Out of the Wilds

I was watching Broadway and film actress Michelle Williams on the Colbert late show the other day, and he started asking her about her childhood. She grew up, she said, in the wilds of Montana, so he asked if she grew up riding horses - she did. When he asked her specifically where in Montana, she got evasive - it's not so wild anymore, she said, big box stores and all that. Anyway I looked her up and sure enough, she was born in that very same Montana town I was - Kalispell. Now I was born a bit more than twice as long ago as she was, and I too grew up with horses, sometimes, but I go back fairly often and and I remember civilization coming a bit earlier. The McDonalds and the WalMart were there when she was born, I think, though the Costco is more recent.

It's true, I suppose, that a lot of population growth and suburbanization has occurred in the last twenty years, but I'm almost sure that football had replaced gunfights as the Friday night entertainment even before I got out of high school.

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