In 2018, the district judge for our area of south-central Montana was retiring and encouraged my husband, Ray, to run to fill his seat. Ray, a lawyer with 30 years of experience in civil and criminal practice, was new to politics. He expected to be the underdog. While all judicial races in the state are nonpartisan, we were not members of the dominant Republican Party. And we had lived in Montana for only 20 years, long enough to know we would still be considered newcomers.
I told Ray: “They just need to get to know you. Then they’ll love you.”
The district covers three rural counties, too big to gather all those voters together at a campaign event, so wooing them with Ray’s barbecued brisket was out. We would, we decided, go to them.
Over six months, we knocked on the doors of over 8,000 registered voters from across the political spectrum. We didn’t know what to expect, but we certainly didn’t anticipate how eager people were to share very personal stories — not just eager, but, it seemed, compelled.
There’s an immediate intimacy in having a conversation on someone’s doorstep. It is, after all, a threshold between public and private, but who would have thought that political canvassing would be so conducive to such unvarnished honesty? Perhaps because of the fracturing of our communities, we encountered an almost universal need to be witnessed and validated, to trust.
Listening will not, alone, alleviate suffering — It has to be accompanied by, as a start, better access to public services. Neither is listening a magic cure for our political divisions. But I believe that any system in which some people feel they don’t matter is doomed to fail. I have no idea what it will take to heal our divisions, but I believe it will have something to do with sharing stories.
Instead of talking about ourselves, we focused on the people we met. We would take note of some detail around the house, most often their gardens or their dogs — there were always dogs, big dogs and little dogs, an abundance of old and cherished dogs.
A few people asked questions, usually, “Republican or Democrat?” When Ray reminded them that the race was nonpartisan, some pushed, but most seemed happy, relieved almost, to let the politics drop. And then, perhaps prompted by our initial curiosity, the stories flowed.
A former mechanic told us he spent his days in a recliner in his garage, listening to audiobooks after losing his sight. He kept his mint-condition ’58 Packard Hawk parked next to him for company. A Vietnam veteran told us he thought he had lost his moral compass until he learned about PTSD. He now runs a support group for other vets.
One man pushed a button on his throat and laughed off losing his voice to cancer because that was nothing compared to losing his child, who had been drowned by his mentally ill wife. Another man told us that just that morning he had taken his daughter to hospice after she had survived unexpectedly past Thanksgiving, and then Christmas and then Valentine’s Day.
A grandmother, a member of the Crow tribe whose father had been taken from his family and “re-educated” at a boarding school, told me, “They stole his voice.” She reached out and touched my wrist. “The men who suffered this way, they cannot speak of it yet. But we women can. We must tell the stories.”
As many stories as we heard involving abandonment and abuse, meth and alcohol addiction, we heard even more about adoptions — some formal, most not — of grandchildren, nieces and nephews and neighborhood kids, tapestries of makeshift families.
The encounters we had weren’t always positive. Sometimes people slammed doors in our faces, and I would wonder, “What’s the point?” We avoided any house with a sign warning of an aggressive dog or, as was more often the case, an aggressive gun owner.
Most often, we heard, “Come in!” sung out from somewhere inside. We were offered water, Gatorade, wine, pie, banana bread and landscaping rocks. We were grateful for the stories, most of all. Something important was built in those brief but intense conversations. We had an overwhelming sense that the people we talked to felt, at least in that moment, that they mattered to someone. We felt we mattered, too.
Ray’s ability to listen is what would have made him a compassionate judge. In the end, the voters chose Ray’s opponent, but it was close instead of the predicted landslide.
It never felt like a loss. We had stood together on porches and broken steps, among pots of petunias and cans of sodden cigarette butts, and we listened. People told stories full of pride and full of pain. Do you see me? they seemed to ask in a hundred different ways. Do you see my beauty? Do you see my struggle?
They were asking so little of us. It was easy to say yes.
