Driving in Montana

There was an LED sign near the west entrance to Glacier National Park which proclaimed that there had been 59 traffic fatalities in Montana when we got there. It was up to 61 by the time we left.

Montana has more fatal automotive accidents and more traffic-related fatal automotive accidents than any other state in the country. Anecdotally, I will also say that I was struck by how few police officers I saw while out there. I'm pretty sure it was just one, while we were in a 45 zone coming into Columbia Falls from the west. I would have spaced out on that cop had Mary not said something.

That said, from a speed perspective, I think Montanans, like most folks west of the Mississippi, do a better job self-regulating than we do back east. Here we are always hurrying to something. It seems they aren't in as much of a rush out west.

But there were an awful lot of bars out there. In the town where we stayed, Martin City, the only two retail establishments, one of which, seemingly anticipating my arrival, had put this excellent sign out by the road.

Overall out there, there is a lot of focus on selling big things with big engines. Trucks, boats, ATVs, chain saws, what have you. I get it. Nature is big out there, you have to work hard to keep it at bay. Push electrical mowers and dinky shit like that ain't gonna cut it. We have historically used big machines to keep nature at bay. We still do, even here, we are just duplicitous about it. It happens while all of us office workers are off doing our thing, crews of people -- many of them hispanic and quite likely less than perfect from a documentation POV -- come in and cut the growth back. Hence the impossibility of working from home on the east coast without hearing mowers, leaf blowers, string trimmers, etc. Nature fights back.

But I have riffed on this before. Time for lunch.