Wolf Point, Montana, population 2,578, is a city on the Fort Peck Reservation near the far northeastern border with South Dakota. This is as much as I knew when I stepped off the train into the humid afternoon haze still hanging over the rippling, endless prairie.
I ended up here because of a sort of dare to myself. Traveling the country by rail, you get intimately but ephemerally acquainted with the little towns that dot the track. Lately I had become possessed by a whim: On one of these Amtrak peregrinations, I needed to get off the train and see a town, any one, in full. When a trip from Idaho home to Pennsylvania gave me my chance, I went about it with due ritual. I printed out the list of Empire Builder stops. I poised a thumbtack and closed my eyes. I brought it down with the force of destiny. After two failed attempts in which the force of destiny went into the table, I had my answer: I was stopping in Wolf Point.
Wolf Point’s downtown is a few blocks of low storefronts, some boarded up, many of whose brick facades had once been charming and could be again. Sticky and exhausted, I lugged my bags to the Sherman Inn, past a bronze statue of a mounted rider, and went to find a beer.
Dad’s Bar and Grill is like many bars of its type: dark, covered in paneling, the walls dotted with the paraphernalia of inside jokes and contests, the bar lined with people who know each other, and have known each other, and whose children will probably continue to know each other. When a stranger shows up at this kind of bar, she is not hard to spot.
I joined the line of people leaning on the polished wood, drinking cold, cheap beers and passing a fly swatter around. They talked in a desultory way about who was having plumbing problems, who was having fencing problems. Eventually, a kindly looking older gentleman asked if I wanted a turn with the fly swatter. It must have been the humidity, or the 1 a.m. boarding call in Spokane; I poised the swatter like I had poised my thumbtack and brought it down with totally unnecessary force and a resounding thwack.
Any constraint dissolved into hoots and shouts, offers of marriage, offers of anger management classes, and the characteristic Wolf Point laugh: broad, self-delighted, always a little at your expense, never against you.
That poor fly was probably some sort of good luck token because after our fatal encounter, I found it very difficult to buy my own drink in Wolf Point. People would come up and silently place a token at your elbow, then disappear back into their own conversations with a self-contained generosity. Once, desperate to at least reciprocate with thanks, I repeated my gratitude for an already retreating construction worker’s kindness. He was having a good night, but he wasn’t too drunk to set me straight: Ain’t kind, he said, just respectable.
With the ice broken, the more normal eddy of conversation resumed. When I came back from the restroom, my friend with the fly swatter gently scolded me for leaving my wallet on the bar. It’s nice to have people looking out for you.
As I walked back to the inn, a few people under the influence of something had gathered in the little park out front. I gave them a wide berth and kept a hand on the weapon in my purse. Most people, whatever shenanigans they’re getting up to or whatever demons are riding them, aren’t trying to bother you, but when it’s your bad luck to meet the one who is, you want to be as ready as you can be. Either way, a big orange crescent was swinging in the sky, and the air felt soft and sweet. I was happy.
The next day, I met up with a friendly, pretty woman from the bar who had offered to show me around the nursing home she ran. Nursing homes are often depressing places. This was not. Partially it was the laughter in the air, that sense again of pervasive inside jokes. There is probably something comfortable about being cared for by people known to you, and to each other, for the whole of their lives. It drives out the formaldehyde-scented institutional air. Even more comforting was the pride my guide exuded, her obvious sense that keeping the old in your community safe and clean and happy is a job worth doing well, and worth showing to visitors. At the end of a long hallway, we came to a wall of windows, looking out over the horizon of waving grass and cottonwoods. The staff wheels the chair-bound and bedridden residents here all year long so they can watch the seasons change across their home.
People take care of each other in Wolf Point, one of these staffers told me. She was the kind of knows-everything-knows-everyone woman who is the lifeblood of formal and informal civic institutions; she reminded me of my great aunts. Had I seen the teepees outside of town? Was I able to get up to the lake? There were pheasants and all kinds of game at the lake, she said; they have their places like we have ours, and we know them all.
On the drive back to the farm where she lives with her husband and father-in-law, I chatted with my guide, who had rapidly become my hostess, about our respective families, about fathers and sons and their clashes over mislaid tools. She pointed out the tracts of land owned by this or that cousin. Wolf Point is as full of cousins as it is of bars.
When her husband finished his work, they took me to dinner at a little roadhouse out on the serene prairie highway. He’s a big, blunt, self-sufficient man, like the husbands of many gentle and sociable wives. We talked about how I’d gotten into writing. Mostly, I said, it was that even if there wasn’t any money, there weren’t any bosses either. That’s how he felt about farming. He had $200 in his pocket until the next influx of cash, but he couldn’t imagine working for someone else. It took some planning and looking ahead, he said, and when he looked around him, he didn’t know who was worse at that, farmers or cowboys. I told them that I was on my way home. I had so much family, such deep roots back east that it was stupid to live elsewhere. My family’s been fighting terrorism since 1492, he said, and threw back his head and guffawed. He paid the check before I realized it had come.
On the drive back to town, with Buck Owens on the radio and a red sunset that filled the whole of the enormous, exhilarating sky, they talked about Wolf Point in better days. There had been a time when multiple tractor dealerships lined the main street. One by one they closed, a canary in a coal mine. Wolf Point is not the kind of genteel ski town where the aspirationally rural flee to escape the problems of cities. Addiction, with all its related disintegrations, is a ravager. Old scars and old problems shape new conflicts, new grievances. And in a town full of cousins, troubles cannot be made someone else’s problem. The lines of breakdown and conflict, and help, are drawn through families. Your whole approach to life can turn on which way this fact strikes you.
After lingering over bacon and eggs and listening to tables of old men in cowboy hats enjoy their social hour, it was almost time to catch the Empire Builder again. I wandered around the Wolf Point Museum, which is a sort of warehouse of the town’s material history: dresses from 1915, pieces of furniture, hotel signs, wanted posters, guns, self-published books on local history, a purse beaded by Mrs. Comes Last, age 100. Then over to Waterhole #1 for a last time-killing beer. It’s a small corner bar, square and shabby, with the stools bolted safely to the floor and an old woman playing the slot machines, her cheerful face a mass of wrinkles. I had the dim impression that there were factions, occasional disputes, reputations, and disreputations, associated with the town’s different bars. But I was an outsider and liked them all. I rolled dice for a free drink and listened to the bartender talk about her lost car keys, her daughter, and her life, which did not sound easy but whose griefs were punctuated with laughter and relayed in the matter-of-fact tones of minor gossip rather than invitation to sympathy. As I left to catch my train, she tossed me a T-shirt and congratulated me on my visit to the roughest bar in Wolf Point, Montana.
As the train pulled away, I found I still had one unused free drink token. I have kept it. I will be back next July for the Wild Horse Stampede, for the prairie moon, and for the people who welcomed me, without qualifications, with so much kindness, into their town. This time, I’m buying everyone’s beer.
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Clare Coffey is a writer from Pennsylvania.
