Welcome.

This is a bit old, from February of 2022, but it is a piece I like and I feel it sets the stage for where I am writing from. It was one of my original Letters that was mailed to subscribers, and it was indeed typed on an old typewriter I borrowed from a friend in Billings. Typographical errors abounded, which I felt added to the charm, but one reader responded with a full list of the errors asking, had I not caught these?

I write now in my neighbor’s grandfather’s cabin. It was built in 1915 when he first came to the canyon. Settlers came largely from Finland and Norway. First there was the George family, Nancy Morris, and the MacKays.

But first were the Apsáalooke. That’s what they call themselves, though white settlers aborted it to Absaroka and eventually changed it all together to Crow Indians. The Apsáalooke are a migratory people. They came to this place from the East, first Ohio, then Winnipeg and Manitoba. They have called this home since the 16th century, though they share it with many creatures, as I do now. Their last chief, Plenty-Coups, made an agreement with the US government to cede the land but allow the people to live on a portion of it. The reservation is two hours from my house but its peaks I see every day. It is asked by the elders that non-natives do not visit or use the Pryor Mountains—that some places remain sacred.

I am blessed to live on a river that flows powerfully from the Beartooth Mountains. It was seven years ago that James and I first drove through this village. It had been recommended that we try the bar in town; now I wonder was it recommended for its quality (poor) or its proximity (the only bar in a 20 mile radius). “It’s notorious,” advised our recommender, so we went. A back road spit us out into a valley and with my first glance to the right, behold, the Beartooth Mountains. Magnificent.

“I am going to look at the river,” I told James while we waited for food. I crossed the road and walked to the creek bank, jumping onto a rock and teetering before I caught balance. The day was idyllic, water flowing sweetly on a calm August afternoon, the whole town, if you could call it that, sitting along its banks. I counted five houses, plus the bar and post office. The river’s cottonwoods lined the creek and it was all densely populated with shrubbery, trees, plants, flowers, and brush. The sky was big, true, but here was a pocket. Bound on one side by a valley on another by mountains, and on the edges were the prairie ridges that kept the limits clear. The sound of the river was consuming. I would like to live here, I thought, and bizarrely, three years later, we bought a house not 500 yards from where I had stood.

Roscoe is a town of 15, our baby the first in this village in 42 years. When we told the neighbors, Dean’s eyes filled with tears. He was born here 75 years ago, a descendant of one of the original settler families. He’s worked and traveled all over but twenty years ago he and Peggy moved back into the house he was born.

The aforementioned Mrs. Morris is responsible for our town’s name as it was originally called Morris. The postmaster, however, was getting confused with the nearby town of Norris and mail was becoming unreliable. Upon asking one of the settlements to change their name, Mrs. Morris readily offered the moniker of her trusty steed. And thus we are called Roscoe since 1905 (settled first in 1894, it took some time to get the name business square).

When we arrived there were six couples, two spinsters, and two bachelors that comprised the town. There is Brandy, the post lady, who comes to work from another area. The post office is open from 9am to 1pm Monday through Saturday and services the greater canyon area. As you read, we have a bar, which since the pandemic is only open weekends from May to September.

We also have the pottery, which Janet (wife of Guy) and Julie (spinster) opened in Julie’s family’s barn in 1971. Their goal was to stay open for 50 years and having completed that two summers ago, they have since retired. When I ask Janet if she’s worried at all about Julie, she says “Yes,” and I see her go past our house every day to visit her long time business partner.

Janet was 22 when she moved here to start the pottery with Julie. She had just married Guy, a tall man from Great Falls, and convinced him to move to Roscoe. They moved into Keith’s grandfather’s cabin, which Keith recently sold to someone in Bozeman for $15,000, though they have yet to pick it up. “I cashed the check, though,” says Keith, eyes ever-shining between sips of Canadian Club.

It took Janet and Guy seven years to save enough to buy the cabin they now live in, though it was a real piece at the time. Down the road from their far end of town (where you also find bachelors Keith and Tom) are Dean and Peggy, and across the river is our house. Behind Dean and Peggy are Jim and Ruth, and across from them are Michelle and Darla. Then there’s Glen and Patti, Norma, and Julie at the other far end. 12 of our residents are in their 70s, two are in the 50s, and James and I are our 40s and 30s, respectively.

It’s a cold day in February as I write this, sitting in this one room cabin. I ask Peggy if I can stay there a night or two, alone.

The cabin is solidly built and well maintained. Inside there is a new paneling that lines the chinked exterior and cottonwood beams that support the roof. James helps me move out the two mountain bikes and the Adirondack chairs that are stored inside for winter, we take the glass patio table off the bed and place it alongside. We shovel a path from the garage to the cabin (150 feet) for an extension cord and I plug it into a space heater, thought its use is tenuous and I am nervous to turn it on. Instead, I put on double socks, a giant wool sweater, and get into my sleeping bag before I write.

There is a lot of Norwegian troll art in the cabin, their shared Norse blood a point of pride. But I take these down or turn them around and put flowers, a rock, a candle, and some cork on the windowsill. I brought six blue pens (four ball point, two ink) and two mechanical pencils, two notebooks, and James’ old laptop so I won’t be distracted by my own computer’s archive of memories.

My plan is to write about Roscoe and pregnancy though ones comes easily and the other doesn’t. I am not in a rush, I have hours more this evening and a sun rise and a morning ahead of me, but putting these feelings, these emotions, these physical manifestations into words evades me.

So here I sit, slightly cold in a very old cabin alone, but not really, my child inside me moves so intently, as if a heartbeat, a pulse, a reminder. Just as they are ready to breathe outside air, eager to spread their arms wide, poised to express themselves fully — so am I.

February 2022