My early orientation to the world inside and outside the vastness of Montana was mostly West, with some North, a little bit East and a handful of trout streams.

Inside Montana, fishing trips dictated travel. For my dad, fishing meant small streams. Canyon Creek (crick) was the perennial favorite. We fished Prickly Pear occasionally. Sometimes we would go over Stemple Pass and fish a couple of streams that ran through some old dredge ponds. My dad finished his day’s content on 10 Mile Creek, west of Helena.

We never fished the big water for which Montana is so justly famous: the Madison, the Bighorn, major rivers like the Missouri and the Yellowstone. They were sometimes mentioned but my dad always demurred and returned to his little streams, fly rod in hand and was happy.

So when it came to travel around home, the better the stream fishing, the better the chance we would go there.

 

Outside of fishing, our main travel goal was always Seattle. My father’s parents, a sister and four brothers and dozens of cousins lived there. Legend is my father’s siblings were spirited away in the days before WWII for a job in the Seattle aircraft factories. My father elected to stay in Helena because he had reached his majority and, if truth be known, the fishing was pretty good.

I grew up listening to stories of living in Tacoma during WWII. My dad worked in the shipyards as a welder and, more importantly, Donna was born there.

My mother loved Seattle. Many are the times she declared she’d move there in a second, sometimes at the top of her lungs.  Might as well have moved, since we traveled there so often. Some years we would make the 600-mile/pre-Interstate slog three and four times. But we never stayed for long, the trout were rising on Canyon Creek.

My father’s family, jobs and the lure of the big city demand the big W on my two and ½ point compass.

We would occasionally travel North to Alberta and British Columbia. Why? I don’t know. Wasn’t fishing. It was a lot of trouble to get even a temporary provincial fishing license. We did look around though. I remember one memorable driving trip to Calgary, through the Canadian Rockies to Banff, on to Revelstoke, then down the Columbia River to Grand Coulee, on to Seattle.

For me, at the tender age of perhaps ten, I recognized we were in another country, my first foreign adventure. The landscape was essentially the same; MT, AB and BC share the glorious Northern Rockies. License plates were different but familiar since Montana was flooded with summer vacationers from Alberta. And there was the fascination of watching my father answer the border guards’ questions.
  


But the real thrill was the money! For years, I treasured Canadian dollar bills with their mysterious “Banque du Canada”. I still do that today, keeping obsolete francs, marks, guilders, yen, pesos, Hong Kong dollars, forints and kroners in a large envelope in the basement.  

N was an important point on our two and ½ point compass. Never mind that it somehow foretold a lifetime of traveling.

Looking East, there was occasional mention of Minnesota by my mother. I never really quite knew what she was talking about, young boys can be dense, but I knew it was about a family member.

Family member indeed! I recently learned that my mother’s father grew up in Minnesota. Theodor Carlson was born in Sweden and emigrated as a baby with his parents.  Legend tells that in a fit of young man craziness, Theodor argued with his parents, left home for the copper mines of Butte, changed his name to Carson and never returned to Minnesota. Evidence exists in an old picture of Theodor that Janice has.
 

We never traveled to Minnesota to investigate. The barrier of hundreds of miles of Eastern Montana plains, the vastness of the North Dakota prairies and the threat of no fishing precluded an eastern adventure. My grandfather Carson’s death in 1937 had closed that that slightly ajar door forever.

E was the ½ point on the compass.

South was an unknown, not considered, just there. Although I was born in Casper, Wyoming, south of us was largely high deserts and high mountains and, a long ways. We did manage to get to Yellowstone Park most years but Yellowstone, 150 miles south of Helena was not conducive to travel. In the winter, drifts of snow closed the park for several months. Drifts of tourists closed the park the rest of the year. Besides, fishing wasn’t that great.

So there you have it. Our travel compass pointed West to Seattle, North to AB/BC, East to legend but never South.