Old Truck Good Coffee continues to find and feature rural voices who see their homes through a different and more complex lens than most. Here, Montana writer Mika Girton talks about growing up small in one of our nation’s (physically) largest states.
When people imagine Montana, they often picture wide-open ranches, horseback rides at sunset and kids stacking bales under the summer sun. But I didn’t grow up on a ranch. I grew up in town, or what we called “town,” though it barely deserved that name. A handful of streets, a school, two gas stations, a couple bars and a grocery store that sold more gossip than food. That was it.
The county had maybe a thousand people, spread thin across the prairie and coulees, and we were the cluster in the middle. In some ways, town life should have been easier — we didn’t have cattle to feed at thirty below, or acres of crops to worry about. But in a place that small, your worth wasn’t measured by grades or kindness. It was measured by who your family was, what work you did in the summer, and whether you fit into the mold of what a Montana kid was supposed to be.
I didn’t.
While the ranch kids came back to school in the fall sunburned and tough from months of haying and branding, I just came back. I’d spent my summers wandering the quiet streets, shooting hoops on the cracked black top at a friend’s house, hiding in my room or exploring along the river. I didn’t have a place that tied me to the land, no herd or field to belong to. In a community where everyone had a role, I felt like I had none.
That’s the thing about small-town Montana- you can’t hide. People notice what you do, but they also notice what you don’t do. I wasn’t the hardworking ranch kid, I wasn’t the star athlete, I wasn’t the preacher’s daughter who sang at church. I was just… there. And “just there” stands out in a place where everyone’s identity is pinned neatly in place.
Inside that stillness, my thoughts grew louder. I didn’t have the language back then for the parts of me that felt different, but I knew enough to stay quiet. Being different was just frowned upon; it was dangerous in a town where everyone knew your name. So I folded myself in, carried my questions silently, and walked with the weight of things I couldn’t share.
There were nights I’d sit on the hood of moms car on the edge of town, looking out at the highway that cut straight across the prairie. I’d watch the headlights appear, small and far off, growing larger until they passed and vanished into the dark again. Each pair of lights felt like a possibility — someone going somewhere that wasn’t here. I’d wonder what it might be like to live in a place where no one knew me, where I could step outside the role small-town Montana had written for me before I could even write for myself.
But leaving wasn’t simple. In a small town like ours, even as you dreamed of escape, you were stitched to the place by familiarity. You knew who lived in every house, whose dog barked from behind which fence, whose grandma drove too slow down Main Street. The grocery clerk asked about your grades, and your teacher had once taught your own mom. It was suffocating, but it was also home. That contradiction is hard to explain unless you lived it — wanting to break free yet knowing that freedom means tearing away from the only ground you’ve ever known.
What I remember most is the quiet. Not peaceful quiet, but the heavy kind. Streets empty after nine, houses dark except for the flicker of TV’s behind curtains. The wind moving through town louder than the people in it. I’d lie awake listening, wondering if life would always feel this still, this small, this lonely.
Growing up in a rural Montana town wasn’t all bad — it taught me resilience, patience, and how to make something out of nothing. But it also taught me how deep loneliness can settle in your bones when you don’t fit in and there’s nowhere else to go. I carried that loneliness for years, long after I finally left. Even now, when I drive through a small town, I can feel it rise again- that mix of familiarity and ache, the knowledge of what it means to be known by everyone and still not seen.
Montana gave me big skies and endless horizons, but inside that space, my world was painfully
small.
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