Dispatches from somewhere in North America I

As some of you may not know, I'm moving to Fredericton effective September 1, and am taking the scenic route. I intend to chronicle this trip as much as possible on my blog, but time and limited internet access may interfere. Here's the first of what I hope will be quite a few installments.

Day 1: August 10

Arguably August 10 is not day 1, since we left Edmonton on August 9, but we spent our first night at friends’ in Calgary, so it felt more like visiting them than it did like starting out on a three week trip across North America, so I’m going to stand by August 10 being the first real day. We started off with a hearty – in the sense of “swimming in grease” – brunch with a few friends, and then set off to the south. After picking up groceries in High River (“home of the Right Honourable Charles Joseph Clark!” I inform an uninterested Catrin), we make a brief stop at Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump, and then set a course for the border. As we approach Cardston, our right window shows fields of wheat against a backdrop of mountains. “Okay,” says Catrin, “where are the cowboys?” “To hell with the cowboys,” I reply, “where’s the cross of St. George?”

The original plan is to stay in Waterton Lakes National Park and then cross the border to Glacier National Park early the next day. However, we want to drive the Going to the Sun Road in Glacier, and it apparently gets pretty busy, so one of our guidebooks advises us to hit it as early in the morning as we can. Since we have no idea who long crossing the border will take (we’re slightly concerned that the presence of most of our worldly possessions in our car will make it look like we’re planning to stay in the U.S. for good), we decide to get it out of the way tonight. After a mercifully complication-free crossing, we enter Montana, stopping for the night at a campground near St. Mary, just outside the park boundary.

The campground we choose is called Koa Kampground Kabins, though it offers tent sites as well. As I register, I ask the fellow at the desk – a very friendly man, which will fast become a theme in Montana – if the KKK thing raises many eyebrows. “Not that I’m aware of,” he answers, “you’re the first one to mention it, at any rate.” My eyebrows are decidedly raised, but the place seems nice enough, and offers an all you can eat pancake breakfast for four dollars, so we stay. It has a hot tub to, in which I partake despite my reservations that this doesn’t really qualify as camping.

Later that night, as we lie in our tent, Catrin begins to worry about bears again (she and bears have something of a history since she met one twenty minutes into a backpacking trip on to which I lured her by assuring her that I’d never seen a bear while backpacking). She eventually decides that she wants to sleep in the car, to which I assent with something slightly short of good humour, helping her move her sleeping bag. I should mention here that northern Montana, being directly adjacent to southern Alberta, is really freaking windy, so standing outside in my underwear helping her put her sleeping bag into the car (and to rearrange the car’s contents sufficiently to allow her to recline her seat) isn’t my idea of a good time, and I get back into the tent as soon as possible.

Soundtrack:

• Tom Cochrane and Red Rider, Tom Cochrane and Red Rider
• Harvest Moon, Neil Young
• Hearts and Bones, Paul Simon
• Traveling Wilburys Volume 1, The Traveling Wilburys
• The Paul Simon Songbook, Paul Simon
• Bridge Over Troubled Waters, Simon & Garfunkel
• Broken Arrow, Neil Young and Crazy Horse
• Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me, Various (spoken word comedy)

Day 2: August 11

Glacier National Park is beautiful (this will actually also be a recurring theme about Montana). I’m not ready to give it the win over my beloved Jasper, but it’s like a lusher, more deciduous version of Alberta’s mountain parks. Its designers also showed a little more aesthetic sense when it came to laying down roads, so the drive through the park is truly spectacular. And yet, despite the place’s otherworldly beauty, most people there seem, like us, to be only passing through. We camped next to a group of cyclists going from New Hampshire to Vancouver (they’ve been on the road for six weeks, and expect to be for another two), and during the pancake breakfast (Catrin declines to partake, for some reason) I meet a couple of bikers from Minneapolis who are taking their Harley up to Banff. They’ve visited there before; in fact, several years previously they’d taken their kids through most of western Canada, including a pile of national parks. Their eight year old daughter’s favourite part of the trip was West Edmonton Mall; I die a little inside. We meet a lot of (motor) bikers, actually; I’m at loss for hypotheses as to why this may be.

