Where Six-Packs Still Ride Shotgun

To Andrew Vandaele, the right to drink and drive is as fundamental as the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And if you don’t agree, well, nobody’s forcing you to stay in Montana.

Vandaele, 68, is a retired refrigerator repairman, a lifelong Montanan and self-described “regular guy.” He has sipped and steered his entire adult life and says he doesn’t plan to change.

“I’m driving home from the lake. It’s hot. I pop a beer. As long as I’m not drunk, what’s wrong with that?” Vandaele says. He’s never hurt anybody. There was the night in 1968, coming home from a Christmas party, where he got a DUI, but even then, he says, he was never out of control. At least not that he remembers.

He and thousands of like-minded Montanans, including some leading legislators, are a main reason why some drunk-driving laws can’t find traction in Big Sky country. Such laws are seen as an infringement on the state’s live-and-let-live spirit, an attitude one legislator sums up as the region’s “cowboy culture.”

Even a leader of the state’s Mothers Against Drunk Driving chapter, Bill Muhs, who’s lived in Montana for two decades, concedes the cultural aspect.

“There are still people here who measure distances in six-packs,” Muhs says. “Bozeman to Billings is a six-pack drive. Bozeman to Montana City is a two six-pack trip. Crossing the state would be a whole case.”

The latest collision of law versus culture took place last month when a MADD-supported bill banning open alcohol containers in vehicles was voted down despite vigorous lobbying from Gov. Judy Martz.

Federal agencies report that 36 states and Washington, D.C., have laws banning open containers of alcohol in cars, and an additional 11 states ban drinking while driving.

Montana, Wyoming and Mississippi are the only states with no federally approved law prohibiting the practice, and, not coincidentally, these states have among the highest numbers of per capita traffic fatalities involving alcohol.

Montana’s major cities -- Bozeman, Billings, Butte and Helena -- have open-container laws that apply within city limits, and half the state’s population lives in these cities. This helps explain why a 1999 survey found that 74% of Montana residents believed the state already had such a law.

But once you leave the cities, you can open a bottle of any kind of alcohol and drink it while tooling down the highway. And most of Montana’s 70,000 miles of paved roads are open highway. With fewer than 1 million people living in an area larger than Germany, Montana is one of the most sparsely populated states in the country. Driving is a necessity.

Those long sections of open road, which seduce many drivers to speed or drink, or both, are part of the problem because they create an illusion of safety, says Muhs of MADD, who lost a 20-year-old daughter to a teenage drunk driver.

The most common fatal accident in the state involves one car losing control and rolling over. In the case of Muhs’ daughter, Anne Marie, it was a case of one motorist losing control and plowing into a young woman riding a bicycle to work.

According to national highway statistics, Montana is second only to Mississippi for alcohol-related traffic deaths per 100,000 people. Last year in Montana, nearly 270 people were killed in traffic accidents, and up to 47% of those accidents involved alcohol. The national average is 39%. In California it’s 37%.

“You remember what Mark Twain said about statistics?” says state Rep. Jim Shockley, a Republican from the town of Victor (population 400). “He said something like, ‘There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics.’ You can get statistics to do anything you want.”

Shockley, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, made sure the open-container bill did not make it out of his committee for a vote. He says many legislators would have voted for the bill merely to be politically correct.

A retired Marine and the only lawyer in his hometown, Shockley is depicted by MADD officials as one of the Wild West characters who defends the culture of drinking. The 58-year-old legislator doesn’t mind the characterization.

Like many Montanans, he’s an avid outdoorsman. He hunts, hikes and rides his mules into the mountains. He made minor national news two years ago when he fell off his mule, broke seven ribs and punctured a lung. The accident almost killed him.

But rough-and-tough living is what Montana is all about, he says. For someone to tell him it’s wrong, after a day of hunting or hiking in the hot sun, to pop open a beer in his pickup -- “Well, that’s just too much,” he says. It’s nobody else’s business.

“People say it’s [drinking] part of the culture, and I think it is,” Shockley says. “As long as you’re sober, I don’t see the problem. It’s not the government’s role to tell us what our culture is. The government should reflect the culture, not the other way around.

“If they don’t like our culture,” he says, “they can go somewhere else.”

Montana has long been a magnet for the independent-minded. Many of the state’s 902,000 residents derive from various strains of frontiersmen: immigrant farmers, sheepherders, Indians, loggers, miners and outlaws. And not a few came to be free of laws, to become, wrote poet Richard Hugo, “lost in miles of land without people, without one fear of being found.”

Vandaele, the retired repairman, came from a Belgian immigrant family of farmers, people who mingled closely with the land and clung tightly to a distrust of big government. The sentiment runs high even among legislators. For this reason, Montana has been among the slowest to adopt highway safety laws.

It was one of the last states to raise the legal drinking age to 21 from 18. Motorcyclists aren’t required to wear helmets, and police aren’t allowed to stop motorists for not wearing seat belts. For three years in the mid-1990s, Montana had no highway speed limits, allowing motorists to drive as fast as they wanted (the limit is back to 70 mph on freeways).

Muhs says it’s highly likely some version of an open-container bill will be reintroduced in the next legislative session in 2005 (Montana’s Legislature meets every two years). If Gov. Martz is reelected, she’ll likely lobby once again for the bill. The issue has become something of a personal crusade.

Three years ago, one of the governor’s aides, after a night of drinking, rolled his sport utility vehicle and killed a popular legislator, state House Majority Leader Paul Sliter, who was a passenger. The death was big news but not persuasive in the way MADD or Martz wanted.

Opponents of the open-container bill point out that the aide, Shane Hedges, was not drinking while driving. He drank at a restaurant and then got in his car. That, according to 22-year-old Jeff Bradshaw, is the problem.

Bradshaw works as a delivery man for M-T Glass Liquors in downtown Helena. In his mind there’s no difference between drinking at a bar and driving home and drinking a beer while driving. “If you’re drunk, you’re drunk,” he says.

“Even if they pass the [open-container] law, you’ll still have all these people getting out of bars at 1:45 in the morning,” Bradshaw says. And they’re not going to walk home. Nobody walks when everything is so spread out.

This is Big Sky country. People drive. It’s part of the culture.