atci90d/app/templates/stops/bozeman.html

<p>I passed a billboard with a depressed woman looking into the shadows:</p>
<blockquote>Ask me how the gun went off</blockquote>
<p>Well ok. That's weird. I was intrigued. How <em>did</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>It is <strong>exactly</strong> how I would look into the distance and talk about how Seattle has been
spoiled by Amazon tech bros.</p>
</br>
<p>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.</p>
</br>
<p>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,
</p>
<blockquote><em>They would not find me changed from him they knew
<br>Only more sure of all I thought was true</em></blockquote>