TUS01602- June-Power of Place – Part Two

Marc Moss: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Tell Us Something podcast. Tell Us Something is a nonprofit that helps people share their true personal stories around a theme live in person and without notes. I’m Mark Moss, your host and executive director of Tell Us Something. Tell Us Something is supported in part this year by a grant from the Montana 250th Commission, which was established to coordinate statewide efforts to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America.

The objectives of the commission include promoting civic engagement, and Tell Us Something at its core does this by encouraging community members to share and listen to the stories of those who live, work, and play here in Montana. We are grateful to the Montana 250th Commission for their generosity.

This week on the podcast-

Karna Sundby: So we would pick up the nursing students at 5:30 in the morning, and they would run to the car with these eager smiles and bright eyes, just so grateful to have a safe ride to [00:01:00] their classes and clinicals that started at 6:00 AM.

Marc Moss: Four storytellers share their true personal story on the theme power of place.

Greg Munro: I went to that window and looked out and was astounded because there was a whole farm out there, just like I had seen on TV.

Marc Moss: Our stories today were recorded live in person in front of a packed lawn on June 16th, 2026 at Bonner Park Bandshell in Missoula, Montana.

Adyasha Nayak: My grandparents’ house, pretty old house that my grandfather built.

It’s next to a pond, and every morning I would hear the neighborhood children jumping into the pond, splashing, having fun, their shouts.

Mandy Moonbird: We had bedbugs always, and dirty needles hidden in the mattresses, and murders and overdoses, and a lot of people said there was a ghost.

Marc Moss: Stay tuned. As we gathered under the summer sky at the Bonner [00:02:00] Park Bandshell, we acknowledged that we are standing on the ancestral homelands of the Salish, Pend d’Oreille, Kalispel peoples.

For generations, these tribes have stewarded the Missoula and Bitterroot valleys, deeply connected to the rhythm of this land. We recognize that our event’s theme that night, the power of place, is intimately tied to their enduring relationship with this region. June brought the vibrant blooms of the bitterroot, Montana’s state flower, and a sacred plant of deep cultural, historical, and spiritual significance to the Salish people.

In this season of growth and renewal, we honor their past, present, and future descendants who continue to live, create, and enrich our community today. Ways that you can honor the land we occupy and celebrate the Indigenous peoples who were the first peoples here are to support Indigenous artists and partake in celebration with Indigenous peoples Remember this: Tell Us [00:03:00] Something stories sometimes have adult themes.

Storytellers sometimes use adult language. Please take care of yourself. Just a heads-up before you listen to the stories in this episode. The recording engineer was unable to get a clear recording of the live event. During the quality assurance process, I noticed a distinctive hum permeating the entire recording.

In order to fix this issue, the engineer applied techniques that unfortunately removed much of the live feel of the recordings. It is unfortunate, and this is the best he could do. Thank you so much for your understanding. All right. Let’s get to the stories. In our first story, when local communities face relentless fear, ordinary citizens step up in extraordinary ways.

Karna Sundby shares her story of driving into Minneapolis to support refugees and students who are in the country legally and in hiding [00:04:00] from ICE. From delivering food boxes to driving terrified students under the threat of arrest, discover the incredible power of neighboring and community resistance in a time of crisis.

Karna calls her story Neighboring. Thanks for listening.

Karna Sundby: A place of power, Minneapolis 2026. My husband Kirk and I spent two weeks there in January helping people who were in hidings from ICE. We have a friend there named Jesse, who years ago developed a nonprofit organization called the Urban Village to help the Karen people who are being persecuted in Myanmar.

Their government is dropping bombs on them, burning villages, and thousands of people are being forced to flee, to live in the jungles or escape to refugees cla- camps. Jeff- Jesse, through his nonprofit, has helped many of these displaced people to immigrate to Minneapolis, where they can be safe and seek asylum [00:05:00] through the legal path of citizenship set up by our government.

In early January, we got an email from him saying that his community was being targeted and twenty people had already been detained by ICE He was, as he was searching for safe housing for people, uh, on social media, Fox News got ahold of the story and broadcast that he was helping illegal criminal immigrants escape from authorities.

