Moving West Isn't So Easy...

"Moving West is not easy -- but change is good!" So says my favorite West Coast blogger, Patricia Corrigan (former St. Louisan and Post-Dispatch colleague, now a writer living happily in San Francisco). Her blog? "Late to the Haight," latetothehaight.blogspot.com.

Alex and I may be a little late to Montana, as well.  On our very first vacation there in the early '90s, he announced that he wanted to live in the Bitterroot Valley someday. His childhood memories of summers driving cross country with parents, to swim and fish in the Bitterroot and Selway rivers and hangout with the Milner kids at their mountain-view home, are imprinted on his brain. I've had a heady dose of the Bitterroot, too. Our first attempt at buying something there in June fell through, when appraisals came in MUCH lower than our negotiated price and inspections turned up problems. But it was a charming cottage, perhaps one of the better ones on the south side of town. We hope that current owners are happy there.

We are still looking. A new cottage came to our attention in the last few days, and we asked our real-estate broker to take a look inside. It is narrow side-to-side and shotgun-like deep, just like the Camp Street house and others in mine and Alex's New Orleans experience...

"...it is very sweet," writes Vicky, our broker.  "It is an older home, 1910 or so, that has been remodeled and such throughout the years."   But it has a very small feeling inside, and it's located on the less valuable north side of town, with commercial property abutting this and some other north-side homes here and there.

We look on. And new friends help! That's one of the nicest parts of this process. Our photographer friend, Mel, sends us pictures of a gorgeous-if-new house for sale by owner, on property with stunning mountain views. Amy, another new contact, tells us about the house in town that a friend of hers wants to sell but is currently renting now. Months ago, Eric Milner sent us links to a beautiful little house, still for sale on the south side. Vicky keeps a regular check of new listings, and we feel like we're getting to know Hamilton really well, inside and out, by looking at all of these houses, there and online!

But as with the fishing while we were there, conditions are not quite right for us yet (with the fishing,  it was melting snowpack -- 250% heavier than usual -- that turned Western trout streams in June into a series of white-water deluges. See our first view (a video; iPhones, for example, may not be able to download it) of the usually serene and fishable Selway...

Hamilton, the county seat for Ravalli County, is worth the effort, we've decided. "The town of Hamilton is the central trade area for hundreds of small farms, ranches, and orchards that fill the valley," says one of its Web sites. "The Bitterroot Valley extends along U.S. Highway 93 from Missoula to the Idaho line. It includes the communities of Stevensville, Victor, Corvallis, Hamilton and Darby. Because of its location between the Bitterroot Range and the Sapphire Mountains, the climate in this corner of the state is more moderate than the rest of the state."

We've heard it called the "bananna belt" of Montana. And, indeed, it may have a slightly shorter growing season than the Midwest's, but its gardens in summer can be lush. 

 The town's pristine, fast-running irrigation ditches help in the growing process...

This ditch borders the garden pictured above.

Officially, Hamilton is designated Zone 5a by the USDA, for gardening with plants that have the same cold hardiness in winter as parts of Illinois and Iowa (minus 15 to minus 20). By comparison, St. Louis, says the USDA, is a warmer 6a (minus 5 to minus 10); many other parts of Montana are much colder, to minus 30 or below.

I've just purchased two Montana gardening books,  "Month-by-Month Gardening in Montana," by John Cretti and "The Montana Gardener's Companion" by Bob Gough and Cheryl Moore-Gough (the latter part of a Globe-Pequot series that I had the honor to contribute to for Missouri). I will study them for their differences and their similarities.


Meanwhile, the great out-of-doors there also can be as dangerous as it is beautiful. This -- the month of August -- is wildfire season in Montana. And The Missoulian already has reported on a number of fires, but fewer than in recent years. The heavy winter snows and rain in spring helped the situation. Still, a fire east of Missoula threatened a few homes.  http://missoulian.com/news/local/article_3e1c91e8-cd21-11e0-917e-001cc4c03286.html

We visited Hamilton one heavy fire season. We stayed in a motel where helicopter pilots and smoke jumpers tried to rest. We couldn't see the mountains for smoke. Breathing was difficult at times. But all of the homes in town are old enough to have survived dozens of fire seasons, or as many 100, in some cases. I'm not worried about fires.

