I know the West is changing. I know there are many who mourn
the losses and I don’t deny that there are losses: billboards obscuring mountain
views, ranches parceled into suburbs, fences stopping short any free-range, chemically
dead fields. These things and many more are distressing, but they are not the
whole story. The West has always been subject to romanticism and then nostalgia.
Neither one is particularly true. It is Montana’s current reality that I am
interested in, a reality that is built on the past and looks toward the future,
but lives in today. What is here to be appreciated? What is problematic? What
can be created?
