The Beauty of Bounty

I have to admit, I came to eastern Montana expecting high desert - a place where a jackrabbit has to carry a lunch.  Little beyond dust and sagebrush ... and oil. What a surprise!  Frankly, I don't know that I've ever seen land more bountiful in crops and natural resources. 

It's stunning as we ride through the surrounding countryside to behold the colors. I did not imagine such beauty. Yellows, tans, and rich golds of the wheat and barley are mixed in with the greens of sugar beets, sunflowers, soy beans, and corn, often a far as the eye can see.  And you can see a long way out here.  While I certainly miss the beautiful Bitterroot, Sapphire and Mission Mountain ranges, this is obviously the type of terrain that made Montana famous as the Big Sky Country. 

 

Field of Sunflowers

 The sunflowers have become mostly heads, leaving little room for the yellow petals now and it's clear the bounty is remarkable.  It will be a rich harvest, indeed. And next is an endless wheat field, the stalks so dense that the sun reflects as if it were shining on water.

 

Where the land becomes too rugged for crops, you find still more colors: scrub oak, cottonwood, shrubs, blue sage and the pink scoria (red lava rock, best known in it's role as the commonly used landscaping pebbles at Taco Bell).  Interestingly, especially for we western Montanans, you'll not find pine trees anywhere unless they were planted in a yard for landscaping or in a row as a wind break.

Earlier this month, we took a ride through Theodore Roosevelt Park - a perfect example...

 

Back to the bounty of the land.  Beyond the crops that are laboriously tended and harvested there are the natural resources - oil, natural gas, propane, scoria and coal - the reasons the population has positively exploded in this part of the world.   These are the riches that have drawn thousands of folks like us who are blessed to have found a way to make a living. 

But I can't wondering about the locals - the folks who have lived on this land for generations.  How can they not resent the devasating impact on the region's infrastructure and it's comfortable "small town-ness"?

I've been told that Williston was once a very nice, sleepy small community.  Frankly, that's nearly impossible to picture now. It is an industrial mecca which goes full speed 24 hours per day. On my first trip into Williston, I counted the oncoming semi's when the light turned green. Thirty-one in a row!  The town is in constant motion, host to the haulers of oil, gravel, sand, water, scoria, natural gas, propane, wheat, beets, the huge drilling convoys moving from one site to another, and the thousands of support personnel, also in motion in their own pickup trucks making it all happen. You can imagine the impact on the streets and surrounding highways (requiring extreme caution by motorcyclists).  The growth is also taking a tremendous toll on the support systems that make a community viable: water, food, police protection, schools, sanitation, and most especially housing.  There are "man-camps" everywhere, from the one in the Wal-Mart parking lot, to a row of trailers in a locals' front yards, to the huge FEMA trailer mazes that house upwards of 2,000 men.  I found it nothing short of overwhelming.

So you can imagine how fortunate we feel to be in Savage, roughly 60 miles southwest of Williston.  It's the best of small town America - a still sleepy small community - right on the edge of the boom so there's work aplenty, neighbors are family and all you need do is ask.

We are rich in the bounty that surrounds us, whether it be of the earth or of the heart.