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Just Passed: Remembering a Montana Son. Memorial Day Meditation.

With all due respect to CM Russell & his art. He portrays how I see my dad. Pops was there. Today is Memorial Day, 2024 and a very, very special one for our family.

Yesterday, the phone rang for my youngest brother about nine in the morning. He and his wife had been visiting her family in eastern Montana. They were hundreds of miles from Butte, where Dad had just passed. He was nearly 93.

When we spoke, Joel and his wife were already beating it back to Helena where Pop’s remains would arrive later in the day. Rodger was in Missoula driving a public transportation bus, a retired Fireman. Kameron and her husband were on I-90 having just left Bozeman, on their way to visit Pops. They missed him by an hour. I was at my desk answering email on the south Oregon coast.

Joel gathered us in WhatsApp to let us know he’d got ‘the call’ from the S.W Montana Veterans Home. The facility is new and the staff, excellent. He reported that the nurse said Pops was up early, unusually perky. He’d come out of his room to breakfast with some of his pals. Afterward, he returned to his room and went down for a snooze, his usual routine. When staff checked a few minutes later, Cow Puncher was gone. No drama, 100% just like him.

Cow Puncher was the term he suggested to the Adjutant for the civilian occupation he was returning to after serving in the Korean War. The record of his service there illuminates how he lived the remainder of his life.

Growing up, he’d shown us the Purple Heart. I could feel the shrapnel floating behind his knee. But we didn’t know the other stuff until the folks at SWMVH and Joel started digging.

Within a couple of hours of his passing, shortly after Kam had arrived, a military detail comprised of Veteran volunteers in street clothes showed up. They covered him in a flag, played taps and escorted him to Helena. (Wow!)

Dad will be recognized in a full military ceremony at Fort Harrison a few days hence. I’ll be there. I hope to meet some others who might share about his service. Maybe its time we knew more. Pops certainly didn’t tell us much at all.

For instance, I’d like to know more about what it was like for him being a ‘Field Wireman’. As a Staff Sergeant, he lead a small crew out to repair and protect miles of phone lines that traversed hostile country between the rear and the front. Evidently it was a job he excelled at. Joel says one of the things he learned from another veteran was that the North Koreans and Chinese would tap the lines.

After tapping these wires, which were just laying on the ground, Dad’s enemies would then set up defenses to protect the taps. This, of course, implies combat between small forces of a very intimate, sneaky nature. It was violent, often hand to hand, and worse. One of the defenses the North used were attack dogs.

And so we learned why Dad always cringed around dogs.

Dads Dad was born on the ranch outside of Great Falls in 1905. Great Grand settled the place in 1873. That’s three years before Custer got into it with the Natives in Bighorn County. What interests my siblings in various ways is the legacy of self-sufficient independence. For us it’s a good-nature thing we learned by observing our parents. Not the kind of thing that can be taught. In a nutshell? Get along happily, take care of yourself and help anyone else you can. Never complain. Always be grateful.

One of the things Pops showed us was politeness. He showed us how to get to know our rancher neighbors and visit with goodies, not just in hunting season.

“If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” Pops said.

He taught us baseball and guns. He taught us how to not get lost in the woods. What to do if you did. “This where to cross the creek, Squirt.” And where to definitely not. This stuff was important then. Because he turned us loose to go out there. It was not like it is now, if your cell phone has signal. Back then, if you got hurt or ‘turned around’? It was going to be a while before people even notice you’re gone. “So tell somebody first, okay?” I can hear him saying. “Leave your mom a note!” He never worried unless she did. And she did that a lot. I can’t count the times getting home late (by an hour or a couple of days) when I had ‘explaining to do.’ Writing those notes was instruction: ‘Say what you do. Do what you say.’ The other top axiom was ‘Always be early. See if you can help.”

As a teenager, hunting and fishing was all about respecting land owners. Who respected us back. My pals and I were never turned down after being polite. At least I don’t recall being denied access. Instead we got permission and words about how to fuss gates that were stubborn or transit rules (If they’re open? leave ’em open. Close ’em if they’re closed.) More than a few times we carried posts and did other things because we were ‘going that way.’ Often we were told where to go to find the elk they’d just seen. Or Grouse. Or where on the river to fish. And camp. Which haystack to climb at 4:00 to catch white tails at 5:30.

It’s a stark contrast. It really seems that for most who have arrived in Montana (since Robert Redford ruined the state) it’s a hyper-in-your-face defiance of community tradition evidenced by ‘No Trespassing’ signs. They live a vitriolic us-verses-them bigotry. The northern Rockies have become a toxic geography wrapped up in the American Redoubt movement and Montana Freemen.

Why is the icky stuff happening in Montana important on Memorial Day, and how does it pertain to my father’s death? Charlie Russell painted it. Welcome home, Cow Puncher. Some things are forever.