One Big Small Town

 

This isn't T'ings, but its a similar Montana bar...

If you wander around Montana, particularly in the small towns, and you happen across someone you know, someone will likely paraphrase the following slogan. Montana is just one small town with very long roads. You would think that with a population of a million people, it isn’t so much a small town anymore. Seven hundred miles from east to west, four hundred from north to south, the fourth largest state in the United States, Montana is anything but small. And yet…

This past week, me and David took off from work early and hit the road in the big Ford. There was an open mic in the town where he grew up, Jefferson City. It was about 120 miles, two hours over Elk Park Pass and the Boulder Hill and a bunch of other oddly named geologic features and funky small towns. Along the way, we passed three vehicles that I knew and I lifted a hand in greeting. One of the local plumbers, the ex-wife of one of our co-workers, a casual acquaintance from the brewery, all of them having some sort of business on a Thursday in Butte or Anaconda or somewhere east on I-90. We stopped into the small grocery and ran into one of our old neighbors at the cash register, bought some gum drops and roast beef sandwiches, maybe booked a gig with the owner of a local Anaconda bar who was manning the next cash register, then continued on. A friend from Brewery Trivia back in 2019 was gassing up at the Town Pump as we went by and waved at me through the window. Miles went by and we rolled into Jefferson City having gone nearly an hour without seeing anyone we knew. 

Now, Jefferson City is a city the way Montana is a town. It is more like a small cluster of run down buildings reclining beside the interstate, letting the decades sweep by like the semis and Canadians that fly by every minute. The population is maybe 300, maybe. David grew up here, a few miles into the hills and pointed out all the main attractions. We were a little early and he wanted to walk me up past the church and point out a couple things, but he recognized a couple folks at the bar and before you could count three Coors Lights, we had found someone we knew. 

One of the few remaining functional buildings, as with any small Montana town, is the local watering hole, T’ings Tavern, the name itself a bastardization of Things Happen. It’s the kind of bar that any tourist will just keep cruising past. The standard bottles and cans, soft baked pretzels and quick-heated bar fare. The pool table was pushed into the corner and a potluck was spread across the top. They were selling $5 bumper stickers that said “Go F*** yourself Kevin” behind the bar. The floor was OSB, the walls in the bathroom were bare sheetrock. 

Being David’s hometown, I was expecting to see folks he knew. Friends of his mom and dad, old co-workers, various musicians from high school asking about bands that had been defunct for a decade. Then along comes his childhood babysitter, swaying like a flag in the breeze at 7pm on a Thursday. We discovered that she was related to some real cow rustlers who had been run out of Philipsburg a few years ago. The bartender/owner flagged us down and after transferring us a few more Coors Lights, we learned that her weird Uncle Keith was my next door neighbor. David’s dad’s co-worker was a former resident of town back in the 80’s before we were even specks of dust and hadn’t been back since. Yet we still knew a handful of the same people. 

David and I broke away from the strange homecoming and got up on stage to play a few songs. You couldn’t hear a darn thing but it didn’t matter. The whole place was rocking. Half the town was packed in the sweat stained, Nascar adorned shotgun bar. Immediately following us was a kid with his guitar. I say kid, though he was probably only a few years younger than me. After his set of Tyler Childers and Colter Wall covers, I got to talking to him. Turns out that his grandpa lives up the street from me in Pburg and I had just borrowed his chimney brush the week before. His uncle was a boat pilot at one of the local state parks where my fiance did school training. His wife was from Alaska and knew some guys I worked with up there in Denali in 2011.

The connections just kept coming with each new person we chatted with. Old roommates of David’s parents, old bosses, old archery buddies’ cousins and coworkers. Unrelated people who happened to just know other people through music. I expected David to have some of these connections, but not that many. And it was heartwarming for me to have direct connections with these people that I had never met before. I didn’t have a childhood in Montana, but I am marrying into a family in which all four grandparents were homesteaders in different corners of the state. Anywhere we go from Scobey to Billings, Kalispell to Lake Hauser, we run into a cousin or old coworker, an elementary school bestie or hardware store clerk from the late nineties. 

Sometimes I get worked up about how Montana is growing so fast and might be losing its small town character. There are so many new people and so much traffic. But then I have a random Thursday night at T’ings and I am reminded that I am now another member of the big family in the small town with long roads.