Modern Montana

Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond, Ph.D.

(Page 6 of 6)

When I asked my friend Stan Falkow, a 70-year-old professor of microbiology at Stanford University near San Francisco, why he had bought a second home in Montana's Bitterroot Valley, he told me how it had fitted into the story of his life

"I was born in New York State and then moved to Rhode Island. That meant that, as a child, I knew nothing about mountains. While I was in my early 20s, just after graduating college, I took off a couple of years from my education to work on the night shift in a hospital autopsy room. For a young person like myself without previous experience of death, it was very stressful. A friend who had just returned from the Korean War and had seen a lot of stress there took one look at me and said, 'Stan, you look nervous; you need to reduce your stress level. Try fly-fishing!'

"So I started fly-fishing to catch bass. I learned how to tie my own flies, really got into it, and went fishing every day after work. My friend was right: it did reduce stress. But then I entered graduate school in Rhode Island and got into another stressful work situation. A fellow graduate student told me that bass weren't the only fish that one could catch by fly-fishing: I could also fly-fish for trout nearby in Massachusetts. So I took up trout-fishing. My thesis supervisor loved to eat fish, and he encouraged me to go fishing: those were the only occasions when he didn't frown at my taking time off from work in the laboratory.

"Around the time that I turned 50, it was another stressful period of my life, because of a difficult divorce and other things. By then, I was taking off time to go fly-fishing only three times a year. Fiftieth birthdays make many of us reflect on what we want to do with what's left of our lives. I reflected on my own father's life, and I remembered that he had died at age 58. I realized with a jolt that, if I were to live only as long as he did, I could count on only 24 more fly-fishing trips before I died. That felt like very few times to do something that I enjoyed so much. The realization made me start thinking about how I could spend more of my time doing what I really liked during the years that I had left, including fly-fishing.

"At that point, I happened to be asked to go evaluate a research laboratory in the Bitterroot Valley of southwestern Montana. I had never been to Montana before; in fact, I had never even been west of the Mississippi River until I was 40 years old. I flew into Missoula airport, picked up a rental car, and began to drive south to the town of Hamilton where the lab was located. A dozen miles south of Missoula is a long straight stretch of road where the valley floor is flat and covered with farmland, and where the snowcapped Bitterroot Mountains on the west and the Sapphire Mountains on the east rise abruptly from the valley. I was overwhelmed by the beauty and scale of it; I had never seen anything like it before. It filled me with a sense of peace, and with an extraordinary perspective on my place in the world.

"When I arrived at the lab, I ran into a former student of mine who was working there and knew about my interest in fly-fishing. He suggested that I come back the next year to do some experiments at the lab, and also to go fly-fishing for trout, for which the Bitterroot River is famous. So I returned the next summer with the intention of spending two weeks, and I ended up staying a month. The summer after that, I came intending to stay a month and ended up staying for the whole summer, at the end of which my wife and I bought a house in the valley. We have been coming back ever since, spending a large part of each year in Montana. Every time I return to the Bitterroot, when I enter it on that stretch of road south of Missoula, that first sight of the valley fills me again with that same feeling of tranquility and grandeur, and that same perspective on my relation to the universe. It's easier to preserve that sense in Montana than anywhere else."

That's what the beauty of Montana does to people: both to those who had grown up in places completely unlike it, like Stan Falkow and me; to other friends, like John Cook, who grew up in other mountainous areas of the American West but still found themselves drawn to Montana; and to still other friends, like the Hirschy family, who did grow up in Montana and chose to stay there.

Like Stan Falkow, I was born in the northeastern U.S. (Boston) and had never been west of the Mississippi until the age of 15, when my parents took me to spend a few weeks of the summer in the Big Hole Basin just south of the Bitterroot Valley (map, p. 31). My father was a pediatrician who had taken care of a ranchers' child, Johnny Eliel, afflicted by a rare disease for which his family pediatrician in Montana had recommended that he go to Boston for specialty treatment. Johnny was a great-grandson of Fred Hirschy Sr., a Swiss immigrant who became one of the pioneer ranchers in the Big Hole in the 1890s. His son Fred Jr., by the time of my visit 69 years old, was still running the family ranch, along with his grown sons Dick and Jack Hirschy and his daughters Jill Hirschy Eliel (Johnny's mother) and Joyce Hirschy McDowell. Johnny did well under my father's treatment, and so his parents and grandparents invited our family to come visit them.

