Novelist Thomas Wolfe might have been right when he wrote “you can’t go home again” in 1940 in a book with that phrase for the title.

I found that out first hand this past summer when I tried to move from California back to the Montana of my youth. I discovered the state, although still beautiful, was not the idyllic place where I grew up and also later raised my children. It had changed and grown and crime increased. Not only was the atmosphere not the same, but I was a victim of the increased crime of its growing cities.

I was permanently blinded in one eye during a beating in late August in a Walmart parking lot in Missoula, once a sleepy, pleasant university town where I started my journalism career decades ago. I typed the first draft of this piece on my cellphone while recuperating from eye surgery and hospitalization in a motel room in Missoula and completed it after I returned to California to live and for further eye care.

The Montana I was reared in was quite different from my recent experience. In the 1950s, on the plains of Eastern Montana my life was outdoor adventures and Western lore. We not only watched cowboy actor Gene Autry in the movies but saw him in person yearly when he came to our cattle town of Miles City to ride in the rodeo parade. We went shopping in Billings 150 miles away when it was a much smaller and quieter city with much less crime than today. I studied journalism at the University of Montana in Missoula in the ’60s at a time when motorists would give others the right of way and strangers would wave hello.

I had a career working for newspapers on both coasts and returned to Montana for the late 1970s and 1980s to raise our children on Flathead Lake in the mountains of Western Montana because it was a better and safer atmosphere than the cities. Later after a divorce, I returned to large cities to work in news and later public relations. I always dreamed of returning again to a quiet, simpler life in Montana. Now retired, I thought it was time.

I had been living in subsidized senior housing in the Palm Springs, California, area, subsisting on Social Security retirement and Veterans Affairs compensation. I gave up my apartment in Palm Desert, transferred my Section 8 HUD voucher (which subsidizes rent) to Billings, put my possessions in storage and drove my old pickup truck north. I visited my old hometown of Miles City and found it almost as pleasant as decades ago, and even some of my classmates still lived there. However, it was isolated without many activities and had gotten spillover from the North Dakota oil boom which resulted in increased prices for rentals and homes. 

I focused on finding apartments in Billings. Senior housing had waiting lists and many low-income apartments were in undesirable parts of town. Billings was crowded, the largest city in Montana, and dirty, with major crime stories in the paper every day, and the city sometimes smelled of its oil refineries. I thought I would check out other Montana cities that might be more to my liking.

I spent a few days in the university town of Bozeman. There was no senior housing available and traffic was horrendous due to a major population increase from Californians having moved to the mountain city. Both in Bozeman and Billings I camped miles away at night because I couldn’t afford motels. I thought I would check out my old college town of Missoula for housing and drove there. I decided against our old village of Bigfork on Flathead Lake because it had too many memories of my failed marriage.

I arrived in Missoula at 11 p.m. on Aug. 24 and drove to a Walmart. In past years I had camped at Forest Service campgrounds outside Missoula but it was late so I checked out camping in the Walmart parking lot. It was full of RVs since Walmart encourages camping in its lots. I went into the store to use the rest room. When I came out I crossed paths about 100 feet from the entrance with two men in their 30s pushing loaded shopping carts at high speed. I was 70 then and am 71 now. 

They stopped and one wanted to shake hands with me. Both were very drunk and I also thought they might want to rob me so I refused. One man then slugged me hard in the chest. I told him if he did it again I would call the police. He then punched me several more times in the chest. I started calling 911 on my cellphone and the men ran off pushing their shopping carts as customers came by. Later, I learned the pair had apparently shoplifted the merchandise from the store. 

Suddenly, a third man also about 30 swooped up behind me at high speed. He grabbed me around the neck with one arm and tried to stop my phone call and take the phone. With his other hand he started slugging me in the right eye with his closed fist. There were about half a dozen blows. He looked crazed and seemed to be on drugs. Some people came, and he shoved me to the ground and drove off in a car. 

I was bleeding from the eye and couldn’t see. Also bleeding and in pain were my knee, an elbow and both hands. Two passersby refused to stop to help me. Then the first two culprits returned. One started harassing me and kicked me in the ribs while I was on the ground. The one who slugged me then punched a man who was trying to help me as the accomplice urged him on. Police came and arrested the two guys after they resisted arrest. The one who put out my eye got away and a warrant was put out for his arrest. 

