End of the World 5 Miles
I worked for ABC News from 1983 until 2010 and was based in its Los Angeles bureau. Although Walter Cronkite had retired as the anchor of the CBS Evening News in 1981 and CNN had begun sharing the television news space on cable TV a year before that, network news operations were still on their high horse.
Disney didn’t own ABC then and the other two major network news divisions— CBS and NBC —also hadn’t been saddled yet either with having to make a profit for their soon to be landlords GE and the Lowes Corporation.
To produce a news story in those still flush with cash days at ABC News no budget was required. Of course by the time I retired that had no longer been the case for a long time. Viewership eventually had declined dramatically and so had advertising revenues. Traveling to cover any story on location that wasn’t deemed significant breaking news became increasingly rare.
In 1996 I spent a month in Montana covering a story or perhaps more accurately waiting for one to possibly happen that I doubt would receive much attention and certainly little network news coverage and surely no physical presence of a network news crew on site today. So, here’s what I wrote a few years ago about my time in Jordan— not the country but the place…
Where is the most isolated town in the lower 48? I had no idea but when I found out, I wasn't surprised. It's Glasgow, Montana. That’s according to Ken Jennings, who in addition to having won a ton of money on Jeopardy, wrote a book titled Maphead, and as a kid slept with a Hammond atlas next to his pillow.
Jennings has calculated that 98% of us live less than an hour's drive from an urban area of more than 75,000 other people. (I guess Jo and I are part of the 2%. We don’t. Portland, ME is a nearly two hour drive for us and it’s population isn’t even 75,00.)
Montana's Glasgow is four and a half hours from a city that size in any direction. I haven’t been there, but I spent a lot of time nearby— well, sort of nearby. Jordan, Montana is only 60 miles from Glasgow as the crow flies, but if you're not a crow and have to drive, it's 137 miles and a five hour trip without a bathroom break.
No doubt Jordan is a close runner up in the "Middle of Nowhere" sweepstakes and in 1996 there was a standoff just outside the town between a group known as the "Montana Freemen" and the FBI.
The Freemen were right wing zealots who believed no government had sovereignty over them beyond the county level. They didn’t pay their taxes and had also committed bank fraud, mail fraud and wire fraud— if you’re counting, that’s a fraud trifecta. At one point they had also offered million dollar bounties on local officials and a federal judge who they wanted captured dead or alive.
After a series of confrontations with local law enforcement and federal agents, the Freemen holed up in a farmhouse on a foreclosed property to avoid arrest.
ABC News considered this a big story because three years earlier the FBI had been involved in a siege in Waco, Texas. That standoff had resulted in the deaths of nearly 80 members of a religious sect called the Branch Davidians. So, I was sent with a crew to Montana to be in place and produce stories for broadcast in the event history was going to repeat itself.
Our arrival in Jordan coincided with the sheep shearing season and the town’s two motels were booked full with the shearers. At one of them I noticed a room behind the front desk that was filled with furniture and other junk. We needed it.
Me: "Does the room behind the front desk have a bathroom and a shower?”
Motel Manager: "Yes, but it’s a tub."
Me: "I'll pay you $100 if you move that stuff out and give me the room."
I probably overpaid but the space was emptied in an hour and way too many of us spent several nights in it. Sharing the bathroom with the tub was ugly and when I saw one of the crew was rinsing his mouth with Snapple after brushing his teeth, it was apparent it was time to move out. We upgraded our accommodations after some of the locals accepted our offers to rent their trailer homes.
According to the last census, the population of Jordan, Montana was 343. We were the only network that had shown up for the story and became, I’m sure, a welcome source of income for the town.
There was really only one restaurant in Jordan and it was Ok but with a limited menu. It had a salad bar and once, when there was nothing left on its cart, a woman emerged from the kitchen with an industrial size can of peas. That became the salad offering for the evening.
After a couple of weeks the correspondent who had been with me was rotated out and another from the ABC News bureau in D.C. replaced him. I had never worked with this guy before and as I drove him to his first dinner, it was clear he was not happy about being conscripted for Jordan duty.
His attitude worried me and I feared that he would make life for the rest of us unpleasant. When we got to the restaurant he quickly was taught the lay of the land and humbled in the process.
Our teenage waitress came to the table and our new arrival asked her if he could see a wine list. Here's how that exchange went and I remember it word for word.
Waitress: "We don't have a wine list?"
Reporter: "Well, what kind of wines do you have?"
Waitress: " We have rose and chablis.
She pronounced rose as you would the flower and chablis as if it rhymed with cannabis. Our reporter was undaunted.
Reporter: "So, bring me the bottles."
Waitress: "I can't."
Reporter: "Why not?"
Waitress: "Because they're in boxes.”
It was like seeing a bucking horse get broken and it was certainly an appropriate howdy do to Jordan for a snobby city dweller. After that I was less worried that our new guy was going to be trouble. In fact I came to admire his chutzpah. At one point he offered someone vetting one of his scripts in New York $100 not to change a word.
It didn’t take long to figure out that if I wanted to know who or where somebody who lived in Jordan was, I could just ask at the post office. It was unlikely you could take a leak in Jordan without everybody knowing about it.
And I gained some useful information by chance one day when I just happened to be using the laundromat at the same time as a couple of FBI agents. I overheard them discussing that the director himself was coming to Jordan the next day for an “unannounced” visit. We were at the airport when his plane arrived.
For the locals Jordan was a place where if you got into a fight at the Hell Creek Bar and were bloodied, you kept drinking because there was no physician residing in town and whoever was going to stitch you up would come from Glasgow for all I know.
After a few months and much negotiation the Freemen surrendered and so, my stint in Montana had been babysitting for a potential disaster that didn’t happen.
I haven’t been back since however, I doubt Jordan has changed a lot in three decades. Unless its kids want to be ranchers, I don’t imagine there’s much to keep them there. But before any wistful reminiscing about the demise of rural life in America, let me relate a conversation of my own with that same high school waitress and local sommelier.
Me: "You must have a pretty small high school."
Waitress: "Yes, too small."
Me: “Really, why?”
Waitress: "Because I hardly have anyone I can date."
Me: "That's too bad, but I guess it’s to be expected, this is a small place."
Waitress: "Small is one problem. The other is I'm related to over a third of my class.”
Pour me another glass of rose or chablis please.
Orwell himself couldn't have done it better. Though he did write superbly about India and other places where he spent time among the locals. The key, apart from being an excellent wordsmith, is in the details: the Snapple mouthwash at the end of the world, that the only restaurant's only two wines were boxed - and their young waitress mispronounced the names, but most telling, her town was so small and isolated that she was related to one third of her highschool class.
These are the lived details that give truth (and beauty) to writing. The things your very first writing teacher meant when instructing, "Write what you know." At some point you understand that what you "know" are the memories that pop up as if on a video screen, people and their words and locations that were burned into your longterm memory. Sometimes you recall the reason, but often they just appear without any clear inspirational prompt. But prompts lurk everywhere in your environment, not the least in reading others' good writing. Peter Imber writes that way. Read him for inspiration.