winter by “extreme” athletes. And what propels this drive to “conquer” yet another peak?

I’ve never understood the mass of “adventurers” who attempt to climb Everest, picking their way among oxygen bottles, human waste and even human bodies left on the frozen mountainside. When do any of our mountains get some downtime?

When extreme runs started across the beautiful and still solitary Crazy Mountain Range, I had mixed feelings about an invasion of people. The Crazies are most famous for the vision quest of Chief Plenty Coups of the Crow tribe. Vision quests didn’t happen at a sprint.

They were a long haul, not begun to conquer a peak. A vision quest was a method of seeking wisdom, a life path. It required many days of patience, fasting and the loss of blood until dreams finally revealed themselves.

Plenty Coups was on a vision quest when he was just learning about the chickadee—the last remaining bird after a forest blew down—and finding the bird survived because it listened and learned, slowly gaining knowledge.

Plenty Coups interpreted this as an admonition that knowledge and education were as critical to the survival of his people as strength and physical prowess.

This is worth remembering as we walk, run, hike or meander through the outdoors.

Dorothy Bradley is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit that seeks to engage readers in lively conversation about the West. A version of this article first appeared in the nonprofit media group Mountain Journal on Dec. 1, 2023, based in Bozeman, Montana, that covers the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.