A reflection on returning

Driving east over the Cascades at Snoqualmie Pass for the first time since moving to Seattle a year ago, I flicked on an audio file of “K. Ross Toole’s Montana,” a 10-hour public television recording of his final Montana history lectures at UM in 1981. If you’ve listened to our first episode, you’ve heard some clips.

As I hope many other listeners of that episode felt, Toole’s words seemed somehow divinely inspired, prophetic in his view that Montana’s next great commodity wouldn’t be mined or slaughtered or dammed, it would be filled: “Beautiful space, clean space, quiet space, space rich in the qualities which Americans, having increasingly lost it elsewhere, are now seeking as they have never sought it before.” This was 1981. 

However, Toole would likely be the first to note that his words were far from prophetic, but rather an obvious next step in Montana’s cycle of boom and bust, commodification and exploitation by the monied outsiders — a cycle which Toole felt should and could be broken, an idea he held as his raison d’etre throughout his life as a historian, public commentator, and political watchdog. 

But this lecture was Toole’s last stand, and he knew it well. 

I was aware that he died of cancer at the young age of 61 (exactly 40 years ago today as I write this), not long after his lecture series was recorded. But it wasn’t until I heard him tell this final class — a lecture hall filled with 1,700 students seeking the wisdom of a dying man — that the gravity of his words caught up to me. 

“Indeed, the task is difficult, it will continue to be difficult. But it’s up to you people now, not to me anymore…” As Toole speaks these words, knowing he will soon die, his voice trails off and wavers, gripped by his own mortality. But it quickly returns with vigor as he delivers his prescription for how Montanans can indeed take on the task at hand without him.

Hearing these words as I descended the east side of the Cascades, as the thick smoke of the arid, burning West replaced the clear humid skies of the coast, I couldn’t help but get choked up, and I’d be dishonest if I hid that a few tears fell in my lap. Not for the dead man, not because the mission he tasked us all with felt impossible, but because I felt I had personally failed Toole’s big ask. 

I’ve said before that Montana in many ways is still the frontier to me. You show up, they don’t ask for a resumé, they just ask “Can you do it?” and you say yes. And then both of you find out if that’s true, if you can or if you can’t. I was proud to find out I could a few times over the years. Montana gave me everything I had, and while not much at any point, it was always enough. From my first job dishwashing at the Outback Steakhouse in Missoula, through multiple kitchen jobs, various side gigs too numerous to list here, a college degree, and becoming a full-time journalist at my adopted hometown’s newspaper, it felt like Montana was there for me, its people actively helping me grow along the way. And then I gave up on it.

I believe if Toole hadn’t become an academic historian, he would have been a hell of a reporter. He was never afraid to cross into muckraking, to be prescriptive where other historians academically dither. Whether it was corrupt Montana politicians or greedy corporate interests sucking Montana dry, he wasn’t afraid to speak truth to power and say loudly how he thought things ought to be. This too is what I once felt called to do.

In May 2020, I decided I was done with journalism. The pay was so low, each month I went further and further into debt just to stay alive. What once felt like a noble calling - to be broke, but be a fighter for the little guy; to live the cliché of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable — was running up against my ability to stay afloat. It was hard to see a light at the end of the tunnel, and increasingly as the pandemic took hold, isolation turned into resentment and I split. I quit my job, and I quit Montana. And now, hearing Toole’s words, I couldn’t help but feel I’d sold out the state that took me in.

But there, driving through the plains of eastern Washington, with Toole’s lecture a steady, haunting soundtrack reminding me that “Montanans, and Montanans alone” can protect and preserve the place that we love, I was left to wonder: Have I ever been, and if so, am I still, Montanan enough to join in that fight? Not for now, not until it gets hard, but for the long and unending battle the people of Montana have always needed to fight to remain the Last Best Place?

I guess time will tell. But I’ll be damned if I don’t give it at least one more shot, and I know John will be there with me and more. 

So stay tuned for what we’ve got cooking, and remember this is an independent production, humbly sustained by donations from people like you.

For Montana,

Matt Neuman