Also like Stan Falkow, I was immediately overwhelmed by the Big Hole's setting: a broad flat valley floor covered with meadows and meandering creeks, but surrounded by a wall of seasonally snow-covered mountains rising abruptly on every horizon. Montana calls itself the "Big Sky State." It's really true. In most other places where I've lived, either one's view of the lower parts of the sky is obscured by buildings, as in cities; or else there are mountains but the terrain is rugged and the valleys are narrow, so one sees only a slice of the sky, as in New Guinea and the Alps; or else there is a broad expanse of sky but it's less interesting, because there is no ring of distinctive mountains on the horizon - as on the plains of Iowa and Nebraska. Three years later, while I was a student in college, I came back for the summer to Dick Hirschy's ranch with two college friends and my sister, and we all worked for the Hirschys on the hay harvest, I driving a scatterrake, my sister a buckrake, and my two friends stacking hay.

After that summer of 1956, it was a long time before I returned to Montana. I spent my summers in other places that were beautiful in other ways, such as New Guinea and the Andes, but I couldn't forget Montana or the Hirschys. Finally, in 1998 I happened to receive an invitation from a private non-profit foundation called the Teller Wildlife Refuge in the Bitterroot Valley. It was an opportunity to bring my own twin sons to Montana, at an age only a few years younger than the age at which I had first visited the state, and to introduce them to fly-fishing for trout. My boys took to it; one of them is now learning to be a fishing guide. I reconnected to Montana and revisited my rancher boss Dick Hirschy and his brother and sisters, who were now in their 70s and 80s, still working hard all year round, just as when I had first met them 45 years previously. Since that reconnection, my wife and sons and I have been visiting Montana every year - drawn to it ultimately by the same unforgettable beauty of its big sky that drew or kept my other friends there (Plates 1-3).

That big sky grew on me. After living for so many years elsewhere, I found that it took me several visits to Montana to get used to the panorama of the sky above, the mountain ring around, and the valley floor below - to appreciate that I really could enjoy that panorama as a daily setting for part of my life - and to discover that I could open myself up to it, pull myself away from it, and still know that I could return to it. Los Angeles has its own practical advantages for me and my family as a year-round base of work, school, and residence, but Montana is infinitely more beautiful and (as Stan Falkow said) peaceful. To me, the most beautiful view in the world is the view down to the Big Hole's meadows and up to the snowcapped peaks of the Continental Divide, as seen from the porch of Jill and John Eliel's ranch house.

Montana in general, and the Bitterroot Valley in its southwest, are a land of paradoxes. Among the lower 48 states, Montana is the third largest in area, yet the sixth smallest in population, hence the second lowest in population density. Today the Bitterroot Valley looks lush, belying its original natural vegetation of just sagebrush. Ravalli County in which the valley is located is so beautiful and attracts so many immigrants from elsewhere in the U.S. (including even from elsewhere in Montana) that it is one of our nation's fastest growing counties, yet 70% of its own high school graduates leave the valley, and most of those leave Montana. Although population is increasing in the Bitterroot, it is falling in eastern Montana, so that for the state of Montana as a whole the population trend is flat. Within the past decade the number of Ravalli County residents in their 50s has increased steeply, but the number in their 30s has actually decreased. Some of the people recently establishing homes in the valley are extremely wealthy, such as the brokerage house founder Charles Schwab and the Intel president Craig Barrett, but Ravalli County is nevertheless one of the poorest counties in the state of Montana, which in turn is nearly the poorest state in the U.S. Many of the county's residents find that they have to hold two or three jobs even to earn an income at U.S. poverty levels.

We associate Montana with natural beauty. Indeed, environmentally Montana is perhaps the least damaged of the lower 48 states; ultimately, that's the main reason why so many people are moving to Ravalli County.

© 2005 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Jared Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He began his scientific career in physiology and expanded into evolutionary biology and biogeography. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. Among Dr. Diamond's many awards are the National Medal of Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, Japan's Cosmos Prize, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and the Lewis Thomas Prize honoring the Scientist as Poet, presented by Rockefeller University. He has published more than two hundred articles and his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.