New to Montana? Get used to the tough life

Eventually, they all call Lee Provence.

Bumping along in his pickup with his black Labrador, Molly, barking in the flatbed, Provence stared straight ahead, shifted into four-wheel-drive and reeled off bleak statistics. As road and bridge superintendent for Gallatin County, he manages 1,100 miles of road with six plow trucks and a budget of $3.5 million. From that pot, he also has to pay for equipment repairs and the salaries and benefits of 32 full-time staffers.

Fixing every road is not an option.

“Neurotic people are moving here,” Provence said. “I’ve had people call my mother a whore because I wouldn’t pave their road.”

One irate man called to report that a dirt road near his office had deteriorated into a dusty washboard and was impassable. Provence drove down and agreed. He was sympathetic enough to send a crew to grade the road, cover it with fresh gravel and sprinkle an inexpensive binder on top of it to hold it all in place.

A few days later the man called with a new complaint. The binder, he griped, contained red clay that was splattering his otherwise sparkling SUV.

Gallatin County officials have a strategy to help disgruntled new arrivals adjust. This month, they spent $8,000 to publish a “Code of the West” -- a sort of cowboy etiquette guide to bridge the cultural disconnect. They are not alone. Four other fast-growing counties in Idaho, Colorado and Montana have resorted to printing pamphlets when down-home diplomacy failed.

Hemmed in by four mountain ranges and patrolled by bushy-tailed coyotes too brazen to postpone their rounds until nightfall, Gallatin County has never been for the faint of heart. This is a place for people like County Auditor Joyce Schmidt, who wears a .357 magnum to work, even though that’s not in her job description. It’s a place for rancher Jim Kack, who laughs off talk about the full-grown bear that pressed its wet, black nose against his kitchen window.

But in the last few years, new settlers have staked their claims here, and evidence of their arrival is everywhere, from newspaper classified ads for housekeepers to secondhand clothing stores stocked with fine women’s slacks.

These new pioneers want country living without sacrificing any of the amenities of big-city life. But Montana is nothing like the home they left behind. Montana is about rugged self-sufficiency. To make it here, one must endure nine-month winters, poor electrical service, slow emergency response systems and rough back roads that rumble to abrupt stops a few hundred feet from some homes.

Gallatin’s 20-page “Code of the West” will be displayed in the offices of government workers, real estate agents and home title agents. The target audience is clear, and the tone is firm, if not slightly intimidating.

Among the issues it addresses: If you call emergency services, don’t expect an immediate response. If you have trash, figure out where you’re supposed to haul it, because there’s no curbside pickup. And if you choose not to build a fence, don’t complain if a cow or a horse tramples your front lawn.

Gallatin County can get as much as 6 feet of snow, so the manual cautions, “It is not unusual for a county snowplow to block your driveway with snow during plowing. Remember, it is illegal to remove snow from your driveway into a county right-of-way. Find another location to store snow.”

It’s a straight-shootin’ method of dealing with a new kind of hubris from strangers who want to perform municipal cosmetic surgery -- a nip here, a tuck there and a smoothing out of every back road.

Kieran Kobell, a retired federal law enforcement agent from New York, arrived here with his wife in April 1998 and immediately volunteered at the firehouse and adopted a stretch of highway near Yellowstone National Park.

Almost as quickly, though, he asked an attorney to look into the county’s obligation to pave some roads near his subdivision in Big Sky. On a recent morning, Kobell stood ramrod straight in crisp, clean jeans and a pressed, Wrangler, snap-button cowboy shirt and admitted he’s a bit defensive about his reputation as a rabble-rouser.

“People say here, ‘This is the way it’s been done for 20 years,’ ” Kobell said. “My response is, ‘It’s not 20 years ago. Get with the time.’ ”

Novelist Zane Grey first wrote of the “Code of the West” in 1934, outlining neighborly rules laid down by settlers for their fellow “cowmen.” The common-sense concept inspired John Clarke, a commissioner of Larimer County, a fast-growing agricultural region along Colorado’s northern border.

Larimer’s population grew by more than 35% during the 1990s, and Clarke said he could hear the urban sprawl through his phone. He nearly lost it one day, after a man who had just purchased a home next to a dairy farm called to complain about the pungent smell wafting through his windows.

“This is the gentrification of the West,” Clarke said. “People moving here don’t make their living from the land.”

In 1996, Clarke penned the first contemporary “Code of the West,” and within months Gunnison County to the west, an area with a similar growth rate, published its own version.

In Idaho, Canyon County officials had watched developers mow down crops of soybeans, sugar beets and hops for acres of housing to accommodate thousands of new residents. This summer, they used a state Farm Bureau grant to publish their own “Code of the West.”

And with out-of-staters moving steadily to the western part of Montana, officials in Beaverhead and Madison counties, west of Gallatin, printed a “Code of the West” two years ago.

Gallatin County is the most recent to address some of its newest residents with literature. During the last decade it grew by nearly 35%, to about 70,000 people. The renovated ski resort in Big Sky and a good airport in Bozeman attracted retirees and “those Californians,” who bumped the median income by more than $6,000 above the rest of the state.

“They say, ‘We want isolation -- we want to get away from it all,’ ” said Penny Bertelsen, a former schoolteacher who runs Bozeman Realty out of the home where she was born and raised. “I have to ask if they really understand what ‘remote’ means. It means, for example, digging your own septic tank.”

Of the 25 homes she sold last year, 18 went to buyers from outside Montana who were relocating or investing in a second residence. A look at land use permits in Big Sky in recent years shows owners who list their permanent residences in states including Arizona, Michigan, Texas, Rhode Island and Ohio.

But maybe the growth is Bozeman’s fault, says Gallatin’s director of planning, Jennifer Madgic. This charming county seat is decked out with tony art galleries, Home Depot and specialty coffeehouses, giving the false impression that rural living can be quilted with urban culture.

“It’s kind of deceptive,” Madgic said. “We have a Victoria’s Secret, but we also have snow on the Fourth of July, and we have grizzly bears.”

Gallatin’s “Code of the West” should come in handy in the coming weeks, as more buyers sneak in their last vacation of the year and plunk down money on homes. But if they think they’ll find their piece of paradise in this corner of Montana, the code will do its best to ruin their fantasy.

“Often newcomers are much more romantic about the West than the old-timers and have false hopes about bringing their urban lifestyles into the great outdoors,” the guide reads. “They come with false expectations. They believe they can fax and e-mail from the mountaintop. In the New West, the information superhighway is often a dirt road.”