This was not true. Every member of the Urban Village community is here legally seeking asylum or on student visas, and none have criminal records. Now Jesse was getting death threats. His wife Becca was 33 weeks pregnant with twins, and they were having to go into hiding too. So we didn’t know, what can we do?

We didn’t know how we could help, but we decided we had to try, so we jumped in our car and started driving towards Minnesota. Once we arrived, we tapped into two organizations there. One was this large Hispanic [00:06:00] church called DHH, and the other was this amazing food rescue organization, and they were packing boxes of food and delivering them to im- immigrants that were in hiding all over the Twin Cities.

We would stand at our station, whether it was apples, potatoes, rice, or beans, and this conveyor w- belt went by, and as quickly as humanly possible, we’d put the appropriate amount of food in the box, and the boxes went by. The goal was every day to pack and deliver 1,200 boxes of food on each shift. And then we started giving rides to students who were here from Myanmar.

Public transportation was too dangerous. License plates were being targeted, and these kids were afraid that if they missed classes, they might lose their scholarships. So we would pick up the nursing students at 5:30 in the morning, and they would run to the car with these eager smiles and bright eyes, just so grateful to have a safe ride to their classes and clinicals that started at 6:00 AM.

We’d pick ’em up at 11 o’clock at night, [00:07:00] still had this indomitable spirit after working eight hours shifts at the nursing home. These days were so long for them, and when we trained to be drivers for them, we were warned that we could be picked up and imprisoned by ICE simply for giving rides to the students who were here legally.

We had to carry our passports everywhere we went. We downloaded this app that we would push to notify someone if we were apprehended. And we took this training called the Rapid Response Training to teach us how to respond to ICE if they showed up where we were. Everywhere we went, we wore our whistles.

It was, it was intense. And w- when we were there, we just were so inspired by these students who were so grateful. We’ve… There was this incredible network of [00:08:00] communication on safe apps called WhatsApp and Signal, and this amazing communication was constantly happening where they would give you information of where ICE was right now, so you could go and help if you wanted to.

You could go and join packs of people that were walking endangered kids to and from school. You could go to targeted neighborhoods and blow your whistle or honk horns to notify the neighborhood. That’s what Rene Good was doing before she was killed. You know, I’m sure that there are illegal immigrants who are here committing crimes, but I don’t know those people.

I know these people from Myanmar. I know their stories about how they escaped from a coun- country where they are being killed and persecuted, and were so grateful to come here where they could be safe and get jobs and further their education and get citizenship. And now they’re being persecuted again by the United States.

We heard so many [00:09:00] stories. I was heartbroken to hear the story of the woman cowering in her apartment while ICE was pounding on the door, threatening to break it down. So traumatized that she miscarried the baby she was expecting. And then I was confused when I saw this gut-wrenching dash cam of a young by- guy outside of his car trying to show his visa to ICE, and they assaulted him and took him away.

And then it was explained to me that ICE doesn’t care if they have a visa, ICE just cares about their daily quotas. And then I felt angry when I heard the story of the young man in El Paso who went to his bond hearing, and his was deter- termed an incorrect detainment, so they told him he could leave after paying 500 bucks, and as soon as ICE returned the documents they had taken from him to the courts.

They didn’t return him for two weeks, and he had to spend this unnecessary another two weeks in prison. And when he left, he wasn’t given his cellphone back. Just such [00:10:00] intentional cruelty. And then we started hearing the stories from people who were released from prison. No change of clothes, no shower, no toothbrush.

La- sleeping on the floor with no blanket. Cement floors, no pillow. Lights on 24/7. Dinner is a sandwich. I started thinking about the… how much better the conditions are of con- convicted criminals who are in prison One day we got an email saying that a member from the Urban Village was going to his bond hearing, one of 60 people, and they asked that at 10:00 AM we stand, light a candle, say a prayer, say his name, stand with him in solidarity, which we did.

He was released, but the 59 other people went back to the hell of detention. And when he was released, he was told he had to pay a $7,000 bond. Now, the Urban Village raises funds to pay those bonds, and then they fly a [00:11:00] volunteer down to Texas to rent a car and drive the detained person back to Minnesota.

