My Montana Summer

This was my summer to discover Montana. This state is chock-full of geological marvels like Glacier National Park, Yellowstone National Park, and what are known to me only as “the pretty mountains one passes on the way to shop in Bozeman.” These places attract tourists from the far reaches of the world who hike, bike, and camp through Montana’s natural wonders.

I am not one of these people.

(If you doubt this statement, see my column, “The Roaringgrrl Goes Camping.”)

I prefer to see the world from the driver’s seat of my car or from the balcony of a hotel. I can look at the scenery and breathe in the fresh air while keeping away from mosquitoes and other creepy crawlies.

So I hopped into Martha, my MINI Cooper, and set my compass to north. Five hours later, we landed in Havre, a town so far north in Montana it should be guarded by Canadian Mounties rather than Montana state police. I was a little nervous. I’d heard people say about Havre, “It’s not hell. But you can see it from there.”

I disagree with this assessment. I think people who live in my part of Montana with its big mountain ranges are geological snobs. Havre isn’t flat; it’s nestled in rolling hills that appear to undulate endlessly in a sea of grass and shrubs. The town is charming with its long main street filled with western clothing shops, small eateries, and bars. There’s even a preserved, historical underground city where Havre residents a hundred years ago kept their shops safe and warm from the howling wind that blows all winter long.

But the best part of Havre, along with its local college, Montana State University—Northern and its Amtrak railway station that leads directly west through Glacier National Park, is the Orange Julius. In my estimation, no town that is home to an Orange Julius can be completely dismissed. The OJ is the stamp of capitalist culture, indicating (to me, anyway), that Havre is a town that is moving forward and growing. I defy you to 

show me a town that died that also had an Orange Julius.

After returning from Havre, I headed east to Virginia City, one of my favorite tourist destinations. It’s a restored mining town with a fabulous boardwalk lining original clapboard buildings filled with all manner of shopping.

I’d visited Virginia City several times and had seen all the old buildings, drunk a beer at the Bale of Hay Saloon, and main-lined Lemonheads at Cousins candy store, but this time, I was there for a high-class Virginia City tradition, the Brewery Follies.

The Follies take place in the old brewery and feature four actors who have clearly spent a lot of time devising rhymes for the word “Nantucket.” Crowded into the brewing room around a stage the size of a placemat, we gave our drink orders to waiters who were also the actors in that evening’s performance.

Borne out of improv, the show was hilariously irreverent, occasionally suggestive, sometimes downright dirty, but always intelligent and thoughtful. Well…except for the sketch when two actors jammed small, pen flashlights up their noses and lit up their nostrils to the tune of “Dueling Banjos.”

Next, I headed northwest to Browning, a town on the Blackfeet Reservation. As I crossed into the rez, I was surrounded by fields of purple lupine, faced with a dramatic backdrop of the steep Rocky Mountains, and looking at a cow…ON the highway.  As I read from a sign about a mile later, “Open Range Grazing” means cows, and, as I saw a few moments later, horses, cross two-lane highways at will. Kids ride ponies across the middle school campus lawn, and dogs roam the streets. I like the idea of this animal-human communal living. It encourages respect. And slow driving.

After Browning, I stayed a few days in East Glacier, a town that boasts itself to be the home of the “World’s Largest Purple Spoon.” I did see the celebrated spoon, but I wonder at its practicality as the only creature I can imagine using it is the Jolly Green Giant.

From there, I drove west across Glacier National Park on the “Going to the Sun Road.” This 50-mile two-lane road spans the width of the park and takes visitors across Logan Pass (6,464 ft) and by Lake McDonald. Martha the MINI and I comfortably toodled through those thin mountain passes while the RVs and SUVs we passed quaked nervously around hairpin turns. Let’s hear it for compact cars!

My last trip had me traveling south, both of Dillon and the United States. I drove to Salt Lake City and caught a plane to visit family in Virginia, catch up with old friends, and mostly check in on my dad who had returned to work following open heart surgery (see my column “Have a Heart”).

Dad is doing great. He’s dropped a lot of weight and is eating very consciously. He works out four to five times a week at a health club that gave him a reduced membership rate because of his heart attack (how’s that for an incentive to join a health club?). He has, according to his doctors, many healthy years ahead of him.

But it was a harder trip than I thought. Facing my parents’ mortality has forced me to face my own, and I worked through this notion quite messily and with lots of tears. My friend Laurie says this emotional work has made me a much softer person, and I can only assume she means that the amount of salt water leaking from my eyeballs has somehow exfoliated my skin.

I never thought I’d be afraid of death, but such is the folly of youth, I guess. Now as I watch my laugh lines deepen and my butt widen, I think about the future all the time and wonder, “Will I die alone?”; “Will I die without family?”; “Will I die with lipstick on my teeth?”

Returning from Virginia, these questions dominated my thoughts as I drove north from the airport at Salt Lake through Utah, Idaho, and finally into Montana. From the flat, dry plains of southern Idaho into the luscious Targhee National Forest, crossing into Montana from Idaho is truly spectacular.

And while the questions I face about my family’s and my mortality are still present, they seem small compared to Montana’s huge mountains. Here in Big Sky country, I can cast my questions to the wind and let them blow in all directions of the compass because the mountains in Montana are everywhere.