A triggering town?

I spent the morning assembling some furniture I had bought on the internet (at IKEA), so I thought I already had the perfect topic for today:  The professor had mentioned in class that he writes for a publication about furniture, so I could simply review the stuff I had made today, and that would be relevant, right?

Wrong  :(  Luckily, I also thought I should check out his work before I started writing, and The Monday Morning Quarterback turned out to be way more specialized than I had expected (it seems to be about the business of furnishing offices by contract or something).  My sofa bed would have been very out of place.

Well, something else I found out this afternoon got me wondering about Dillon, MT, so I decided instead to look that up and write what I saw.  Why not?  Richard Hugo had some great poems (such as this one, which was one of the pieces Jim discussed on my first day at the Workshop this summer) about small towns in Montana, and I have even read his book about it, and I am only blogging, I am not writing a poem.

I have never been to Dillon (the closest I have ever been is Butte, which is about an hour north), so the first order of business was to land right in the middle of the town (with Google Street View) and walk around for a while.  And it is pretty  :)  Since this is Journalism class, I should probably mention that the office of the Dillon Tribune-Examiner is on South Montana Street between East Glendale Street and East Bannack Street (with a restaurant called Blacktail Station to its left and an Alltel store to its right) (there is a green bench on the sidewalk in front of the Tribune's window, which should make the office easy to spot).  Okay, no more spoilers, visit it yourself if you have a few minutes!

My next stop was the city's website, where I found some beautiful old photographs and a link to the more-than-a-century-old Dillon Public Library, but not much else on the website caught my eye.  I did notice that the Mayor's blog was started in April and has exactly 2 entries to date (he blogged one time in June).  I have to blog five days a week for this class *sigh*.

The other place I looked was this website, where I learnt that Dillon is not far from a ghost town called Bannack.  If I have a couple of extra hours the next time I drive through Butte, I might drive down there, because maybe I will get lucky and strike pay dirt in some abandoned mine  :)

Or I might drive down to Dillon, because maybe I will get even luckier and experience a Richard Hugo moment.