Summer Is a Lie
Missoula Didn’t Get the Memo
Seventy degrees. That’s supposed to mean something. Bare feet, cold drinks, that particular laziness that only arrives when the sun actually means it. Missoula has looked me dead in the eye and handed me a fleece jacket. Fine. Moving on.
Last week I ended up at Lewis and Clark State Park, which sits in the kind of landscape that makes you feel simultaneously small and strangely okay about it. Rolling hills gone gold, scattered trees that look like they were placed there by someone with decent taste, mountains in the background doing their mountain thing. I honestly wasn’t sure what I was looking for out there. Summer, maybe. A feeling. Something that justified the drive.
I didn’t find summer. Not technically. But something happened anyway, the way things sometimes do when you stop trying to make a place be what you expected. The park just... existed, quietly and without apology, and at some point I started existing in it the same way.
Now I’m back home and the memories from that place keep surfacing at odd moments. Not dramatically. More like a detail you notice was always there. The dry grass, the way the hills caught the afternoon light, that specific stillness that only open land can hold. I find myself missing it, which I didn’t see coming.
Whatever summer is, I don’t think it’s a temperature. I think it’s something closer to attention. The park had it. I just had to slow down enough to receive it. Oh, and IT WAS 70.
March 30th, The Wheels Keep Turning
For fifteen years, March 30th has marked endings and beginnings: signed documents, solo victory laps, corrupted footage, fiery sunsets, and the day I finally told the whole Team MoBill story. Turns out this date keeps teaching the same lesson in different weather—turn around when you need to, but only because there’s something worth coming back for.
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