Tuesday Night at the North Wind

This story is part of the series Greetings from Stumpville.

Few towns are well-known in Montana. The “thar be dragons” mentality is alive and well in these upper reaches. Of all the hamlets tucked throughout the state, it could be said that Stumpville is one of the best-advertised, mainly due to its support for winter sports and the rampant gentrification that has molded it into the gossamer getaway it purports to be today. Located one comfortable hour south of the Alberta border, one heavily treed hour east of Idaho, Stumpville gained notoriety after the housing crash as having Significant Developer Potential in an area where the tourist dollar remained regardless of repeated development failures. More recently, it has been featured repeatedly in both domestic and national news as harboring a well-publicized white supremacist and the community battle with those associated with same.

The town needs little introduction. You fly into neighboring Cowsmell over a length of mountains that will take your breath away. The land looks winding with rivers and farms from afar. As you approach you see the usual offal that gluts all half-cities: the strip malls, the small yet serviceable bypass, the busy gravel pits, the McMansions pimpling sterile subdivision plots, the long brown blanks of impending construction. The airport itself is miniscule. One easily arranges for a rental car here, although shuttles will bring you to the various hotels. Knowing from my youth here that walking tours of Cowsmell leave very little to be desired, I got myself an economical Accord and settled in a chain hotel. As promised, there was no sidewalk for several miles in the area, and the hotel itself was down the road from a defunct office supplies store and what used to be an assisted living facility but now purports to be a campground. On the other side was a daycare. I remembered that, during my last visit in 2014, it was a cigarette store.

I write all this with an edge of incredulity because Montana is such a curious animal. The small-town mentality that still pervades most affairs keeps large-scale growth down to an ugly crawl. Western Montana is the picturesque part. Every fly fishing photograph that has trees in it was shot somewhere in the western part of the state. The east stretches high and thin and North-Dakotaesque once you leap over the mountains. Much of Montana is bare, dry land, remnants of an ancient sea bed. Those who come to the hunting-fishing-hiking-snowboarding-skiing-drinking-flagwaving Stumpville do not have visions of gumbo mud and the brown Missouri dancing in their heads. No, the Montana they want is tree-furred and stuffed with game. The Montana they want is the Montana you can hide in.

The North Wind is an institution in Stumpville. It has been there since before prohibition — this is its hundredth year. For the last several decades, it has amassed an impressive selection of signs from now-defunct businesses. Some of them are too old for me to recognize. Others have stories I am well aware of. One belongs to the prior incarnation of the business that employs me now. One is from a barbecue restaurant I used to work at that actively lied to its customers about the source of its catfish. One is from a bar that started as my Cheers and ended up alienating most of its customer base before choking on the limited Canadian tourist dollar. One is from a sweets shop that belonged to the owner of the entire marketplace where it lived and died. Most are from the 80s. On its website, the bar gives credit to the “business climate of the town” that allowed for high turnover as residents entered and left and tried to figure out what the hell to do with themselves.

I arrived at the North Wind at that early-late hour when sizing up happens. Upon entry I nearly collided with a patient-looking man that was leading a boy out the door past the pool tables. My first thought was how it must feel to be a father in a bar, wading through a sea of unmarried, childless men, men with tufty beards, men whose khaki pants are fifteen years old, men who never get involved enough with anyone to be married or have children, and therefore never buy new pants. These men find childless women, or women who have already done the work of childbearing. These men do not remain in relationships, not yet. On Tuesday, at this hour, they play pool.

The pool crowd is laughably young. It is a Tuesday crowd, locals or drifty lifties with a smatter of tourists vying for position or poon. The poon is very minimal at nearing 10 p.m. Several cougars in Tinder attire are roaming with their dates. The remaining women are flannel-and-beanie clad, and are fixed firmly within the peripheries they are hovering on. Their demeanors range from casually interested to actively irritated as they sip the night’s special — a $2 Kokanee tall boy.