That’s how people from the urban, Urban Village make it home. I don’t know what happens to people who don’t have a community like that to support them

But we, we were so… I was so just shocked by what we saw in Minnesota. I was… I just, I don’t think you can understand how real it was unless you were there. What it’s like to watch ICE target and surround a neighborhood or a vehicle in America. But I think we can all understand how deeply wrong it is.

This was not some country in a dictatorship. This was Minneapolis where I, a citizen born in this country, initially felt afraid to give rides to kids here on student visas. This was Minneapolis where every day [00:12:00] one or two planes would fly out to Texas carrying immigrants to get them out of T- Minnesota jurisdiction and into Texas jurisdiction as quickly as possible.

This was Minneapolis where we had a friend who owned a warehouse near the airport and somebody wa- talked to him about wanting to rent space. And as he was showing them the place, the guy was taking measurements and explaining the size of the vehicles or the cages that they intended to build there. We were so happy to be there to help.

It just felt so purposeful. We stayed with dear friends in downtown Minneapolis and they would introduce us as their friends from Montana. And sometimes people would just burst into tears so touched that somebody came, cared enough to come and help. The only reason we left was that I got sick and what a miserable drive that was back to Missoula.

Just burning sore throat, splitting headache, [00:13:00] fever, chills, body aches and all I could think about was, what would it be like to be this sick in detention? When we were in Minneapolis we heard a new word, a new verb called neighboring. Neighboring means protecting and supporting the people that live next door or down the street a couple blocks.

We saw so many examples of this. Neighbors giving food, shelter, money, breast milk from a, for a woman who, too stressed to make her own. Neighbors carpooling endangered people to appointments. Workplaces setting up sleeping arrangements when it was too dangerous for their workers to go home at night.

Teachers going to teach kids at home after school, kids who were too scared to go to classes. And people, clinicians going making home visits to people too afraid to seek medical help. We were so inspired [00:14:00] by the The strategies and the effective results that the people in Minneapolis got by organizing, creating neighborhoods, neighborhood communities, by teaching tactics of resistance and remaining resilient.

Minneapolis, a place of power, the power of people with whistles, organizing and uniting to create hope and to create a model of solidarity for our country.

Marc Moss: Thanks Karna. Karna Sundby’s journey of self-discovery has led her to explore many paths in life, from teaching meditation to a successful career in corporate sales. What has always driven her most is the desire to make a difference. Often, the toughest times in life are the ones which break us open and forge within us a deep well of compassion.

In our [00:15:00] next story, Greg Monroe wakes up on his grandparents’ Montana homestead at eight years old. He falls in love with the land and the hard-earned romance of ranching. Decades later, as a law professor working alongside indigenous colleagues, a stark realization shattered his nostalgia. Today, we explore one man’s journey from boyhood wonder to confronting the deep history beneath his roots in a story that Greg calls The Expanding Power of Place.

Thanks for listening.

Greg Munro: It was June 8th, 1956. I woke up in a strange place that I didn’t recognize because my family had arrived, uh, during the night, uh, the night before we had arrived. Uh, I was in the upper floor of a log ranch house or farmhouse, uh, at my grandparents’ homestead eight miles east of Dutton, Montana out in the prairie I heard sounds I had never experienced in real life.

[00:16:00] There were roosters crowing, there were hens, uh, clucking, and there were cattle bawling. There was an open window at the end, the gable end of this, uh, upper floor where everybody slept, and I went to that window and looked out and was astounded because there was a whole farm out there just like I had seen on TV.

We’d been on the East Coast in the Gulf of Mexico for years. And I, I, I couldn’t wait to get outside. We lived there for about a, a month. It was my grandparents’ homestead. They’d homestead since 1910. And in that month, I got to explore every inch of it. It was heaven for any child, and I was eight years old.

When my father arrived late in the summer, we moved down to Great Falls, 36 miles away. And my mother was a devout Catholic, and she enrolled us all at St. Thomas Orphanage as day students. All the s- all the s- the Catholic kids in the neighborhood went to the orphanage as day [00:17:00] students. And at the orphanage, I was fortunate enough to meet my first Native Americans, uh, and they were either orphans or boarding there, and I observed that they were very quiet.

