The World’s Most Conspicuous Man
It is impossible to be inconspicuous in Ovando, Montana. This I learned when I drove into town in my flashy rental and there was not another vehicle on the street. I rolled into town around 10:00—the dead hours between breakfast and lunch—and so kept going, following the road to Helmville. The Ovando-Helmville road winds over and around steep glacial moraines before it reaches the North Fork of the Blackfoot River. In mid-September, the North Fork doesn’t have a lot of water running through it, but still enough to tempt me to dive in. After the North Fork, a broad ranching valley unfurls with panoramic views of mountains in all directions. I drove through Helmville, then looped north on Highway 200 back to Ovando. The town boasts that it has more scenery per capita than any other small town in Montana, and I might just believe it. The Swan and Garnet Ranges surround the valley, and the Blackfoot—to my mind one of the most poetic of all rivers, and a fly fisher’s dream—cuts a wide swath through the middle of the valley.
When I got to Ovando, I stopped at the Stray Bullet, one of the town’s two cafes. This hundred year old restaurant gets its name from a bullet lodged in the wall, supposedly from a brawl on the street sometime in the last century. In my continuing attempt to blend in, I ordered apple pie and coffee; I’ve spent enough time in small town cafes to know that coffee might make me seem less an outsider. My stabs at inconspicuousness were thwarted from the get-go. To start with, I was the only person in the café. When two other customers finally came in, the waitress and cook knew them both by name, and this conversation actually happened: The waitress took a phone call, when she hung up the phone she turned to the other customers and said, “That was so-and-so, are your cows out? Because someone’s cows are on his road and they aren’t ours.”
I knew then that I could never blend in in Ovando, Montana, so the next opportunity I got, I asked about town’s museum. It turns out, even if you can’t blend in that’s ok, because people seem more than willing to make friendly conversation with a stranger. I never did get to see the museum—if you head that direction, be sure to set up an appointment; they don’t have enough staff to keep it open all day—but even so the day was worth it, I met great people, ate delicious food, and drove through some of the prettiest scenery Montana has to offer.
