New Podcast Episode: Some Notes Towards a Metaphysics of the Ninepipes Reservoir Turtles

Every spring, on a bend of Highway 93 in the Mission Valley, the Western painted turtles wake from the mud and start walking. They are following an instinct older than the road, out toward the pond where they will feed and mate and lay their eggs. They cross the asphalt at a top speed of about seven miles an hour, with no way of knowing what a car is.

A federal study counted roughly 350 of them struck on that stretch every year.

Episode 14 of Distinctly Montana Stories uses that crossing to ask a much larger question: what is a life worth when it isn't ours? The essay chases the question through the sparrows sold two for a farthing in the Gospels, through Robert Burns and the mouse his plow turned up, through the truck driver in The Grapes of Wrath who swerves to hit a turtle, and finally into the front seat of a car on Highway 93, kids in the back, cooler in the trunk, a turtle fifty feet ahead. Along the way it visits a University of Montana biologist who studies what he calls "charismatic minifauna," and the wildlife crossings that were planned for the highway before most of the funding was pulled.

The story appears in the Fall 2026 issue of Distinctly Montana, on newsstands now.

Some Notes Towards a Metaphysics of the Ninepipes Reservoir Turtles is available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, wherever you listen to podcasts, or using the embedded player below.