It’s sticky, not yet sizzling. I check directions on an old-fashioned paper map. Just in case the nav system doesn’t work, I tell myself. Daily heat alerts for the west suck out plans for a chilly day. I’ve had more than enough physical and emotional heat these last few weeks. I want cool and calm, welcoming peace and harmony.
I want a road trip.
Back from the pandemic sheltering-in-place and a couple of years in central Mexico, I’ve landed in Oregon, driven to my house in California. Now I’m headed to Montana, to Helena, the state’s capital. In all the times I’ve worked and traveled through Montana, I’ve missed it.
Traveling with me are innumerable problems. Partner tussles, tenant hassles, squatter problems, health issues. Fingers wrapped around the steering wheel, cooling system adjusted, fuel tank filled, NPR, classical, comedy, and country stations located on the sound system. Favorite camping gear in the back. Water and snacks onboard. Electronics stored properly.
I’m ready.
Dreaming of this day for months, I slide into the driver’s seat, turn off the sound system, pull the gearshift into Drive. Now I’m meditating to a different ohm. Ask me to wash dishes, vacuum, or shine the windows? My back aches immediately and I’m exhausted. Drive eleven hours a day on interstate or better yet, back roads? Let’s press on, I say.
Montana’s never been a place for me to live but it has been a place for me to love. And few places are better to drive than Montana.
Leaving my hotel, a top molar shatters and drops against my tongue. Now, exploding tooth pain mars my plans. Pulling off Highway 50, America’s Loneliest Highway as it is touted, I long for something to gulp, strong enough to knock me out of my misery. By the time I arrive in Austin, the Nevada near ghost town where I’d hoped to soak in its rustic hot springs, I welcome the sign on the old two-story building advertising an international café, offering Serbian food.
Heading up the steps, I see “No masks allowed” in the dining room. The door to the bar held a sign warning the place is for “members only” for the Maskless Club.
I could have left my mask in the car, entered, had delicious food, and met some great people. But I didn’t. The owner’s political persuasions and mine appeared sufficiently different that I saw no reason to release any of my funds there. Onward I went through the light snow and gloomy day, steering cautiously on wet roads. Tooth pain mauled my senses, squatters were still squatting, and tenants continued to complain.
Montana was waiting.
My first road trip through Montana was via a Greyhound Ameripass. I’d said goodbye to a dull job, my then husband, and headed cross-country. A colleague encouraged me to visit his daughter, teaching on the two plus million-acre Crow Nation Reservation. Her infectious enthusiasm for her students and their families was catching. Her residence across from the Custer Battlefield put me a new place to learn history. Meeting a linguist, helping put the Crow language into written form made that linguistics course I’d finished a couple of years earlier come alive. Visiting Red Lodge in the Bear Mountain foothills increased my fascination with the region.
A US Office of Education project took me to Big Sky country for more extended periods. Monitoring three of Montana’s school districts implementing a planning, curriculum, budgeting system let me observe impacts of the three-year program. Even better, it let me drive the real Montana.
In Butte, that gold and silver mining area at the top of the US’s most fascinating towns, I stayed at the then Palm Motel. The story I was told was that the owners visited Hawaii, loved it so much that they returned home with palm trees. Montana’s frigid winters were not meant for palm trees, soon making the palms memories only.
Fascinated by Butte’s stately houses, I read a bit of the town’s history. One story told of two wealthy men standing in the street talking. Air pollution from the mines was so severe, they could not see one another’s diamond stickpins. Oh, the problems the rich have had.
These days, Butte’s a different place, I confirm as I sip my soup, staring into the distance from Sparky’s Garage. Later I’m embarrassed. Had I done my research properly. I could have visited the Pekin Noodle Parlor, built in 1906, surviving from the original Chinatown neighborhood. At the Front Street Market, I don’t want to leave. I want to be alone sauntering aisles, reading labels, tasting cheese, sipping wine, and staying…maybe forever. My tooth pain throbs but I press onward.
Montana has provided several firsts for me. My first fly fishing experience, albeit with a child’s pole, compliments of my male university colleagues near Bozeman on the Gallatin River. The first time I awoke to a cow outside my window or saw motorists give right of way to the dog lying in a traffic intersection, both in Twin Bridges. Heart in my mouth, clutching the pilot’s arm in a single engine plane headed into an encroaching winter storm near Lewistown.
On this day, I buzz close to another first in Montana, a speeding ticket. Totally absorbed with Tim Ferriss interviewing Joyce Carol Oates, I begin to pass a nondescript dark sedan. Moving into the left lane to go around the slower car, I panic. I am traveling 85 mph, likely fifteen or more above the two-lane road limit. I sneak back into my lane, then follow the car as I see the sign above the bumper, Montana Highway Patrol. He moves over to let me pass, pulls out again, then follows me for another nervous twenty miles before he takes a turn. I exhale.
