By MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian

POLEBRIDGE – His first impulse was to run, to turn tail and never look back at that ramshackle stack of logs the real estate agent kept calling a cabin.

“But I was looking for something a little more exciting than Ohio, and the more I thought about it, the more exciting it seemed,” John Frederick said.

Frederick wanted to live “somewhere on the rustic side,” and his future ex-wife wanted to run a hostel, like the European hostels in which she’d spent four years while traveling the continent.

And there it was, the decrepit cabin on 2 1/2 acres, backed by public land and a wild and scenic river – many, many miles from the nearest power line – where grizzly bears, despite their endangered status, outnumbered the human neighbors by a considerable margin.

Needless to say, he bought it.

Lock, stock and barrel for $39,000.

It was the ’70s, after all, and this ponytailed back-to-the-lander was “just living. That’s all. Just living.”

A full 30 years later, Frederick finally is selling his wildly popular North Fork Hostel, located on the outskirts of downtown Polebridge. The town, if it can be called that, is a northwoods outpost home to a saloon, a mercantile and one very colorful honorary mayor.

That’d be Frederick. And he’s retiring.

The getting here is no easy thing, what with the only route in being a jagged and rock-pocked road that eats tires the way a cheese grater eats the skin off your knuckles.

An hour north of Columbia Falls, almost to Canada and hard up to Glacier National Park’s western boundary, the North Fork Flathead River Valley remains much the same as the day Frederick first laid eyes on it. His hostel, though, is no longer derelict; it has been spruced up, fixed up, primed and painted and peopled with visitors from all over the world.

“Hostel travelers are different,” Frederick said. “They tend to be rather friendlier than your average tourist.”

They don’t want to hide away in a resort with all the comforts, he said. They want to “meet other people, talk to other people and get involved. They want to be a part of the place.”

He’ll remember David Mech, the wolf biologist who stayed for months on end, in the little cabin out back. When he left, Frederick was cleaning the place out and for whatever reason laid himself down on the bed. It was one of those old mattresses, the kind with all the little buttons sewn on top.

“Oh no,” Frederick said. “It was a horrible bed. Horrible. I felt so bad. That’s when I started the habit of laying in every bed at least once a year.”

Once a year’s enough. It’s a hostel, after all. No need to get too excited about bed buttons.

And he’ll remember Steve Lake, too, the English guy whose home back home was made from wood salvaged out of a ship dating to the 1500s. “Now that’s pretty cool,” Frederick said.

He’ll remember the Israeli fellow who was so excited about spotting a squirrel in the woods.

“That reminded me what a special place we have here,” Frederick said. “We’re all out looking for the big guys, the bears and the lions, and he’s thrilled to see a squirrel. Your perspective sure changes in a place like a hostel.”

That’s because here, so far from anywhere, the world comes to you.

They come from all around the big round globe, from big cities and from tiny towns, too. The hostel walls are papered in the world’s currency, many of the small bills now extinct, victims of inflation.

The Russians never came much, though, and neither did the South Americans or the Mexicans. “And it’s too uncultivated for the Japanese,” Frederick said.

But everyone else came in droves, especially the Germans.

“They love this place,” he said of the Germans. “They love the wilderness.”

Just ask Oliver Meister. He came, way back in 1992, from southern Germany to stay for a night – but he stayed for a summer, returned for years, and now is buying the place.

“I found it by pure accident,” the immigrant said. “I had been traveling around the world for about 10 years, and was camping up in Glacier Park.”

It was cold, he remembered, and rainy, and he asked a ranger where he could get in out of the weather for a day or so. “I found the hostel and I never left,” he said.

For the past five years, this inveterate traveler has not traveled, a fact that seems to genuinely surprise him as it crosses his mind.

“I didn’t have to travel,” Meister said. “The world comes to me.”

This international oasis deep in Montana’s backwoods is his home now, and as of the first of the year it will be his livelihood, too.

“Oliver’s a better businessman than I ever was,” Frederick said. “Someone gives me a sob story and I let them stay for free. He’s smarter than that.”

“There’s always a way,” Meister said of shelter at the hostel. “There’s always chores that need to be done. If someone’s short on cash, we can put them to work.”

In fact, before becoming manager of the hostel these many years, Meister himself traded labor for a place to hang his hat. And the beds, he said, are better now. No buttons.

The four basic rooms handle a baker’s dozen, the two small cabins a half-dozen more. Meister has plans for a private room upstairs, to handle the more “upscale” of the hostel’s thousands of guests that arrive each summer.

There’s the father-son groups that return year after year, the families and loners who show up each and every July like Capistrano’s swallows. There’s the old friends and the new friends and “all the loveable crazies,” as Frederick calls them.

Among the crazies, of course, is the lady who showed up on her bicycle, here so far from anywhere, with a huge old sleeping bag strapped to the rear fender and not much more.

“She was nutty as a fruitcake,” Frederick said. “She really would’ve been better under somebody’s supervision.”

But he swapped her a smaller sleeping bag, got her on her feet, pointed her back down the road to where the real world waited.

“A lot of people who come through are a little lost,” he said. “They’re looking for something. They stay a while, think about it, talk with people, and when they leave, they have a direction.”

It helps, of course, that there’s only one direction out, one road, and that heads south.

“Hostel folk are unique,” Frederick said. “They tend to be younger and maybe not so wealthy. Some are so idealistic they don’t even fit in the real world. Some are so practical you want to hit them on the head. They’re people with ideas, people who want to do things.”

After 30 years, though, all Frederick wants to do is get back to “just living.”

“Thirty years is a long time,” he said. “It saps your energy, and I just don’t deal with people so well anymore.”

Except the ones Meister sends his way. When an interesting traveler comes through, particularly an interesting lady, someone from somewhere with a story that Frederick should hear, Meister goes and gets the boss.

“They are so interesting,” Meister said of his guests. “They are the neatest people in the world.”

And they come, and keep coming, at $15 a night, because “here, it’s not the usual hubbub of the world. It’s not the rat race.”

It is, however, a business, and now that Meister’s bought the farm, so to speak, Frederick has a bit of advice for his friend.

“It was fun,” he said of his 30-year run. “I didn’t make any money at all, not a dime, but it was fun.”

Which the “hostel meister” knows, of course. You might say his first instinct, too, was to run.

“I didn’t really want to buy it,” Meister said, “but John wanted to sell. Basically, I bought it just to keep living here, to maintain my lifestyle.”

And the lifestyle of all those interesting and international globetrotters who arrive on the doorstep every summer.

“I love it,” Meister said. “I love the people who come through. They’re like family. It’s a friendly place, where people can be themselves.

“This is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life. I have everything I need from this world right here in Polebridge.”