What Missoula Looks Like in January

The tower comes down off the mountain in October, more or less on schedule, and by the time I’m back in Missoula it’s already getting dark at five. That’s the first thing that gets me every year, not the traffic or the noise, just how early the light goes. Up at the lookout the days shrink too, but you don’t notice it the same way because there’s nothing scheduled against it. In town the dark shows up in the middle of whatever you’re doing, and you have to keep doing it anyway.

I rent a room from a guy named Carl who’s had the same house near the university for something like thirty years and doesn’t ask many questions, which suits me fine. Whatever pays is the honest answer to what I do down here. Some winters it’s a warehouse job unloading trucks at five in the morning, some winters it’s construction cleanup, one winter it was three months answering phones for a company that sold used forklift parts, which taught me more about hydraulics than I expected to learn from a headset. None of it is what I’d call a career. It’s a bridge between one fire season and the next, and I’ve stopped apologizing to myself for that.

The strangest part isn’t the work, it’s the noise. Not loud noise, just constant noise, other people’s noise, coming through the walls and the sidewalk and the radio in Carl’s kitchen that’s always on low. After five months where the loudest thing most days was wind moving through the lodgepoles, a grocery store on a Saturday afternoon can feel like standing too close to a fire. I catch myself standing in the cereal aisle a beat too long, not lost, just recalibrating, letting my ears adjust the way your eyes do coming out of a dark room.

Winter here means real weather too, not the fire season kind I track for a living but the kind that closes roads and makes the whole valley go quiet under an inversion, that gray lid that settles over Missoula for weeks at a stretch and doesn’t lift till a chinook comes through and blows it all out in a day. People complain about the inversion, the way it traps the woodsmoke and the exhaust down at valley floor, and I get it, but there’s something almost familiar about looking up at a sky the color of a dryer sheet, some echo of the smoke I watch for all summer, except this smoke is just us, all of us down here at once, heating our houses and driving to work. When the snow finally does come down and settle over the valley, it quiets and cleanses the place for a day or two the way it’s supposed to, before the plows and the exhaust start working it gray again.

I don’t call it lonely, the winter life, though people assume the tower is the lonely half and town is where I get filled back up. It’s more that they’re different shapes of the same year. Up top I’m alone but rarely idle, every hour has a task attached, weather to log, a radio to answer. Down here I’m surrounded by people and often just as idle, standing in a break room waiting for a shift to start, and that kind of idle takes some relearning every October. By March I’ve got the rhythm of it back, the bus schedule memorized, the regulars at the laundromat recognized on sight. And then the snow starts going soft on the south slopes and I start checking the Forest Service board for my rehire date, and the whole valley starts feeling a little bit like a waiting room again.