You can’t go around ranking animals. That said, Buckshot rules all horses, just dominates. Shaggy buckskin coat. Obliging soulful eyes. Jet-black mane sweeping left then dramatically right in a way I can only describe as early ‘80s. A very good boy. We crunched along the frosted banks of the Blackfoot River, ancient and clear, the last of the pale afternoon sun slipping down the Swan Range to the north. Buckshot picked his way over hunks of granite, and in some unseen dimension the beginnings of a song assembled.
My son Casper rode a smaller horse named Kodiak, who had a condition compelling him to scratch his belly on every prickly shrub in sight. Casper’s condition was to urge him ever onward. At 11 this was his first time on a horse. First time in Montana. First time in a land home to gray wolves, bear, mountain lion, lynx, coyote, elk, moose. This was my first time crossing state lines to write some verses and a chorus.
Some time back, I got an email about a new offering at the Resort at Paws Up, a working cattle ranch resort in western Montana. As someone who sometimes writes about travel, I get many such emails: new food menus, spa treatments, some sort of whiskey-branded DJ. I hit delete, generally speaking. But this one stopped me: If I understood correctly, Paws Up had solved a problem, nay crisis, I’d been lamenting for years: the quiet agony of traveling without a guitar.
On evening jingles at the Resort at Paws Up, wranglers bring horses back to the stables.
Courtesy of the Resort at Paws Up
Like 16 million other Americans, I play. I have mixed feelings about my pastime, and regard it as a cross between tying balloon animals and smoking angel dust—a benign hobby I’d need some kind of intervention to quit. At home, my guitar is always within reach. Travel is another story. Vacation for a musician is deprivation: How many times have I tried to jam my 12-string into the Prius on family road trips or rued the size of an airplane’s overhead bin? Here you are at your most reflective and relaxed—your most musical—and you must, what, crochet? Think thoughts? Scientists will never know how many beautiful songs never got written on account of guitar-less travel.
Turns out, the good people at Paws Up had heard this complaint before. They reached out to Fender, the musical instrument company. Conversations ensued and voila, guests can now strum a variety of acoustic and electric guitars in their rooms, and have access to an in-room iPad equipped with a special Fender tutorial app.
Thus persuaded, Casper and I embarked on a three-day western bonanza this past fall, Montana’s more contemplative season, when wooly bison turn against the harsh wind, bare aspens reach up into lead skies, and the landscape itself hunkers down for the coming freeze. These 37,000 acres are rugged, though we were in no danger of roughing it; when Leonardo DiCaprio or the Rolling Stones come—when they are loaned their own Lexuses as we were—I imagine their hardship is perhaps circumscribed. So it was that, after bidding adieu to Buckshot and Kodiak, Casper and I arrived at our little cabin to find three guitars waiting.
I’d come to experience Montana with my son and also to write a song. The latter is a simple but elusive goal in my life; my phone is full of half-finished verses and progressions in need of bridges. Getting away from daily life, and then replacing it with mountains and windswept bluffs, seemed promising. The structure of vacation itself seemed promising, what with all that pensive downtime between activities. First chance I got, I grabbed the California Vintage King propped up by the fire. (Immediately I put it down and Googled it on my phone, and learned I had leveled up my beloved guitar at home.) Valiantly I subdued through the who-do-I-think-I-am voice that can accompany a fine instrument, and soon a warmup Mixolydian scale was ringing through our cabin.
Fender partnered with the Resort at Paws Up in Montana to provide guitars to musically inclined guests.
Courtesy of Cam Ostman/Resort at Paws Up
In advance of our trip, I’d been reading How to Write One Song, Jeff Tweedy’s insightful guide to, yes, songwriting, but really to any creative pursuit. In addition to outlining some practical steps, he discusses the nature of creation. When we’re making art, the goal should be to disappear inside the process, “to watch your concept of time evaporate, to live at least once inside a moment when you aren’t ‘trying’ to do anything or be anything anymore. To spend time in a place where you just are.”
Occurs to me this applies to travel, too. Not Disney-type travel, but that other kind, where you leave all that’s familiar and dial back to some elemental and receptive state. I was elementally receiving when Casper and I ventured out into the autumn air again, this time on bicycles. We pedaled off on a dirt road heading north, till we hit some woods, and a different stretch of the Blackfoot.
Along the way, I attempted a songwriting approach to cycling, or a cycling approach to songwriting. With every breath, I endeavored to take in the kind of sensory detail that normally just whizzes by. The first bits of frost dusting the riverbank. The whiff of distant campfire smoke in my nostrils. The crunch of Casper’s tires on the road; my low-key vigilance about him veering into the frigid river below.
I can’t say any of this turned into a song by the time we pulled over to throw rocks in the water. But I was in song mode, which I suppose is just awake mode. I was awake to the casual death we passed—this fallen juniper or that Western larch crumbling in the dirt after however many decades upright. I was awake to the past—Shoshone, Flathead, Pend d’Oreille, and other tribes following this river east to vast bison herds. I was awake to the future, this same water carving its way improbably through Idaho and Oregon all the way to the Pacific.
The writer stayed at the Scapegoat accommodations, which are one of the Meadow Homes at the Resort at Paws Up
Courtesy of Cam Ostman/Resort at Paws Up
That night, Casper and I took out a notepad over dinner. Per Tweedy’s instructions, we made a column of related words on one side of the page and then another on the other. We began drawing lines connecting this word with that, with an eye toward unusual pairings, interesting resonances.
Then we watched a ‘90s legal thriller on the big screen in our cabin (see: not roughing it). Then we sat in the hot tub on our deck, looking out at the starry Montana night. Then I read to him from our book, and tucked him in, and sang him a song, and reviewed tomorrow’s itinerary, and then he was asleep. I crept back to that California King by the fireplace. I was still awake—awake—and as I worked on a little riff (I was in open D, guitar nerds), all the moments from the day seemed to light up and become awake, too. Almost fell asleep with the guitar in my bed but thought better of it.
Hearty western breakfast. Mist lifting off a distant pasture. Eyes scanning for wolf, bear, mountain lion, lynx, coyote, elk, moose. We kept scanning as we climbed into a van with some other guests.
The van drove us to a remote spot and deposited us near four Old West–style buildings, or rather facades of buildings. A brief safety talk followed and then we had rifles in our hands. For the next hour we plinked away at little targets hung in windows and doorways. A sniper will time his or her shot to happen between heartbeats; neither here nor there but surely worth repeating. I believe Casper would’ve traded all the songs in the world for his .22.
The rest of our trip unfolded too fast. We fired different guns and hiked and drove go-karts and read and played Connect Four and discussed future legal thrillers we might watch and ate huckleberry ice cream. And—can’t explain but it’s true—that riff in open D somehow kept sorting itself out in the background. Between activities, I’d grab a guitar and find that some stubborn transition had been magically ironed out, absent any conscious effort on my part. Anyone requiring proof that travel does something unseen to our innards need only measure how excellently we get from G sharp minor to E by the trip’s end.
Our trip’s end came on a blustery afternoon, winter decidedly coming. I did not, as imagined, bang out a fully formed song on the porch of our cabin before departing; distant bison did not swing their massive heads around. But Casper and I had, the night before, laughingly sung some experimental first verses, based on those paired words. There was mention of freezing eyeliner and a hot grudge. We didn’t record it on my phone; maybe we were just spending time in the place we were.
