Unspoken beauty: This is how St. Mary’s Lake, in Glacier National Park, looks from the air. Pilot David R. Hunt, a Deer Lodge native, took this photo.
By Kevin S. Giles
From my aisle seat aboard the sardine can of an airplane, I manage a glimpse through the window before the sleepy woman in front of me, blinded in a purple sleep mask, fumbles the shade down to block any evidence of the outside world. Imagine flying over some of the best mountains on earth and she doesn’t want to look.
Mountains look small from several miles up. We see them blotched over the landscape like paint globs on a canvas, snow gracing their highest peaks. We see their beginnings and endings and the context of their existence in the wide and wild place we know as Montana.
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It’s always a bit unsettling returning to my native state. The mountains point the way to a long-ago place, a yearning deep in the spirit. Random glimpses through tiny plane windows show me little of what I already know is down there. Those mountains are intensely familiar to me but a sudden turnabout from the crowds and traffic noise that surround me in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, now approaching 4 million residents. It takes time to hear Montana’s wind-born silence. Montanans know what I mean.