My Montana Hangover

photo by Tim Kupsick

Henni Lowisch, the Fall 2006 Pollner prof, reflects on the semester with students in her seminar on foreign correspondence.

By Henriette Lowisch
Fall 2006 Pollner Professor

A few months before I heard the word Missoula for the first time, I embarked on a brief experiment that involved living on a mountain in Virginia. To my surprise, I spent most of my time either in the car or crouched on the living room floor, trying to get the fireplace going. A week later, I returned to the city with a new pair of Western boots and proceeded to walk off the pounds I had gained in the countryside. My preliminary conclusion: To spend time outdoors is a feature of urban rather than mountain life.

Yet, in some part of my brain I knew that the experiment was far from complete. Which must be what brought me to the University of Montana. The mountains and I were given a second chance.

In Missoula, two steep hills marked the perimeter of my daily life. One, called Mount Jumbo, rose just behind my house in an area called the Lower Rattlesnake. The other, Mount Sentinel, flanked the university campus. Looking at them every day, I never made it up to either peak. Flatlanders, after all, are allowed to be prone to vertigo.

Instead, I soon discovered that to venture into parts of town outside my original perimeter never implied more than a 15-minute drive. Bikes were common in Missoula, with cafes, shops and bars just a short ride from home and school. So I decided to do without a car, a fateful decision that would earn me the local equivalent of a military medal: a knee injury from falling off my bike. But for a while, I was able to carry on with my city ways in a town located almost a thousand meters above sea level.

The little time it takes getting places in Missoula initially lured me into an entirely misguided assumption: To keep busy during my stay, with only one class to teach and some student advising to do, I would need to write a book, or at least read one! It will come to no surprise to past Pollner professors that I did nothing of the kind. No time to read or write, when you are busy sitting in the office of the student newspaper, mastering a puzzle game called “Escape from Kaimin Island.”

What makes Missoula so much fun and so exhausting at the same time is the fact that this is a great gaming town. For one thing, there’s the Griz, whose exertions I went to cheer enthusiastically, once a friendly local expert had taken the time to explain to me why a bunch of guys would want to keep piling on top of each other (again, my assumptions proved wrong). There also was poker hour to be observed at the faculty retreat (this, of course, after the day’s hard work had been done and the future of the J-School secured). Not to forget trivia night at the local pub, with questions like “Who was the youngest German tennis player ever to win the Wimbledon cup?” (Boris Becker, in case you missed that one.)

Not only do the people of Missoula love to play, they are game for almost everything. I challenge anyone to find a more open-minded crowd anywhere on either side of the Atlantic. Missoulians spend lots of time to encourage you to play hard and fast, and they eagerly participated in the outrageous schemes introduced by this outsider.

The 22 students willing to stick with my seminar on Foreign Correspondence were model citizens in this regard. They surprised me by coming back for a new round of class each week, answering hypothetical questions like would they ever work for Al-Jazeera (to my astonishment, most of them said they would) and covering mock press briefings in incomprehensible languages (who knew Americans know so little French).

Many were soon ready to pack their briefcases for reporting trips to outlandish places they had never heard of before. True, they occasionally grumbled to the competition (i.e. the other profs) that I made them sweat too much for the two credits promised by the end of the semester. But who suffered most for making this particular game altogether too hard to play, if not I? Teaching journalism, after all, must be one of the most difficult jobs to be found at an institution of higher learning. Try to grade an opinion piece, or a humor column, and you’ll know why.

Missoulians occasionally worry, quite unnecessarily, that their mountain air might get stale from isolation. Thus as the Pollner Professor, you are expected to raise a storm. This is particularly true for the public lecture you are asked to offer, which in my case was concerned with the image of the United States abroad. So serious was I about my task to adequately prepare for this windy performance, that I missed the Rolling Stones concert at Grizzly Stadium, the one real act in town.

The speech that would become infamous under the title “The Ugly American” was generally well received, as far as I could tell from comments I heard at the cheese counter of the local Good Food Store. The only person really provoked by it was the author of a letter to the Missoula paper, who mistook me for a French person and called for driving this ‘fascist hatemonger’ out of town. I would like to thank the good people of Missoula who realized I was a passing phenomenon and thus bided their time instead of heeding the letter writer’s call.

Montanans in general, whatever their political and philosophical inclinations, are firmly rooted in their way of life, and thus very different from the transient populations of Berlin or Washington, D.C, who make their living at least acting as if they could be persuaded. You’ll never be able to sway a Montanan. At best, you will be remembered as a pleasant breeze, nothing more and nothing less.

So when the midterm elections came along in November, I had already spent three months at the University of Montana without making myself useful in any tangible way. What had promised to be the first U.S. election night in years that I wouldn’t be working turned out being the only time during my stay in Missoula when I felt I had been of real help to anyone. After all, if you’ve worked for a wire service for over a decade, you know what to do when the deadline comes along before the results are in. Hanging out at the office of the Montana Kaimin until the wee hours of the morning brought the universal thrill of our profession home to me as if I were experiencing it all for the very first time.

In the end, however, to be useful is not what the Distinguished T. Anthony Pollner Visiting Professorship is all about. Like most beautiful things this world has to offer, it’s about luxury rather than necessity.

The most obvious aspect of this luxury is the opportunity you are granted to frolic in the great outdoors. You are constantly encouraged to take a fishing trip, to go horseback riding or to spend a weekend up in Glacier, Montana’s premier tourist site. Up until the end, it was hard to make my hosts understand that I neither wanted nor needed to partake in any of these things to make the four months in Missoula worth my while.

Yes, I did enjoy the drive along the Mission Range to Flathead Lake, the leisurely inner tubing trip down an icy river, and soaking in the natural hot springs across the state line in Idaho. But mostly, city and beach type that I am, I was content with having nature come to me. Sitting on the front steps of my house, I watched a bear roaming the neighbor’s yard across the street. A common occurrence in my part of town, I learned, when I tried to brag about the sighting to unimpressed locals later on.

Missoula is a place of splendid isolation and there is no way escaping its permanent ambiance of fresh air. So at last, I found what I had been looking for in my experiment – to let a prairie wind blow through my head, clearing away layers and layers of cynical city debris. I was reminded that important things could be grave and light-hearted at the same time. I might not have changed any minds by my presence, but the relentless beauty of Montana and its people certainly succeeded to sway me.

And then, once you have your head full of air, it’s time to leave. Nomads, you see, do not belong in Montana; they are just asked to come back and visit one day. You alight from the plane in your home city with the worst kind of hangover you’ve ever experienced in your life. Soon, you will be afflicted with what I shall call ‘le mal montanais’, a strange ache for a foreign place. Unless you can find someone to buy you a ticket back.

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