Why Montana Is Turning Blue

By Walter Kirn

People have ideas about my state, particularly people who aren't from here. About 10 years ago in New York City, I mentioned to a new acquaintance--a young, well-educated journalist--that I was flying back that afternoon to my home in Livingston, Mont. A look of concern came over the fellow's face that was similar to the expression on Montanans' faces when they had heard I was visiting New York City. "Take care of yourself. Be careful," the fellow said. Montana, he contended, was a bastion of dangerous right-wing zealotry. Not only did the state's residents carry guns, persecute environmentalists and gather behind barbed wire in encampments like the one where the notorious Freemen engaged in an armed standoff with federal agents, but Montana's highways had no speed limits. "The place is still in the Stone Age. It's Neanderthal. Personally, I couldn't live there," the fellow said.

But maybe he could live here now. The rowdy, roughriding Montana of legend has begun to civilize itself in ways that would have seemed unimaginable only a few years ago. The process started with last November's election. Although the state went to George W. Bush in the presidential race, coloring it red on the electoral maps, it also chose its first Democratic Governor since 1984, broke the G.O.P.'s hold on the state legislature and backed a pair of progressive ballot initiatives banning toxic mining practices and legalizing medical marijuana.

The biggest changes came just this month, however. First, in a frontal assault on the state's image as a vast frontier-era saloon where a person is free to lose his life to vice as long as he doesn't take other people with him, the legislature prohibited smoking in all public places, including bars and restaurants. Only 10 other states have passed such sweeping laws, including New York, California and Massachusetts--places that rugged, traditional Montanans not only revile as effete and uninhabitable but also will seldom confess to having visited, even if they have family members in them.

This spring's second insult to freedom-loving cowboy types was graver yet, although its implications might be hard to fathom for non-Montanans. The state's drivers, as of October, will not be allowed to drink alcohol in their vehicles. Outsiders may find this development astonishing. Drinking and driving was legal in Montana? Yes. And not only legal but rather popular. In a state that measures more than 700 miles from its southeast to northwest corners and where most of those miles consist of empty highway enlivened only by blowing tumbleweeds and the occasional bloated mule-deer corpse, a cold can of beer was viewed by some as a necessary, invigorating diversion.

The outlaw Montana that I moved to 15 years ago and that my Eastern friends had apprehensions about--many of them quickly dismissed once they visited and fired a few rounds from the target pistols I own or took a pickup down to a local bar with a poker table in its back room--is setting like the evening sun. Ragged former cow towns like Bozeman are turning into suburbanized high-tech meccas for Ph.D.s who like to go rafting and snowboarding. These immigrants have brought with them an exotic culture of dining spots that feature formal wine lists, bookstores that sell titles besides the Bible, sports that don't center on the killing of animals and taverns whose air is as clean and clear as the expensive vodka in their martinis.

But the old-timers are turning bluer too--perhaps as a result of choking on the polluted air that issues from the state's assorted smelters, refineries, pulp mills, oil and gas wells and non-emission-controlled exhaust pipes. The inevitable legacy of almost everyone doing pretty much anything he wished is a huge environmental mess, from the copper mines of Butte, where the water table is thick with heavy metals, to the asbestos mines of Libby, where laborers are dying in large numbers from chronic respiratory ailments. No wonder Montanans legalized medical marijuana last fall. The stuff is said to ease the pain of battling cancer, and up in Libby at least, that pain is great.

Freedom has a price indeed and not only in times of war. Montanans know that well by now, but even as they try to lower the costs of enjoying so much liberty for so long, a lot of them--me, for one--are suffering from a nagging sense of loss. The open range was fenced in long ago, but the hell-raising atmosphere lingered on. It was a smoky, boozy atmosphere, unfit for sensitive, rigid, allergic types, but it did allow a person to breathe deeply. And to cough a lot too, of course; that was also part of it (maybe that's a reason cowboys wore red neckerchiefs). Those breaths will be easier now--in bars, especially--but perhaps our hearts won't beat as hard. o