For a Moment, Happy

All too soon, it was time to head east, back to North Dakota. Oh, it was hard to leave Montana, so we made one last stop at Makoshika State Park, which is a paleontological site southeast of Glendive.

We never found the dig or any fossils, but the scenery was terrific. Transformative. We drank in the evening, making the most of Montana's midnight sun, when it stays light until almost 11 pm in June.

A mule deer doe came walking carefully up a draw, her attention ahead of her.

Her huge ears swiveled side to side as if she were apprehensive of ambush.

Oh, the light was so beautiful. I could see myself painting the scene with her just so, touching light across the grasstops and casting the foreground in deep violet shadow. Oh, to have world enough and time...for now and for the foreseeable future I'm painting birds, but someday...deer.

Suddenly she vaulted into space.


She pronked high, looking for danger.

Her springy tendons and slender, resilient legs carried her high up into the air, over and over.




She wasn't so different from my daughter, whose lightness I envy as I grow closer to the earth.


The grace in these children comes alive when they are allowed to gaze out over miles of wilderness. It turns into something electric, something beautiful, infused with the spirit of the landscape.


I couldn't stop trying to keep some of it for the coming winter. And now I'm glad I did.

There is a thought scrabbling around in my head that's hard to catch and contain, so it's going to come out in pieces. It's about happiness, that most elusive of human emotions. If emotions were birds, happiness might be a rail, skulking through the dark reeds of dissatisfaction.

You can take trips with your family, and think back on them, and think, "Yeah, that was a great trip. I was really happy out there in Montana."

And what I'm thinking is: Why does that feeling have to be remembered as just part of a great trip, isolated in occasional memories, floating out there on its own? Why not look at that trip as part of a continuum of good things, an integral part of your great life, and think of it when you step back to take stock, as we so often do?

Because this is your life, this moment in Montana. And these are the people you love most.


And you set up a camera on a tripod to record this moment, this evidence that you were happy for a while.


Believe it. You are.

These are the gifts that wilderness can give to us. Small wonder we turn to it again and again.