Distinctly Montana Magazine

article by SHERMAN CAHILL illustrations by ROBERT RATH W hy do so many tourists do such dumb stuff? Every year there are a glut of stories about people getting too close to animals in the Parks, walking off of the boardwalk, trying to swim in boiling bodies of water, so on. As far as I know, we don't reciprocate—do you hear sto- ries about us hick Montanans heading en masse to Times Square, trying to pet rats and take selfies with speeding taxi cabs? Petrarch wrote that "a good death does honor to a whole life." Another wise soul (some attribute it to Crazy Horse, others Low Dog, and still others the Klingons) once said, "it is a good day to die." I remember when I was a kid wondering what that meant. What could be a good day to die? One that you'd had an extra scoop of ice cream? One on which Michael Jordan had personally signed your Nikes? But as an adult, I think I came to understand it better, or at least to come up with my version of what I think it means: you want to die in a way that that means something. Or, at the very least, is badass. Now, I'm not morbid. But there are a billion ways to die, even in the most boring of places—you could trip on your way to the breakroom and break your neck at work. You could pass on the toilet, as did no less regal an American personage than the King himself, Elvis Presley. Ok, maybe I am morbid. But it seems to me that no spot on earth is without an ever-present risk of death. Montanans need not be reminded that they're sitting more or less atop a volcano overdue to belch out a few hundred million metric tons of magma right on top of us. Like, any minute. Or, let's say that Yellowstone doesn't go off in our lifetime, or even ever again. Well, then we might also point out that we're over- due for WWIII, which so far has some surprising similarities to the Mission: Impossible series of films in that the first and second entries came out pretty close to each other while the third is somewhat delayed. But all it would take is one very bad diplomatic gaffe, some President to vomit in the wrong lap, and China, North Korea, Iran, and/or Russia might mash that big red button. Undoubtedly one of their targets would be Montana, the site of a strategically vital cache of intercon- tinental ballistic missiles. 12 D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A M A G A Z I N E • S U M M E R 2 0 2 3

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