ARTICLE: Time to Bale

Well, I made it back to the east coast in one piece. Montana to DC in four days of driving, whew! I thought to honor my time in the Rocky Mountains, I'd post my swansong for the Philipsburg Mail (August 2013).

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Time to bale

by Reecy Pontiff

Well, I did it. Yes, this southern city girl made it through an entire year in Montana, including a winter, and most of the summer (which is like a New Orleans winter, but colder).

And to cap it off, I became a part of that revered annual ranching ritual: the hay harvest.

My rig during the hay harvest, the hay rake.

When I mentioned my new employment to my Montana friends, many regaled me with stories of driving tractors shortly after they took their first steps, but were encouraging nonetheless.

When I told my metropolitan friends what I was doing with my summer vacation, there were mixed reactions. My favorite came from one of my most fabulous of city-slicker friends, a cabaret singer named Chris who exclaimed, “Reecy, you're a farmer now?!”

I suppose for a few weeks there, I was.

My job was to operate the hay rake. For you fellow city mice out there, a hay rake is a long “V” shaped contraption on wheels pulled behind a tractor. The beams that form the “V” have a number of light-weight metal wheels covered in tines that spin on the ground, combing flattened rows of mowed hay together into big, fluffy piles. This allows the hay to dry faster – if you have wet hay in a bale it will rot – and the baling machine to scoop it up more efficiently. It was fun to watch the baler roll by, gobbling up the rows of hay like Pacman and then periodically pooping out a big round bale like a gigantic mutant rabbit pellet. 

Life from the tractor.

The training I received was startlingly brief, considering that I'd never even ridden on a tractor before, and how lawsuit-happy America has become. My only strict instructions were not to hit any bales (“The bales will win.”) and to keep the tires of the rake out of the ditches. Each field is hemmed in by irrigation ditches, which given my instructions meant the outer ring of hay was the most stressful to rake. It was hard not to feel at least a little paranoid, as the job entailed constantly looking over my shoulder to make sure the tires and rake wheels were all where they belonged and functioning properly.

On my first day I repeatedly hit a particularly lumpy patch of ground and my tiny, open cab John Deere pitched uneasily beneath me every time I moved across it. I asked my co-hayer, who like everyone else in Granite County had been doing this since birth, how difficult it might be to actually roll a tractor. “More talent than you've got,” he replied amicably, which put me at my ease–though I think he underestimated my talent.

The baler at work. See? GIANT RABBIT PELLETS!

As for my boss, he spoke almost reverently of the reason we'd gathered together. “That's some good hay,” he'd say with bright eyes. And he wasn't exaggerating—I keep hearing around town that this is the most hay a lot of folks have ever seen in these fields, and a number of times out on the ranch we had issues with the baler jamming up because there was so much.

Generally I found operating the rake to be meditative. I created a temporary labyrinth from the ground, shaping tidy lanes across the valley between four-foot, olive-drab barricades of hay that would soon be transformed into a flat, camel-colored landscape dotted with bales.

Haying was one of the best seasonal job I've ever had. I soon shall take my leave of the Rocky Mountain wildfires and return to moister altitudes--but might I return to Montana for the next haying season? I just might at that.

#end#

ARTICLE: These Boots Were Made for BBQ

From the Philipsburg Mail, July 2013

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by Reecy Pontiff

“The nice thing about barbecue is that there are no fingerprints, so you can't trace anything to anywhere,” laughed rotund and jolly BBQ impresario John Bagorio as he performed emergency chicken skin surgery on his entry with a toothpick.

Bagorio traveled with his three man team, “Da Fat Boyz BBQ”, all the way from Portland, Oregon in a converted 1989 ambulance to compete in the first annual Boots and BBQ Cookoff at the Drummond Rodeo last weekend.

It was a last-minute decision for the team to head up; Bagorio's regular teammate was unavailable to come, but “it showed up on the schedule and I'd never been to Montana, so I said, if I can get help, I'll come.”

Though Montana is a first for them, Bagorio's team participates in cookoffs near and far.

It's tricky to guess what judges will like in any given region as tastes vary from place to place, according to Bagorio. The day before the rodeo Da Fat Boyz sold samples to try and get a feel for the Montana palate.

“We travel all over the country and each region has a different flavor,” he said, “What I'm hoping is they like a little bit of heat and a little bit of sweet. If they don't, we're in trouble.”

It's not cheap participating in these events and Da Fat Boyz regularly look at $1000 in expenses between entry fees, travel and supplies. Some of their costs are recouped from food sales, but the big money is in the cash prizes – $6500 in all this time – handed out by the Pacific Northwest Barbecue Association (PNWBA), the group who with the help of Drummond mayor Gail Leeper sanctioned the Drummond cookoff.

