For a time, they lived in Laos, where my father would curl his body into the shape of an egg and float down the Nam Khan River, a tributary of the Mekong. My parents found each other in New Delhi in the 1970s, as likely a place as any for a woman from South Dakota to fall in love with an Englishman, and for a decade they hopscotched around Asia, hippies searching for meaning. You can’t choose where you come from, the geographical contours that shape your personality, and this is as true for a river as it is for a person. I had come to Missoula for college, an idealistic 19-year-old with unruly hair, jewelry and Birkenstocks, fresh off a gap year teaching English in Laos and backpacking around Southeast Asia. We hiked to a collapsed cabin, whose age and history we could not determine, and I took their photograph in the snow with my old Nikon. I drove out of town and up the valley to a trailhead with two college friends. It was more than half a lifetime ago now that I first encountered Rattlesnake Creek. On those nights I would stand on the porch, the dog at my feet, and both of us would listen. But in the middle of the night, quiet enough to take your breath, there it was: a swishing, hushing murmur of a story being told, a promise of continuity.

Sometimes, most thrilling of all, I could just make out the faint whisper of Rattlesnake Creek through the quivering limbs of cottonwood and ponderosa and Norway maple.Īs the crow flies, our house is a quarter mile from the creek, far enough for the hammering of humanity to drown its sound during the daytime. I’d rub my eyes and watch whitetail deer amble the sidewalks, and once, I heard a great horned owl. Overhead, Orion was mid-stride, railing against the darkness. The traffic had evaporated and the shunting locomotives in the railyard at the foot of the valley slumbered like hulking beasts. Once outside, it was the stillness I noticed first.

Early on the rapid filling of that bladder would wake her in the night and rouse me from our creaking bed to carry her outside to paint another yellow dot on our snow-scaped front yard.

Anthony Pollner distinguished professor at the University of Montana School of Journalism.Īll photographs by Lauren Grabelle, an award-winning photographer based in Bigfork, Montana.Ī week before Christmas, my wife and I adopted a two-month-old blue heeler, 12 pounds of face-licking, tail-wagging, sock-eating fur and energy with a bladder the size of a walnut. Jacob Baynham is a National Magazine Award-winning writer and a former T.

No Words Alone by Autumn Dawn