Dutton — Field Notes — craig davidson

**Marfa, Texas** :: Image – Google Earth

I’ve never been to Texas. My wife has visited Texas a few times, her parents lived there decades ago, our daughter has a good friend outside Dallas, and I know someone who spends half the year somewhere in the state. I’ve only heard stories about it, or watched movies and television shows based there. I’ve seen a lot of images over the years too, horrifying and soothing, I’ve read articles about Austin, and I used to watch Austin City Limits frequently. When I see pictures of Marfa’s main streets though, it feels like a bunch of small Montana towns I know — Dutton, Havre, and Jordan — some with a few hundred people, and some with a couple of thousand.

I was listening to a podcast and the show’s celebrity guest mentioned Marfa, Texas. He’d been there recently and spoke about how much it’s changed from when he visited a few decades ago. It’s become a remote outpost for artists and galleries, initiated by Donald Judd in the 1970’s, who moved in and shifted its energy. Even with that kind of contemporary change, I still wonder how anything can be sustained in towns that size. Then I remember that most small towns didn’t begin because of retail opportunities for the residents, or tourists like me, unless they have a Corn Palace, or a giant truck stop near the highway. They exist because it’s a place for the people who live nearby to drop off crops, buy propane, and replenish their water supply — they’re literal weigh stations. If you look to the edges of the towns, there’s usually a cluster of silos, and depending on the size, maybe even a few clusters of silos. Sometimes the smallest towns only include a hardware store, a small tavern, maybe a cafe, and a couple of gas pumps. If it’s larger, there might be a post office, a bank, a courthouse, a Chinese, or Mexican restaurant, with surprisingly great food, and an insurance agent who occupies a vacant storefront one day a week because they travel from town to town.

If a local farmer, or rancher, drives through and decides to see if anybody they know is there, they rarely need to go inside anywhere to check who’s there. They know just by identifying the trucks parked out front. People often work alone when they live in isolated places like this, so conversation is welcome, even craved sometimes. You might see two trucks parked in the middle of main street next to each other, facing opposite directions, without their engines running, while the occupants talk. Conversations that last awhile and typically revolve around the weather, commodity prices, their families, and updates on the repairs each of them has been making to their equipment. It’s hard to keep everything that’s on their minds to themselves. It’s hard for their spouse, or their kids too, to be burdened with the same worries and frustrations day after day, so, they drive through town looking for others to talk with.

So, I can imagine what Marfa might feel like without visiting it. The air might be thicker and smell different than in Dutton. The color of the soil might differ, construction materials and building silhouettes might be different too because it’s Texas, not Montana. Except for all of the painted stars, cement stars attached to exterior walls, and forged steel stars hanging from mobiles around Marfa, I think its heartbeat is just like Dutton’s.

Songs :: Transcendental Blues by Steve Earle, Out of Touch by Hall and Oates, My Hometown by Bruce Springsteen, All My Days by Alexi Murdoch, and On The Nature Of Daylight by Max Richter

**Highland Cemetery** :: Great Falls, Montana

**Bethany Lutheran Church** :: Dutton, Montana

Near Our Home – Minneapolis

A couple of months ago, my wife heard an owl while she was walking our dog near the Mississippi River. When she got home, she was really excited and planned to return soon hoping she might even get to see it. More recently, we walked the dog together and ended up in the same area. Just as I was telling her that it would have been my mother’s birthday, she gently touched my shoulder, and suddenly an owl burst out of the trees from the river bluffs, with a crow and a peregrine falcon dive bombing it. The three of them flew and wrestled mid-flight directly overhead, and then landed forty feet up a pine tree very close to where we were standing. After ten minutes of hassling the owl, the crow and the peregrine falcon gave up, flew out of the tree, picked on each other briefly and disappeared to the north. The owl remained silent until my wife started to hoot. It responded to her a couple of times. They were talking to each other and it felt otherworldly.

Highland Cemetery – Great Falls

During the Fall of 2017, I ended up in my hometown for a couple of days. The evening before I returned to Minnesota, I drove to Highland Cemetery on the edge of town to hang out at the family plot, talk to my folks in case they could hear me, and wandered around a little. It’s a beautiful area with a great view to the south towards the Little Belt Mountains. Whenever I visit the cemetery, I always pay my respects to Charlie Russell’s grave too, which is very close to where my parents are buried.

As I walked back to the plot, I heard a noise in the distance which got slowly closer and louder and ended high up in an enormous pine tree not far from where I was standing. I assumed it was a bird, but it was oddly loud — like it wasn’t just flying, but also struggling somehow, like it was crashing through something. The noise was alarming — any noise in a cemetery, as slight as it may be, is unsettling. It’s a cemetery, and if I hear a strange sound, I imagine that something might be rising from the dead by clawing its way out and then levitate towards me in a standing position at high speed, like in a vampire movie and then I’ll have a heart attack.

I looked high into the trees, where the sound ended, and I assumed had landed. If I hadn’t heard it coming and scanned for the sound of the noise, I never would have seen it. It was hard to tell what kind of bird it was at first because its’ body blended in with the dark trees. I grabbed my phone and zoomed in on it with the camera. It was still murky and hard to distinguish, but once I saw its’ head move in that distinct way, I knew it was an owl. I stared at it for ten minutes or so and then it flew south and disappeared into the prairie towards the mountains.

Bethany Lutheran Church – Dutton

The next day, I ate lunch with my sister, said goodbye, and left to begin the drive home. I’d been looking forward to this leg of the trip because I planned to take Interstate 15 North to the town of Dutton and then east along the hi-line. I hadn’t driven this route in decades. I’d been looking forward to stopping in Dutton for as long as I can remember because my Dad designed a church there in the 1960’s. Up until then, I’d only seen professional photos of it and read some articles about it. It had won numerous AIA awards and I’d admired it since I was in grade school. The building was a bit radical for this small farm community — located in the middle of the wheat capital of Montana, with a population of just a few hundred people. While the design was contemporary and forward looking, it blended in naturally with the vernacular of the agricultural buildings.

I stood in front of the church, with the car doors and rear hatch wide open while eating a snack. After a while I noticed a dark shape underneath the shaded eave high up on the eastern wall — the building and the chapel interior are almost three stories high. It looked like a bird was sitting on the gutter downspout. I walked closer to the side of the church, looked up and saw its head rotate towards me and realized it was an owl. It was big. I scanned the wall further and then noticed a second owl on the other gutter downspout. I couldn’t believe I was seeing two more owls in less than twenty-four hours, for a total of three.

All of these sightings felt really specific, timely and personal, like visitors from the other side during challenging times — messengers breaking through and keeping watch. When I googled owl symbolism, the information went a little dark. Most of the cultural references focused on death, but I read further and it explained that death means a lot of things besides ‘the end’, it also means transition and change — from one thing to another thing, maybe even from one time and space to another time and space. Seeing an owl is always a big deal. Usually they just silently appear, or maybe they’ve been perched there forever, motionless, rarely blinking, and then it dawned on me that all of them probably saw me before I was even born.

For Jeenee and my Mom and Dad