Eastward into eastern Montana

Alix and Dustin like to sleep in, I like to get up at dawn if not before. Stalemate.

But Alix divided the difference, and when I came back at eight from a short walk up the canyon, she was out of the tent. She suggested we two drive to nearby Big Sky for breakfast, and Dustin could sleep, which he preferred to do. “And maybe if we’re gone long enough,” she said, “he’ll have packed everything up by the time we get back.” To cultivate the possibility, we took the van.

It pretty much never occurs to me to go out for breakfast. Or to do something as inefficient as leave a campsite and drive fifteen miles only to drive back. But luckily Alix is more flexible and open-minded. We had a fabulous breakfast at the Bugaboo Café, at the junction of the turn-off to Big Sky proper. The heart of the resort/ski mountain is nine more miles up a side valley, and it offers nothing like a pleasant café, but only the expensive and ersatz “western” amenities that the loaded vacationer apparently prefers. Condo complex redoubts are scattered about the valley floor, and log shopping centers too, with discreet signage masking flyfishing stores and fine dining….

The Bugaboo was related to this breed—with its log cabin décor—but more hipster, with tattooed waitresses and organic ingredients. I had the best breakfast I can remember eating for years. The basics, two eggs (over-medium), fried potatoes, sausage (patties), and wheat toast, but each item perfectly prepared, perfectly tasty. Alix had ordered from the lunch menu, an open-faced sandwich with ham and melted cheese and tomato. It was good, but she envied me my choice. Towards the end of the meal I slowed way down, trying to make it last, and mulling over which bites to end with…. Plus, I wanted to linger in Alix’s company. Soon we would be heading out in different directions….

Back at the campsite, Dustin was up but he had been occupied in making a fire so he could boil water for coffee. No packing up yet…. The van is always ready to go, so I didn’t have anything to do but follow them about, talking at them as they emptied the tent and took it down and packed up their full car….

And then we had to part, which was hard. They headed south towards Idaho, planning to spend the night at the Mackay Tourist Camp. “Dustin likes the word ‘free,’” Alix said. Most of us do…. I drove back north to Bozeman, skirted along the edge of town, and got on I-90 going east….

The day was oppressively hot again, in the nineties, and the mountains were almost obscured by haze. I kept checking the dashboard controls to see if the heat was on, but no, that was just the normal air….

I got gas in Big Timber, where I found the library but forced myself to push on another hour to Columbus before I took my afternoon break. In the first three days out from Boise I had covered 650 miles, which is nice, closer to an amble (the ideal) than a dash. But I only had three days left and still a thousand miles to go. I’d have to pick up the pace.

But not if it meant driving through the afternoon.  At two I entered the cool refuge of Stillwater county’s small library. For the first time on the trip I didn’t first ask the librarian for a wifi code, and for the first time I needed one. I spoke with a young woman in a colorful and airy and sleeveless ankle-length dress; her name tag said Sarah. Later, an older man came in and announced loudly, “Don’t you look Hawaiian today!”

I stayed till closing, at 5:30, and when I went back outside I discovered that if had become noticaby warmer over the last hours. It was now 101 degrees….

A bottle of cold water from the cooler offered solace for a few miles of driving. As did the two-lane roads I took down the Yellowstone River valley, rather than the interstate….

When I got close to Billings I managed to tune in the NPR station and was rewarded with a half hour lecture on Robert Frost, recently given by his most recent biographer, Jay Parini. According to Parini, a professor at Middlebury College, Frost’s notion of “truth” harkened back to the ancient Greek idea of “alethea,” meaning something that must not be forgotten. He tried to tell of, or show, such truths in his poems. Parini argued that such a concept was different than the contemporary definition of truth, which emphasizes verification (a result of the Scientific Revolution). The Billings station broadcast only the first half of the talk, promising the second half for the next evening. I made an out loud sound of disappointment….

Around eight I started to look for a place to stop for the night. I had been considering Pompey’s Pillar, a landmark on the Yellowstone that Lewis and Clark mention in their writings, and where one can still see some of their graffiti carved in the face of a cliff. But the gates were closed….

Instead I found an open lot nearby, at the edge of a bluff above the river. A bit of crumbly pavement suggested it might have been an overlook at one time, but a big pile of gravel implies a currently more pedestrian use…. I opened all the doors and windows of the van and let the warm wind blow through. The temperature was still well up in the nineties, but the sun was nearly down, a nebulous ball of orange on the hazy western horizon, its clout diminished and fading fast.

In the back, I made a sandwich and cut up a cucumber and carrots and listened to a station reporting Olympics results…. After sunset the wind died and a number of mosquitoes arrived. I had to shut myself in (except for the two small sliding windows with screens), and I lay in the still and sultry dark on top of the sleeping bag…. Below the bluff a train passed alongside the river, while behind me a quarter mile distant big trucks rumbled by on the interstate.