The Burden of Discovery

Seventy-two degrees in the Gallatin canyon on a Saturday in August. Partly cloudy. The river running green on the left, the highway bending along with it, the fir coming down to the water on both sides. It is very difficult, driving through country like this, not to start doing arithmetic in your head about what your place would sell for.

That feeling is worth examining, because it lies.

There is a joke among people I know — some of us in the trades, some of us just people who have lived in hard country a while. We call it the four-year rule. Someone drives through a beautiful place in July. They see the light on the aspen and the meadow full of grass and a town of two hundred people where everybody waves. They buy. And somewhere between the second and the fourth year, the sign goes back up.

In Guffey the mechanism is winter. People show up in summer, fall, and spring, and those three seasons make an unanswerable case. Then January comes and the thermometer reads forty below, and it stays there, and the road is a problem, and the woodpile is a problem, and the nearest anything is a long way off. They last one of those. Maybe two. Then the property is back on the market and someone else is standing in the meadow in July doing the same arithmetic.

It is easy to be smug about this and I am trying not to be. The newcomers aren't fools. They were shown a real thing. The country is that beautiful. What they weren't shown — what the place could not show them in September — is the rest of it.

Here is what I have come to call the burden of discovery.

A new place is beautiful in part because you have not learned anything about it yet. Every place, given enough time, will hand you its history. Who cancels at the last minute. Who talks about you at the post office. Who took a large sum of money during a remodel and never came back. Which grievances between which families are still live after twenty years, and which side of them you have accidentally landed on. None of that is visible from the highway. All of it arrives eventually, and once it has arrived it cannot be returned.

And worse than the money. There were promises made — the kind that come with a handshake and a signature and someone telling you they see exactly what you see. We built something around one of those. Poured a year of work and our own name into it, and what we built was good. Then it was taken out from under us, quickly and without warning, for reasons that had nothing to do with anything we had done.

Here is the part I hold onto, though. When word got out, the neighbors came. Not one or two. A crowd of them, with trucks and trailers, first thing in the morning, and they had us clear of it in a few hours. Nobody asked what happened. They just showed up and worked.

You do not learn either of those things from the highway. Not what a person is capable of doing to you, and not who turns up when they do.

The usual phrase for all this is that familiarity breeds contempt, and I have never liked it. It blames the place, or it blames you for getting bored, and neither one is accurate. I have not stopped loving where I live. The country hasn't changed. What changed is what I know about it. The weight I am carrying isn't disappointment. It is information.

So when I drive through Bozeman, or Missoula, or Challis, and the whole valley looks clean and open and unburdened, I am not seeing a better place. I am seeing a place I have been in for two hours. Give me four years here and I would know which contractor to avoid and which neighbor to stop waving at, and the mountains would look exactly the same and feel entirely different.

That is the part worth being honest about. The lightness is not a property of the new place. It is a property of my ignorance, and ignorance has a short shelf life everywhere.

Which raises the real question, and I am not going to pretend I have it fully answered: what do you do with the burden once you have it?

The easy answer is that you leave, and you get another four clean years somewhere else, and you keep doing that until you run out of road. Some people live that way. I have watched them do it. From the outside it looks like restlessness wearing the costume of adventure.

The answer I have arrived at, at least for now, is this. The burden of discovery is not the cost of staying somewhere. It is the evidence that you stayed. It is the only proof that you have actually lived in a place rather than visited it at length. A person who knows nothing bad about where they live has not been there long enough for the place to trust them with anything.

And the people who stay — the ones who are still there after the third forty-below winter and the fourth falling-out — are not tougher than the ones who left. That is a story we tell ourselves and it is mostly vanity. What they are is people who got the full invoice and chose it again anyway. Not the July version. The whole thing, the winter and the gossip and the long drive to anywhere, and they signed for it with their eyes open.

There is nothing romantic about that. It is just the difference between falling in love with a photograph and staying married.

I will be home in a week or so, and it will be eighty-six hundred feet and the same neighbors and the same history. And I will be glad.