My home­town of Helena is a pretty lame place to be hang­ing out in. There isn’t much of any­thing to do and I don’t have a car so I can’t exactly go visit all my friends indi­vid­u­ally when I visit. But at the same time I feel at ease and happy when I’m there. Every time I go visit Helena my mind is flooded with mem­o­ries from every moun­tain, side­walk, and rural area.

I may not par­tic­u­larly like Helena itself, but the peo­ple I met there and the expe­ri­ences I had in that town will always be with me sub­con­sciously. That envi­ron­ments in Helena shaped me into the woman I am today. It is always a lit­tle bit­ter­sweet to see Helena again. A lot of sad/bad mem­o­ries hap­pened there as well, and when I recall that place or spe­cific mem­ory its as if it just hap­pened to me. All the old ridicu­lous dra­matic feel­ings of my teen years espe­cially become fresh in my mind.

When I visit Helena and rem­i­nisce on my past I always laugh about some of the crazy things I did when I was a teen. I was a huge rebel with my par­ents and school and caused those peo­ple a lot of grief I’m sure. I liked to live on the wild side and be really spon­ta­neous with every­day life. Sum­mer time was always my favorite time of year in Helena. There was always some­thing great that came out of every sum­mer in Helena despite the lame­ness of the town.

I can recall when I was about 16 I was dat­ing a 19 year old guy named Joel and we used to go camping/partying up in priest pass about a half hour out of Helena all the time that sum­mer. We would drive up there two or three cars at a time, my car would always over­heat and die right at the top of the road right before the turn off to our camp­site. So we would just walk the rest of the way because the camp­site was only about 15 min­utes from the road.

It was early in the evening and Joel and I were look­ing for a place to pitch our tent when I stepped on a piece of glass and cut my right toe open. I had cut a vein it seemed, because I was bleed­ing pro­fusely, luck­ily Joel had had some med­ical train­ing from the Army and made me a ster­ile ban­dage out of a strip of his shirt. It was my friend Kyle’s birth­day so we were all start­ing to drink and have a good time.

Joel put me in a lawn chair with my foot ele­vated and told me to stay in the chair while he went down the road to get my car and drive it up closer to the camp­site. He said I could not put any pres­sure on my foot or else it would bust open and start bleed­ing again. So I sat in a lawn chair all night and got wasted, every­one was really nice and came and talked to me, I thought the whole sit­u­a­tion was pretty funny, I wasn’t in a lot of pain so I just laughed about it all.

About an hour after Joel had gone to get my car I had to go pee really bad. I per­suaded my girl­friend Corinne to help me go hob­ble behind a tree and take a pee. I was drunk and kind of stum­bled a lit­tle bit onto my right foot and just as Joel pre­dicted, it started bleed­ing all over again. It was all kind of a drunken blur, but I remem­ber every­one stand­ing around me in the lawn chair won­der­ing what to do. I kept telling them to wait for Joel to get back because he would take care of me.

Well I guess I was bleed­ing through my ban­dage pretty bad and Corinne told me she had to take it off. Then my friend Kyle see­ing the wound poured some south­ern com­fort liquor onto my wound to dis­in­fect it. I was really drunk, but the liquor burned into my wound and made me cry a lit­tle from the sting­ing pain. Joel finally returned right after this had hap­pened, he was dis­ap­pointed with me for putting pres­sure on my foot, but was very light-hearted and laugh­ing about the sit­u­a­tion at hand, it was pretty funny. He fixed me up with a new ban­dage and we went to bed shortly afterwards.

I remem­ber get­ting up the next day and dis­cov­er­ing all of the toes on my right foot were not only stained red from blood but they were actu­ally stuck together with dried blood as I tried to wig­gle them free one by one. We left early and went back to Helena to Joel’s house where I cleaned and re-bandaged my foot which turned out to not be that deep of a wound at all, it had just cut a vein on the side of my right big toe and made me loose a lot of blood that night. Kind of a ridicu­lous story to retell, but it always makes me laugh. Me and my crazy teenage antics……….

I used to have a lot of funny good mem­o­ries around Canyon Ferry Lake in the sum­mer­time too. It felt like my own slice of Mon­tanan par­adise out there on the soft, sandy beach hav­ing fun, swim­ming in the glis­ten­ing water every day of the sum­mer. There is noth­ing more fun than going out to Canyon Ferry Lake on a hot sum­mer day to jump off the cliffs to cool off and soak up the sun. My friends and I would often go camp­ing out at the lake, build a huge bon­fire near the lake and party all day and all night at Canyon Ferry every summer.

The sum­mer mem­o­ries are prob­a­bly the best to recall. There was always some­thing great that came out of every sum­mer in Helena despite the lame­ness of the town. Its like that time of year really makes peo­ple happy and mem­o­rable to me. It brings peo­ple together under the sun in a very dynamic way that just fills me with ecstasy.

This sum­mer will be my first sum­mer not liv­ing in Helena. It’s going to be strange, but I’m sure I will still have a blast in Mis­soula. I will most def­i­nitely be vis­it­ing Helena to hit the lake though.