Leaving Home and Looking Back

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By Jesse Bloom

I'D JUST FINISHED TELLING A FRIEND
from New York about working last summer as a water-commissioner. We were sitting in my dorm room in Chicago. My friend looked puzzled. "I don't mean that I was on a commission," I explained. "I was the water-commissioner for a creek—you know, the ditch-rider."

My friend looked even more puzzled. "What's a ditch?" he asked.

Right then, my heritage came a little more into focus. I think it's usually like this with our heritage. Sooner or later, most young people leave Montana, at least for a while, and it's on those journeys through other places that we start to appreciate the special place we call home.

You don't understand how interesting your way of life is until you have to explain it to somebody who doesn't have any idea what you're talking about. I'd grown up in a place where people had fields that they irrigated with water that came out of ditches that flowed from creeks that were fed by high mountain lakes. I thought most people knew what ditch-riders were. And surely everybody knew what a ditch was.

But here in Chicago, I was learning that I had to provide a lot of background information before I could explain much about my life to friends from New York, Cincinnati, and San Francisco.

Before I could tell them about my job as a ditch-rider I had to tell them about the water rights system in Montana, but before I could tell them about the water rights system I had to tell them about the dams and mountain reservoirs, but before I could tell them about the mountain reservoirs I had to tell them about all the creeks that flow from the Bitterroot Mountains into the Bitterroot Valley, but before this would make sense I had to tell them about how farmers have to irrigate their fields because of the semi-arid climate, and even after I explained all of this I still needed to define "ditch."

All this knowledge is part of my heritage, and as I talked about it I became more appreciative of things I had always taken for granted. People from New York, Cincinnati, or San Francisco might have never gone hiking or fishing. They may not know that the best duck hunting is at dusk and dawn. They probably won't know that Marcus Daly made his fortune from copper mining in Butte and built a special place at his ranch in the Bitterroot.

I tried to enlighten my friend about these things, but he was only mildly interested. He thought that it was kind of cool that I had shot a shotgun, but he wasn't that interested in hearing about Montana water rights. I didn't even mention Marcus Daly's copper empire—I was pretty certain that he didn't care.

Instead, my friend from New York wanted to tell me about Yankee Stadium, Mayor Giuliani, and all the different neighborhoods that he knew. As I listened to him prattle on about New York, I learned another lesson about heritage: someone else's can seem less significant than one's own. I liked hearing about Yankee Stadium, and mayoral politics were kind of interesting, but learning about the history of New York's many neighborhoods was about as exciting as watching paint dry. I was polite, and pretended to pay careful attention.

Maybe my own heritage is interesting because it is a living heritage. I know that my future is entangled with Montana's future. Even though I now spend three-quarters of the year in Chicago, I still think of myself as a resident of the Bitterroot Valley. Anything that relates to the valley remains part of my heritage. I still care about the basketball games there, and I don't get bored by Marcus Daly.

New York's neighborhoods are interesting to my friend because they are part of a heritage that is alive to him. I've learned to appreciate that, just as particular places are important to me, other places are equally important to him.

We can't love all the little places in the world, but it's important that we love some place, and it's important that all the good places in the world have people who care about what has happened and what is going to happen there. For me, that place is Montana. I am thankful somebody took the time to teach me about my heritage.

Jesse Bloom, a 1997 graduate of Corvallis High School in Corvallis, Montana, attends the University of Chicago on an academic scholarship. This article originally appeared in the spring 1999 edition of the Montana Heritage Bulletin, published by the Montana Heritage Project. Reprinted by permission.

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