Beneath the thin haze smothering northeast Montana on a recent sweltering July day, Glasgow sat defiantly, chiseled from the earth where the prairies drain into the Milk River. The railroad cuts like a spine through Glasgow — the most distant town in America from any urban center — and helps you imagine that elsewhere, maybe somewhere far down the tracks, life might go on too. But here, life emanates from the town’s small downtown, where you won’t miss Candy Lagerquist’s cafe.
For beside it stands a street sign that reads “MIDDLE” and “NOWHERE,” a reference to the town’s unofficial motto. Or as Lagerquist calls Glasgow: A little piece of heaven. Photographer and storm chaser Sean Heavey looks out at downtown Glasgow from The Loaded Toad cafe, just after 1 p.
m. on Thursday, July 25. Sean Heavey runs a gallery next to the cafe.
His photographs depict a not-so-heavenly Montana, a “land of extremes,” suddenly tempestuous and always harsh. In its residents, this place inspires a “tenacity to overcome,” he said. This day, like all others, the people of Glasgow lived athwart the forces, primordial and novel, buffeting this middle of nowhere like the Montana winds.
In the span of these 24 hours, the city grappled with its remoteness, worrying about the future of rural services but gushing about its tiny advances. It just got its first Starbucks. Until then, the nearest Frappuccino was 145 miles away in North Dakota.
Welcome to Glasgow, where nowhere means .