As a child, I learned of my home state of Montana's unique connectedness. I grew up in the western, mountainous portion of the state but found that from mountain valleys to rolling plains the state was linked by an unlikely source: its license plates.

Each of Montana's 56 counties possessed its own numerical identity via the first digit(s) on its license plates. I grew up in the county of Missoula, home of license plates beginning with the number 4.

Family road trips turned into number spotting competitions with my siblings. The lower numbered counties (the most populated ones) were easy to notice along the roadway because more people meant more cars. The sparsely populated and distant counties became rare collectibles similar to a Babe Ruth rookie year baseball card. To this day there are county license plate numbers I can only visualize, having never come anywhere near their county line.

Early in my adult years, I moved away from Montana to the more populated state of Minnesota. I quickly learned that Minnesota also had a connectedness, but not in the form of license plates. In Minnesota they call such a mutual link "winter." Another attribute of Montana -- good Samaritans -- were also present in Minnesota, but mostly only in winter. Winter was a sort of six to nine months of "we’re-all-in-this-together."

One Thanksgiving my girlfriend and I attended the dinner festivities at her parents' house, with a brief side trip to offer Grandma a ride to the gathering. As is typical in Minnesota whenever one needs to get somewhere in the winter, a snowstorm deposited plenty of white stuff on the city's streets. The major arteries were plowed several times during the day, but when the time came to return Grandma to her home, the side streets had yet to be plowed. I gunned the car's engine and managed to get over the snow blower's berm and onto Grandma's street. Once on the untraveled street, however, the car's front bumper became its own snowplow. Within about four houses of Grandma's front door, the car would move no further.

Wading through knee-deep snow to assess the situation, I was just on the verge of getting to Grandma's house to acquire a snow shovel when a four-wheel drive pickup turned onto the street, drove around my car and stopped. A friendly young man hopped out of the truck and offered to tow my car to the next plowed street. I explained that I needed to get my elderly passenger to the house just within the limit of vision through the falling snow. "Not a problem," the friendly lad answered and positioned his truck in front of my car. As I was kneeling down to find a stout chassis location to hook his towrope to my car, I noticed his license plate -- Montana tags beginning with the number 4. "Hey," I announced with great surprise, "you’re from Missoula."

As it turned out, the young driver was on his way home from college to visit his family in Wisconsin. He had pulled off the interstate to gas up, become disoriented, and driven about two miles in the wrong direction. I gave him directions back to the highway after being towed to passable streets, and we both headed home...feeling connected.