Distinctly Montana Magazine

Literary Lode DEPARTMENT ROBERT RATH T he next passage in my journey is a love affair. I am in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some af- fection, but with Montana it is love, and it's difficult to analyze love when you're in it. Once, when I raptured in a violet glow given off by the Queen of the World, my fa- ther asked me why, and I thought he was crazy not to see. Of course I know now she was a mouse-haired, freckle- nosed, scabby-kneed little girl with a voice like a bat and the lov- ing kindness of a gila monster, but then she lighted up the landscape and me. It seems to me that Mon- tana is a great splash of grandeur. The scale is huge but not overpowering. The land is rich with grass and color, and the mountains are the kind I would create if moun- tains were ever put on my agenda. Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans. Here for the first time I heard a definite regional accent unaffected by TV-ese, a slow-paced warm speech. It seemed to me that the frantic bustle of America was not in Montana. Its people did not seem afraid of shadows in a John Birch Society sense. The calm of the mountains and the rolling grasslands had got into the inhabit- ants. It was hunting season when I drove through the state. The men I talked to seemed to me not moved to a riot of seasonal slaughter but simply to be going out to kill edible meat. Again my attitude may be informed by love, but it seemed to me that the towns were places to live in rather than nervous hives. People had time to pause in their oc- cupations to undertake the passing art of neighborliness. DISTINCTLY MONTANA | DIGITAL Hear John Steinbeck's Nobel Prize acceptance speech… www.distinctlymontana.com/steinbeck122 www.distinctlymontana.com 41 C harley T EXCERPT BY JOHN STEINBECK ravels With IT SEEMS T ANA M AO S P S O ME THA S A GREA T NTH O L I ANDEUR. F GR T

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