Getting lost in Montana

In high school, I loved my geography class, but had a terrible time with the actual “geography” bit. The part where we learned about other places and cultures was endlessly fascinating; the part where I was supposed to look at a map and understand it or remember where things go on the map was a nightmare. Soon the class ended, and it didn’t seem like a matter of much consequence.

Billboard on the way in to town. (photos by Heidi Hansen)

Flash forward seven years: I’m working as a reporting and photography intern in Malta, MT for the Phillips County News and I have no clue how to get out to the bird refuge for my interview with the new biologist. Pulled over on US Highway 2, which runs adjacent to the railroad track known by locals as “the Hi-Line” because it inches across the northern half of the state, I try to remember which side of the track is supposed to signify north and south. Locals tell me the Hi-Line, which has stops every 30 miles, is the reason this town exists – if homesteaders didn’t get off here, they could get off at the next 30-mile mark. This history might illustrate what geographer Joni Seager states in this reading on maps: “Maps don’t just reflect ‘reality,’ they help to create it.” Legend has it, each town got its name by a Great Northern Railway official who would spin a globe and point: he picked out faraway names like Havre, Malta, Glasgow, Zurich, and Harlem and thus the vast prairie bison habitat became the agricultural communities of Havre, Malta, Glasgow, Zurich, and Harlem.

The “Hi-Line”

While the Little Rockies of Northeastern Montana aren’t too far from Malta, they are invisible along high prairie horizon. This is where Montana (the alleged “land of mountains”) gets its nickname: “Big Sky Country.” The Hi-Line is thus the only landmark in the town of less than 2,000 people and the obvious point for mapping. But it also makes directions difficult to follow here. Did they build the town to the north or the south of the railroad? Or wait, does the railroad split Malta along east and west halves? They told me if I drove south out of town I couldn’t miss the refuge, but I’m late, and wherever it is, I’ve missed it.

A flooded field in Malta visible from the Hi-Line. All sky.

Looking back, I wonder at my foolishness. When teachers asked where I would be interning for the summer, I had absent-mindedly responded: “Some placed called Malta – it’s in Montana, I guess.” I was just going – wherever the hell it was. I said I was going because I needed the writing experience; in reality, I was going because I needed to get away from Northern Utah, from the memory of a traumatic relationship, from the dreaded summer at home after three years away at school, now single, now estranged from old friends. I needed to see myself as something else, somewhere else. I couldn’t say any of this because it wasn’t very reporter-ly of me. David Spurr, in his book, The Rhetoric of Empire, characterizes the problem of “reporting” as: “the privilege of inspecting, or examining, or looking at, by its nature excludes the journalist from the human reality constituted as the object of observation.” In journalism school they spin this differently: the privilege of inspecting provides the necessary distance from a subject to avoid bias. But the weight of the task was restricting, I didn’t want to stand apart from this new place, I wanted – no, desperately needed – to be transformed by place, and wherever Malta was, would do.

Among other things, my internship became an exercise in mapping, and not just geographically along the Hi-Line. Getting my bearings required leaning into this new world. After the botched bird refuge assignment, I was asked to profile a woman named Annie Jefferson for a series on local characters. Everyone in town knew this fiercely feminine woman with Down’s syndrome. She invited me to tag along on her paper route, and she showed me a secret that echoes the famous words of Herman Melville’s Ishmael in Moby-Dick, “It is not down on any map. True places never are.” From Annie’s perspective, I saw all the “ins” of Malta, details that weren’t on any physical map: which houses had the best garage sales, where “cottontails” liked to hide, what bank had the best free treats, who would invite us in for a chat. Annie became a constant presence in my life, regularly stopping into the newspaper and inviting me out for a walk. With Annie’s help, I began making my own map of Malta, complete with the people I enjoyed talking to and my favorite places to photograph.

Annie Jefferson getting ready for her paper route.

Soon other Malta insiders showed me their own maps. Great Plains Dinosaur Museum Paleontologist Sue Frary taught me about the remarkable fossil discoveries of the Judith River Formation that made up the soil under our feet. The most complete dromaeosaurid raptor found in North America (“Julie the Raptor”) belonged to Phillips County. Sue also showed me the “nightlife” of Malta and invited me to cut loose at the VFW Post 4067 anytime. Some locals would lament: there’s more bars than churches in Malta. One grocery store. One fast food restaurant. One movie theater. My boss had mapped the empty lots where buildings burned down and were never been rebuilt, including his own newspaper press – the printing was now outsourced to another Hi-Line town. Many of these lots had remained empty for 20-30 years as the population subtly declined from a high of 2,367 residents in 1980 to 1,997 in 2010. As long as people moved away, there wasn’t much need to rebuild what was lost.

Outsiders also wanted to show me their maps of Malta. The Denver-based nonprofit group EcoFlight took myself and a group of journalists on a bird’s eye tour of the nearby Bitter Creek Wilderness Study Area where a new land management plan was being considered and stirring controversy. Likewise, the Bozeman-based nonprofit American Prairie Reserve invited me to campout for an overnight “bioblitz” on their nearby private conservation ranch where bison had been reintroduced. The goal was to bring in scientists and interested amateurs together to inventory the biodiversity of plant and animal life on the ranch which was slowly being returned to a more natural prairie state. I stayed up late into the night with a group of giddy biology students looking for bats. They caught two. Locals were leary about what those weird conservations were doing setting up a yurt camp for more outsiders, but the experience broadened my view of what it means to co-exist, not just with each other, but with the environment.

Bird’s eye view of the Milk River heading into the Bitter Creek Wilderness Area.

Kids enjoying the discovery of a rattlesnake on the American Prairie Reserve.

These experiences with local people and organizations showed me there is more than one way to map a place – and once I connected people and animals and habitat preservation with the lines on the map, it was a lot easier to read. In this way, my journey in Malta, MT also became what writer Casey Blanton describes as “the interplay between ‘observer’ and ‘observed.’” My role as a reporter in Malta was sensitive. I wanted to bring these loving people a warm reflection of themselves while treading the line of complex conservation issues and small town agriculture-based life. At the end of three months, I emerged to head home: not totally transformed, but lighter.