Two very different Montanas

There are two very different Montanas.

One is booming economically with skyrocketing home prices as newcomers flock there to get a piece of the Big Sky. It’s the Montana that’s pictured in magazines and on the big screen.

The other is where I live, the Montana folks are leaving or stuck in with few job prospects and only distant mountains or bad lands on the horizon.

I couldn’t be happier with my choice.

When Barb and I left Bozeman 16 years ago and moved to Malta we jokingly told people that we were moving back to Montana.

But it was true.

Bozeman, like so many other places in the state, was quickly becoming like everywhere else in the country. Lower your eyes a bit and you could just as well be standing in Des Moines, Iowa as in the middle of the Gallatin Valley -- the architecture, the chain restaurants, the retail outlets -- all the same.

I suppose that’s comforting to a lot of folks, myself not included. I prefer a little funk to cookie-cutter urbanization.

The apartment building where Barb and I lived on Willson Ave. was torn down shortly after we left to provide a larger formal garden for the house next door. A four-plex, probably built in the 1960s, our well-kept building didn’t fit in with the character of the other turn-of-the-century homes on the block. It simply provided housing. So down it came.

In Malta we were able to buy a century-old, two story stone house in the middle of town on half a block for what the down payment on a condo west of the Main Mall would have cost us.

We’d never have been able to afford such a place in Bozeman or even Livingston.

And if we had it would have come with rules. Here there are few – no fires and no chickens are about it.

You can park anything in your yard. It’s where we retire our old cars and trucks, lawnmowers that have given up the ghost, and assorted appliances.

Having only lived in Malta for a short time, my collection is quite modest, just a riding mower, a couple of brush piles and an old picnic table.

But I can dream. A guy down the block paved his entire yard and has it packed from sidewalk to front door with tons of swell stuff.

Try that in Bozeman.

Someone would start crying.

In other parts of Montana, however, we still relish our freedom to do as we please, but it often comes with a lot of junk.

Parker Heinlein is at [email protected]