He arrived in a Datsun B210 with a master’s degree in civil engineering and four hundred dollars. That was 1974. The mountains held him, the fishing kept him, the quiet convinced him to stay.

Thirty-four years at the water treatment plant on the north edge of town. “Someone has to know where it goes,” he would say, and everyone agreed because it was true. He watched the hay fields around his house on Durston Road become subdivisions named after the farms they replaced. He never complained. He just shook his head at the traffic backing up on North 19th.

Every Saturday for twenty-two years he taught kids to tie flies at the Bozeman Fly Shop — woolly buggers, elk hair caddis, the occasional royal wulff for the ambitious. Three generations learned at his elbow. His garden produced the best tomatoes in the valley, a fact he never advertised but half the neighborhood knew anyway.

The view of the Bridgers from his kitchen window filled in with rooflines, one building permit at a time. He still called the coffee shop on Main “the new place” thirty years after it opened. His wife Akiko says he died with a spool of olive thread in his pocket.