True to Montana’s libertarian bent (we see three Ron Paul signs while we’re in the state, compared to one for Obama and none for McCain), quite a few of these bikers don’t wear helmets, which strikes me as profoundly dumb (though one such biker, himself from Idaho, tells me that wearing a helmet while riding on the highway is nothing more than the difference between an open casket and a closed one). Hang around in Montana for long enough, though, and the libertarianism starts to make some sense; everything’s so perfect there already that it does seem that government couldn’t do anything but screw things up. The highways, though, offer a reminder of the price of this pigheaded independence: there are fatality markers wherever somebody died in a car accident on one of them, and there are a terrifying number. I can’t help but to think that a lot of them were unhelmeted bikers; probably a few more were motorists refusing to wear seatbelts, which are technically mandatory.

Besides the natural beauty and the fatality markers, there are a few more things you notice when driving around Montana. First of all, drivers there have an unnerving (to me, at least) tendency to yield to you when they’re oncoming and you’re trying to make a left turn. That’s the friendliness at work again, I guess, but I’d rather have the certainty of needing to wait for a break in traffic. As well, Montana businesses have a strange habit of replacing the letter C in their business names with either a K or an S, as the situation demands (only a few examples we noticed: Kleaners, Kars, Senter). Could be some kind of bold libertarian thing, I guess.

After a brief picnic stop at the pristine Swan Lake (this lake is not unique: we passed enough of them that Catrin was reminded of the part of Forrest Gump when the title character says “So I went to the White House, again, and met the President of the United States, again”) Catrin needs a bathroom break. Since we’ll probably have to justify it with a purchase of some kind, we hunt for a café where she can get a coffee. In Drummond, we find the Bull’s End, and decide it’s worth a shot. We walk through the doors and into a stereotype. There are three customers, all of them sitting on stools at the counter: one obese woman in her sixties doing a sodoku, and two old guys in white T-shirts and suspenders saying things like “No doubt about it”. It’s around four in the afternoon by this point, and you get the impression that all three of those customers have been in there for most of the day. After looking at the menu (the “Chef salad” consisted of ham, turkey, two kinds of cheese, tomato, and egg), Catrin gets her coffee and I get a bowl of beef noodle soup. Both are about what you’d expect, but cheaper; in keeping with the time warped feel of the place, the coffee costs seventy-five cents (though Catrin had to order a glass of milk too, since they only had cream). As we walk in, Ellen is playing on the TV; despite the state’s conservatism, time and network television wait for no man.

During a commercial break, some sort of an advocacy commercial comes on:
Talk to your children about sex,” is advises. I’m a little surprised that this is a message that is getting play in Montana, until the next line is “tell them you want them to wait until they’re married.” This is more what I was expecting. What I was not expecting was the end of the commercial, when the viewer’s attention was directed to a website for more information. It had a .gov domain name.

The day’s destination is Butte, about which I know very little besides that its name can be mispronounced in a childishly amusing manner (Catrin never grows tired of this). It turns out it’s a charming town, smaller than I expected, with a pretty nice core of nineteenth century buildings, harkening back its history as a prosperous mining town. The mine’s still there, re-opened recently as a result of rising commodity prices, but the prosperity has gone into hiding. The streets are empty – we see two dogs before seeing any people on them – and it only gets more dire from there. High on the list of business items in finding a laundromat (while we’ve only been on the road for two days, we haven’t had a chance to wash the clothes we were wearing in the days before our departure), which we do without too much difficulty. This is a typical sized laundromat, I’d say – probably twenty washing machines, and half as many dryers – but well over half of the machines are out of order. Which isn’t really a problem, since we’re the only customers in the place. The walls are covered with photographic portraits of cowboyish or just plain hickish looking men, which I’m informed are the result of the previous owner’s hobby for amateur photography. The current owner is a reserved older guy named Michael. One gets the sense that he will be the last. Butte’s every bit as much of a time warp as the Bull’s End. Its remaining residents are struggling to avoid becoming a ghost town, but not struggling too hard. It occurs to me that as much as it harkens back to a more glorious era, it could also be seen as a glimpse into the future – Alberta after the oil runs out.