They said little, they were shy, and they, uh, didn’t make eye contact, and they stuck with themselves. Every summer while we lived in Great Falls, my parents took us up… I, I shouldn’t say every summer, but most summers they took us up to Browning, Montana, uh, because the North American Indian days were held up there.

It was a large powwow, and it was, it was fascinating because I was in heaven, enthralled with all the horses, uh, all the tipis, all the Native American dancers, all the costumes, uh, even the hand, the hand bone gambling games. It was all amazing. But Browning had another thing that was amazing, and that was the Museum of the Plains Indians, and we went there every time we went to Glacier Park, and I could [00:18:00] not get enough of that place because they had dioramas, and they had all kinds of drawings.

They had the weapons. They had the tipis, uh, the dress, uh, tools, everything that the Native Americans used on the prairie, uh, and, and that they used that came from Buffalo, and I was absolutely from, uh, uh, thrilled with it, and it was, it was kind of a whole romantic notion I s- uh, s- uh, got back to the farm much in the summers.

I spent a great deal of my f- summers as a teenager on that place. By the time I graduated from the eighth grade, I was a full-time farm and ranch hand, paid, living in a bunkhouse on that homestead. And I heard all the stories, the stories of my grandfather and his brother coming out and being led by the landman, or sent by the landman, I should say, out eight miles east of Dutton to look at this particular homestead and pick out the, the staked out [00:19:00] lots.

And I heard the stories of his building his first, uh, homestead shack. I saw the pictures of it. Uh, the pictures of the giant steam engines breaking the prairie into, uh, fallow for wheat. Uh, the pictures of threshing crews. The stories of my grandfather going 75 miles by wagon to the Rocky Mountain front to bring the loads of logs back with which he built this log place, uh, that I woke up in.

I loved being on that place, and the sense of power and responsibility to work with my homesteading German grandfather and my uncles and operate big crawler tractors with plows and big trucks full of grain, and to be standing out in the amber waves of grain. It was all amazing to me, and it was an ungodly sense of place, and I have an ungodly nostalgia for it.

Uh, life goes on. I moved off and I went to college. I went to the army for a couple of years. [00:20:00] I went to law school. I was a trial lawyer in Billings. And whenever I got a chance, I’d go back to any events they had back at the homestead. It was, it was wonderful. My nostalgia was awful. Uh, and, uh, then in 1988, I made a major change in my life.

I gave up law practice and trial practice, and I took a position at the University of Montana School of Law. And there had been big changes there. Marge Brown, one of my classmates from 1975, was the, the, uh, uh, associate dean. She started the first Native American law clinic in the United States, and other schools soon followed.

They had a very active rep- recruiting program to try to get Native Americans from the tribes in Montana into the law school, get them through law school, mentor them in finding jobs, and mentor them in their profession. And the school is very proud of what happened in the, in the [00:21:00] 30 years that I was there.

Uh- And the school had the clinic, and they had a Native American law program in the summer. They had all kinds of Native American law courses and courses on the treaties, et cetera. And an amazing thing was that Ray Cross, r- uh, Raymond Cross, arrived one year and joined the faculty. He was a famous lawyer and the, and the subject of a book called Coyote Warrior.

Raymond Cross was the Coyote Warrior. He, as a young lawyer with the Native American Rights Foundation, made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court and the United States Congress and got hundreds of millions of dollars of reparations for the three North Dakota tribes, the Mandan, Arikara, or, or Arikara, and Hidatsa, uh, for the, the, uh, homeland that had been flooded in 1951 by the United States government to make way for the Harrison [00:22:00] Dam and never paid any…

Garrison Dam, and never paid anything. And he got the reparations, and here he was, officed right next door to me. A profound change took place. One day, I was standing in the hallway, a long hallway, and the law school had placed on that, on the wall, the history of all the treaties, all the law that was forced on the Native Americans was all down that wall.

And I, it, it came full force, the full realization That my grandparents could homestead that place and could provide for themselves on land that the United States government forcefully took away from Native Americans. They took it away from the Blackfeet Nation. They pushed the natives off after they’d killed all the buffalo.

