Respect, on and off the road

I asked a friend of mine if he had ever known a man named Bat O’Callahan who lived in Trout Creek years ago and was married to my good friend Jessie O’Callahan. Whether that marriage ended because Bat left town or died I never did know, but since Jessie had remembered him so fondly I thought he must have been a good man. 

“Yeah, I remember him,” my friend said, “He used to drive home from the bar, pull off the highway onto Swamp Creek Road, turn off his car right there in the middle of the intersection and go to sleep. He was a pain in the butt.”

This was not the fond memory I was hoping to hear from someone who had known a man who to me, although a known rascal, had a kind of positive aura around him in my mind. 

If anything can be said to describe the people of the county that I live in it is that we are individualistic. 

Many of our eccentricities are traffic and travel related. For a period of time in the 1970s and 80s there was a group that refused to get drivers licenses because it infringed upon their “constitutional right to travel”. 

One fellow who I believe had never, ever had a drivers license drove his tractor into Trout Creek every day. He had no other vehicle. That would have been not much of a problem if there hadn’t been a quarter mile long bridge over the Clark Fork River between his home and town. The speed limit on the bridge was 70 mph. The top speed of the tractor was maybe 22 mph. 

The Sheriff was frustrated because people were complaining, but the farmer kept pointing out that agricultural equipment was allowed to use the highways of Montana, including bridges. The Sheriff countered that the law actually read “while engaged in farming operations.” No problem there. The farmer then towed a baler behind his tractor, summer—and winter. 

Trout Creek has grown a lot in the 48 years I’ve lived here and like many people I miss the old days and the interesting ways that people got around and where they left their rigs when they got out of them. So, when I parked my outfit sort of off a side street to do a short errand I was surprised when I returned to it by a lady asking me if I was all right. 

“Sure,” I said. 

“You left your truck in the road,” she said. 

“Well, it’s Trout Creek, isn’t it,” I said, as if that should explain anything. 

“This is a street, there are laws,” said she. 

“Laws?” I said in the way of someone who was surprised to hear about it. 

“Well, respect, anyway.” 

“You have a good point there,” I conceded, and got in my truck and drove away to Missoula. 

And that encounter bothered me for the rest of the day. I had to admit to myself that I had been a bit like Bat O’Callahan and not thought about the inconvenience I might have caused someone, Namely the anonymous lady. 

When I got to Missoula, I found that there had been a heck of a storm the preceding night. Trees were down and many traffic lights were without power. On one stretch traffic was backed up miles and when I finally reached the intersection, I was pleased to find that Montana drivers had figured out what to do. Everybody was treating the intersection as a four-way stop, stopping to give the cross-traffic an opportunity to enter the intersection and then taking their turn to go across themselves. It was slow, but it worked well. 

“Respect”, I thought. 

Here, despite a political climate that rivals any other time for rudeness, insults, threats, and other unpleasantries, people were behaving like, well, people. Which leads me to believe that left to themselves people will behave towards each other in a respectful way. They need no encouragement to be polite. They do, however, need encouragement to be rude, inconsiderate, and hateful, and we are getting plenty of that from rival political parties and their candidates. Maybe that’s always been there, but for my part I’m going to try to remember to show a bit more respect to others.

Jim Elliott served sixteen years in the Montana Legislature as a state representative and state senator. He lives on his ranch in Trout Creek.