I had just finished my breakfast in the little café down the road from Two Medicine Lake when the old man walked in. He sat down at the counter, ordered a cup of tea, and began to banter with the cook and the waitress. As I heaved my pack up to leave, he turned toward me and asked, “Where you headed, young lady?”

“Up to Essex,” I said.

“Well, if you’ll wait till I finish my tea, I’ll take you up there.”

And that was my first introduction to Francis S. June.

Twenty one years old, I had arrived in Montana two weeks earlier to do some backpacking with a friend in Glacier National Park. Finding Glacier with too many rules, we’d hiked instead for several days in the Bob Marshall Wilderness to the south of the park, then spent a hot shower and recovery night in an old railroad hotel we found in the little town of Essex, situated roughly half-way between East and West Glacier and fifteen miles from the Continental Divide along Highway 2.

My friend had taken three weeks off from his job in Detroit, while I had quit my job as a cook in Annapolis, Maryland to make the journey. When the time came for my friend to return, I found myself unable to leave. I had fallen in love with the landscape. The pull toward the mountains was so strong, I felt as though a decision to stay had been made by some force beyond myself and I knew this area would be my home for a while. Instead of heading back East, I had my friend drop me off near the East entrance to Glacier National Park, then I hitch-hiked up to the head of Upper Two Medicine Lake and made camp for the night. The next morning I walked out of the park to the café, and Francis June walked into my life.

I sat down at the counter next to the old man, who introduced himself and continued his conversation with the cook. He had a face as craggy as the mountains behind us, a giant hook of a nose, and blue eyes beginning to blur with cataracts. A closely cropped ruff of white hair was visible beneath his beat-up cowboy hat. Underneath a red and black plaid hunter’s jacket, he wore a nicely worn wool shirt, neatly tucked into his trousers. An ancient Leica camera was slung around his neck. I took an immediate liking to the old guy as I listened to him ramble on about the bears, the hapless tourists who trained the bears to follow them with their bear bells, the early spring, and local gossip.

After a while he finished his tea and we walked outside into a brisk spring day punctuated by clouds rolling across the sky. He insisted on carrying my heavy pack. When we arrived at his car, a rusty red Karmann Ghia, he held up the keys.

“You drive?” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Well here then,” he said, and tossed me the keys.

From that time on, over the course of the next year and a half, I don’t think Francis drove for me more than once. Which was good, because the one time he did, he couldn’t stay on his side of the centerline.

On the drive up to Essex, we stopped at the cabin Francis was caretaking for “a lady doctor back East.” The kitchen spilled out the back door with bags of corn, tomatoes, and onions. Scattered around were old tin cans, dried up biscuits, half-eaten pies, and the remains of various cooking projects. And trash, lots of it. It appeared that Francis would start a meal, go off on some tangent, remember he was cooking, come back to eat a small portion of what he’d made, then leave or forget the rest.

The other rooms in the cabin had much the same look: clothes, books, pine cones, deer antlers, and boxes and boxes of photographic slides piled everywhere. In these haphazard piles, I was already seeing what I would come to know as the central themes of Francis’ life: making food (mostly for others), spending time in nature, taking pictures, and as he liked to put it,  “roughing it.”

I got the job I was hoping for in Essex, as the evening cook for the Izaak Walton Inn, along with a room on the third floor that was included in my pay. Francis and I became picture-taking buddies. I was new to this country, overwhelmed by its beauty, and he was a willing guide and interpreter. At least once a week, if not more often, we would hop into his car, along with his little dog, Peppi, and head out to explore some new territory, Francis providing a running commentary on the geography, wildlife, and history of the countryside. He knew where every bear had been sighted, where every forest fire had burned, how long it had taken to get the road built here, and where the train had derailed there. He introduced me to the lay of the land and its people, as well as the name of every mountain and plant in sight. I learned a great deal about local hiking trails, though with Francis along, I was generally limited to short roadside excursions: he was pretty crippled up with arthritis. We also spent time roaming the Blackfoot Reservation around Browning and the tiny settlement of Heart Butte. His knowledge of Indian culture and history seemed as extensive as that of his own.

