Montana, the Fair, the Hostel & the Lie

Yesterday, I told a lie. I told the same lie the day before, and the day before that. It wasn’t a big lie. It was rather a small lie. And it wasn’t really the type of lie that was a falsehood uttered aloud. It was more of a lie of omission.

But let me backtrack, and tell you what I have been up to.

At the end of April, I got laid off, decided to write a book, sat in front of the computer and mostly stared at it. I got a couple of odd jobs, mainly doing construction. Still waiting on payment for those.

But then I got a phone call. My brother-in-law, the airbrush artist, wanted me to go on the road with him to run his airbrush t-shirt stand, which is how I wound up in Montana.

I think it is totally pointless in saying how exquisitely beautiful Montana is with its rivers, pine forests and tall mountains. It would be like saying that water is wet. But we did wind up spending five days at the Gallatin County Fair in Bozeman. We didn’t make many sales. I don’t know if it is the economy, or that Montanans are just not interested in having t-shirts with gangsta script on them.

On a side note… Montana girls… Where else can you find girls who play football, hunt, ski, rope, work on a pig farm and still manage to be crushingly pretty? It reminds me of Temple, who was bucking 100 pound bails of hay when I found her.

The most awesome part about staying in Bozeman was staying at the Bozeman Backpacker’s Hostel. When I heard that we would be staying in a hostel, I was not thrilled. I had had the hostel experience in Europe. Hostels had the reputation of being seedy, alcohol-soaked places.

When we got there, I was pleased to find a beautiful, Victorian house built in the 1890s – its claim to fame, Gary Cooper used to board here as a high school student. We walked up the steps to the front porch, which had several couches littered with exhausted-looking backpackers. Inside was a large kitchen table with other guests. We were directed to sign in, put our money ($20 per bunk) in an envelope, slip it under the door and pick out an available bunk. We walked up the creaky stairs to find a couple of bedrooms with three sets of bunk beds per room.

I was appalled to find all of the rooms filled with people. Appalled, because I have a deep dark secret. I snore. I snore horribly. It can be measured on the Richter scale. I settled down into my bunk, very self-conscious. Every time I felt myself starting to snore, I woke myself up. It didn’t help that the guy in the bed close to me would toss angrily in his bed.

The next evening, after the fair, I was dreading going back to the hostel. But when I walked in, I found a group of people sitting around the table, talking and laughing. There was the owner – a guy named Wayne. He is a charismatic man of Sri Lankan descent from Australia. The man just has an aura about him. He has traveled all over the world, including some extended visits to Africa. There were also a couple of girls from California and Oregon, respectively. And there was a lank Frenchman named Jerome.

That night, as I climbed into my bunk, I apologized to Jerome in advance for any snoring I might do.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I snore, too.”

In the middle of the night, I heard him blurt out, “Révolutionaire!”

A couple of minutes later, he muttered, “Napoléon!”

In the morning, I told Jerome, “You don’t snore. You sleep talk. What were you dreaming about?”

Soon, I came to love staying at the hostel. There was someone new there every day – people from all over the country, and even from other countries. Germany, Japan, New Zealand, etc.

Now we come to the part about the lie…

One morning, I got into a discussion with Erin, a hiker from New York. The fact that she had done religious studies, I brought up that I had been a member of the mainstream Mormon Church, but that I had been excommunicated twenty years ago. I carefully omitted why I had been excommunicated. I just made it seem like I wasn’t Mormon anymore.

Then amazingly, she brought up having read “Under the Banner of Heaven” by Jon Krakauer. What an amazing lead-in to a discussion about my lifestyle. Instead, I made a vague comment about being related to the FLDS. Also true. But I said nothing about me being a polygamist.

Why did I do it? I don’t know. I guess maybe I wanted to enjoy being with people without the stigma of being different. I guess I was probably thinking that if I told people that I am a polygamist, that it would be like a big, black cloud hanging over me wherever I went in the hostel, intruding on every conversation. Which is kind of weird, because I am not ashamed of who I am. I think I was just wanting anonymity.

But maybe even that is a cop-out. Because it is such a vital part of who I am. There is no way that I can divorce myself from that aspect.

But as the visits continued (Nikki, Natalie and Alicia, college students on a road trip, Matt from South Carolina, Aaron from New Zealand, a high school graduate doing a bus trip from Philadelphia, Carlos and David, two Mexicans traveling with their drunken companion) more opportunities came up. I told stories about “my wife”, morphing Martha and Temple into one, homogenous person. I even told them about the TLC show and about the book I am writing, even though I was careful to tell them nothing about what they are about.

So, like I said, a lie. I told them nothing that was untrue. But I really didn’t tell them the truth, either.

The biggest irony was stopping to see my high school French teacher, who lives in Montana, on my way to Great Falls. We sat across each other and chatted for about an hour. Both of us know who and what I am. But none of us said a word.

I supposed that I remedied all of this by providing every person I met with my contact information, including the link to my blog…