Photo and text by A.Sønju

It is a hard place. You live on the same land for generations and never really know it. It can turn against you. Everything is under the weather, the weather will always win; it is a Big Sky. You can live there all your life and hike over every inch of the ‘foot hills’ (mountains out here) that make up your back yard and they will surprise you. You call yourself well traveled; but how many rivers do you know? How many ranges of those mountains and foothills can you name?

Say them to yourself: Absaroka, Bear-tooth, Tobacco Root, Wolf, Swan, High Wood, Teton, Sawtooth, Mission, Seeley, Pintlar, Anaconda, Cabinet, Cascade.

It is a place founded on blood and iron, a lust for gold, silver; desire for mastery of the untamed wilderness. Even now, we are its mercy, or lack thereof. You asked me why I wanted to leave, and I say I felt walled in, mountains on all sides. You ask me why I want to leave here, and I say ‘because I feel walled in’. You say you want to be nearer to the water, I say I want the real sea. You wonder what there is to do for a living. I say, you can raise livestock, you can fight fire, you can cut down trees, you can teach. You can write when you have the money, or you’re broke.

Pioneer, Rattlesnake, Bridger, Blackfoot, Gallatin, Clark’s Fork, Marias, Powder, Tongue, Mussel Shell, Clearwater, Missouri, Sun, Thompson, Kootenai, Madison, Bitterroot.

I explain that while the teachers teach, in the summer they will fight fires. Cutting down trees is something you will end up doing regardless. And fighting fires. When the writer is not teaching, he or she is a sometimes a river guide.

Say their names, Yellowstone, Bighorn, Milk, Poplar, Flathead, Boulder, Big Hole, and Wise.

We have some of what you have; the meth, the cops, the bankers (though they’re likely raising livestock also), even a skyscraper or two if ten or twenty stories count. I should have said something about the construction worker. Blood and iron; only it isn’t in the mountains. I say the mountains are not big, two or three thousand feet nearest to town, twelve thousand at the tallest, taller than here.

Sapphire, Ruby, Judith, Red Rock, Two Medicine, Crazy Mountains, Granite, the Big and Little Belts, the Gravely, the Snowcrest, and Glacier.

You ask me if money were no object where would I go. I say Norway, Ireland, Patagonia, Peru, and Morocco. I did not say Australia, or Hungary, and maybe- and I do not remember how you replied. Except that the sound of your voice, overpowered by the cut-time tempo of the subway tracks, was far away.

Flathead, Lewis, Whitefish, Jefferson, Smith, Dearborn and Beaverhead.

You wonder if I am homesick, I say maybe so. You are wondering about the things I miss, the space: how the walled in feeling vanished for a while the first time I returned after living here, and you speak as if it is an alien thing. I try to explain how spring – but I wonder for an instant if maybe you don’t know more about it than I do.

A.Sønju works with various mediums; light, glue, paper, pigment, noise and language, generally leaning toward the practices of film making, photography, and writing. As of autumn 2010, he will be pursuing a Masters Degree at the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver, BC.