WHEN YOU'RE a newspaper columnist and you drive by a sign that reads "Monida, Montana - Exit 0" and you look out Exit 0 and all you see is a ghost town; well, you take the exit and see what turns up.
Monida isn't a Spanish name, by the way. The town sits on the Montana-Idaho border. My guess is that when it was named, half the town stood on the Montana side and yelled "Montana!" while the other half yelled "Idaho." Finally some blustery town father with a watch chain and a pot belly stepped forward, made the King Solomon "let's cut it in half" speech, and the world was blessed with "Monida."It is a very ugly town.
That is, it's ugly in the way some sweet, charming, soulful people are also ugly. Because it can't trade on looks, it trades on other things.
And why the place was left to rot while the towns on each side of it flourish is beyond me. Probably for the same reason one soldier gets gunned down and while another lives to tell the tale.
At any rate, Monida has lost it. But the nice thing is it hasn't changed a whit since 1959. Where other old towns are "preserved" - like pickles and canned peaches - Monida has been preserved the way dinosaur bones are preserved in limestone. Nothing artificial. In fact, the notion of it being a "skeleton" fits.
A couple of houses there have television antennas poking from them, but my guess is the people in them are either railroad part-timers or winter road-crew folks. A couple of buildings still show very authentic false fronts. Log cabins appear here and there, and an old, faded red barn actually has barn swallows.
Around the stores you find cans and bottles that were there 20 years ago - from Prince Albert tobacco tins to bottle caps for "O-SO" soda pop.
The town looks like a movie set where movie bikers stop to fight other movie bikers.
It looks like "Mayberry" after Andy moved out.
Still, there are many lessons to be learned from Monida. I agree, it's a little like learning lessons from disasters, but there are lessons.
Here are four:
1. Monida not only serves as an authentic history of our past, it's an honest history of decay. It is a showcase for time and the way time wears out the universe. Unlike some Montana "theme" towns, Monida is much more than a poor man's Disneyland.
2. As gritty as it is, Monida proves the Realtors are right: Location is everything. Because Monida sits at Exit 0, every mile marker on the freeway tells you where it is. In outer Montana you may not have a clue how far you are from Helena, but you know Monida is 197.5 miles up the road if you need it. In its grubby little way it's the most important place in the state.
3. Monida shows the "passages" that America goes through. It went from "a place people went to see," to "a place people pass by" to "a place nobody visits on a dime." Monida is a metaphor for the life of human beings.
4. Finally, Monida is not a product of "image enhancing," "marketing" or "cosmetics." Like an old man who lets his pate show, like an old woman who doesn't fight gray hair, Monida is what it is. It is not packaged. And for that alone, I salute it.