They pushed them off to Browning, Montana, a place that’s so arid and has such a short grazing season that there are no amber waves of grain there, and you’re lucky if you can raise a cow-calf pair on less than 50 acres. [00:23:00] And as a result, what I witnessed in my lifetime going back and forth through Browning was the city is po- impoverished, the reservation’s impoverished, and I know what the suicide rates are and what the rates of disease and desperation and everything and the- how bad the economy is there.

And the disparity between what happened. My mother and all of her siblings, and my father, who also grew up on the homesteads, and their siblings, and even their spouses in many cases, were on those homesteads, and almost every one of them went… My mother and all of her siblings went to college. And you know what?

I and my 40 cousins, any of us that wanted to, went to college. And that, uh, that realization was, was really, uh, a stark thing. And then the other realization was that all over the world, I had come to realize that white people from Europe and from the United States had pushed, um, the, [00:24:00] uh, people off the land and the native peoples off the lands, uh, and in order to make way for monocultures, whether it was pineapple or rubber or, um, uh, sugar or wheat and barley.

And the realization that my grandest days as a teenager out there on those tractors and those combines were spent in a giant monoculture where we had shoved all the animals and all the people off the land, the indigenous people were all off so that we could have a monoculture because it was all wheat and barley.

And, and the animals were gone. And that’s another stark realization. Today, I have that same longing for that place. I have a terrible nostalgia for it. I have a deep, deep sense of place and a deep s- sense of self because of my years there. But my sense [00:25:00] of that as a place is so much deeper now because I know how much history there was there before.

As giant John Hiatt sings, “There’s a graveyard under that cattle herd.” Thank you.

Marc Moss: Thanks, Greg. In Greg Monroe’s 50-year career as a trial lawyer, including 30 years as a law professor at the University of Montana, he has made storytelling the center of his advocacy. Greg is awed by this ancient and beautiful communication. He is now the patriarch of both sides of his large family. He was born curious, and persons, places, and things are endlessly interesting to him.

Greg describes himself as the proverbial jack of all trades and master of none. Coming up after the break.

Adyasha Nayak: My grandparents’ house, pretty old house that my grandfather built. It’s next to a pond. And [00:26:00] every morning, I would hear the neighborhood children jumping into the pond, splashing, having fun, their shouts.

Mandy Moonbird: We had bedbugs always, and dirty needles hidden in the mattresses, and murders and overdoses, and a lot of people said there was a ghost.

Marc Moss: Stay with us. Thanks to our partner for the 2026 season, Parkside Credit Union, a community credit union that likes to say yes. Learn more at parksidefcuonline.com. Thank you to our story sponsor, The Good Food Store, who helped us pay our storytellers.

Learn more about them at goodfoodstore.com. Also, big thanks goes out to the KettleHouse for donating the beer that we enjoyed the night of the performance. Check out the KettleHouse in fine retailers across Montana and select parts of the United States. Visit them at their tap room in Bonner, Montana, or learn more at kettlehouse.com.

You are [00:27:00] listening to the Tell Us Something podcast, where people share their true stories around a theme live in person and without notes. I’m Mark Moss. Storytellers in this episode shared their stories in front of a full house on June 16th, 2026 at Bonner Park Bandshell in Missoula, Montana. Opening the second half of the Tell Us Something podcast, every year, Adyasha Nayak’s grandparents’ home in India offered an escape filled with chai, warmth, and the captivating tales of her grandfather, a former Forest Service ranger.

Years later, after following in her grandfather’s footsteps and eventually moving across the world to Montana, a moment of deep homesickness revealed something unexpected. The comforting power of home can be found where you least expect it. Adyasha calls her story Finding Home. Thanks for listening.

Adyasha Nayak: Let me take you back a couple of years, um, to the other side of the world.

This is in India. My [00:28:00] family has been moving about since I was 10 years old. We never spent more than two years in any single city. But every year, without fail, during holiday season in October, we would go back home to my grandparents’ house, and it was a momentous occasion for me. Um, I got to spend time without my parents telling me to do homework or anything at all.

