Call Home - A Very Real Help For Those Who Contemplate Suicide
Author: Scott McMillian, Editor of Montana Quarterly Magazine
Scott McMillian
Editor of Montana Quarterly Magazine
Editor's Note: The sculptor Jim Dolan stationed his blue horses on a windy hillside in South Broadwater County. They can be seen as you drive by on Highway 287.
Suicide claims more lives in Montana than drug overdoses and homicides combined. Somebody takes their own life almost every day in Big Sky Country, giving it the highest suicide rate in the country. This trend is not a new thing, particularly in the state’s more rural reaches, where reaching any kind of medical help can mean a long, lonesome drive.
Sculptor Jim Dolan has seen suicide in his own family. He knows the pain, and he wants to help. So, he built a couple dozen phone booths.
“What can I do to help the people of Montana with my art?” he asked himself last January. “How do you deal with isolation? You talk. You stay in touch.”
Dolan fired up his torch and started making phone booths of sheet iron and stainless steel, then hauling them hundreds of miles from his Gallatin Valley home to central and eastern Montana. They don’t function as telephones, of course, but that doesn’t mean they can’t carry a message.
On one side of each booth, about 8 feet tall, a sign says, “Call home.” Another side says, “Keep in touch.” A third says, “Dial 988,” the suicide and crisis lifeline. The bright red cubicles are designed to be visible, to catch the eye from maybe a half mile away on an open prairie, to urge a person to slow down as they approach and maybe think about the message.
“It won’t solve all the problems, but it might get somebody to call home, to get some help,” Dolan said.
Dolan grew up in California but has lived in Montana since his days at Montana State University, where he earned two degrees in agriculture. He began making a living as a sculptor 53 years ago. His best-known work is what he calls the Bleu Horses, a herd of 39 lifelike equines that twist and respond to the wind on a hillside north of Three Forks. While horses are a specialty, he’s also made an even bigger herd of bison, some oversized elk and an eagle the size of a shipping container. His work adorns homes and public spaces around the country and in countries as distant as Japan and Ukraine. It’s high art but also hard labor, with a lot of lifting, welding and grinding.
The 24 phone booths he’s created weigh about 500 pounds apiece, sturdy enough to survive constant prairie wind and occasional stints as a bovine scratching post. It takes a tractor or a bobcat to load them on a trailer and install them on isolated patches of pasture from Ringling to Saco, from Ekalaka to Birney to Circle. No landowners have turned him down when he’s asked to park a booth on their property.
He’s financing most of the materials, labor and transport on his own, though a couple friends have chipped in.
“You can spend all your time raising funds, or you can spend all your time making phone booths,” he says with a shrug.
So, he’s trying to make calls happen. “Maybe you’ll call your kids,” he said. “Or your mom and dad.”
It’s how healing starts.
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PhotoCredit: Scott McMillian, Montana Quarterly Magazine Editor
Image 1 Caption: One of Sculptor Jim Dolan's telephone booth replicas, 8 feet tall and made from sheet iron and stainless steel. Dolan hauled them hundreds of miles to lonely stretches of rural roads to reach out to those who might be considering suicide.
Photo Credit: Scott McMillian, Montana Quarterly Magazine Editor
