Preserving Big Sky Kindness: Why Simple Decency Is Still Montana’s Greatest Asset

The last time I cried in a parking lot, I was standing outside a gas station somewhere in Wisconsin, watching a man nearly knock my grandmother out of her wheelchair because he was too busy staring at his phone to notice us. He didn't stop. He didn't look back. He just kept walking, earbuds in, lost somewhere inside whatever world exists on the other side of a glowing screen.

That moment stuck with me for the rest of the drive home. And it made me fall in love with Montana all over again.

Planning a Cross-Country Road Trip to Montana

A few weeks ago, I packed up my car and drove east to pick up my grandmother, who we call Bob, and bring her back to Montana to live with us. Bob has been dealing with some memory issues, and the time had come where living alone was no longer safe or fair to her. Our family made the decision together, with love and a little bit of heartache, that the best next step was to bring her here, to be close, to be cared for.

It wasn't a sad trip. It was the right trip. But it taught me things I wasn't expecting to learn.

Driving Across the Country: What I Noticed Heading East

I want to be careful here, because this isn't a broad stroke about every single person east of the Mississippi. There were kind people. There were genuinely wonderful moments. But there was also a pattern I couldn't ignore, and the further I got from home, the more it stood out.

Traci Taylor

People are rushed. Not just busy, but rushed in a way that seems to have hollowed something out of them. In restaurants, in parking lots, in grocery stores and gas stations, so many people moved through their days like they were trying to outrun something. Eye contact felt like an inconvenience. A smile from a stranger was met with suspicion. Nobody talked to each other. Nobody seemed to want to.

Traveling with a Wheelchair: A Lesson in Modern Courtesy

Traveling with Bob in a wheelchair gave me a front-row seat to how people behave when they think nobody is watching or when they simply don't care if anyone is.

I can count on one hand the number of times someone held a door open for us without being asked. More than once, people squeezed past us in doorways like we were an inconvenience, a slow-moving obstacle between them and whatever came next. There were no apologies. No acknowledgment. Just the quiet efficiency of people who have somewhere more important to be.

I pushed Bob's wheelchair through more than one entrance alone, the door pressed against my back, maneuvering her through sideways because no one nearby thought to step forward. She never complained. She just looked up at me and smiled with a knowing smile, and that somehow made it worse.

Crossing the Montana Border: A Shift in Community Culture

We crossed into Montana and stopped at a gas station just off the interstate. Before I even got Bob's chair fully unfolded from the trunk of my car, a man about my dad's age was already at my side asking if I needed help. He didn't wait to be asked. He just saw us and came over. A woman inside held the door open and stood there until we were all the way through. The person behind the counter looked up, smiled, and asked how we were doing like she actually wanted to know.

I almost didn't know what to do with it. I had spent so many days in places where that kind of simple decency was the exception that I had started to forget it was supposed to be the norm.

Debating the Montana Way of Life: Has Big Sky Country Changed?

I know what people say. Things aren't the way they used to be in Montana. There are more cars, more people, more traffic on roads that used to feel like they belonged only to us.  People here have real frustrations, and they're not wrong to feel them.

But I'm going to push back, gently, on the idea that what makes Montana Montana is gone. Because I don't think that's true. I think it's still here, still woven into the way people treat each other in ordinary moments, at gas stations and grocery stores and in parking lots where strangers still walk over to help a woman get her grandmother out of a car.

The kindness is still here. The manners are still here. The instinct to stop, to look up, to recognize another human being as worth a moment of your time, that is still here. And it matters more than most of us realize, because I've now seen what it looks like when it's gone.

Preserving Montana Values and Community Traditions

The greatest thing we can do right now, as Montanans, is refuse to let our hearts go hard. Because that hardness doesn't happen all at once. It creeps in, a little impatience here, a small discourtesy there, and before long, you're the person walking past a woman in a wheelchair without a second glance, and you don't even notice.

Teach your kids to hold the door. Teach them to make eye contact, say "thank you," and mean it. Teach them that a stranger is just a neighbor they haven't met yet, and that slowing down for someone else is not a loss, it's a choice. A good one.

We get to decide what kind of place this is. Not the headlines, not the growth, not the influx of people bringing habits from somewhere else. Us. The people who are here, who are raising the next generation, who stop at gas stations and still say good morning to the person at the pump next to them.

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Welcome Home to Montana: Why I'm Glad We're Back

My grandmother is settled in, and while the drive was long and parts of it were hard, I  came home with a clearer picture of what we have here in Montana and a renewed commitment to protecting it.

Montana isn't perfect. But it's still good. And as long as we keep choosing to be good to each other, I think it's going to stay that way.