In fact, I'm so curious. I went looking for pictures of the historic year-2000 fires south of Hamilton, near Sula. We'd driven through the burnt-out but recovering Sula forest to get to Hamilton this summer. Back in 2000, heavy winds made one fire in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness grow almost 10,000 acres in one day. Here is a spectacular Sula shot by John McColgan:

"The Elk Bath"

 "If fire can be called beautiful, this photographer has captured it.
Taken by the Alaskan Type I Incident Management Team on August 6, 2000 on the
East Fork of the Bitterroot River on the Sula Complex. By John McColgan,
Bureau of Land Management, Alaska Fire Service.

"One of Montana's many year 2000 Wildfires.

Read the News Story by Rob Chaney about this photo in The Missoulian Newspaper

"Near Sula, Montana"

"John McColgan, Bureau of Land Management, Alaska Fire Service. 

Copyright 1998-2011 All Rights Reserved"

The Missoulian carried other reports on these unprecented fires:  http://missoulian.com/uncategorized/article_d305bf80-d395-50ff-915f-3214f6ea4426.html.  What a fascinating place!!

The cat-share program

Josephine, the Cat.

We will be traveling back to Montana, sometime September-December, looking at more houses with Vicky, our real-estate guru; maybe cross-country skiing; certainly seeing friends there. But it's clear that we're hunkering down in our old St. Louis neighborhood for much of fall and winter when...

...we have the chimney of our living room's little gray-enameled wood stove not just swept but scoured...

... and we have two big loads of firewood delivered...

... and we start up again an informal cat-share program with our neighbors' personality-packed little black cat.
 
Josephine was with us all of last winter while her family was in Cambridge, Mass. The dad did a visiting-professor gig at Harvard; the mom worked long-distance from their temporary home; the two little girls happily attended public schools.  We'd long admired their Josephine from afar.  She's more like a puppy-cat, following her young family around their front yard, scooting along with them up and down the block, guarding their front porch from a perch at the top of the steps.  She'd come visit us on our front stoop occasionally, and that was long before we began feeding her.  She'd roll around on the sidewalk and meow a bit and show off her fur coat. In the sun, it glistened like the finest pelt of little black bear.

We're cat lovers at heart. But we'd lost two great ones -- a 20+year-old calico and a 10-year-old white cat, in the space of a couple of years recently, and we weren't ready for another full-time feline. A loaner cat?? It seemed like a perfect way to ease back slowly into catdom.

A wary cat.

And then we fell in love.  Josephine fit right in, if a little warily at first because there were just the three of us rattling around this big old house.  Food -- even that disgusting, slightly greasy and too-aromatic dry stuff that she loves and that we once fed our own cats -- cemented our relationship.

There wasn't a laundry basket she didn't take as her own, or an empty grocery bag temporarily set down on the kitchen floor that she didn't dive into.

She'd sack out by the warmth of the wood stove, when our sofa was angled up next to it. She'd leave bits of her fine pelt everywhere. My vacuum cleaner did overtime all winter long on our prissy, white New Orleans-inspired (Alex is a NOLA native, I'm a convert) slipcovers...

Lest you think that all Josephine did was laze about, you should see one of the little gifts she'd leave for us on our front door mat...

Josephine is quite the mouser.

She also brought us a couple of equally dead sparrows, plus one of our beloved juncos. But mostly, mice. Our garage is nearly rodent-free!
 
And when spring came, she enjoyed the back deck as much as we did.

She especially liked the oat grass that I grew from a free sample I'd been sent of Renee's Garden  "Gourmet Cat Treats" seeds.

...Her new salad nestled on back steps between pots of squirrel-protected arugula and dwarf kale.

