Bench, saddle, and cutbank

Place-words are enchanting

Living in the world means living in place, and all places have their words. You may not notice the words associated with your place until you have ejected yourself from your fishbowl and landed elsewhere, into a place that uses different words. There are the obvious candidates, like freeway vs. highway, lightning bug vs. firefly, tote vs. poke vs. bag or sack and so on. Even more interesting to me are all the regional words for landscape features.

This is my novice approach to a thing that has fascinated people for far longer than I’ve been around; I’m just one of a long line of folks to love specialized landscape vocabulary. A favorite author Robert Macfarlane writes about these words from his region, the British Isles, in The Guardian, here, and in his book Landmarks which is on my to-read list. Home Ground is a collection of brief essays about various American place-words and significances and I look forward to perusing more of it.

I was driving around north-central Montana a couple of summers ago when I started writing some of these words down. It is a landscape of high prairie bordered west by the backbone of the world¹ as it spires ever skywards. To the east, the land mostly flattens itself for a long while. In between, the rolling prairieland features names I like: Neuman Bench and Fairfield Bench are there; Sand Coulee; and a favorite, the Sun River Crossing. I have stopped there countless times to read the brown board (highway historical marker) and take pictures of the scales.

This public scale right next to the Sun River Crossing will weigh you and your car for a few coins. At night the sign features pretty lights.

Mountain peaks often bear fantastic names, but I like the simple ones too: Missoula’s Point Six is exciting because it often commands the highest wind speeds in any given weather event, 99 mph and thereabouts. Recently a story was published in our local paper about a bright red broken-down snowcat up there, tough to repair or retrieve because… Point Six. You can also ski off Point Six if you feel like it.

Evidently I’ve always liked mountains, from the times I rode as a child in the backseat to my grandparents’ house in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, to the semester I spent in Scotland. Mountains there are named Ben this and Ben that. I climbed Ben Nevis with a group of hikers and my friend Amee, and I recall my amazement at the smooth valleys where receding glaciers had scrubbed surfaces and rendered them gently U-shaped with crags at the tops and thin waterfalls ribboning down.

Me at the top of Ben Nevis, fall 1992, back when hiking in cotton seemed like a good idea.

I like a mountain saddle, a hanging valley, a grade, and of course a pass. In a Montana winter it’s important to know your passes along with your weather forecast. The major passes from Billings to Seattle are Homestake Pass (6329’), Lookout Pass, 4th of July Pass, and Snoqualmie Pass, and of course there are some littler Montana ones like Bozeman pass and that grade outside of Cardwell. Many passes double as state lines, too.

Passes are dramatic to look at and scary as hell to drive in the winter. My all-time scariest winter drive used to be one I did over Rogers Pass (5610’) on highway 200 between Lincoln and Great Falls, Montana some years ago. Before I left Lincoln, I overheard truck drivers in the gas station discussing their inability to make it to the other side. I thought, “Oh well, that’s just them. I’ll be fine.” I was not fine. This is a winding, two-lane snake with essentially no guardrails. I drove single-digit speeds for much of it.

However, my spring trip to Oregon this year featured an equally terrifying experience involving 4” of slush and fishtailing on 4th of July Pass. 130 miles of white knuckles. All thumbs down on that.

Near death on 4th of July Pass, Idaho in March 2023. And why? Because Idaho doesn’t believe in snowplows. They’d rather, you know, let people fend for themselves. I was driving like 9 miles an hour here, thus the photo opportunity.

How about canyons, coulees, washes, gullies, draws and gulches? You can find these all over western Montana as you pass through narrow valleys where cold, clear water washes clean the rocks. Early gold miners in the west especially looked to the gulches for color as they raped the waterways and landforms to locate their hoped-for fortune. And I don’t know if this word is regional or not but a gully-washer is one of my favorite terms for a sudden, heavy rainstorm. 

And on a side note, here you will not find a ditch. You will find a borrow pit, also spelled barrow pit. I have spent many a far-off stare considering the origin of this term.

Waterway words that have my heart are oxbows, headwaters, cutbanks and river breaks. The Upper Missouri River Breaks is one of the most gorgeous spots in Montana. Drive north on highway 191 from Grass Range and you will go right through it. The straight high plains roadway softens a little, starts to dip and curve, and flatlands to either side wrinkle and ripple. Soon enough you’ll feel yourself descending, and you’ll careen wildly around curves if you’re uncareful. Scrubby trees appear alongside the roadway and a rocky, broken landscape replaces the smooth grassland. Then: around a bend and the broad Missouri River appears like a muddy smear, perpendicular across the lowest dip in the highway and flowing just under a low bridge. Once over the bridge, the road again begins to climb, a reversal of the trip down into the breaks, topping out again on the prairie.

A cutbank is just water erosion, but they are beautiful and some are more dramatic than others. I like that the University of Montana creative writing rag is called CutBank.

A shadowy cutbank on a wide curve of the Missouri River near Fort Benton, MT, fall 2022.

These words are quirky, descriptive, and often majestic. Some give me goosebumps. I know I’ve forgotten a few, and I don’t know a lot more. What are your favorite place-words?

1. Blackfeet tribal term for the Rocky Mountains