Day 20: Missoula

Distance: 35 avg: 17.5

I don’t know what really bothers me with the place that john found us. Perhaps that it’s filthy, or that the people there are kinda delusional, lazy, and complicated. I don’t know about that last part, it’s hard to lump a group of people together. They’ve been very nice to me, and they even made me an elk burger and veggies. And let me crash at their pad.

I guess I don’t know where to start. We came in to Missoula, and we pulled in to this place with shit everywhere. They have a yard full of projects, most in various stages of completion or abandonment. John found this place through a site called Warmshowers.

There are various gardens strewn about. A greenhouse. A greenhouse frame. A ‘chicken coop’. Three disused vehicles, one of which has been converted to makeshift housing. And shit everywhere. Trash. Freebies(ie. trash noone wants). Pieces of bikes.

Probably what irritates me most about the place is the ‘good enough’-ness. Things are done good enough, without any eye to detail. I’m sure they have some half-assed philosophy that would explain how living like pigs is more earthy or how true anarchy is blah de blah.

So I was as nice as I could be. I thought, ‘hey this could be fun’. But no, it became more clear that these people had dropped out. They were living some kind of alternative lifestyle, which basically was:

Step 1: collect shit.
Step 2: live in it.
Step 3: work some crappy job to pay for beer.

And I’m not sure it counts as an alternative lifestyle if thats the only one you can maintain.

I was ‘assimilated’ at this point, and so I did my best to make idle chatter and find things interesting. I asked about their garden. And deer hunting in Montana. I steered clear of controversy. I listened to them talk about whatever. And talk about their job. One guy was a bike taxi, which is freaking awesome.

I’m probably making it sound worse than it is. There were cool bits, such as the gardens. And the interior of the house was semi-clean. There were probably other things. 🙂

Oh! They were all into bikes! That was pretty cool.