This week marks the launch of Rants, Raves and Revelations, a new semi-regular series where you get to contribute your most creative complaints, love notes, confessions or retellings of recent notable events. What asinine behavior in downtown Missoula makes your blood boil? Describe your favorite piece of graffiti or your obsession with a particular breakfast burrito. Give us the details on the funny interaction you had with a stranger at the Oxford at 3 a.m. Let us know what lingo Missoulians always say that irks you most. We’re here for it. Any submissions we choose to publish will be done so anonymously, so feel free to let loose. But be kind. We’ll publish our favorites. Send your rants, raves and revelations to [email protected].
Awkwardly yours
To the person who drives the car with the personalized license plate AWKWRD around Missoula: Every time we see your car, my daughter says, “Look, mom, it’s your soul mate!”
And truly, I feel that you are. Wish we could meet someday and I could shake your hand, but of course, I know that would probably be…. You know.
Sweet gestures
To the woman picking out white wine at Pattee Creek market at the same time as me this week:
You said something funny about needing to buy chilled alcohol to survive the heat wave. Then I saw that the only other thing you were buying were multiple packages of Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies.
“Wow, a perfect night,” I said. “Wine and one million cookies!”
Then you explained that the cookies were for your dad, who is in assisted living. You give the cookies to the nurses, along with a big batch of handwritten notes. So he gets his favorite cookie and note from you each night after dinner.
I just want to say: I hope we all have someone like you to care for us when we get older. Cheers to you. I wish I had been quick-thinking enough to buy that bottle for you.
Windshield swipers
There is nothing the Missoula driver loves more than directing traffic with his hands. Sometimes, when I am in my car with my left turn signal on, yielding to oncoming traffic as law and custom demand, some theoretically courteous person will stop and wave me in front of them. If I am on my bicycle at a stop sign, it is only a matter of time before someone stops and motions me across. My wife was once called a bitch after hesitating in this situation.
“When I say go, you go!” the driver shouted.
Often, when I am walking, drivers wave me in front of them while continuing to roll forward. Twice under these circumstances I have been not hit, exactly, but bumped with the front portion of the car. It was similar to being nudged aside by a horse: less injury than insult, a reminder of the brute authority of mass.
These experiences and the impatience with which many drivers wave me ahead have made me think that courtesy is not their primary motivation. Particularly since the pandemic, when everyone seemed to get 10 percent more sociopathic in their cars, I have started to think that some drivers view the world beyond their windshield as the contents of another screen, swiping left at things they want to go away. I have become irrationally angry at these people. This is America: we have a whole system of rules and signage for who goes when. Those who would refuse their right of way for the opportunity to supervise others deserve to wait, then scowl, then rail inside their cage.
Brews, interrupted
A few Wednesday evenings ago, a little after dinner, I arrived to meet some friends for a drink at Gild. We got our beers and hovered near the sidewalk tables on Higgins, waiting for one to open up. But nobody seemed in a hurry to leave. It was, after all, a beautiful summer night.
We chatted idly for a few minutes (whom would Kamala choose? Pritzker? Kelly?) before one of us noticed a strange wind creeping toward us along Beartracks Bridge. In the pilsner glow of sunset, the dust whipping off the river bank was a surreally beautiful sight. This, I guess, is what they call the calm before the storm. Within seconds the dust was all around us, lashing our eyes. Everyone skittered inside, where the Gild staff barricaded the doors, all of us watching in awe as the scene out the window took on an apocalyptic cast.
No sooner had we taken shelter than the lights began to flicker dramatically, before shutting off altogether. Huddled in the dark, in a room full of strangers, with a storm raging outside, we began to feel like we’d entered an Agatha Christie story. Scanning the crowd, we selected our fellow characters — the hipster with the frightened dog, the couple playing cribbage by lamplight, the man in the felted hat… Who was the murderer? And who would be the first to die? It was all fun and games until we learned that Gild would close early due to the power outage. No more beer.
By then, the wind and rain had begun to dissipate, and we ventured out to Higgins to assess the aftermath. There were downed tree limbs everywhere, dead streetlights. And just up the block, in front of the Roxy, a cluster of moviegoers clogged the sidewalk, having been prematurely evicted from the 8 p.m. showing of Twister.
Where the sidewalk ends
There’s a game we play in the Franklin Park neighborhood and it really sucks. The way it works is, you begin walking on a sidewalk in the semi-unlikely event that one should appear. Then you follow that sidewalk until it suddenly and inexplicably ends, forcing you to trample on someone’s flowers as you are belched back into the street.
Why must it be this way? How did sidewalks get to be such a precious and unpredictable commodity in this neighborhood? Sometimes I think it would be better if there were no sidewalks at all here, since at least it would eliminate the guesswork and stop us from ever getting our hopes up.
Instead we’re left to wonder, will the sidewalk beneath my feet continue for the rest of the block? Maybe, if I’m very lucky, will it even carry me through the next block? Or will it disappear abruptly, with no warning or reason, until all us Franklinites have accepted that in this life we can trust neither man nor beast nor pavement?
Cold comfort
Hey there, driver. I’m the person walking across the street in our charming Missoula downtown. I see that the matter of my one precious human life is merely an inconvenience to you by the way you’re turning your car into the crosswalk while I’m still walking in it. It looks pretty comfy inside your enclosed, climate-controlled vehicle while I’m out here exposed to all the elements, so I don’t know what your rush is. I’m sure you think of yourself as an upstanding citizen who won’t accidentally goose the gas pedal and mow me down, but I can’t feel assured of that, so instead I’m giving you the stink-eye the entire time that you creep forward, looking as if that 20 feet you just gained is vitally important to your trip. I hope you hit every red light.
Meow report
Shoutout to Mushu the Air Quali-Kitty and Hester the Smoke Purrcaster (whose humans are air quality specialists Kerri Mueller and Sarah Coefield). The air quality report emails from Missoula Public Health officials are grim for the foreseeable future, but adding some cute kitty pictures softens the blow of yet another day of scorching temperatures and hazardous air quality. Climate change and wildfire season are scary, but at least we have cats.