The whole incident was on Walmart videos, and bystanders got the license plate number of the man who fled. Police said they were familiar with all the suspects. The one who fled had been convicted of felony assault and was a registered violent offender. He is still at large as of this writing.

I was put into an ambulance and my bleeding was halted. Police interviewed me and I was taken to a hospital. There a CT scan showed I had a rupture of my eye globe, which is the eyeball,  plus the other injuries. A retina specialist performed eye surgery the next afternoon. He said the contents of my eye, including the gel and retina, had gone out the rupture hole and he pushed them back in and sewed the eyeball shut. He said the eye was not repairable and I would be permanently blind in the right eye. Furthermore,  he said I could later possibly lose the eye itself and that the good eye had a risk if blindness from a rare condition in which the body’s immune system attacks the wrong eye.

I was in a daze over all this while hospitalized for two days and wondered about the wisdom of moving back to my home state of Montana. What had happened to the idyllic Montana, Last Best Place as it’s often called, that I once knew? Missoula was no longer a quiet college town. Reading the local paper in coming days I was struck by the amount of violent crime there: murders, robberies, assaults. Just like in the much larger Billings. A journalism classmate, Steve Smith, who visited me in the hospital and had been a local reporter and editor, said Missoula had gotten rougher and less safe than it was 20 years ago or even 10. Another friend told me Missoula had changed. The town has a large homeless population. In an Internet search I found that crime allegedly abounds in Walmart parking lots around the nation, including murders, kidnappings, robberies and assaults, but it isn’t just Wal-Mart. 

I found that the state of Montana was obviously not the same “Leave it to Beaver” or “Father Knows Best” atmosphere from my youth. When I was a child, cowboy actor Rex Allen visited me in the Miles City hospital while he was in town for a rodeo and parade. This time the hospital in Missoula rushed me out after two days when I was still weak and unable to put medication into my swollen eyes. I was told it was because Medicare wouldn’t pay the hospital for more days. I was in a motel where my wounds bloodied the sheets for days.

One of the guys who assaulted me pleaded guilty to four misdemeanor charges but got only six months jail time for one of them, with sentences for the other charges suspended. I testified at the sentencing that he should get the maximum six months for each of the four charges for a total of two years. The other man who was caught pleaded not guilty to four misdemeanors and asked for a trial. 

I was amazed they only were charged with misdemeanors for their part in what happened to me. Tougher crime laws are needed. The one who blinded me could get 50 years in prison for the felony, according to court documents. News reports have said he is believed to be either in Montana, near Browning, or in Washington state.

Eventually, my Missoula eye surgeon said he couldn’t do any more for me. A very long shot and risky operation to repair and reattach my damaged retina and other procedures inside my eye would likely not give me vision and could result in loss of my eye and would best be done at famous eye centers like UCLA or USC, he said. Plus it could be too late to do it now, he said. 

What I needed is a miracle, I thought. The doctor said unexplained things happen in medicine. I asked people to pray for me. I believe in miracles and rely on my faith during troubled times. Jesus healed the blind, I thought.

With one good eye, in late September I drove back to the Southern California desert to live and get follow up eye care. My Section 8 housing voucher was transferred back from Montana. I still don’t have a place to live due to waiting lists for subsidized housing, but if I have to be homeless for a while, like I was once years ago, it’s warmer in the desert. Winter comes early to Montana. 

I’ve been staying in cheap motels, but may have to camp out soon until I find an apartment. But it won’t be at Walmart. And no shopping there after dark, either. I got an opinion from an eye surgeon at UCLA who said he could try to restore some very minimal vision, but I would have to have a place to live and 24/7 care for at least the first three weeks. I have neither and so far no options, so the surgery seems unlikely and perhaps too late now as there was urgency to do it within weeks of the injury. I may be doomed to be blind in one eye. 

“It’s a classic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” one doctor told me.

As for Montana, it’s Last Best Place moniker doesn’t work for me anymore. The state still has the famous big sky but the clouds are now troubled. The man might have been right. Going home after a lot of years will find great change. Unfortunately, as I discovered, in today’s society it’s often for the worse.

I won’t let the blindness in one eye destroy me, though. I have a couple of books I’m working on and plan to persevere with my writing and other life. God willing and the creek don’t rise, as they like to say in Montana.

Les Gapay is a retired newspaper reporter in Southern California. He has worked for the Wall Street Journal, Missoulian, Daily Inter Lake and other publications.