Eight years ago I left Missoula, Montana with a heavy heart, anxious to leave behind the tight valley that had held the bulk of my twenty-something angst and self-doubt. When I’ve thought about that town in the years since, I’ve remembered the fight I had to break up between the two guys who lived above me in the creepy apartment between the highway and the railroad tracks, the persistent winter grey, my four years of un-asked-for celibacy, the empty abyss I saw before me as graduate school came to an end, and my fear that I’d never do anything but sell coffee for seven dollars an hour if I didn’t get the hell out of there. And fast.

Over the years, the Missoula of my memory became a heavy wool blanket wet with sadness and that weird smell that comes with it. So I wasn’t prepared for the deep sense…