Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [16]
“So I started fly-fishing to catch bass. I learned how to tie my own flies, really got into it, and went fishing every day after work. My friend was right: it did reduce stress. But then I entered graduate school in Rhode Island and got into another stressful work situation. A fellow graduate student told me that bass weren’t the only fish that one could catch by fly-fishing: I could also fly-fish for trout nearby in Massachusetts. So I took up trout-fishing. My thesis supervisor loved to eat fish, and he encouraged me to go fishing: those were the only occasions when he didn’t frown at my taking time off from work in the laboratory.
“Around the time that I turned 50, it was another stressful period of my life, because of a difficult divorce and other things. By then, I was taking off time to go fly-fishing only three times a year. Fiftieth birthdays make many of us reflect on what we want to do with what’s left of our lives. I reflected on my own father’s life, and I remembered that he had died at age 58. I realized with a jolt that, if I were to live only as long as he did, I could count on only 24 more fly-fishing trips before I died. That felt like very few times to do something that I enjoyed so much. The realization made me start thinking about how I could spend more of my time doing what I really liked during the years that I had left, including fly-fishing.
“At that point, I happened to be asked to go evaluate a research laboratory in the Bitterroot Valley of southwestern Montana. I had never been to Montana before; in fact, I had never even been west of the Mississippi River until I was 40 years old. I flew into Missoula airport, picked up a rental car, and began to drive south to the town of Hamilton where the lab was located. A dozen miles south of Missoula is a long straight stretch of road where the valley floor is flat and covered with farmland, and where the snowcapped Bitterroot Mountains on the west and the Sapphire Mountains on the east rise abruptly from the valley. I was overwhelmed by the beauty and scale of it; I had never seen anything like it before. It filled me with a sense of peace, and with an extraordinary perspective on my place in the world.
“When I arrived at the lab, I ran into a former student of mine who was working there and knew about my interest in fly-fishing. He suggested that I come back the next year to do some experiments at the lab, and also to go fly-fishing for trout, for which the Bitterroot River is famous. So I returned the next summer with the intention of spending two weeks, and I ended up staying a month. The summer after that, I came intending to stay a month and ended up staying for the whole summer, at the end of which my wife and I bought a house in the valley. We have been coming back ever since, spending a large part of each year in Montana. Every time I return to the Bitterroot, when I enter it on that stretch of road south of Missoula, that first sight of the valley fills me again with that same feeling of tranquility and grandeur, and that same perspective on my relation to the universe. It’s easier to preserve that sense in Montana than anywhere else.”
That’s what the beauty of Montana does to people: both to those who had grown up in places completely unlike it, like Stan Falkow and me; to other friends, like John Cook, who grew up in other mountainous areas of the American West but still found themselves drawn to Montana; and to still other friends, like the Hirschy family, who did grow up in Montana and chose to stay there.
Like Stan Falkow, I was born in the northeastern U.S. (Boston) and had never been west of the Mississippi until the age of 15, when my parents took me to spend a few weeks of the summer in the Big Hole Basin just south of the Bitterroot Valley (map, p. 31). My father was a pediatrician who had taken care of a ranchers’ child, Johnny Eliel, afflicted by a rare disease for which