A Little Too Much Freedom?

Flee to the hills--

A refuge from the daily grind,

Hassle of traffic and endless bills.

It’s surprising what one

might find . . .

--Montana poet

Yvonne M. Unruh

*

The speedometer quivers at just over 100 mph, and the rented sedan is shimmying some too. Is this really reasonable, or prudent, on a public highway?

Then a Cadillac whooshes by at 115, which is reassuring if not also a little maddening. The showoff.

This is Montana, where everyone can enjoy unshackled freedom from everyday rules and regimens.

But for some people, a little freedom, like the freedom to drive legally as damn well fast as you deem “safe,” only whets the appetite. Big Sky spaces and Old West traditions provide haven and nourishment for outlaws amid Montana’s ordinary individualists and nonconformists. Some immigrate here. Others rise out of pioneer stock. Once in a while, the consequences are awful.

This last week has brought that reality into focus--disturbingly for many here.

“The sound you hear is Montana uttering a collective sigh of embarrassment,” says John Schlosser, a law student from a ranching family in Lewistown. “Have these things shaken my faith? Only my faith about what people believe about Montana.”

In the eastern part of the state, the growing hunger for absolute freedom, which could also be called grand self-indulgence, produced the local-born “freemen”--a group of anti-government renegades accused by the authorities who now keep watch on their ranch of creating their own bogus money schemes and otherwise proclaiming independence from society and government, stockpiling arsenals and threatening harm to anyone who dared object.

In the western part of the state, a similar yearning may have led a brilliant loner to assemble his own bomb works--with deadly results.

Freedom: You can never have quite enough, it seems.

In Montana, panoramic openness and a lightly sprinkled population provide fertile ground for extremist beliefs to take root. And its Wild West neighborliness supplies protective cover for these ideas to blossom--in particular the old notion that freedom and violence are blood brothers.

With the freeman face-off on a ranch outside Jordan and the arrest of Theodore J. Kaczynski, the suspected Unabomber, in a cabin near Lincoln, Montanans now find themselves wondering as never before about their own outsized myths.

Live and let live--that remains at the heart of Montana’s stereotype of itself. This and its stupendous outdoors have idealized Montana like few places. Never mind the hand-to-mouth wind-whipped existence of many here, or that city water is sometimes unfit to drink, or that long lonely winters are endured at 30-below with shivering calves herded into the living room to survive.

“We have an ethic in Montana that you don’t dig into your neighbor’s business, unless it has to do with your water rights,” says Ken Toole of the Montana Human Rights Commission.

Suspicions Grow

But events of recent days--and several years of trouble with hatemongers and cultists before that--have Montana worried about its traditions. Just as many urban dwellers fret that their cities are going to the dogs, the ranchers and farmers and shopkeepers are taking a hard second look at strangers and peering over their shoulders at their neighbors and relatives.

Rural life isn’t what it used to be.

“It’s been smoldering for a long time now,” says Ed Dobler, the former sheriff and now part-time deputy in remote Garfield County, headquarters for the freemen.

Both ordinary fears of crime and the suspicions of renegades among them have led rural Montanans to install security systems in public buildings and place locks on schools. And, if you believe the news reports, some people have started taking guns into the bathroom when they shower.

“It’s natural enough that Montana would attract and breed social misfits,” says Mike Malone, historian and president of Montana State University in Bozeman. “The [suspected] Unabomber is an anomaly, but the freemen type have been around for a while, and this has made people very nervous here. People are saying, what in the world is going on when these guys begin arming themselves to the teeth like this, particularly when they’re your only neighbor for 20 miles?

“I hope these events are making Montana a little introspective--it’s good for it,” Malone says.

Montana’s 147,138 square miles make it almost the size of Michigan, Illinois and Indiana combined. It is really two states in one, split by the Rockies into the mountains and pines of the west and the vast plains and breaks of the east. And with a population of 800,000, just five people per square mile, residents are outnumbered both by deer and elk. Nearly every community has a packing house for game meat. “Your Food Bank,” reads a sign at one in Billings.

Garfield County is the size of Connecticut and has only four full-time law enforcement officers and one part-timer. This last week, a trucker had to pull the one highway patrolman out of a ditch, where his car had slid during a snowstorm.

Place for Individualism

The state has always encouraged individualists.

Radical progressive Jeannette Rankin, elected in 1916, was the first woman in the U.S. House and the only member of Congress to vote against World Wars I and II.

Her breed of progressive populism arose from militant labor organizations, the unions of the copper and other hard-rock miners. And strains of it remain today in a state where Democrats still have a fair chance in statewide elections. But just as conservatives have grown louder and more strident across the nation, so have they here.