This time I’m in Montana to visit a friend I met in Mexico. Not a native Montanan but thirty years residency gives her some rights to claim state citizenship. A foremost cheerleader for the state, her journalism career lets her point out the state’s occasional shortcoming. I land on her Helena couch, inform her that she has invited an emotional wreck to visit her, and bare my soul. It hurts more than my tooth.
I curl into her guest room, feeling safe from life’s brisk and unwanted winds. Together we fret over the fledgling tomato and eggplant seedlings a friend gave her. I’m on the road, yet I feel at home. Maybe my problems will disappear, the way heavy snowfalls evaporate on Montana foothills each Spring.
When outsiders think of Montana, they don’t think it has much demographic diversity. That may be true but some ranking puts Helena in 8th place for state diversity. When I am included in a Sunday morning gathering of my friend’s friends, I meet her hiking buddies. Her Ghannian professor friend had left on summer break but Ish, her Sikh friend joined. Days earlier I’d met Ish at her house where she afforded me my first taste of Mumbai in Montana, a fraction of the delight she cooks when she and her family create community fund raisers.
Helena’s streets are wide, yet I am warned about heavy traffic, I see little of that. “They’re all in the mountains”, I’m told. I see a town with so many wide-open spaces that it feels empty. No elbow jostling, no quick changing lanes, just urban open space with a street named Last Chance Gulch.
On a street in Helena’s closed-to-autos historic mall, we enter the 1960’s where we could learn from the master about historic coins at Wayne Miller Coins. The Saturday market, the library, wine store and other shops allow a road tripper to hear the locals connect with one another, plan trips to mountain cabins, exchange outdoor gear, arrange fishing or hunting trips. I make notes about where to go on the next trip.
Plans to spend a couple of nights stretch to a week. Her tomato and eggplants branch upward.
My gracious friend puts her foot down firmly when I want to wash my clothes at the only place I’ve heard of where a bartender holds the key to the laundromat. At a different laundromat a man helps attach window screens to my car. He’s on a road trip, too. Now I can camp in my car minus mosquitoes attacking me. Perfect road trip. One night a motel. Another night a campsite, or a friend’s guest room with mountain views.
The Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts reminds me that once, I had a ceramics studio at my house. I would drive all day once a month to study with a ceramicist. I had little to no talent for molding the clay into what I wanted it to be. Yet when I touched the clay, it felt familiar. Now I realize that patience, time, and practice might have helped me find what the clay wanted to be. Is it time for reconsideration?
The road calls. I decline my friend’s offer to see her dentist. I must press eastward, remembering the squatter and tenant business that awaits me there.
Leaving Helena, I don’t want to go. I want to stay longer. What’s East Helena like, I wonder. So many places to see. I want to stare at the big sky, visually inhale the colors changing on the hills, sit in the middle of nowhere and breathe fresh emotions and air, letting me pretend I’m the only one on the planet.
I am headed toward North Dakota but I’m not ready to leave Montana. Could I stay longer? Should I take 191 or stay on Highway 12? Should I revisit the Crow Reservation? Should I head east to the Fort Peck Reservation, part of the Department of Interior’s 2015 Buy-back program?
I linger in Harlowtown. A sign warns me that I should not make a U or a J turn. I Google to learn what a J turn is. The most red, white, and blue flags I have seen ‘anywhere in Montana, one near a customized three-wheel motorcycle with a steel covering turning it into a two-seater vehicle provides my major memories of the town.
The four-lane leaving Helena turned into a two lane. No traffic for miles. Sky and space with the road ahead. Perfect. Nothing in Lewistown looks familiar to me. Maybe my air fright wiped out my memory.
By the time I arrive in Sydney, a pleasant border town and the only one I know named after a six-year-old, I’m ready for a drink. I head out my motel’s back door and into a pleasant bar/restaurant devoid of customers aside from a twosome having dinner. Not too surprising given we are on the back edge of the pandemic.
The earnest cook breaks out from the kitchen, proclaiming the prime rib’s excellence. My Montana beef history tells me she is accurate as I recall steaks dripping over dinner plate sides.
The bartender sporting an infectious smile, cheerful attitude, and what every good bartender has, a willing ear, pours me a drink. We share common experiences but she’s the first person I’ve met who has worked the North Dakota oil fields in boom times. I have a thousand questions about that and how she ended up in Montana. As I prepare to leave, she asks for a hug which I give, my first hug to a Montana bartender.
This is what road trips are about. Seeing the countryside, meeting people I would never have met if I stayed home or traveled with a group or by plane. Road trips are about exhaling, taking in new, fresh breaths.
A Quiet Place was showing at The Centre, Sydney’s 1947 built theatre. Just what I needed, I thought as again, I considered extending my stay in Montana. I may not live in Montana, but I love it. Its roads have many more firsts to give to me.