Francis’ credentials as a guide were extensive. Born in a depot in Nebraska in 1900, he quickly took to the restless drifting that was to mark the rest of his life. His family gradually made its way West through South Dakota, Wyoming, and various places in Montana, reaching Butte in 1912. As was the case with many pioneer men supporting families, his father took whatever work was available, starting out as an operator for the railroad, later working the copper mines in Butte, still later staking out a homestead in Troy, Montana. In 1917 the family moved to Essex, which became the central switching point for the rest of Francis’ life.

Essex was at that time a booming railroad town with over four hundred residents. Francis finished the eighth grade the same year he arrived, then worked for the Forest Service near Essex and over on the East side of the mountains, until a high school professor convinced him to finish school. He graduated from Kalispell High School in 1924 and entered the University of Montana in Missoula that fall, graduating in 1930 with a bachelor’s in Forestry.

Then it was back to Essex, where he worked at various times for the Forest Service, the railroad, the Post Office and the Essex General Store. During this time he explored the mountains and rivers around Essex both professionally and for pure pleasure. By the time I arrived in 1977, Essex had dwindled to twenty six permanent residents, and Francis had accumulated over fifty years of experience roaming the backwoods of Northern Montana.

He loved making light of the infirmities advancing age was bringing to him. Francis would come into the café where I worked, and order a “Lumberjack Cocktail,” – glass o’ water and a toothpick – with a side of baking soda for his ever-present indigestion. When he’d have trouble standing up due to his arthritis, he’d quip, “Grandpa can’t get up – no traction.” I remember once in a discussion about skiing, he deadpanned, “I never skied much. I’d like to learn, but . . . . it’s too expensive,” completely bypassing the fact that his bones had long been too brittle for that sort of undertaking.

Age did not keep Francis down much though. He moved six times during the time I lived in Essex, including a winter stint at the hotel , where he paid his rent by serving as the resident raconteur, regaling tourists with local history during fireside chats in the lobby. The following summer a local rafting concessionaire hired him as chief storyteller for their rafting trips, and he spent the summer going down the Middle Fork of the Flathead, sometimes making the loop three or four times in a day.

Francis’ eyes were nearly blind, except for the special things he wanted to see, like the rare and tiny orchid he pointed out to me on one of our morning rambles. His selective vision would have trouble reading a menu, but he could spot an elk on a mountainside a half-mile away. His feet, gnarled and misshapen, could still propel him up and down banks in search of flowers for my table.

In addition to accompanying me on my natural history excursions, Francis was a frequent companion on trips into town for supplies or diversion. While caretaking the cabin for the lady doctor back East, he put up my visiting family and friends on a number of occasions, “feeding and watering them,” as he put it, and showing them the sights. When Maureen – the life-long friend I met in Essex the day I started working there – and I would arrive back late from an overnight trip, Francis was always there with a meal, fussing over us like beloved children. He had a sixth sense about character, and watched over me and my escapades with a sharp (and occasionally jealous) eye. His combination of gentility and irascibility appealed to me, and we had many quiet adventures.

One time Francis and I drove to Columbia Falls, a forty-five mile excursion, to buy groceries. When we got back to the car after shopping, he pulled a bag of candy out of his shirt.

“Here,” he said, “these are for you.”

“Francis! That’s shoplifting! You can’t do that!” I scolded.

“Why not?” he said, “They’ve been stealing from us for years.”

In some strange way, I understood his code of ethics. I couldn’t bring myself to make him take it back. We ate the candy in the car on the way home.

After I quit my job at the hotel, I moved into an upstairs apartment across the creek from the hotel. Francis became worried that I didn’t have enough money to live on, and I would wake up to finds bags of groceries on my doorstep. These groceries reflected his ideas of necessity, consisting of things like cans of beans, corn, and peaches, beautiful fruits and vegetables, chocolate bars, and often several tins of Crisco for biscuits. He also kept me fairly well supplied with flowers. One Mother’s Day morning, I awoke to find a dozen red roses and a box of chocolates on my steps, accompanied by a Mother’s Day card. This touched me greatly, but by now I was beginning to feel a little, well, “kept.”