And then there was the planter of nasturtiums, also started from seed in our basement. Somehow, when they got into a planter outside, Josephine thought they'd make a bed! And also somehow, she didn't kill the plants.

Now Josephine's first family is home for good. We see her less often.

But whether her "owners" know it or not, we're still in the cat-share business. It started simply. We'd see Josephine outside and give her a rub.  That led to whistling for her (okay, we're dotty but we do have a bona fide way to whistle that worked on our white cat and now works on Josephine).  As I said, she is a puppy-cat; she comes when you call!

We hesitated about buying a new bag of cat food.  We thought her first family might not appreciate that. Recently, though, when Alex was making tuna salad, he poured the bit of tuna water into a small clean deli container. When Josephine came by a bit later, she slurped it up and licked the tiny plastic tub dry, moving it all over the pantry.

What made the difference about having real cat food in the house, however, was the recent week that the first family went on brief vacation and hired a neighbor kid to let Josephine in and out of their house. One midnight, as I was locking up in back, she was at our door, howling to come in.  I let her,  of course, got her some water and emailed the fam.  Later, I heard from them that they were on the trip.  Josephine seemed to want to stay here. I kept them apprised, we bought her catfood and fresh litter and the rest, as the cliche goes, is history.

Now we're back to seeing her a few times a week and when we do, dropping a pinch of cat food -- just a snack, really -- into a bowl each time. One recent weekday, her visit turned into a nap on the guest bed upstairs. Another day, she hung out in the backyard for a bit and helped us garden.  Here's how truly dotty I am: I bought her a Trader Joe's recycled-cardboard scratching pad with organic cat nip that you spread on top ($6 for it all). She spent about three minutes on it and that was it.

The scratch pad is still in a corner of our kitchen floor, and I still have hopes that she'll use it less dismissively. She is a great cat and greatly appreciated by her family. We miss her when she's not here, but we're so glad that they found her, cared for her, feed her, get her in at night and are truly back in her life full-time.  All bets are off, however, when the weather gets cold enough for firing up our wood stove. We'll have more than a part-time cat then, I'm betting. That radiant heat is way better than cat nip; it's like kitty-cat crack.

Happily, still house hunting in MT...

Ohio River, at sunset

...but getting some perspective on it by thinking about the east -- Louisville, Ky., where Mom and I recently checked out the sunset after dinner at Blue Dog (http://goo.gl/HJzBB). This bank of the Ohio, east of downtown, might've been close to where William Clark tied up, then climbed the hill for a visit with his sister at the old Locust Grove Plantation.

Locust Grove

A Web site calls it, "The last remaining residential building to ever provide shelter to the Lewis and Clark Expedition leaders, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the Locust Grove is a National Historic Landmark in Louisville, Kentucky. It was owned by Clark’s sister Lucy Clark Croghan and her husband, William Croghan." (See http://www.locustgrove.org/). An 18th century "domestic Georgian" mansion, it is a far cry from one of the little 20th century Montana homes that we've been looking to buy. Alex and I turned down the final counter-offer on the recent Hamilton cottage, after our appraisals came in late and way lower than the asking price. It didn't help that the stock market tanked that week, and we also would've had expensive repairs for some aforementioned home-inspection problems. So...

We are fine with the decision. In fact, we go out and "celebrate" with our good friends Hank and Rochelle over an excellent Missouri-sourced dinner and wine at Farmhaus (http://goo.gl/6Mv9o), including...

...my "local summer salad," served in a Ball canning jar that's carefully spilled onto a plate at table

Onward.

One or both of us plan to make another trip to Montana this fall (maybe staying into winter to do some cross-country skiing on what we hear are impeccably groomed trails at Lost Trail Pass!!). We'd fly this time; save the next drive for a rental truck with furniture!

I keep the Wyoming fortune cookie in mind...

What an adventure! Wish us luck.

Homes, Homes on the Range?

