I went to Montana expecting loonies with guns. Instead I found Jews in sandals. Great food. Mike Art.
No good thing could happen in Montana is what you'd believe if you believed the myth. No place on Earth
gives lie to the idea more than Chico Hot Springs, and Mike Art and his family. Guns? I don't think so,
not here, where even the cowboys wear shorts. Says Colin Davis, the general manager: "You're really only
native if you've gotten beyond cowboy boots."
Never was a place more Edenic than this little lodge tucked into Paradise Valley in southern Montana.
Never was a hotel family more sophisticated and urbane and generous than the Arts. We are talking
fly-fishing in the Yellowstone River, and osso buco for dinner in the dining-room; we are talking
conversation about Prague and jazz, and great Martinis in the bar, and "A Winter's Tale" at sunset
on the lawn.
Infused with the style and spirit of a remarkable family, Chico really is paradise. The sky is huge,
the air at 7,000 feet is thin, and I'm not at all sure I even want to tell you exactly how to get there
in case contact with the real world makes it disappear. I can't swear it's all because the Arts are
Jewish and Mike was raised partly in New York, but I can try.
I went to Montana because I was nearby for work and wanted a vacation. I'd heard Montana was gorgeous,
if weird; I don't know why but I had the name Chico in some random memory-bank (it's not in most guide books).
But, in fact, scenery apart, what I knew about Montana was that they raise libertarians there. They do
not like the government. And it was in Montana that Ted Koszynski, the Unabomber, plotted how to maim
and kill from a shack in the hills. I went anticipating pea-brained men with biblical beards and pick
up trucks with gun-racks in the back.
I arrived towards sunset, driving forever down a back road south from Livingston into a lush valley
set between mountains going blue with dusk. Between the towns of Pray and Emigrant was Chico. An
old-fashioned lodge -- white with green trim -- had a porch and on it were people reading BOOKS
(no TV in the rooms, no phones) . Out back, a few horses ate their dinner. Inside, the lobby people
sprawled in armchairs, and you knew: there was someone at home here, an inn-keeper in this inn.
For three days, I lingered on the lawn, ate in the restaurant, swam in the pool fed by the hot springs.
On the third day, I ran into Mike Art, an ebullient bear of a man. "Would you like a beer?" I said.
"Does a duck quack?" he said.
We sat at the bar in Chico's saloon. Mike, born in Chicago, raised in New York, had settled in Cleveland.
He told me how, on a trip west in 1973, he saw Chico. He went back to Cleveland and said to his wife, Eve:
"I have bought a hotel in Montana."
Eve Art was not amused. An elegant woman born into a Jewish family in Prague (they escaped in 1939),
she was even less enchanted when she saw Chico. It was a ramshackle place, much of it built around
the turn of the century.
For the first few years, Mike and Eve and their teenage daughters, Jackie and Andy, made the beds
and washed the dishes. Winters were long and cold.
Slowly, the Arts infused the place with their own sense of style. They bought pictures by local
artists. Hired great chefs. The road doubled as an air strip. Word spread. People flew in for
Sunday brunch. In Chico, someone tells me, Jeff Bridges met his wife.
The other Montana myth, of course, is that it's all a movie set. That Harrison Ford might show up
on a horse, or Robert Redford. They shot "A River Runs Through It" and "The Horse Whisperer" near
Chico. (I don't mind giving Jews credit for the nicest resort hotel in the West, but I'm not sure I
can actually claim horse-whispering.)
Andy and Jackie Art went away to university and came home, and both of them work at Chico now.
Jackie's involved with marketing at the hotel and with environmental issues. Andy makes exquisite pots.
Mike and Eve Art live in a house perched on the hill behind the lodge itself where they can look out and
see what they've made at Chico.
Comfortable, funky, alluring, most of all Chico has charm. It is, after all these years, itself.
"It's not for everyone," Mike Art said. "You either love it a lot or you don't care."
On my last night, there was a full moon. I sat out on the lawn at midnight, watched the moon,
sipped some wine. I was hooked.
"You're not going to tell me that it's all because the Arts are Jewish," said a friend I was
traveling with.
I remembered that on another trip at another time -- it was in Switzerland -- I met some members
of a Jewish figure skating club from Marseilles (talk about high concept).
Seeing me waltz off on to the ice with one of them, my then boyfriend said enviously: "You're
everywhere!"
Sitting in the moonlight in Chico Hot Springs, Montana, I thought of what I'd say then, and I
said again now, shamelessly: "Yes!"