Prompt entry #2 - Sojourner

(Italicized portions are taken from Lisa Knopp's The Nature of Home: a Lexicon and Essays)

At the heart of the Old Frisian sojorner or sojourner is the word journey. The Low or Late Latin root of this word is diurnation, "a day's travel or work." 

Thirty minutes south of Bozeman on route 191, there's a turnoff across from an unnamed road. The road winds through the Flying D ranch (Ted Turner's quarter million acre plot) and up to the base of the Spanish Peaks, but that's not what we're after. From the turnoff, you have to find somewhere to fjord the Gallatin River – that is, after most of the snows have melted and the Spring runoff is done. The waters are quick and deep enough to pull you under once you near the far bank, so look sharp and stay steady. Keep your gear above your head. Keep it dry. Suit up again once you're on the bank and make your way upstream. The next tributary is the mouth of Squaw Creek, and that's where you really start. These waters are clear, cool, and hyaline in the estival heat of a high-country June. This is where you should start, string up a fly-line, and watch for the caddis and mayflies hatching on the slack water behind rocks and along the banks. If the action is good and the trout are rising, it will take all day to make it to the lake.

A sojourner is one who resides for a while in a place that is not her home among a people who see her as neither native nor alien.

No one else resides here. And no one ever fishes here – at least, none that you'll ever see. This stretch is tough to get to, and easy to never know was there. There's a forestry service rescue outpost here, half a mile or so north at Storm Castle, a megalithic bulge rimmed with palisades on three sides; a forbidding hunk of rock that looms behind me with a terrible sovereignty about it. No people here, but always the threat of grizzlies, the occasional moose, and mule deer passing like phantoms through the evergreens, more likely to be heard than seen. I keep fishing, laying line into the currents, an eye and ear kept open for bear, and I remember what my father told me. He had been fishing somewhere upstream from here when a grizzly came upon him fishing at a bend. My father lowered his rod onto the grasses beside him, careful to make no sudden moves. The bear was just across the stream, five yards or so, and more than capable enough to dash through the waters and strike him down in a moment. Standing slowly again, my father kept eye contact and began to step carefully backwards into the trees behind him. With no apparent anger, the bear reared onto its hind legs, arms folded up against its chest, and huffed a few deep breaths at him before lowering again, turning, and disappearing into the brush. He knew my father was no native to those woods, but neither did he pursue him as a threat.

A sojourner is someone trying to go home again or trying to find a place and people that could become home.

Past Storm Castle is Purdy Creek, then Line Creek at Spire Rock and Mica Creek all to your left. Take the tributary to the right after Mica, an unnamed stream that leads sharply up one side of Garnet Mountain. It takes all day to get here, if you're doing it right; all day to reach Rat Lake and the meadows that surround it. It is a lovely scene, a gentle sloping depression vaulted up above the canyons and streams, half way up Garnet Mountain amidst its stillness and quiet. The lake itself is relatively shallow, tinted a milky green for most of the year – the result of slow out-flow and the buildup of algeas and such. Pitch a tent on the eastern edge to catch the last of the setting sun and prepare to hike back downstream in the morning. 


No, I don't live here, but there's something akin to home in the still and the quiet of the Gallatins. Something that could be home.