In late November, 1985, after 30 years of marriage and life in a small Texas town, my father left my mother and all the friends and family he had in the world.  In a move that bewildered all who knew him, he struck out alone for the northern reaches of Montana.  One must have known him then to understand how wildly radical this move was for him.

My father was not an adventurous man.  He was a man of roots and routine.  Like many poor children of the Depression – he and his two brothers slept every night of their boyhood on cots in the screened porch of the tiny house his parents rented in Palestine, Texas, because so many extended family had taken refuge in their two bedroom, one bath house – he sought security in work, family and community.  He never ventured beyond east Texas until his service in the Air Force, and later for a few days each summer when we took camping trips to Colorado.

That he could deracinate himself from all that he knew was incomprehensible.  By means I still don’t know, he was hired by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to manage the health clinic at the Rocky Boy’s Agency near Box Elder, Montana, a Chippewa Cree reservation about 30 miles south of our border with Canada.  As we say here in Texas, if it wasn’t exactly nowhere, you could see nowhere from there.

Bear Paw Mountains and plains on the Rocky Boy reservation

This man who for three decades shaved every morning before donning a tie and button-down shirt, and had never seen more than a few inches of rare short-lived Texas snow, drove to the Montana plains in a 2-wheel drive Buick (a blizzard in northern Wyoming left him stranded in his car for more than a day), adopted clothing worthy of Jim Bridger, and grew a thick dark beard.

I didn’t speak to my father for almost two years after he left my mother.  That was the only time in his life that I knew him to behave dishonorably.  Mom was devastated; her sons were angry.  Though we had all long since left home and begun making lives of our own, my brothers and I were ripped from the home and family that still rooted us.

Indian boys at the Rocky Boy’s Agency

But I still loved my father.  So in May, 1987, I went to see him, to try to understand why he had left us, and to learn about his new life.  From our drive under the indescribable concave Montana sky to the reservation from the Great Falls airport, through a week at the agency, and the meandering three-day road trip back to Texas (where he had business for a few days), I learned more about my father than I had in all my life before that time.

I never learned why he left my mother and the life he worked so hard to build – and I never completely forgave him for it – but I came to understand why he sought a new life in a strange world, and why he came to love a tribe and people incomprehensibly different from any he had known before, a love and admiration he kept to the day he died.

Annual dance ceremony at the Rocky Boy’s Agency

I have lost every palpable thing from that time – photos, journal, trinkets picked up along the way – gone with the old house in hurricane Ike in 2008.  All that is left are memories as faded as an old photograph and fading still more with every year: walking the silent, green Bear Paw mountains, unchanged for ages; the lonesome winds blowing through the lonely village of Box Elder; the vast expanse of the Montana plains; a haunting visit to the Little Bighorn battlefield; throwing snowballs at each other at the top of Raton Pass after a spring snowstorm.

Highway leading east of the reservation, the start of our road trip

I don’t think of these things often any more.  They came back to me today when I began reading again a book my father gave me on that trip: Son of the Morning Star, by Evan S. Connell.  I was lead back to that book by way of an aimless succession of books about American Indians.  Memories of my father came back with it.

So tonight I toast my father with the best whisky I have on hand (though I also never understood his fondness for cheap blended Scotch) and with a sadness that caught me by surprise.  We lost each other once, then met again.  Through a long meandering drive through the high plains of Montana and the western mountains, we discovered that we were different men than we had ever known.  And we learned again that we loved each other.