Along the other side of the bar are the men with the childless women, the new dates that fortysomethings force themselves through. Skinny pants in denim, camo print, leopard. These women wear wedge heels or stilettos. They ask for a beer if they are feigning a woodsy persona. They ask for a mixed drink if this is a new date, if the man is paying and they have not yet been intimate. If they have already been intimate, then the woman orders hard liquor if the man does, early. The higher the stilettos, the stiffer the mixed drink.

In the middle room, lapping at the empty stage, a ping pong game is in full effect. It was started by two well-meaning young girls, the daughters of the aforementioned crowd-weaving father, and abandoned after several dozen missed balls sent the girls back and forth and between the feet of everyone in the bar. As the music eased from common reggae to B-sides, the father’s gestures became more insistent and they were instantly and swarmingly replaced with ten or twelve Good Old Boys.

Good Old Boys bear a marked difference from Old Timers, chiefly in age and demeanor. An Old Timer is well into their 70s at least and peppers legitimate wisdom into whatever tirade he or she is mounting. A Good Old Boy is in his 50s to mid 60s and generally broadcasts ignorance to all and sundry, either without respite or in short, passive-aggressive bursts, depending on the type and frequency of the alcohol he is consuming. A Good Old Boy wants to have an in with his local businessmen and authority figures, but in a Mafious, rather than community-involved, sort of way. An Old Timer does not play ping pong. They are too busy being a fixture at the bar. This game, then, is loud at first, but dwindles in fifteen-minute increments. By eleven all of these men will be in bed. They are not retired yet.

A new crowd of driftylifty-locals appears, making the rounds. A young man gestures a hello at my frowning face and I shake my head at him. My beloved is out having a cigarette on the taxidermy-studio-turned-eating-porch, unaware of how sought-after I become after 10 p.m. at small-town drinkeries. Something about my inherent cynicism comes across as a challenging confidence, once desperate men get a few beers in them.

By 10:30 the attire is set: skinny jeans, puffy jackets, quippy trucker hats. The men and women dress the same. At the far end of the middle room a group of flannel girls have arrested the billiard scene and are punctuating each missed shot with a screamed anachronism. A boy with a paisley shirt and a Hitler haircut is trying to interest the crowd in a game of shuffleboard. A drunken couple have taken over the pingpong game like first-date cougars take over pool tables. A young woman with a highly stylized mullet walks by wearing a real fox fur.

You can spot a local hipster by his well groomed mustache. You can spot a local stoner by his local trucker hat, provided that the hair beneath is several days unwashed. You can tell a Tuesday night tourist by how dressed up he or she gets.

“It’s lifty night,” comments our drinking companion. He is a well-known saxophone player and keyboardist for a popular and long-running local band. “This is definitely a lifty crowd.”

A man with a flowered hoodie and military-issue glasses, such as he would be forced to wear at boot camp, sidles past us and waves his arms like a referee at the bartender, who turns her back. Behind him a puffy jacket sports above its zippered vacuole an enormous sunbleached head of curls.

The women are gathering, but they are an understated downtown bunch. A girl without eyeliner, who just got off work, a girl whose ass is buried in several layers of lycra, does not entice so much as spark recognition in this crowd. Some of the blonder ones with a little rise to their hiking boots draw a glance or two from the poonhounding Canadian peacocks, but only for a moment. Their attention is being repeatedly diverted by the cougars that have commandeered the table nearest the door. The cougars all have tight sweaters, and none of them are wearing muck boots.

It is heartening to see the shoulder slaps, the handshakes, among the crowd. Only in the well-watered parts of the state will you find people that try to overdress. Everywhere else the reigning attitude seems to approach fashion with: Don’t you work for a living? In Stumpville, where a decade of presumption has twisted the face of the town into something shining and hollow, the fingerquotes Club Scene got stronger when the local bros-and-hoes bar got a makeover. This obscenely bedazzled new animal of a town is foreign to me, so I feel most at home among the whoop and woodsmoke-scent of my fellow yokels.

Leaving and coming back it struck me as a youth how in Montana I have felt so much less pressure to buy into the bullshit. At the end of the day, however, no state, no town is immune to bullshit, and the hooting that takes over the ping pong area ends the night as a testament to that.

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