Rites of Passage

It took me a long time to fully appreciate the differences between a rural upbringing and an urban upbringing. These differences are not especially manifest, but they exist.

Montana has no large cities, so all its urban areas retain a bit of country influence. Some years ago the most common name for a bar in Montana towns was “STOCKMEN'S.”

Until the 1970s, law mandated that children attend school in the county where their parents paid property taxes, so all the high school students in Helmville and Ovando “boarded out,” or lived in Deer Lodge during the week and attended Powell County High. Helmville is 50 miles from Deer Lodge, and Ovando is actually closer to Missoula than to the county seat,

The high schoolers from Avon and Elliston were bussed, as were those from Gold Creek, Galen and Warm Springs areas. Some of the older students drove themselves, especially when they had football or basketball practice after classes.

The high school had nearly 500 studen`ts when the post-WWII baby boomers reached their teens. The school population was divided approximately 60 percent Deer Lodge residents and 40 percent rural.

Many of the country teens came from ranches with thousands of acres, but when they moved to Deer Lodge they were confined to a city lot or the public sidewalks. Young people are malleable, so the change wasn't onerous, although many suffered from homesickness for the first weeks of boarding out.

The differences in upbringings never provoked any problems, and the country population, which had studied in one or two-room schools, were academically equal to those from Deer Lodge.

The only overt competition between country and city was the annual Easter egg fight. Students from each culture bought or saved hundreds and hundreds of chicken eggs, and on the Saturday night before Easter they all cruised around town, throwing eggs at each others' cars.

The ritual lasted for two or three years, until the police department decided to put an end to the foolishness. They sent everyone to jail and called their respective parents. The mass arrest made Paul Harvey news the next Monday, eliminating the stigma from being hauled to jail. Paul Harvey was the king of radio news in those days. Everyone listened to Paul, so his light-hearted delivery allowed them to see humor in the incident. I suffered the disappointment of being unable to participate because I was always home on Easter weekend – too far away to be a one night delinquent.

Although not a marked phenomenon, we country raised teens often had a different approach to work and family dynamics. In those days there was so much work (and often children) in the house, the husband did almost all of the actual ranch labor.

Many of us tagged along with our fathers when we could. A rancher told me once, “Kids are handy to have around, but as soon as they get old enough to actually help, they want to get paid.”

When we were seven or eight years old, we were steering the tractors while our fathers pitched hay to the cattle. At that age, many urban children had only a faint idea of what their fathers did during the day, but we worked alongside ours, wishing we were older and stronger so we could be more like them.

We often took on tasks that were too much for us, and many jobs pushed us to our youthful limits. But we managed.

A number of times I helped my father string barbed wire along fencelines that were inaccessible to vehicles. A new roll held a quarter mile of wire and weighed 80 pounds – more than I did in those years.

We put a crowbar through the roll and each of us took an end. Then we started walking through the sagebrush, stringing the wire out. Being shorter than my father, the roll of wire always gravitated to my part of the bar, and I had to hold it chest high to keep the weight in the middle.

My father was a patient man and never got in a rush. When he saw that I was suffering, we stopped and slid the roll to the middle of the bar. He would offer to put the load at his end, but I didn't allow that. I wanted to be an equal in the job, not a child.

One of my uncles had a penchant for taking on ugly tasks, plus he did them the hard way. He never asked the impossible or gave any direct orders, but he got a world of work out of the kids who helped him. He usually paid me a warm can of beer at the end of the job. That allowed me to feel like an adult when we leaned on the back of the pickup and visited.

Good or bad, it was a rite of passage that most town teens didn't get a chance to experience.