When we left Casper the sun had not yet risen. Day broke over the Sand Hills and Teapot Rock in northern Natrona County, but the morning remained gloomy until all at once the Bighorn Mountains emerged sunlit from above the low hung clouds, as if through a bedroom window as we drew the quilt from our waking eyes. By the time we reached Buffalo and Interstate 90, the morning was clear and bright and alpine.Big Sky Country: The surface of Montana takes many forms, but its overhead remains always true to the appellation, and seems to pull the land inexorably toward it. Just north of the Wyoming line, the Wolf Mountains rolled endlessly across the Crow Reservation like peals of snowcapped thunder, and we wound with the Little Bighorn River among them. Past Billings we climbed the face of an escarpment and struck out over the pervasive highlands. At Judith Gap, north of Harlowton, ninety stark new turbines looked like nothing so much as a baleful army of cyclops as they marched toward the ridge crest, drinking the wind from the constant sky. To reach Great Falls, we were again drawn heavenward, rising out of a valley onto a plateau from which we did not descend, a surprising topographical situation for a city built on the banks of the Missouri River. Then again, how could there be a great falls except from such a pronounced height?
Because of moderately icy roads, we'd left earlier than planned, leaving us with extra time to kill when we arrived in Great Falls. This chronocide was carried out at the Holiday Village Mall, which is to shopping centers as Great Falls is to American metropolises. Here the Big Sky was a thing more felt than seen, for if Casper had sent the wind in icy daggers, then Great Falls carried a lance; I'd never before seen coffee frozen solid. We played a modest municipal auditorium in the Civic Building, with an entire convention hall for our backstage, down the corridor from where you'd obtain a Flood Plain Permit if you needed to. That, combined with a vague nighttime awareness of its attractive riparian setting and a fortuitous after-hours fast food stop, was all we ever knew of Great Falls.
Shortly before midnight, having driven nine hours already from Casper, we piled back onto our bus for another six hour trip, a cost-saving venture to the tune of about two hundred dollars a head, to the Spokane airport where the celestial boarding call would finally be answered. The moon was full enough to show that we traversed the most beautiful scenery of our entire odyssey by night in the mountains north of Helena. I saw it again a few hours later, from the other side of the clouds and thirty thousand feet farther away, and I would take one more on-the-road meal in Denver before boarding my last flight.
That day I departed one Washington and arrived in another, and while the new time zone was three hours ahead, the late eastern autumn still in force seemed to set me back two months from the winter I'd just left, almost as though I had never been away.
View Larger Map
No comments:
Post a Comment