This week it's Montana

Winter sets in quickly here, and it tows a crippling wanderlust for me. Trapped indoors even at the day's warmest point, I diminish without my bicycle or the ability run and still feel my toes at the jog's end.

It's a brutal season, and it just began. Four days before the first deep freeze, I jogged in 60-degree weather. Those coatless days bundled up quickly.

So it makes sense I'd dream myself to Montana, right? This imagined mountain state was still ensconced in summer.

As we wandered among ranchers' fields rolling into mountains and miscellaneous rock jutting up from the hills, I actually asked my guide, some patchwork Virgil conjured up from my brain's sorry depths, how harsh its winters turn.

So why Montana, aside from its unexpected proliferation of independent-minded Democrats, including a Senator-elect (Jon Tester) who lost three fingers to a meat grinder at age 10 (you better believe that he popped into the dream, but I didn't get at his hand)?

I miss the openness of the American West; in Ohio, no matter how country the road, you're always rolling from one village/city into another. Even where sprawl has not taken over. Maybe my life just needs a journey through large tracts of desolate beauty barely interrupted by small cities.

For now, I'm staying, possibly for a longer spell than originally imagined.

But look out Montana, you're awfully close to my crosshairs.