We’re staying in the Copper King Mansion, built by William Andrews Clark in the late nineteenth century and more recently used as a bed and breakfast. Clark was a Butte copper baron (hence the name of the building) and later a U.S. senator. It’s a spectacular building, richly deserving of the title of “mansion” even in an era in which the word is held to a higher standard than it was a hundred years ago, and it’s easy to forget Butte’s apparently grim present while in it. John, who owns the mansion with his sister (they inherited it from their mother, who bought it from the Catholic church, who bought it from Clark’s son) recommends a few dinner places, and we choose the Pekin, a local Chinese restaurant owned by the same Chinese immigrant family for the last eighty years.

On the way there, we stop by the laundromat to put our clothes in one of the three dryers marked as “good”. It turns out to be mislabeled (at least, I’d say so, on the basis that it doesn’t work – Michael disagrees, assuring me that it is a good dryer: “it makes me money”). When we share our dinner plans, Michael frowns. The Pekin is “pretty boring,” he warns us, “nobody in this town has much taste.” We take his suggestion of a 24 hour greasy spoon under advisement, but ultimately opt to stick with the Pekin on the basis of the promised atmosphere.

The Pekin does deliver a unique atmosphere. All the tables seat four, and each is located in its own salmon-coloured, curtained booth (I hypothesize that the restaurant used to serve as a brothel). A glass of the premium wine goes for $2.75, fifty cents more than the house stuff. As for the food, if I had to describe it in three words those words would be “really fucking awful”. Catrin barely touches hers, though I finish mine on principle alone.

Since we still have time and hunger, we decide to check out Michael’s recommended greasy spoon (hey, his recommendation about the Pekin was pretty solid). We sit at the bar, where we enjoy our conversation with the bartender. He’s probably about our age, smaller than me, with more facial hair and fewer teeth. He’s friendly, though, and shares with us a variety of local lore (turns out Even Knievel was from Butte, and there’s an annual festival honouring him). He also shares a bit of his personal history; he’s trying to escape Butte, and worked across the U.S. for a pipeline company for a while. He can’t go back to that kind of work, though. Why not? “I got shot.” Um, any context to that? “It was over a girl.” Right here in Butte? “Yeah. He got me four times, in the arm and the ankle. He was a lousy shot.”

The greasy spoon itself, the M&M, has something of a history – the bartender says it’s been visited by 22 American presidents. I try to calculate how far back this would take it, but only get to thirteen before I forget who preceded Herbert Hoover. In any event, 22 sounds unlikely. “How long has it been around?” I ask. “Since 1819,” he replies. 22 begins to sound less unlikely a figure. Today, the M&M is decked out with a lot of Barack Obama gear. This seems odd to me, since I know Montana’s a red state, and the M&M doesn’t exactly seem like the kind of place that bucks the trend. “Is this a Democratic bar?” I ask, gesturing at the Obama paraphernalia. “No, it’s just that Obama visited us a couple of times during the primary season.” Indeed, there’s a picture on the wall of Obama sitting at this very bar that I’d have noticed if I was more observant. 22 is sounding more plausible all the time. “Do you think Obama has a chance of winning Montana?” I ask. “Oh, he’s got Montana. Butte, Montana – “ Butte’s residents seem to prefer to include the state’s name when mentioning their town, presumably to distinguish it from smaller communities in Alaska and Nebraska “ – isn’t a Democratic town at all, but everyone I talk to is voting Obama.” This strikes me as unlikely, since the polls are showing that this is a close race, and a race in which the Democrat wins Montana is, almost by definition, not a close race. Still, it will be interesting to watch.

Soundtrack:

• Beautiful Freak, The Eels
• Left and Leaving, The weakerthans
• mix CD made for Catrin by a friend, The weakerthans
• Pinkerton, Weezer
• Mirrorball, Neil Young (with Pearl Jam)
• The Millennium Collection, Aerosmith
• Hawks and Doves, Neil Young
• Graceland, Paul Simon
• Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me, Various (spoken word comedy)