I curled up with a good book the other day: “Dale Burk’s Montana.”
Here’s my look back at the book. It was published in 2002, but it's filled with content that dates back at least two decades earlier.
Burk’s Montana is the Montana I never knew, first hand at least. The Montana Burk describes, writing in the late ’70s, was gone before I arrived in 1992. But I learned of that Montana in other ways, from friends and later in-laws when I married into a Montana family with roots dating to the early 1900s. And I learned about that Montana from Burk himself. I went on to lay my own, tentative, Montana roots. My twin daughters were born in Missoula, one graduated from the University of Montana, though neither live in the Treasure State today.
Work keeps pulling me away, but whenever I’m not in the nation’s greatest state, I’m plotting my way back, either for the summer, or hopefully some day, permanently.
“Dale Burk’s Montana” is available at https://www.stoneydale.com/.