Airport security was a nightmare, and apparently the gate on my ticket was displayed incorrectly, which I learned after I’d already hiked across an entire wing to find that the gate on my ticket said St. Louis instead of Missoula. By the time I found the right gate, I was ready to rip someone’s head off. Instead I called Thad, because I was bored and I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts. He helped me as much as he could, but he had to be at work in five minutes and didn’t have much time to chat.

            “Call me tonight,” Thad said. “I wanna know how it all went down.”

            “As in whether or not I had to fist fight my dad in a parking lot?”

            “Especially if that happens.”

            I hung up, deflated. Fortunately, all my running around the airport had killed some time, so I didn’t have to hang around the gate for long. I was only sitting there for ten minutes before they started boarding. I got a window seat toward the back, and for a second I thought the person settling in next to me was a man, but then I realized she was in fact just a very butch woman. I’d been dreading the possibility of sitting next to a baby or someone with a poor understanding of personal hygiene, but instead I’d gotten another gay. The Lord was smiling upon me today.

            I was usually the last person willing to start up conversations with strangers, but I was anxious and needed to do something with my excess energy. So I asked, “You from Montana?”

            She looked down at herself in her flannel shirt and faded jeans. “That obvious, huh?”

            “Just wondering, that’s all.”

            She laughed, and I instantly liked her. She was probably somewhere in her mid-fifties, and there was something so comforting to me about seeing an older gay person in the wild, like I was meeting a village elder or some shit. “Yeah, I live in Missoula. Best place for a country dyke to live, if you ask me.”

            “Oh?”

            She lifted an eyebrow at me with a smirk. “You a tourist?”

            “Uh, well, not really. I was born in Missoula, but I haven’t been there since I was a baby. I’m going to go meet my dad.”

            “Ah, well, I’m not sure if you know this, but Missoula is Montana’s gay mecca.”

            “What? Really?”
            “You didn’t know that?”

            “No! Damn. Maybe that’s why I turned out like this.”

            She chuckled. “Could be.”

            “You know any good places to hang out?”

            This was how we chatted up until take-off, and then a bit after. My seat neighbor introduced herself as Jude, and she’d been in Los Angeles at a friend’s wedding and was returning home, where she lived with her wife of twenty years and worked as a local truck driver. They were taking care of her wife’s sister’s baby, so her wife couldn’t come with her to the wedding. She told me about all the bars to visit and the best drag shows, though I wasn’t sure if I’d have time to stop by if I was doing some family bonding shit.

            A someone who so often sucked at socializing and befriending strangers, I’d done a pretty good job with this random woman on an airplane. We didn’t talk the whole time, but it was enough to keep myself from freaking myself out over what would happen once we landed. Plus it had really improved my idea of what Missoula was like. Maybe its designation as Montana’s gayest city was the reason my dad was so chill about my sexual orientation. One could only speculate.

            I was feeling pretty good until the plane landed. As I waited for the plane to clear out, I could feel my stomach starting to twist up. I stared out the window at the state’s namesake in the distance. There were no skyscrapers, no smog. Just mountains and a cloudless blue sky.

            Finally the line in the aisle began moving. Jude gave me a nod and wished me good luck before grabbing her suitcase from the overhead compartment and heading up the aisle. I didn’t have much to collect because I’d only brought my backpack on the plane, so I quickly followed.

            Despite my mom’s fears that it’d be cold, it was hot when I stepped off the plane and up the ramp to the airport. The air smelled different here, which came as no shock. LA was a trash heap. I couldn’t help but smile to myself when I stepped into the airport terminal, because it looked exactly like you’d imagine any building in Montana looking, with wood paneling and log cabin-esque columns everywhere. I was not shocked to find deer heads hanging in the fucking baggage claim area, because of course they would be.

            I sent a text to Kent about my arrival as I waited for my suitcase to show up on the carousel. I had borrowed my mother’s floral luggage, so it made it easy to spot amongst the copious blacks and dark blues. I then took a few pictures of the elk and bison heads and sent them to Thad, because I felt like he’d get a kick out of them.

            Not in Kansas anymore, I wrote.