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By Root 1954 0

our ability, but our efforts will probably not please everyone. The newcomers to the Bitterroot come for the view. At first, they like to see the cows and hayfields in the distance, but sometimes they don’t comprehend all that comes with agricultural operations, especially dairies. In other areas where dairies and development coexist, the objections to dairies are associated with their odor, the sound of running equipment too late at night, truck traffic on ‘our quiet rural road,’ and more. We even had a complaint once when a neighbor got cow manure on her white jogging shoes. One of our concerns is that people unsympathetic with animal agriculture could propose an initiative to restrict or ban dairy farming in our area. For example, two years ago an initiative banning hunting on game farms put a Bitterroot elk ranch out of business. We never thought that that would happen, and we can’t help but feel that there is a possibility that, if we are not vigilant, it could happen to us. In a society that espouses tolerance, it’s amazing how intolerant some folks are to animal agriculture and what comes with producing food.”

The last of these four life stories that I’ll quote is that of John Cook, the fishing guide who with infinite patience introduced my then-10-year-old sons to fly-fishing and has been taking them out on the Bitterroot River for the last seven summers: “I grew up on an apple orchard in Washington’s Wenatchee Valley. At the end of high school I had a wild hippie phase and set off for India on a motorcycle. I only got as far as the U.S. East Coast, but by then I had traveled all over the U.S. After I met my wife Pat, we moved to Washington’s Olympic Peninsula and then to Kodiak Island in Alaska, where I worked for 16 years as a wildlife and fisheries ranger. We next moved down to Portland, so that Pat could take care of her sick grandmother and grandfather. The grandmother died soon, and then one week after the grandfather’s death we got out of Portland and came to Montana.

“I had first visited Montana in the 1970s, when Pat’s father was a wilderness outfitter working in Idaho’s Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness just over the Montana border. Pat and I used to work for him part-time, with Pat doing the cooking and me doing the guiding. Already then, Pat loved the Bitterroot River and wanted to live on it, but land there already cost a thousand dollars per acre, much too expensive to support the cost of a mortgage by farming. Then in 1994, when we were looking to leave Portland, the opportunity arose to buy a 10-acre farm near the Bitterroot River at an affordable price. The farmhouse needed some attention, so we spent a few years fixing it up, and I took out a license as an outfitter and fishing guide.

“There are only two places in the world to which I feel a deep spiritual bond: one of them is the Oregon coast, and the other is here in the Bitterroot Valley. When we bought this farm, we thought of it as ‘dying property’: that is, a house where we wanted to live for the rest of our lives. Right here, on our property, we have great horned owls, pheasants, quail, wood ducks, and a pasture big enough for our two horses.

“People may be born into a time in which they feel that they can live, and they may not want to live in another time. We love this valley as it was 30 years ago. Since then, it has been filling up with people. I wouldn’t want to be living here if the valley became a strip mall, with a million people living on the valley floor between Missoula and Darby. A view of open space is important to me. The land across the road from my house is an old farm two miles long and half a mile wide, consisting entirely of pastureland, with a couple of barns as the only buildings. It’s owned by an out-of-state rock singer and actor called Huey Lewis, who comes here for just a month or so each year to hunt and fish, and for the rest of the year has a caretaker who runs cows, grows hay, and leases some of the land to farmers. If Huey Lewis’s land across the street got subdivided into house lots, I couldn’t stand the