The First Two Weeks Back in Town

It’s not the noise that gets me, or not only the noise, though Missoula in October after a season up here does sound like a lot at first, traffic and doors and music leaking out of bars on Higgins that I’d forgotten were even open past nine. What actually catches me off guard every single year, five for five now, is overhearing strangers.

Up in the tower the only conversation is mine with dispatch, twice a day, and whatever I bring with me in a book or say out loud to an empty room, which I do more than I’d have admitted before this job. Come down to town and you’re suddenly awash in other people’s sentences, half of a phone call at the table next to you at the co-op, two guys arguing about a truck outside a hardware store, a couple having what’s clearly not their first version of an argument in the booth behind mine at the diner on Broadway. None of it’s addressed to me. None of it requires anything from me. And for about the first week I find it strangely exhausting in a way I can’t fully explain to people who haven’t had five months of the alternative. It’s not that I dislike people. It’s that my ears have spent a whole summer only needing to process one voice on a radio for ninety seconds at a stretch, and then suddenly there’s ambient human noise everywhere, constant, undifferentiated, and something in my head keeps trying to parse all of it as if it matters to me, the way it would if I were actually part of the conversation.

I usually rent a room through the winter, month to month, depending on what work I can find, and it’s taken me most of five years to stop being surprised by how disorienting the adjustment is given that I grew up around people same as anyone. You’d think coming back to something familiar would feel easier than it does. Instead it’s the small mechanics of town living that trip me first, every year, in a slightly different order. Traffic lights. Making change at a register instead of just handing over exact bills because there’s been nobody to make change with. Remembering that a closed door in a house full of other renters means something specific, privacy being asked for, rather than just the fact of a door being shut the way it is on an empty tower.

By the second week most of it’s smoothed back out, the way it always does, and by November I’m mostly just a guy in Missoula again, taking whatever work covers the winter, plowing driveways some years, warehouse work other years, whatever’s around. The tower starts to feel like something that happened to someone slightly different from the person standing in line at the grocery store arguing internally about whether he actually needs six things or is just buying them because he can.

What gets me every year, and I don’t think this one’s going away regardless of how many seasons I do this, is how much I miss the quiet by February, and how much the quiet was starting to wear on me by September. I’ve stopped expecting that contradiction to resolve. It’s just the shape of the year now, two seasons that don’t reconcile so much as take turns.