Reasons why you can't live in Montana (anymore):
1. No place is ever as it once was. Instead of wheat fields, you find cinemas, sushi, and roundabouts. Even the sugar beet factory isn’t allowed to smell anymore.
2. Montana is a lonely place full of lonely people who've chosen to remain as such. There is no press of humanity to your side.3. You will never feel colder. The sun on snow is the biggest and most blinding disappointment you'll ever come to know.
4. You can drive very fast and very far and still not get anywhere. The dream is a wide tongue of interstate, unfurled behind the teeth of the Rockies, accompanied by George Strait. The reality is a trailer-park-lined two-lane and a caravan of half-tons in a blue diesel fog, grit peppering the underside of your rig.
5. Spend all your time studying their profile on the horizon and still you’ll never quite be able to feel the weight of the mountains.
Camille Griep lives and writes north of Seattle, Washington. Her work has been recently featured in WhiskeyPaper, Treehouse, and The First Line, among other fine online and print journals. She is an assistant editor at The Lascaux Review and a reader for the Los Angeles Review.