Montana is a place so weightily marked by its physicality that the lore surrounding the place has kicked into overdrive, as if to match the enormity of the mountains. Some days, those very mountains seem to look at me, to speak to me. We’re in on something, they say. We contain secrets. You don’t know them yet.
I was living in Chicago when it dawned on me that I would likely move back to Montana. I was in the midst of completing a cushy yet painstaking graduate degree, for which I wrote a collection of essays about the American West and Montana in particular. I wanted to know the secrets of the mountains. I wanted to know them, understand them, grasp them. Everyone I went to school with seemed to narrowly interpret the American West as a place of whiteness, of maleness, of machismo and of inequity. They would call these composite of the “myth” of the American West but still, for some reason, cling to them as if it were true.
Before moving, I had known Montana as ephemera: my parents bought a tract of land here when I was ten years old, and we would spend summers and winters here. Back then, the valley was unknown to most of the country, certainly the world. We were interlopers. Now, after nearly twenty years and a cross-country move back to Montana, I am still an interloper, but one of many.
But in all my years spent in rural Montana as the child of an Indian woman and an American man, I perceived the West as something else entirely. Montana was the place where I felt the most free and unencumbered from the pressures and expectations of modern society. In Chicago, I dreamed about this freedom: each time I boarded the L train, stashed pepper spray in my pocket, steered my car around the curves of Lakeshore Drive, or woke up to the sound of a siren, I held a parallel dream in my mind: of quiet, of blue, of dry heat, of solace, of sun. Of space, simply, for my soul to expand.
And so when I moved back, it was partly in order to test the truth of this dream, to see if I could firmly plant myself in Montana and still experience it as a place of freedom.
Much of the U.S.A. — the world, even — shares an emotional attraction to Montana, whether they have lived here or not. Montana as representative of a collective national yearning proliferates in the popularity of shows like Yellowstone, but also in the popularity of ‘country’ in general (Sabrina Carpenter, Role Model, Stagecoach, the Austin/Nashville Bachelorette Industry). A few months ago, travel writer Waverly Middleton identified “yeehaw travel (aka cowboy core)” as one of the biggest travel trends of 2025.
“Montana’s basically the main character here,” she wrote, below an image of a place I recognized: it was the river that I grew up on, where my dad taught me and my brother how to fish.
When I moved back to Montana from Chicago, I was aghast at how much the place had changed, but more shocked at how the place seemed to exist on two tracks of existence: the real and imagined. There was Montana, the real and rural place, that I have known since I was a child. And then there was Montana™, the destination, the product — a facsimile of the real thing. Though very different in feeling and substance, from a distance, the two were nearly indistinguishable from one another.
Montana™ is a place where you can don cowboy boots and wide-brimmed hat, bounce around on horses, spot a bison or a grizzly and marvel at the big, big sky. It’s a place where you can raft a river and belt your heart out to folk and bluegrass unironically, where the days are long and the rivers are longer.
Of course, this Montana — the one that boutique travel companies and Hollywood sell — isn’t so much a fantasy as it is actually just a vacation: a vacuum-packed experience you can pay for, if you would like.
When I moved back, it became clear to me that I would spend the rest of my life wading through the real and the imagined in tandem: that the manufactured Montana and the Montana I knew from youth are braided together, part of the same thing. It’s all very reminiscent of Baudrillard’s idea of the hyper-real, which he describes as “no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real.”
Here are my signs: I wear a wide-brimmed hat in the summer months — the UV index is higher here than the national average — and don my cowboy boots out to dinner or a show. I often find myself in wide-open spaces, and always remind myself of Zadie Smith’s instructions on attunement when I’m in the presence of folk/bluegrass heads who proliferate in this region. I joined a bear hunt last week, and many days I eat bison, or bear, or venison that my boyfriend Morgan, shot with his gun or with his bow.
But for the most part, for me, living in Montana means something else. It means bicycling to the grocery store and running into someone I know while choosing lettuce; it looks like biking to a friend’s birthday party, like driving 30 minutes on a Monday night and arriving in remote woods, where I can scream at the top of my lungs and no one can hear me. It means floating on the river, sometimes, if I’m lucky enough to know someone with a boat, or just driving to the river with our dog, where we sit and splash and cool off. Living in Montana means hearing the rodeo blare into my bedroom many summer nights, when the windows are open and I hope to catch a breeze. It means hearing the train groan in the early mornings as it hauls materials and other fuel across the country. It means that the chicken that I eat comes from a farm 20 minutes down the road, and that I’ve met the woman — my age — who raised those chickens from the time they were little yellow blobs trundling across the grass. It means that my weekend plans no longer have to involve meeting for drinks or dinner, as they so often did in a past life, and that I can easily leave my phone at home when I pop out for any of the above aforementioned activities, because I don’t need the map — my town is so small — and generally, I’m not worried about my safety.
So in the end, I did find the freedom I sought. But the bigger gift that Montana gave me was a gift of time. In Montana, my life began to slow down. Activities of daily life — grocery shopping, seeing a friend, getting outside, getting anywhere at all — became a little easier. Not frictionless, but less arduous, less rushed. Here, there’s less of a collective, ambient rush to get there, wherever “there” is. And the mountains, stolid in the distance, are a constant reminder of the enormity and generosity of time.
This is to say, I slowed down. Not just physically, but emotionally, too. It turns out that the secret of the mountains that I searched for was not a secret at all. It’s etched across every rock and outcropping here. It is time, and it is the land is reminding us, all the time, whether or not we are listening: I have been here for a very long time. And you have not: your life is fleeting, temporary, a piece of dust. Can’t you take a breath, the rocks seem to say, and remember that you are finite? ✦˚*
Surya, I so enjoyed reading this article, your writing style is beautiful. What a gift you have with writing❣️ Montana is definitely on my list to come visit.
-Carolyn Keenan (Morgan’s favorite Aunt)
I love your hand on the bear’s paw. Please send your bear essay when time.💕