Our Coyotes Never Sounded So Loud

By Walter Kirn

I have neighbors in Livingston, Mont., who have geared up for every potential Armageddon since the Cuban missile crisis. From the cold war to the Gulf War to Y2K (how quaint it seems now, that odd abbreviation), a certain vocal minority hereabouts has been hoarding ammunition, boiling water and stockpiling gold coins in hopes of riding out some vast calamity that will devastate the unprepared while leaving savvy country folk untouched. That was the vision, at least, until last month, when the attacks on New York City and Washington proved to all but the most stubborn of mountain dwellers that that's not the way it's going to be.

The disaster could not have happened farther away. That was the first rebuke to the survivalists. International terrorists, it seems, just aren't interested in Montana, and guns are useless when the enemy is 2,000 miles out of firing range. They're doubly useless when you can't get parts for them. Like so much of the isolated, rural West, Montana is inordinately dependent on UPS and FedEx for supplies, but suddenly such services were grounded. The lack of fresh seafood was a minor annoyance; the stalled shipments of car parts and medicines were serious, as was the disappearance of the tourists who keep Rocky Mountain towns afloat in U.S. currency. An economy based on the trading of beef jerky can't hold up for long. For those few planeless days, our remote Montana valley felt uncomfortably like an actual wilderness. The howling coyotes never sounded so loud.

Worse, our TVs continued to operate, revealing just how psychologically entwined Montanans are with distant urban centers. Though the fact might embarrass some rugged individualists, the Western outback is satellite-TV country; normal transmissions can't make it between the mountains. There's a dish on every cabin, every ranch house. And since the service that many other people and I use features network affiliates from New York City but not a single station from the West, the bad news from Manhattan was local news. Electronics trumped geography. To feel separate from the horror was impossible, and there were times I walked out of my house after long sessions of compulsive viewing and was startled that Livingston was not on fire too.

From a strict mathematical perspective, the toll of the attacks was easy to translate into local terms. There are only about 7,000 people in Livingston, and if what had happened back East had happened here, almost everyone in the town would be dead. Every house, every office, every vehicle, the schools, the stores, the hospital--all empty. The instinctive rural resentment toward city folk, whose perceived wealth and influence can make country folk feel like sharecroppers or peasants, was swallowed up by that awful calculation. The ghost town is a familiar Western image--just drive up into the hills; they're everywhere--and suddenly it was possible to picture another one: ours.

Without the tourists, without the FedEx trucks, without a single contrail in the big sky and with so many people holed up in their houses watching the local New York City news, Livingston felt empty and cut off. The illusion of independence from the grid had been blown away. Donation jars started appearing in diners and gas stations. The local Hardee's burger joint announced on its marquee a benefit for New York City fire fighters. The people who work and eat at Hardee's aren't rich, but they felt they had something to give, and so they gave. A few blocks away, a memorial sprang up in the tiny front yard of a modest bungalow: a miniature cemetery of white crosses underneath a flag.

There were also darker feelings on display. One night I drove by a downtown dry cleaner and spotted two young men in dirty work clothes attempting to hang a bin Laden effigy from the outdoor sign. The crude, stuffed dummy dangling by its heels could have been anyone, so its makers labeled it. They also gave the figure long black hair. The next morning I passed by again. The thing was gone.

The FedEx vans and even a few stray tourists have returned to town, but the only business that's thriving just now is real estate. One agent tells me she has been getting calls from up and down the East Coast. I'm not surprised. Thanks, ironically, to the Unabomber and to news stories on the Freemen and the militias, Montana is regarded as a safe place. Keep a low profile, surround yourself with land, and the rest of the country can go to hell. I have had some calls about real estate myself. Friends from New York City will ask, not jokingly, if I know of any cheap houses for sale. I don't. For years, nervous urbanites have been driving up prices here. A bunker under the pines fetches top dollar.

And, as most locals now know, it isn't worth it.