The PNWBA's judging is done double-blind – each entry is put in a box with a barcode on it and assigned a random number. This is done “so your friends can't help you and your enemies can't screw you,” said BBQ master Dale Groetsema, who came out from Vancouver, Washington to participate.

Participants are also given a deadline to turn in their entries.

“If you're early you just stand around and wait,” Groetsema said, “if you're late you're disqualified.”

The competition included four kinds of meat – ribs, beef brisket, pork and chicken – judged for appearance, texture and taste. The judges are all certified by the PNWBA and overseen by a “table captain”, a sort of referee for the judges, according to head judge Angie Quaale.

“This is a first year event and kind of out of the way, so it's a good place to get your feet wet,” said Quaale, and with only eight teams “it's a great place to start with a small competition.”

This year the “Mayor's Choice” award, along with overall second place, went to Philipsburg's Upnsmokin' BBQ.

Competitions are how Upnsmokin' originally got their start, but to cover costs they had to start catering. Now with the restaurant, they've had to make time to get back to their roots according to owner Brett Schreyer.

“You have to back it up,” Schreyer said, “Some barbecue joints, as soon as they open up a restaurant they stop [competing] and they lose credibility with their customers.”

“So far it's been great. There's some top-notch cooks from the Pacific Northwest here,” he continued, “the contest is small but the competition is high.”

#end#

ARTICLE: Merrill K Riddick - Pioneering Eccentricity

I was terrible about documenting the 10 months I spent on an off-grid homestead in Montana. Fortunately I spent most of that time scribbling for the local rag, The Philipsburg Mail, which covers all of Granite County, MT (population 3000). I'll be posting some of my articles here.

From the Philipsburg Mail, May 2013:

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by Reecy Pontiff

Granite County's airport, Riddick Field, bears the name of a quixotic legend, a man who barnstormed with Charles Lindberg, ran three unsuccessful presidential campaigns and pioneered environmentalism in America. 

“He wasn't going to be the president... but everybody tolerated him. He had respect,” said Dean Neitz, who worked at the Philipsburg Mail when Merrill K. Riddick made his home here after World War II.

Neitz ran the printing press late into the night, sometimes until two in the morning, and Riddick would stop by to chew his ear off.

“When I'd be working at night Merrill would come in, and he'd talk and he'd talk and he'd talk. I was trying to run the press... He was kind of a nuisance. ” Neitz said.

But “he was certainly very bright... and a very accomplished pilot,” Neitz said.

And Riddick surely was. A graduate in the first class of the Army Air Force Aeronautics School in California, Riddick flew reconnaissance missions in Europe during WWI and acted as a flight instructor in both World Wars. He later barnstormed in an air circus with Charles A. Lindbergh and was also one of America's first airmail pilots, according to the University of Montana's Riddick archives.

Neitz recalls Riddick saying “he landed many times on the White House lawn with the mail,” during one of their late-night sessions.

Though born in New York state, Riddick's family moved to Montana when he was 11 years old. After his adventures through the wild blue yonder, Riddick returned to Montana to prospect for gold, according to his New York Times obituary.

While mining around the Granite County area, Riddick made local history by staking a claim on the corner of the bank parking lot in downtown Philipsburg. He drove a 4x4 post into the ground and placed the claim in an old tobacco can hanging from it, according to Mike Kahoe, who was chairman of the committee that rededicated Philipsburg Airport in Riddick's name.

“I don't know if you can actually stake claims on private property,” Kahoe said, “but I think he was trying to make a point.”

“The banker didn't like that very well because [Riddick] was actually thinking about drilling,” said Steve Immenschuh, who was just a boy in the 1960s and 70s when his mother ran the Philipsburg hotel where Riddick took up residence, “He had a drill rig just outside of town here on another project... he was serious!”

Riddick was quite a character around town, a short, round widower with thick glasses. He forayed into politics after the death of his wife, making a bid for governor of Montana in 1968 and U.S. senator in 1972. Failing miserably on both counts Riddick decided to raise his sites to the highest office in the nation – he ran presidential campaigns in 1976, 1980 and 1984, according to his New York Times obituary.

Immenschuh was a teenager when Riddick asked him to paint a campaign sign for his first election, which was hung in the window of Riddick's office on Broadway.

After Riddick lost, “it was stored in the hotel basement... a year later he decided he was going to run for another political office and we dig out the sign and I repaint it with a different party and a different office,” Immenschuh said, “The 'Merrill Riddick' stayed and everything else changed.”

Riddick was also famous for refusing to accept campaign donations – with the exception of a silver dollar from young Immenschuh.

“He was kind of a unique guy. I went down to his office and said, 'I know you're not taking any campaign contributions, but have a silver dollar,'” Immenschuh said, “He thought that was pretty nice. He said, 'That's not really a campaign contribution, that's something else,' so he took it.”

