Adventures in Greenough, MT: Chapter 3 - Sunset Hill Road

Cruising up Highway 200, just before you crest into Greenough metro, is Sunset Hill Road. With a swooping turn, the road descends through the trees and is slightly visible from the shop, which lies on the opposite side of the hill from the road. I recall my dad telling a story of a woman staggering into the shop one morning after having crashed off Sunset Hill Road. She was badly injured and covered in blood. That first little section is tricky.

Continuing on, the road dips through a small timber section, an area, like so many others on the ranch, that I experienced on horseback, making me feel a certain way about it. Closer. Bonded. Similar to skiing, where if you ride a patch of pristine powder in particularly smooth and creamy way, the situation kind of binds you to the moment in a sensational blockchain of memory. It's as if riding through country on horseback is a song, an ancient and beautiful and very catchy song.

As Sunset Hill Road emerges from the trees the entire valley is framed in front of you with Hunter's Point in the distance and the Blackfoot river just beyond that. To the left, nestled back down the tree-line are barns and outbuildings that constitute the town. Mainstreet Greenough brings back lots of memories, like my brother hot-dogging around on the four-wheeler (surely to flip with multiple passengers), a butchered cow whose gut-pile was so massive I had to use a forklift to move it, and tragically a cowboy's dead dog hanging off his truck. Lord knows why he tied that dog up, but he did and the dog hung himself for me to find tail dripping with urine; it was extremely sad and downright uncomfortable to see a big, tough cowboy man sob over his stupid blunder.

Thinking back to the barns, the most remarkable thing happened in the loft of the Big Barn - a huge open space with a basketball hoop, skate ramp, and these huge cardboard rolls that we used to package ourselves in and roll down the skate ramp. It was dizzying fun. Anyway, one day, dinking around up there, we went to kicking a mini-sized basketball all about (cowboy boots pack a nice toe-punch). It was impressive to see how far the ball could travel, unobstructed in the big barn-space. The bigger our kicks got the more exciting it was and eventually my friend Neil unleashed a monster kick that soared the ball across the expanse and then, horrifically, towards the one breakable thing in there, a set of windows. Bracing for impact and the shock of breaking glass we all stood motionless and then bewildered, as, at the instant of impact, there was nothing. Only pure silence as the ball vanished into another dimension. 

Dazed and confused we stared up at the window. The glass was partitioned into panes and upon examination we discovered that one pane, barely bigger than the mini-sized basketball, was missing. Simply incredible. The chance that a ball could fly cleanly through that window was next to impossible, but it happened and it didn't seem real even as we retrieved the ball from across the street.

Nowadays, considering that we don't own the ranch anymore, I'm grateful that Sunset Hill Road is a public road allowing access to my sensational blockchain memory song.