A CASE FOR RIVERS

In the summer of 2020, a man on a gurney was rushed through a hospital in Phoenix, Arizona. By the end of that night, the 23-year-old was pronounced dead from a fentanyl overdose.

He was a childhood friend of University of Montana student, Gage Griffen. Griffen was shook, and felt prompted to reevaluate his life. “I was on my way to work — I think it was a phone call or a text,” Griffen said. “I remember my boss saying, ‘You’re too young to have friends dying.’” Griffen, now 26, had just graduated from the University of Arizona.

“We did a lot of the same shit,” Griffen said about his friend as he walked down a gravel trail toward the Clark Fork River just outside Missoula. “It was a confrontation of, ‘Maybe I could die from doing something dumb.’ It made me think that this is real.”

His friend’s death, paired with a drug-related seizure his roommate at UA suffered two years earlier, motivated Griffen to rethink his life decisions and values. Shadowed by questions and guilt, he moved to Montana and found answers in its rivers.

ROLL FOR INSIGHT

Six adventurers trudged their way through churning sands. Amid sharp mountains sat a crumbling amphitheater where cheers once rang out across a great city. As the party approached the arena, hundreds of pained faces trapped in stone flanked the crew.

Lightning struck the amphitheater, sending hails of stone toward them. Cracks ran up the arena steps and the ground splintered beneath them. The air smelled metallic.

“Fools …”

Behind the booming voice, along with every other interaction, battle, setting and character, sat a quiet but commanding McKay Cheney — the Dungeon Master who pulled the strings for the group’s final session of their two-and-a-half-year-long Dungeons & Dragons campaign. He was surrounded by stacks of books, dice and sheets of numbers. All of the plans to bring his and his friends’ epic journey to a close hid behind a large plastic divider. 

The party of adventurers, from completely different upbringings and moving toward different futures, have come together with Cheney to defeat their world’s greatest beasts. Through their adventures, they’ve attacked their insecurities and found a creative escape. That opportunity now seems more open than ever to the rest of the world.