Fortunately Riddick had other projects to spend that silver dollar on. He also published a periodical on resource management called the “Journal of Applied Human Ecology” completely out of his own pocket – and that of his local financiers.

“My dad owned the service station... and I can remember him when I was a kid coming up and asking my dad for a little bit of money” to publish the journal, Kahoe said.

As the name of his journal suggested, the environment was a huge issue for Riddick. During his late-night sessions at the printing press with Neitz, “he talked about environmentalists. Nobody had heard the terminology [back then]. He was ahead of his time,” Nietz said.

To that end, Riddick ran for president under a political party of his own creation, the grandiosely named Magneto-hydrodynamics-Puritan Epic-Prohibition Party.

“He explained to me [his political party] had to do with producing electricity through burning coal and producing steam to turn the turbines,” Immenschuh said, “Which was really neat because I'd never heard of it before.”

And so it came that Philipsburg Airport was renamed Riddick Field on the town's bicentennial in 1976. Due to poor health Riddick had already relocated to Maryland to live with his sister, but he returned to Granite County with his family for the ceremony on that sunny day in May. “Several hundred persons flocked to the field” to listen to the local high school bands and watch the air circus, according to the May 6, 1976 issue of the Philipsburg Mail. Riddick even returned to the skies once more, taking a ride in an open cockpit biplane during the celebrations.

Merrill K. Riddick died in 1988, but here in Granite County his legend will live on forever.

#end#

ARTICLE: The City Girl's Guide to Winter in Montana

My, my, blogosphere, it has been a while since last we talked. 

I did it. One whole year in Montana. I'll actually be leaving on my first anniversary. There's so much I could say, but instead I'll post this piece I wrote not long after my arrival here (in fact the first article I wrote for the Philipsburg Mail back in October 2012, which I've been scribbling for ever since). It's actually hilarious to go back and read my blog posts from Cherrymont Farm in PA (where I only spent a month) after having braved life on an off-grid homestead for a Montana-style winter.

More to come later. Enjoy!

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The City Girl's Guide to Winter in Montana

By Reecy Pontiff

With the first dustings of snow covering the mountains here in Montana, Philipsburg is abuzz with a completely foreign concept to me: winter.

I'm a dyed-in-the-wool city girl – and to top it off, a Southerner. I relocated to Philipsburg about two months ago, and while I grew up with the occasional snow during my childhood in Virginia, I haven't spent a whole winter north of Louisiana in almost a decade. The nighttime temperatures here have already dropped well below what we see during the coldest months in New Orleans – when it hits 60 degrees we're shivering in our parkas on the Gulf Coast. My beau, a Rocky Mountain native, and I have already argued over whether popcorn snow is “real” snow or not a number of times – of course it is, I say – and it's not even “real” winter yet. I've avoided winter for a very long time, so long that it's become a mythical beast in my head. This year it's time to face my fear.

TIMBER! Felling my first tree.

But ultimately, this is all an adventure to me, and living on the side of a mountain a few miles outside of town I'm experiencing firsthand what must be accomplished before a thick blanket of snow creates extra challenges for outdoor projects. Most of this is all new to a city girl like me. Before I moved here, I thought sawyers were just relatives of Tom, but today I felled my first tree with a chainsaw. Earlier this month I helped thresh the kale seeds and harvest onions and potatoes from the garden. Soon we'll be cutting the rest of the firewood and canning up stews. I'll be going on my first hunt, though thankfully we won't be relying on my skills alone for this year's meat.

When I tell Philipsburgers where I'm from, many say I'm really in for it come winter time. Fortunately far more folks say that winter is their favorite season here in Montana and that I'm in for a treat.

So while the cold and the dark are daunting, I am looking forward to fun in the snow. I grew up skiing on the icy, groomed slopes of the Appalachians and can't wait to carve into the powder of the Pintlers.

Here on the mountain we'll be gearing up for my first snowshoeing expedition and I've been promised an ice luge to sled down once the snow is deep enough.

We'll build wooden sculptures to burn in a bonfire for the winter solstice, and I'm hoping that at least once or twice I can commute to work by snowmobile – that'll boggle some minds when I tell my friends down in New Orleans.

Perhaps most of all I am thoroughly charmed by the romantic vision of snuggling up with my mountain man and the dogs and a steaming mug of chocolate by the blazing wood stove, reading aloud from a favorite book as the fluffy snow piles up outside the window, dancing the limbs of the Lodgepoles in the gulch. It's a writer's dream, really.

Yes, if my thin Cajun blood can stay pumping in the cold and my vagabond soul can withstand the cabin fever, my first Montana winter shall be a wonderland indeed.

#end#