I charged over to the hotel where Francis was staying to yell at him: “You can’t keep giving me things Francis! And besides, I’m not even a mother!”

To which he replied, “So, you will be someday.”

And that was that. The roses were mine, the first dozen roses I had ever received. I cherished them down to the last fallen petal.

One morning Francis came over to the house agitated and incoherent. He’d been complaining of a toothache for several days, but I thought it was something that could wait until the next trip into town. I felt his forehead and found he had a high fever, looked inside his mouth to find a gum swollen nearly to bursting. I hustled him into the Karmann Ghia and we headed to town in search of a dentist, who found a tooth so abscessed he put Francis in the hospital.

As we waited in the Emergency Room, Francis, delirious with fever and thinking he was going to die, spilled out a disjointed confession. “It doesn’t matter what those gossips in Essex think about us. We’ve done nothing wrong even if we aren’t married and they’ve no right to talk about us.” It was obvious that he was seeing me as his lover, something I’d caught glimpses of in our wanderings, but had chosen to ignore. He rambled on and on, angry at the townspeople, defensive of his own actions, perhaps re-living some situations he’d found himself in earlier in life. There seemed to be a fantasy floating around in his head that I was Grandma to his Grandpa, with my friend Maureen as our daughter. I was both touched and annoyed. After he recovered from the abscessed tooth, Francis never referred to his hospital confession, though he often referred to me in his frequent letters as “lovebird” and “dearest,” and to Maureen as “the little one.”

Although Francis had many friends, his rambling lifestyle prevented him from having much success in establishing a family of his own. His first wife divorced him, though I gather they remained on friendly terms. A second wife, whom he married late in life, drank up his money till she died of liver failure. I asked him once if he had liked marriage. “No,” he said, “I was always too busy taking pictures and hunting to be married.” Both were passions for him.  I almost never saw him without his Leica. Even the picture I have of him in his youth shows a neatly dressed young man with a camera in his hands. As for his hunting, I once made an off-hand comment about the number of deer he must have shot in his lifetime. “Oh, not too many, “ he replied. “About twelve hundred deer and a hundred and fifty four elk.”

So many of my memories of Montana are intrinsically tied up with Francis June. Getting up before dawn and driving over to his cabin for breakfasts of bacon, eggs, fresh biscuits, and coffee (which he always made but could no longer drink). His apple pies, sometimes perfection, sometimes merely sliced apples with cinnamon and sugar strewn erratically about. But always with perfect crusts.

Like his pies, Francis’ photographs were haphazard and erratic. He would shoot his favorite landscapes over and over again, trying to capture their beauty. He never used a light meter, relying instead on an innate sense of light. I have a box of his slides in my possession. Mostly they are repeats of the same shot. But here and there is a prize-winning photograph, perfectly clear and sharp, a tribute to the old man’s vision.

Francis was the first person I met on my mountain odyssey, and the last person I saw when I left a year and a half later. I felt as if his spirit bounded my adventure, guarding my entrances and exits into this wilderness world. Sitting in Francis’ kitchen, there was a sense of family and belonging that I’d rarely felt in my life up until that time. Perhaps it was not just Francis, but the brightness of our lights burning so far away from anyone and anywhere else. The mountains bound us together in a friendship that crossed generations and vastly differing experiences.

I have a letter from Francis, delivered by hand on the day Maureen and I left to join the National Geodetic Survey crew in Texas. In his beautiful old-fashioned script and stream of consciousness sentences, Francis sums up his view of human relations, particularly with regard to him and me:

10-5-78, 8:oo AM

Leslie My Love

Here is the freezer. Take it along and return when you return if not What the Hell do we have friends or Relatives for only to borrow or love.

Remember I am still your Grandpa and you are my favorite Granddaughter.

XXX Love,
FSJ