Joplin, Mo., where many homes were destroyed by the May 22 tornado (photo by J.B. Forbes)

How lucky am I? We have a fantastic 100-year-old (this year!) St. Louis home that we've rehabbed (okay, it's not perfect, but it's close enough). We own my mother's pristine little 1920s condo in Louisville, with windows on three sides looking out on mature maples, sweet bay and conifers; she feels like she's in a tree house even though she's on the first floor, and she loves it! And we're able to pursue yet another home -- an in-town cottage in Hamilton, Montana! Some people have lost homes, lost everything, and we've been just frugal enough and lucky enough to be able to add on.

If we got the little Montana place, I am thinking we'd rent it much of the year through a wonderful woman there, and "book" our own visits in the heat of July and August (here), plus a month or so in winter for cross-country skiing and other outdoor winter stuff. But we're still struggling with how we might divide our time.

I think about all of these options and how incredibly lucky we are to have them when I visit the photo exhibit of Joplin's tornado-flattened homes.  My former colleagues at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, senior staff photographer Jim Forbes...

the lovely Mr. Forbes

 ... and (Pulitzer Prize finalist) Robert Cohen, put on this showing with help from the newspaper and from Schiller's Camera to raise money for Joplin. I missed the party and silent auction but stop by the next day and fall in love with the horrible beauty of these shots.

(photo by Robert Cohen)

I can't stop thinking about them, and when I email Forbes about one of his images, he says that if I match the silent-auction price, I can get it, framed!! What a deal. Happy Birthday to me, and the proceeds go to Joplin! Can't wait. 

Meantime, I also can't wait to hear about the Hamilton, MT, house.


Do we really get it?  (Do we really get it?) Maybe we weren't meant to have the house. It is all so complicated.

Oy vey is the only, short-hand way to describe it.  We are trying to be the best -- VERY BEST -- consumers, getting inspections on ALL of the pertinent issues before closing on what may be our "last, best place." And yet, those very inspections may be our undoing.

They turn up many unforseen problems with the cute little house: an aging electrical system that may have been grandfathered in to the local code, in an otherwise beautifully refurbished home, circa 1939; a decades-old shingled roof needing to be replaced; but most upsetting, a basement radon reading of 16 (normal levels shouldn't go above 4, according to the EPA, the Montana Dept. of Human Health and Public Services and other authorities; YIKES!).

granite in nearby Bodgett Creek canyon

Montana is a surrounded by and built on top of gorgeous granite -- a natural source of radioactivity. It is "a terrible beauty," to hijack the phrase and its meaning from the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. But it IS horribly wonderful -- all of that decaying radioactive uranium in those gorgeous upthrusts of steel-gray rock.

It's kind of funny, too. Only one in ten houses that we looked at had been radon tested. The tested one had, indeed, gone through a radon-mitigation process. We wonder if Montanans don't worry about such things, take it as a part of life in the Bitterroot. In fact, online, I found this funny little Montana "resort" site featuring so-called Radon Health Mines, at http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2143. People with arthritis and lupus (me on both counts, but very mild cases) go there, the story says, for "natural" treatments!?! They do keep children and pregnant women out. I would never partake.

And yet, it makes me think again and again about the radon. We've made pre-sale radon mitigation a condition of the cottage purchase -- no negotiating. We've also asked for a price reduction to factor in the new roof and electrical work that we would have to do.


(Crickets.)  The sellers are very quiet. We get occasional emails from our real-estate broker saying they're "still pondering... it may be a day or two yet before they respond." 

Meanwhile, I go back to my life in St. Louis. I get approved for an American Express credit card (whoopee!! don't tell me, Equifax, that I don't have a credit rating!!!).  We're slogging past the spate of 100+ temperatures (103 yesterday) and are expecting a "cool spell" of high temps only in the mid-90s.  Out I go today, to work a little in our scorched garden and then on to a meeting for Brightside St. Louis (see a new promotional image for my favorite daffodil-supplying, not-for-profit, below).

http://operationbrightside.org/

And we wait. And we wait. And we wait. I'm thinking that I very well may be planting fall crops of lettuces and kale in my St. Louis garden by the time we hear back from Montana. Oy, again...