WILD HORSE PLAINS MONTANA

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Get one of us in a real city, such as Denver or Seattle, and it's like Attila the Hun at the Bolshoi. It's not that we're crude or lacking in the social graces; our priorities are just a little different. Life in the fast lane is difcult on Forest Service roads, and fashion doesn't count for much in a town where getting an elk brings more status than getting a new Mercedes. It's a lifestyle that some people like, some don't like and some dream about. Some of those dreamers come to Paradise, and a few even end up staying. They don't come here to find good jobs, because there aren't any. They don't come here to homestead, because no one is going to sodbust their way to financial independence on a 40-acre stump farm so steep and rocky that it's only fit for raising wood ticks and rattlesnakes. The reason people here endure grunt labor and low wages is as elusive and as difficult to explain as the sound of one hand clapping. But as that infamous poet, Jerry Garcia, once put it:

"Once in a while you get shown the light/In the strangest of places if you look at it right." On a crisp fall day up in the mountains, coming out with a full load of firewood, the left rear tire goes flat. Nothing for it but to swear and sweat, unload the wood and dig through the empty beer cans and other assorted trash for the jack and lug wrench. Then a miracle happens! Amongst all the junk is a full can of beer that somehow survived the last cookout on the riverbank.

After receiving such a Holy Gift, all activity ceases except for popping the ring and lowering the tailgate to use as a bench. Suddenly, everything stops, and the world is revealed in its timeless clarity. All around, the larch are turning yellow and the mountaintops are dusted with early snow. The smell of pine rides through the air on the sound of the wind, and the afternoon sunlight filters through the dark conifers as if for the first time. Away in the distance and far below, barely visible between two steep ridges, sits the little town of Paradise beside the green ribbon of the river. Even from this far away, it looks like a very humane place to live. All too soon the beer is finished, and it's time to get on with changing the tire and reloading the firewood, but somehow that brief glimpse of Paradise makes it all worth it.

Rube Wrightsman—philosopher, guitarist, amateur astronomer and master mead

maker—writes an award-winning weekly column, "Hey, Rube, "for The Clark Fork Valley Press from his cabin in the woods. Once, when asked how he plans to support himself in his old age, Rube replied, "I'll get a shillelagh. "

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