In the state Legislature last year, a new crop of conservative lawmakers proposed requiring Montanans to equip themselves properly for unspecified “militia obligations,” according to the Human Rights Commission. Another bill demanded that federal authorities check in with local sheriffs before undertaking any law enforcement activities. Neither measure passed.

Long before that, head-for-the-hills groups, apocalyptic religious clans, white supremacists and militias made a home, and sometimes trouble, on the fringes of Montana life. Despite its current prominence, however, the state has never really emerged as a national center for these estranged, rebellious cultures.

In the 1980s, national attention was drawn to the Church Universal and Triumphant, a transplanted Southern California group that set up headquarters on a ranch near Yellowstone National Park. It stockpiled survivalist supplies in preparation for impending nuclear war.

After that, white supremacists and others took root, with a spin-off group or two emerging indigenously.

Finally, in a bizarre coincidence, the freeman and Unabomber cases combined to put Montana’s renegades on the nation’s front pages.

“For a state with three electoral votes, we are not accustomed to turning on ‘Good Morning America’ and hearing, ‘Meanwhile, elsewhere in Montana . . . ,’ ” says Jeremy Scott, a senior at Custer County High School in Miles City. “Usually, we make the news only with our winter weather.

“I just hope this is all over before the bucking horse sale,” he adds. The late-May sale is when Miles City, a medium-sized town south of Jordan, closes off Main Street and waives its law against drinking in public--creating one of the biggest annual street parties in eastern Montana. According to Scott, Miles City once set a record for the most alcohol consumed in a small town in a single weekend.

Image Problems

But Scott’s fellow students sound an objection. Many here, it seems, are suddenly self-conscious about Montana’s reputation. After all, one of the paybacks for enduring the hard winters and remote living is the satisfaction of feeling you live in a place where “America still exists” and where people across the country know it and are envious.

“Now everyone is starting to think we’re all sexists and racists and ride our horses to school,” complains Hannah Nash, a high school junior. “Well, that’s not our Montana at all. I can see it now: I say I’m from Montana and they’re going to ask, ‘Are you a freeman?’ No. We saw them and figured they’re just a bunch of wackos in pickup trucks without license plates.”

In fact, many Montanans are proud of how they’ve stood up to hatred and bigotry over the years. Seven years ago in Helena, the state capital, more than 1,000 residents rallied to protest a white supremacist group. More recently, Billings made national news when thousands of citizens showed their support for Jewish residents and religious freedom after anti-Semitic attacks on property. Citizens called their campaign, “Not in Our Town.”

No state has done more to protest hatemongering, according to the Human Rights Commission.

But there also is little question that the freemen are accused of a run of crimes that would never be tolerated except for the fact that they are local men and women with deep roots in eastern Montana.

Had outsiders--California immigrants, for instance--bought a Montana ranch and started cheating merchants, refusing to pay their taxes, forfeiting on loans and threatening to hang the sheriff--all acts attributed to the freemen--well, nobody doubts they would have been “run out on a rail,” says ex-Sheriff Ed Dobler in Jordan, the Garfield County seat.

Yet, the freemen have been on the loose and preaching their own vitriol on and off at least since 1991, according to authorities. Last summer, in the ranching community of Roundup, several were arrested after another standoff. At that time, threats to the freemen were issued not only by authorities but also the local school--officials blamed the freemen.

Roy Huffington, a construction worker, college student and nine-year veteran of the U.S. Army, recalls he was “a little uneasy” about the safety of his two children in Roundup’s schools.

But like many Montanans, he holds dear the Old West dictum that anyone’s opinion, even a radical freeman’s, deserves to be considered.

“Well, they do have some points about the government and all,” Huffington says. “And you have to say to yourself, these are people from our community. Are they just bluffing or are they really going to do some of these things? Most people figure there are only one or two leaders who really are out of control.”

Earless Calves

Right now, the ice is melting on the still water in eastern Montana; the rivers run chocolate brown. Drifts of dirty snow shrink to expose the stubble of spring range. It’s been the worst winter in years. Ranchers are raising earless calves--the result of frostbite. As usual, they’re chewing restaurant steaks as tough as saddlebags.

And they’re wondering: Is this new breed of fiery, violent freedom seekers going to spoil things further for everybody else? Or is state Atty. Gen. Joe Mazurek right when he insists: “This is way out of the ordinary. This is not Montana”?

The Miles City Star groped for an answer in an editorial on Friday: “While most Montanans are acutely uncomfortable with the national attention the state is getting, the reality is that Montana is, as always, a reflection of the nation at large. There is the same range of views, reflected more clearly because there are fewer of us.”

Or, there was the wag in Helena over the weekend selling T-shirts, saying: “At least our cows are sane.”