I was allowed to, uh, roam free, and I remember those days. Uh, my grandparents’ house, um, pretty old house that my grandfather built. It’s next to a pond, and every morning, I would hear the neighborhood children jumping into the pond, splashing, um, having fun, their shouts. Um, I would hear the bread vendor, uh, come out, and I would run [00:29:00] downstairs, grab myself a breakfast, come up, have breakfast and chai So this is 2018, late 2018, um, few months before we started to hear inklings of a certain virus up in China.

This is a year before the rest of the world gets to know about it. And we had just gone home, but this occasion was different. Slightly somber because we were there for my grandmother’s first death anniversary. We call it Barsi, and in Hindu culture, the first death anniversary is important. We believe that the soul remains attached to their body, to their worldly possession for the first year of their life.

And you celebrate with food, you make their favorite things, and you gently tell them to go back to heaven, [00:30:00] or you gently help them exit the cycle of life and death. So we are there to see off my grandmother. She was kind of a bitch, uh, but she knew what she wanted and always stuck to her guns. So it makes sense that for her Barsi, everything had to be perfect.

Um, so my dad and my mom, as the oldest, uh, son and the daughter-in-law, are spending their whole time making sure that everything is perfect. My grandfather, on the other hand, is in… was incredibly calm, quiet, never spoke up. And me and him, because I want to avoid all the questions that aunties are throwing at me, and he’s just old and tired, we are sitting there at one of the chairs just talking to each other, not even talking sometimes, just enjoying the silence.

[00:31:00] And he wants to go home because he’s tired. I took him home. I put him to bed. I left the next day And a year later, we got to learn that my grandfather passed away. That was the last time I saw him Surprisingly enough, um, my grandfather was a ranger in Forest Service, and he told me bunch of stories from his old days of traveling in Indian rainforest, finding ghosts, which just turned out to be foxes.

Uh, sometimes running into tribal people trying to hunt in the night with their bows and arrows. And he opened up this one box. In there is a little compass, an old water skin, one of the oldest kits for making animal footprints ever. [00:32:00] And I loved that. He was, he was different than any other adult in my knew in…

I, I knew in my life. He didn’t have a nine-to-five. He had interesting stories. Um, he never just sat in an office. He went outside. And I only wish that he had gotten to see me where I am, because 2020, in the middle of pandemic, I ended up taking a job with the Indian Forest Service. And I ended up working with tribal communities, traveling through Indian rainforest, not seeing ghosts, unfortunately That experience was something I had wanted to share with him, but I would never get to.

Now we jump back to 2023. Um, I had just moved [00:33:00] to Missoula, and as somebody from the Global South, I hated the winter, and I also did move here in the peak of winter, and I immediately wanted to go home. So this is peak of winters. I, um, I had actually made friends through the Missoula International Friendship Program, and they had very kindly recognized that I was homesick and sent me a gift basket.

So on one very cold winter evening, as I am not having a great time far away from my family, I can’t talk to any of my friends in person, and I had this gift basket that, uh, was full of caramel chews, which I had just offhandedly told them that I love caramel chews. So in my state of grief, I sat there, entered a fugue state, and when I came out of it, I was sitting amidst a carnage of caramel [00:34:00] chew candies.

Um, my teeth hurt. And I don’t know what to do. Um, I felt lost, and in that moment, I got a text from my friend Stephanie just checking in with me, and I gave her a call, and I broke down, and I started crying. I said, “I’m missing home. I’m missing family, and I’m not having a great time.” Almost within an hour later, um, we made a plan and Stephanie showed up to my door with a bag full of groceries.

We made pancakes and chai, and we had long conversations about just anything. And in that moment, I knew that whatever life threw at me- The same way I always had my grandparents’ house to go back to, [00:35:00] to root myself in, in myself, in my culture. The same way I had finally found people in Missoula that were there to make a home for me, a home that I could go back to every time I needed any kind of support I just wish that where I am today, I had been able to tell my grandfather all of my stories.

But I just know that he is too impatient to not be out here listening to me

Marc Moss: Thanks, Adyasha. Adyasha Nayak is a researcher and artist from India. Love of stories drives many of their interests in life. They are about to finish their PhD and excited to be using their degree helping marginalized [00:36:00] communities in their home state. When not on their computer, you’ll find them bird watching or painting.

