I haven’t swooned for anything quite like I did for the city of Missoula since that little deaf red-headed girl.
THE BEST PEOPLE TO GET EVEN WITH ARE THE ONES WHO LEND YOU A HAND, saw this on a readerboard outside a chiropractor’s office coming into town. Missoula (elevation 3200 feet above sea level) would be a good place to become a rock hound.
Downtown on the banks of the Clark Fork River, we parked at the local Holiday Inn. Two hundred rooms with a heated indoor swimming pool and jacuzzi. Tucked in just beyond the hedge protecting the motel’s capacious and nearly empty parking lot. Spent the night quite happily right there.
Hiawatha had often reminisced about the good old days, when they’d all pile into the truck and drive numerous miles to a small college with which the commune had absolutely no connection. Except for the long hot showers they’d take once a week at one of the dorms. Or maybe a gym.
She sprung for an actual breakfast in an actual restaurant where we must’ve consumed several quarts of hot coffee, so I never pointed out we were unlikely to be mistaken for college students.
Why not? I started thinking as we cruised the sylvan University of Montana campus. I was looking for, there’s got to be a domed stadium at any school where the average January HIGH is twenty-four degrees.
I brought Merry Miler to a halt in a spot of shade across from the domed stadium. Building right next to it I figured would be the gym. A trail rose straight up from us to a big white M painted in the hillside.
Parking Lot X. My lucky letter. There’s a sign warning something about stickers and towing which I ignore. I haven’t gone five days without a shower since those military exercises in the mountains south of Darmstadt. Operation Ice Station Zebra. Cold c-rations and colder showers if the groundpounders didn’t use up all the damn water. War games is an oxymoron.
Five days without a shower, wired from the caffeine, Hiawatha is in a hurry to get wet.
“Let’s just find a map and figure this out,” I suggest, still worried I’ll be hosing off in some strange locker room and it will suddenly be filled with a bunch of nubile young lasses from the state cheerleaders’ camp being held on campus.
I worry about these things. Hiawatha was in one of her I-Am-So-Focused-I’ll-Do-Anything-He-Says moods, so she follows me to the Student Union.
The building I thought was the gym is really the natatorium, a Latin word meaning showers for sure. I send Hiawatha in first just to check things out.
Meanwhile, I swept the van, combed the dog, and thought about going back to college. But it wouldn’t be like going back, it would be like going forward.
I think I am ready for college. Maybe this time I’ll get something out of it. I wouldn’t have so much grade pressure. Or would I?
Hiawatha was gone a long while. And the glowing woman who came back from the swimming pool was not the same one who had left us.
At Fort Missoula, I learned “The first coroner’s jury in Missoula sat on the death of a man named Overland in 1863. Both Overland and a friend, Big Nick, had an interest in a certain woman. Hot words and gunplay <another oxymoron> soon ensued. Big Nick shot and killed Overland. A coroner’s jury was called to hear the story and examine the remains. What they found were three shots in Overland’s heart. After serious discussion, the jury returned the verdict: Damn Fine Shooting.”
The Fort was once home to the Black Bicycle Brigade, a negro outfit in U.S. Army. Led by their white officers, the soldiers once biked from Missoula to St. Louis in just forty or so days. As a demonstration of the bicycle’s utility as a military transport.
The Department of War, imagining Custer’s Last Stand fought on two-wheels, shipped the men back by rail. Wait for roads.
An hour north of Missoula on the southwest shore of Flathead Lake, we see a old cowpoke, his pickup behind him off to the side, brandish a chrome-covered thirty-eight caliber. A sweeping almost grand gesture he made as his arm came around, the sun caught the chrome just as my eyes caught up with his hand and I could sense everything stop for just the nanosecond I needed to take everything in.
Great lighting, I thought. Good colors.
And then his arm kept sweeping and without even really ever slowing his arm, he stopped exactly at the brain pan of the injured deer and he pulled the trigger. Godlike.
Driving by at the speed limit, I saw the deer’s large rack of antlers jerk back with the impact. The man’s face looked more like a gardener with a grudge than a samaritan putting an animal pedestrian out of its misery.
And what about the driver who hit the thing? Some Japanese businessman in his rental car with the nuclear family of mama and papa-san and the two kids. The girl, Hiroshima, and the boy, Nagasaki.
Maybe a realtor. Saw a real estate sales catalog that referred to trees as “amenities.” Cattle were “animal units.”
I am worried about Montana. How many animals does a human being eat during a course of a lifetime? And is it really necessary?
We stopped at a public boat ramp on the Flathead River to bask in the warm sun. Probably eighty degrees, all of a sudden it was summer. No bugs and a private picnic bench pointed the right way. Riverside. First time in too long we could put together some good weather with the right spot. The place gave me a sense of, you know, that French word sounds like “vegetable doo.”
I spent a couple of languid hours pouring over the University Of Montana Semester Catalog. No foreign language requirements. Ha!
I could do it.
Looks expensive, I noticed.
I could do it.
Go back to school, the voice said.
Hours later. Twenty years ago, I had come up from southern Idaho, and my first sight of the Columbia Gorge was from the Oregon side. I was startled to realize the Gorge was prettier than the Grand Canyon.
Today we drive up to the Columbia River coming in from the north on the Washington side, Route 14, across from Umatilla. Been through here many a time. And I chuckle that they wait eight miles before they tell you it’s fifty miles to the next gas. There’s a sign, near those two service stations that went out of business years ago, right at the junction with 212 North.
I am the Master of The Gas Gauge and I am not worried.
Teasing ourselves, we drive west, the mighty river Columbia rolls along to our left. Just then the clouds break open.
Like Pre, when Steve Prefontaine used to come jogging into Hayward Field. The sun always turned on then just to spotlight a glint off the athlete’s pale hair.
He was James Dean in a singlet. Just like I had thought of myself the last time, that first time I moved to Oregon.
Now it’s Merry Miler glinting. The spare runner so far out in front nobody can ever catch him.
Now an older sun’s rays seem drawn to the ribbon of water like a spotlight on a fancy painting. That’s Oregon on the other side. Separated by water.
That’s home. We’ll be there tomorrow.
The trip was like ten months dropped behind enemy lines.
Having entirely dislocated my body and then circumnavigated America, humbled by reality, repentant for past sins, determined not to fail again, I pray for the prodigal son’s triumphant return.
Summer 1992