Hiking the M

I'm staying in Missoula with Kevin and Susan Miltko, both class of '91. Kevin is president of the club here, and he offered me a place to stay after I cold-called him on his cell phone. The Miltkos are a really cool family—they have three young daughters, plus their "Brazilian daughter," a foreign exchange student who has lived with them for over a year and goes to the University of Montana. The girls are awesome, very enthusiastic and just fun to be around. Kevin and Susan are a dentist and lawyer, respectively, and both are very committed to the community through service work, and they also host a wide variety of guests on a regular basis, so staying here feels very comfortable. Last night after soccer practice Susan made us all brownies and then I wrote thank-you notes while they put together 200 invitations to their annual family Halloween party, now in its 11th year. Susan had bought a bunch of fun stamps, including Star Wars-themed, and 7-year-old Molly's job was to pick who got which stamp. Things went smoothly until Grandma got the Sith Lord.

Missoula is a university town, and you know what that means...yes, giant landscaped letters! Like the interlocking ND flowerbed (which recently bit the dust to make way for a hideously collossal campus entrance on Notre Dame Ave.), the University of Montana has a big M made out of concrete on the side of the mountain overlooking campus. The trail going up to the M—aka the M Trail—is a popular hike for students and locals, and Kevin recommended I give it a try. It was a good day for it. The foliage here is at its peak, and it's one of those fall days where it looks like it's going to rain but doesn't feel like it's going to rain, if that makes any sense. So I spent the afternoon hiking and then hanging out at the campus.

My interviews here have gone very well. I've talked to a few younger graduates, one a '99 alum who is about to have her first baby, and we hit it off right away, so it was a particularly fun interview. She did the ACE program and now practices law here in town, and she was very articulate and passionate. That one will be a tough edit. And the highlight by far was my interview with Bob Sullivan, a 1940 grad who played football and then coached for Frank Leahy for a few years after he graduated. He had saved all kinds of stuff, including playbooks, scouting reports, programs, his own notes on proper techniques for tackling, etc., and his old uniform! It's funny because those uniforms were really thick wool, and the jersey actually came up underneath and buttoned like a onesy! Bob laughed when I pointed this out. You don't live to be 90 without accumulating a lot of great stories, and he told me all about his late wife and his son who was killed in Vietnam, plus the football and ND stuff. He had a real instinct for radio, in the sense that he described what we were looking at in detail without being asked. I was there for a full 3 hours, which was exhausting, but we both were having such a good time!

I'm really enjoying Missoula (or Zootown, as those in the know call it), but it has to be a brief visit—tomorrow I'm heading to Seattle, where I'll be staying with my cousin Kristen and her family. It's a pretty long drive, but thanks to one of the guys I interviewed the other day, I know all the best places to stop and things to see on the way. He literally drew out my entire route and told me exactly which exits to take. This is the third time someone has done this for me, and I've enjoyed everything I've been tipped off to so far. One of the things about this trip is that from the outside it might look like a sort of individual exercise in self-reliance, since I'm traveling mostly alone, setting my own schedule, deciding who to interview. But I've actually found the opposite is true; I'm asking for even the most basic things (a place to live, food, laundry, etc.) sometimes from complete strangers. And so far they have completely risen to the occasion, and in most cases gone way beyond my expectations. So in the middle of Week 3, so far, so good.