Visit brings renewed perspective
Well you can all take a deep breath and rest easy; my Southern family is no longer driving the roads in the Flathead Valley. Actually that statement isn't totally fair, as it was my Montana-born girlfriend who's car got stuck and not my Arkansas-raised father in his tank-like SUV. I'll hand it to him, though. I saw plenty of people who's license plates started with "7" that were doing a far worse job during last weeks snows.
Having family in for the holidays is a time-honored tradition, and this wasn't the first time the Strickland clan has come to me. Three years ago they flew halfway around the world to spend Christmas with me in New Zealand where I was studying (surfing). That Christmas was spent taking a long hike through the fern covered forests of the South Island in the Austral Summer. Swimming to celebrate the birth of Christ is something we can't even do in the South.
But this trip was to Montana, which I am now pleased to call home. What has been incredible to me over the years I've been here is how quickly things once spectacular can become trivial. I still marvel each time I come over the hill at St. Ignatious and see the Mission Mountains on a clear day, but I don't take the time to notice the snow line at the bottom of the Swans when there's heavy inversion. To my mother, raised on the Florida coast, the sight of trees dusted with white in the distance was not only novel, it was beautiful.
My 10-year-old brother saw more snow fall in one afternoon than he'd previously seen in his whole life and got to sled, his second-favorite pastime, and throw things at me and my sisters, his first.
While my youngest sister was doubled over in hysterics about being stuck in a powder well at Big Mountain last week, I was grumbling about having to take off my skis and help drag her out of the hip-deep sink. I was not amused. She couldn't stop laughing and I couldn't figure out why.
This weekend I skied through a pocket that was chest-deep and I couldn't stop laughing. Click.
No matter how much we love this place — and I think you would be hard pressed to find many who love it more than me — we all start to overlook so many of the things that brought us here in the first place. Fall foliage is beautiful, right up until you have to rake it.
Having family here for Christmas wasn't just a chance to hang out with my siblings and parents who I only see once a year, it was a chance to remember some of the reasons I chose to move so far away from home in the first place.
—Alex Strickland