Closing out this episode of the Tell Us Something podcast, Mandy Moonberg is the last employee left standing at the city’s seediest no-tell motel. She survived bedbugs, crime scenes, and hiding out in empty rooms watching Law & Order. But her final week on the job brought an even bigger disaster. Pick up your broom and dustpan and listen along in a story Mandy calls Last Housekeeper Standing.

Thanks for listening.

Mandy Moonbird: I am alone in the dark in a room in the worst motel in town. I’m peeking out the window at the office of the motel where I can see there’s a cop banging on the door and no one’s answering. So he takes out a phone to make a call and my phone starts ringing. That’s because I am the only employee at the worst [00:37:00] motel in town, and he probably wants to talk about some heinous crime that’s been committed here, but I don’t have the emotional fortitude.

I’m not getting paid enough. So I silence the phone, and I carefully close the curtains, and I go back to watching Law & Order When I started, I was not the only employee at the worst motel in town. I was part of a whole team of housekeepers, but this place had a real hard time hanging on to its employees.

To be fair, it was like walking into a nightmare every morning. We had bedbugs always, and dirty needles hidden in the mattresses, and murders, and overdoses, and a lot of people said there was a ghost. So gradually, everybody else just stopped showing up, and I was the last housekeeper standing. People like to call this place a no-tell motel, which is a cute little euphemism for the type of stuff that goes on [00:38:00] there.

But it had a deeper meaning to me because I didn’t like telling people that I worked there. I did, however, start to identify with the clientele of the no-tell motel because it was the type of place where no one would stay if they had any other choice, and it was the type of place where no one would work if they had any other choice.

So I felt like we were all trapped in there together. Uh, while the housekeepers were dropping like flies, the same thing was happening at the front desk. So I started having to cover some of those shifts too, and when that happened, I was the only employee on the whole premises. And I was terrified of working in the office.

I always felt like someone was gonna point a gun at me. So I got in this routine where I would lock up the office and put my number on the door, and then I could just go find an empty room and watch Law & Order until the shift was over, and I could go home. So I passed a long, hard winter that way until I [00:39:00] finally got a better job offer at a respectable grocery store with a generous employee discount.

And at that time, I still believed in some sort of sacred trust between an employer and an employee, so I went back to work and I put in my two weeks notice at the No-Tell Motel. Then I got to have the glorious honeymoon that comes after you put in your notice at a job that you hate. I was showing up late.

I was saying good morning to the dead raccoon that had been out front of the office since I started this job. And I was washing blood off of walls, just carefree. Until towards the end of the two weeks, one morning, the owner of the motel came in, and she was having a crisis because she and her husband also own a nice hotel on the other side of town, and that morning, all of their housekeeping staff had quit and walked out, and they had a ton of reservations, and they wanted me to go out there and clean for the day.

I declined because I didn’t have a car, and she said her [00:40:00] husband could come pick me up, and he would take me home at the end of the day, so I agreed. Uh, then the husband arrives, like an alien landing in the parking lot of the No-Tell Motel, where everyone’s having the worst day of their life. He’s in this huge, shiny, show-off, gaudy BMW.

I never met him before, but I get in the car, and he’s covered in jewelry, and he reeks of cologne, and he’s a huge creep Did you see that coming? Um, he propositioned me in a number of ways. He said he has mistresses that work in all of his hotels, and he gets them management jobs, and in some cases he’ll buy them a car, and he calls it helping me out.

He said, “You could help me out, and I could help you out.” And he wants me to manage the housekeeping department at the nice hotel, and he says he could buy me a car, and he’s like, “Don’t you like my car? It’s a BMW.” And I’m like, “Yeah, cool car.” And I’m thinking, [00:41:00] because at this point I’ve watched a lot of Law & Order You’re not supposed to allow yourself to be taken to a second location-

by a guy like this. So for safety, I text my roommate, and I tell him where I’m going just so if anything gets any weirder, somebody at least knows where I am. And we arrive at the nice hotel, and the owner introduces me to the manager, who is now the only employee at the nice hotel. And he gets her to corroborate his story.

