| Going Back to Missoula, Mt. |
| Missoula, Montana, is quite a unique city. |
| It is a city of serenity, a place to be one with nature. |
| It is the land of the gods, gatekeeper of the Big Sky. |
| It is a remote mountain city where the angels come to rest ... |
| ... and end up getting hassled by The Man and watching total strangers becoming violent for absolutely no reason and being arrested by swarms of police officers who are just itchin’ for a fight. |
| My wife, Katie, and I traveled to Missoula, my college town, last weekend to see a great friend get married, and ended up staying in the city with 600 Hell’s Angels, including one guy wanted for murder, who were on a one-week vacation. |
| To hear the locals talk about the Hell’s Angels gathering, it was the biggest thing to happen in Missoula all summer. And to hear the local newspapers write about the gathering, the world must have been coming to an end. |
| As soon as we arrived at our hotel, we knew we could be in for an interesting stay. Lined up outside the main entrance were about 50 Harley-Davidson motorcycles, cooling off from a long ride. |
| Inside the hotel, there were two or three Hell’s Angels milling about, greeting friends and club members. |
| Katie and I were nonplused. Some of the finest people we have met have been bikers, and there was nothing to suggest these people were going to be any different. |
| Later that night, a slightly stressed-out bartender in the hotel lounge told us there were 600 Hell’s Angels in town for the week, 50 of them staying in our hotel, and some of them had been getting downright ornery at the bar. |
| But not a lot of Hell’s Angels stayed at the Holiday Inn. From what we heard, many more were hanging out at the Come On Inn up the street, and most of the rowdies were probably there, we figured. |
| Police officers had been called in from across Montana and throughout the Northwest to bolster the Missoula forces. The police presence was overwhelming, and the chief of police said at least one officer was assigned to keep groups of Angels in sight at all times. |
| Police were everywhere, even though the bikers behaved quite well, and the locals finally got a little upset. Someone decided to have a good old-fashioned rally at town hall to protest the increased police presence. |
| It wasn’t fair, they shouted. The police were discriminating against the Hell’s Angels, the protesters claimed. And then this group of about 30 people started to push, shove, and throw things at the officers, who were all-too-prepared for mass chaos. |
| At the end of the melee, 14 protesters had been handcuffed, arrested and taken away for disturbing the peace, inciting to riot, and other charges, all while Hell’s Angels watched curiously from the sidewalks around the town center. |
| Only in Montana would a visit by a bunch of fairly intimidating but generally law-abiding citizens on motorcycles lead to public protests and arrests, as the Hell’s Angels watched, laughed, and stayed innocent. |
| Shortly after the Angels left town in a huge ball of dust after a week or so of having a nice vacation in the mountains, the police separated as well. Shortly after that, the locals settled back down. |
| And all that was left of the weekend was what was supposed to have happened and didn’t, what nobody thought would happen but did, and a whole lot of police and Hell’s Angels sharing the same roads on the way home. |
| Our friends did get married, in a small town south of Missoula, with no interruption, either from the Harley-Davidson fellows or the police. |
| And Katie and I had a double experience: We caught a glimpse of the peace and quiet that living within a stone’s throw of a mountain brings, and we saw just enough going on in my old college town to remember how unusual it is. |
