Yeah, Missoula. My favorite town. Why? Missoula is the finest outdoor town in the lower 48. You can hang in a coffee shop and five minutes later be in the Lolo National Forest. Just to the southwest lies the largest wilderness complex in the lower 48, the Selway-Bitterroot/Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. Directly north looms the Rattlesnake Wilderness, the Mission Mountains, and incomparable Flathead Lake. To the northeast you’ll encounter the southern tip of the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem, known by most as the Glacier National Park/Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex. Directly to the east rise the Sapphire Mountains, Rock Creek, and the Welcome Creek Wilderness. Two blue ribbon trout streams flow through town, the Bitterroot and the Clark Fork. Water is everywhere unlike the Rockies south of the Wind Rivers. Yellowstone National Park is a bite-sized four hours away. All of this public land serves as a barrier to unchecked development.

For the most part the people are kind, and lack the jaded sarcastic edge of metropolis suburbs (where everyone got everything they always wanted for Christmas). I keep waiting for that cynicism, that snark in various conversations (because I myself have it) but it never comes. It’s a shock, but a welcome one. I’ve made great friends in Missoula on my trips, and this year was no exception.

I’ve been in and out of Missoula for the past couple of months, and honestly I hate to leave. Part of the reason for the trip besides wildlife photography and work was to research relocation possibilities. I had it narrowed it down to Seattle, Portland, Missoula, or Chicago. Now it’s down to Missoula and Chicago.

The problem is I really don’t want to leave. Oh, I’ve tried. I got as far as Rock Creek and became nauseous. Pretty crazy right? Why would a 6’3 195 pound scary-looking dude such as myself act so afraid?

Sprawl.

It scares the hell out of me. If you’ve read any of my work, you’ll know how often the topic of sprawl comes up. The contrast between the sprawl in Montana and Chicagoland is stark. In Chicago, if a fifteen year old strip mall starts to look slightly worn, they just build another one four miles down the road. The net effect of this is miles of avenue entirely devoted to dead malls (see Route 64 from St. Charles to Chicago). In Montana, what little sprawl exists is kept in check by millions of acres of public land such as national parks and forests. Northern Illinois has none of that. So farmland gets bought up for new strip malls and housing tracts, and it’s just going to go on and on. I feel like an ant there, burdened by an urge to chew off a hunk of leaf and scurry back to the colony. The absolute greed on display by city and county officials in contributing to this reckless sprawl is embarrassing.

Further adding to this sense of crowding (and some would say isolation, which is an interesting contradiction) in this mega-sprawl-complex is that it takes five hours to reach a national forest from anywhere in Chicagoland. And yet these national forests are mere shells of the public land west of the Mississippi–usually flat, cut-over tree farms with high road densities and a cabin on every lake. Some might say, “why not just go out to the farms? That’s nice country”. Nope. That’s not country. That’s agricultural industry, for miles on end, sprayed hard with various toxic pesticides. “Country” is where the road sometimes ends, where biodiversity increases.

Only one artist has expressed this fear of sprawl in a way that flattens me: Jason Lytle of Grandaddy. He’s such a talent that he creates a devastating effect with a single line and a simple melody:

“The dead malls are all over town”.

The dead malls are all over town. Zombies aren’t fiction. We’re becoming them, structure by structure.

“Fare Thee Not Well Mutineer”:

This would be such an easy decision if not for family and friends. So as I try to drive back, mile by mile I feel that sprawl squeezing me–that existence where all we think about is our paths amongst the strip malls somewhere between breakfast and dinner, where a world outside of our own material creation doesn’t seem like it exists at all.

That’s the most terrifying thing of all to me. You’ll see this expressed in my story “Street Lamps and Carbaryl” and my most recent piece, “Hydra“.

Another reason I’m considering postponing relocation is the workload. I have several huge writing projects stuffed into my laptop, and a few surprises in terms of medium. I’ll be able to post more information deeper into 2014, but needless to say things are amazing right now.

So, Missoula. It seems to have a gravitational beam like the Death Star, except unlike Han Solo and Chewbacca, I want the damn thing to take me.

Sunset in Missoula, December 10th, 2013, my mom’s birthday. This photo is dedicated to her.