He’s like, “Didn’t I get you this job, and didn’t I buy you a car, and don’t I help you out, and you help me out?” And she says, “Yes” but she is seething with hatred for this man. It’s palpable how bad she wants to kick him in the balls. And I’m just here to clean rooms. I’m an incredible professional housekeeper, so I get a big list of all the dirty rooms and a master key, and I take off to start cleaning this hotel, which I had never been to before, but it’s one of those big [00:42:00] franchise places, real homogenized.

There’s a surface level illusion of luxury, like the sheets look like cotton, but they don’t feel like cotton type of place. It’s not fooling anybody. Um, I’m cleaning, and my key stops working, so I have to go back down to the lobby, and the owner’s still down there just bothering this poor woman. I ask her to reprogram my key, and while she’s doing that, he turns to me, and he starts going off again about he could get me a job, he could buy me a car, he could help me out, I could help him out.

And at this point, I have started to suspect that if all of your employees are always walking out of all of your businesses, the problem might be with the business and not with the employees. So I’m staring straight ahead just trying not to make eye contact. I’m looking at the wall between the lobby and the pool, which has this huge fake carved mantle covered in fake ceramic [00:43:00] vases full of fake plants, and I was thinking, “I didn’t think I could hate any place worse than the No-Tell Motel.”

‘Cause that place sucks, but at least it’s honest. And I was thinking because everyone’s always walking out of these terrible jobs, maybe no one has ever actually told this man how bad it sucks to feel trapped in his shitty motel, and maybe no one’s ever looked him in the eyes and just told him to fuck off.

I feel this rumbling, like something’s in the walls trying to get out. It feels like a dam is about to break. And then suddenly, he shuts up, and we’re all just staring at the wall. And I’m starting to think, “Everyone can feel that rumbling?” And then the wall just explodes- … and water comes pouring in. A lot of [00:44:00] water.

The fake mantle breaks, and all the tacky decorations go flying, and all the fake plants are floating at our feet because all the water that should be going into the pool is coming into the lobby, and now the lobby is the pool- … and we’re standing in ankle-deep water. So the owner runs to turn off the water, and the manager and I just have a moment of peace just listening-

to the water come in. And I don’t know what it was about the wall exploding, maybe it’s just that my feet got wet, but I finally took out my phone and I texted my roommate, “Could you actually come pick me up right now?” And then I grabbed a mop and kind of pretended to try to help clean up. I don’t know what that’s gonna do.

This place is trashed. It’s, like, completely underwater. And my ride shows up, and I start to make my exit, and the owner tried to stop me. He’s like, “No, no. Wait, wait. I could give you a ride in [00:45:00] the BMW. Don’t you want a ride in the BMW? It’s, it’s a BMW.” And I was like, “No, thank you. Uh, it was wonderful meeting you.

I actually have to go, but, you know, thanks for the opportunity. Good luck with all of this.” And I think I shook his hand, and then I sprinted to the car and got in, and I never went back to the nice hotel or the no-tell motel ever again. And telling this story and looking back, I wish that it could have ended with me speaking my piece and telling him how I felt about him and his creepy motel and his tacky car, but I didn’t.

Uh, what I can do is choose to believe in my heart that eventually some brave employee kicked that man in the balls.

Marc Moss: Thanks, Mandy. Mandy Moonberg is an [00:46:00] artist from Kalispell, Montana. She is trained in sustainable construction and is currently studying art at the University of Montana. You can catch her painting live on stage at concerts and festivals across the world. She is passionate about creating community-wide art projects and wants to apply art therapy practices to public art.

Mandy is on a mission to find the sourest sourdough in Missoula. You’ve been listening to the Tell Us Something podcast. Thanks again to the Montana 250th Commission for their support of Tell Us Something in 2026. Thanks to our media sponsors, missoulaevents.net, Mike’s Print and Copy, The Roxy Theater, and Missoula Broadcasting Company, including the family of ESPN Radio, The Trail 103.3, Jack FM, and Missoula’s source for modern hits, U104.5.

And thanks to our in-kind sponsors, Float Missoula and Joyce of Tile. Thanks to Cash for Drunkards who provided the music for the podcast. The song is called [00:47:00] Buzzin’ and can be found on their album, which you can stream at cashfordrunkardsband.com.