I passed a billboard with a depressed woman looking into the shadows:

Ask me how the gun went off

Well ok. That's weird. I was intrigued. How did the gun go off? This billboard was not offering any answers to this Raymond Chandleresque question. By the time I got much closer, I could see the small text in the corner: Sponsored by the Montana Meth Project. ....Oh. I see.

Bozeman is a wildly gentrified town. There are wine bars next to wine bars across the street from wine bars. Talking to locals, the area is well known as among the best in the world for snow sports and hunting. Retired or near-retired lawyers and doctors are moving here in droves, building massive properties for the outdoors proximity.

A well-established mood that I have encountered over and over again, through central Oregon, Idaho, and now here in Montana is a sharp distaste for Californians... Californians coming with their money, buying up land, putting up fences, building secluded houses. The locals feel taken advantage of by rich Californians. It's always Californians. They are the bogeymen in the hills here. People love to look in the distance and talk about how something or other has been spoiled by Californians.

It is exactly how I would look into the distance and talk about how Seattle has been spoiled by Amazon tech bros.

I was eating lunch and a group noticed the patches and buttons on my vest. An old woman in the group asked if I was a boy scout.

I went into a local bookstore and found a book of Robert Frost's poetry. Inside was a poem with 2 lines that struck me then and stuck with me for the rest of the trip. He writes about how he would like to just wonder off in to the woods, with no direction or purpose but to get away. And should anyone come to find him,

They would not find me changed from him they knew
Only more sure of all I thought was true