Old Truck Good Coffee is growing. Part of this involves bringing in more voices who speak from the urban+rural interchange. Rian Kochel began his life in rural Montana, left to Philly & Mexico for several decades, and came back to the Big Sky, for at least a while. Along the way, his writing has appeared in HuffPost, The Sun, NerdStash, MakeUseOf, Fat Nugs Mag, and more.
After decades of intentionally placing two or more time zones between myself and my family, I’m back in Montana.
My arrival in late June from Philadelphia did not unfold in the cinematic way. I’m here in the way you return to a place that made you, knowing full well it can still unmake you.
I’m not out here living some Hollywood television producer’s Yellowstone wet dream. The only drama I see that comes from that corner of the state isn’t clad in designer denim. It manifests itself as an annual summer run of a satirical play pitting tourism against Darwinism, set on a stage of unstable tectonic plates that serve as the lid to a prehistoric cauldron of doom.
The mountains are all purple majesty as they just sit there, smug as ever, because they know they’ll outlast me and the family I silently vowed to never get tangled up with again.
But I came back because someone needed me.
It wasn’t a thunderclapping epiphany—just a slow accumulation of signs and phone calls and a gut feeling I couldn’t ignore. One day I woke up and realized I was moving toward someone else’s needs. And that’s the thing about being “the one who shows up.” You don’t do it because it’s glamorous. You do it because you can, and to blot out that gnawing glint of regret on the horizon that promises only to get bigger if you don’t.
I came back because my older brother, Sean, needed me.
About a year ago, he reached out from the ether of our messy and abandoned past with a gesture that leveled four decades of the high-voltage dynamic we spent our lives curating. All the gauzy recollections of rage, symbiotically shared between us during our teenage years together—scenes that make Lord of the Flies look like a Pixar film—evaporated the day he texted me and asked for help.
My brother is a true renaissance man, with a plethora of talents and trades—from beekeeping and beer brewing to furniture building. His main focus in business for the better part of twenty years has been his work as a luthier. He sources the wood for his bespoke guitars, banjos, and mandolins from the crooked barns and old, abandoned icehouses that pepper the velvety green floor of the valleys outside of Missoula and beyond. He hand-carves fret markers from elk antlers or cements spent bullet casings into place along the necks of ancient cedar and fir with the effortless grace of a true craftsman.
But I got the gift of gab, and, as such, a pretty keen acumen for marketing products and promises.
This is why he came sniffing around for my help. He was at a lull in business and needed someone to help push—at least, that’s how he framed it. What came to light within two short weeks of intermittent “business” calls was that he was in way over his head.
I’m the last of five kids. Two brothers and two sisters came before me. Sean and I are the youngest two and closest in age. I’m the gay one that ran away to the city. The rest of my siblings remained under the big sky for their formative and adult years, while I honored my lifelong inability to sit still or commit to anything beyond a fear of commitment.
Sean has been our ornery-as-she-is-earnest 84-year-old ma’s primary caretaker since she was widowed 20 years ago, when my dad was forced back to the fold with a brain full of cancer. Her name is Arlene—Leanie for short.
Since my father’s passing, Leanie has been residing in a modest home on 12 acres up the Potomac Valley, 20-some miles east of Missoula. This plot of land is also where Sean built out his shop and a studio apartment above it to live in… when he was a bachelor and self-proclaimed recluse.
Over the course of the last two decades, Sean’s hand at craftsmanship isn’t the only thing that has become refined. His penchant for being a curmudgeon on a mountain has also been buffed away. A little over a decade ago, while teaching a beekeeping class, he met a lovely human who is now his wife. Together they have purchased a house in town where they are raising their eight-year-old kiddo.
Living a few acres away from Leanie started to become more than he bargained for. And the reality that there will never be an adequate average of time zones to keep me separated from the beauty and burden of my family was queued up right behind this truth.
In late spring, Leanie needed to have dental work. That dental work ended up causing an infection, which caused another infection, which became a catalyst for 30 hours of Sean giving me play-by-play text message updates regarding Leanie’s health from the ER. I found my thumbs making a promise that I couldn’t argue with:
I’m coming home to help you. I’ll be there before my birthday.
I once thought Montana was a place to escape. Now I know it waits, biding its time, until it calls you back to remember home and make it your own again.
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