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Sunza Beeches Bozeman, Montana 2012

Breakfast with the boys, a traditional geezer activity all across this country–one which I participate in myself almost weekly. One of the guys shown here was relating an incident that occurred to him recently. He was burning the weeds along an irrigation ditch when one of his new neighbors from out of state came over and started complaining that his fire was also burning some fence posts that may or may not have belonged to the neighbor. (The two had strikingly different opinions on that.) The guy telling the story objected to his neighbor’s attempted interference–strenuously. After some choice personal accusations suggesting the neighbor participated in questionable sexual activities with family members, he started on a more general rant that I’ve heard regularly since moving to Montana thirty years ago. It goes something like this: “I wish they’d build a fence on the god-damned border and keep those sunza beeches from California out of this state altogether. All they do is drive up the damn property prices and try to change every damn thing from the way we’ve been doing them around here forever.” In spite of not being a Montana native no one’s ever called me a sunza beech for moving here–at least not to my face. I think they more gladly make room for you if you grew up in a place like Kansas as I did because, out here where mountains are considered a form of supreme being, anyone coming from such flat country is considered a refugee.]]>