Montana

July 29, 2004

      I crossed the border from North Dakota into Montana on Route 2 outside of Bainville.  Right on the border stood a large wooden structure with few windows and billing itself as a casino and dance hall.  I pulled over to rest the bike against a wooden fence connected to the building.  At eleven in the morning the place was closed.  I was eating my lunch of bologna sandwiches and Fig Newtons in peace when a car pulled up.  The driver was a young and quite attractive Native American woman and her passenger was a slightly deranged elderly white woman. The older woman was rambling on about how a guy on a bicycle, my age or older, had been begging for money the day before, but when he was given a bunch of cash, he went and got drunk instead. They suspected that the man had stolen the bike and the gear that was with it. He didn't seem like the bike-camping kind of guy.  I couldn't figure out if she was trying to find this guy, so people could get their money or property back or take vengeance, or maybe get the guy scooped up by the authorities before he harmed himself, or was she trying to warn me about this predator possibly lurking and stalking in one of the ravines and leaping out like a hungry cougar; whatever she was trying to say it took about twelve minutes for her to convey the message.

      After the two women sped off in their car, I packed up the debris from my quick lunch and I likewise hit the road, eyes wide open for any sketchy looking folks. I noticed, about a mile down the road that the highway mile marker read "665 miles".  That meant that Route 2 ran approximately 666 miles across the Big Sky State.  And I would end up traveling on most of that length of wide open Route 2, and even enjoying most of it.

      My first stop in Montana was Culbertson, fifteen miles west of the border.  Before the center of town there was a combination tourist info center and museum of local Wild West history. The place was air-conditioned and there were a number of interesting old artifacts in one of the rooms which I would have liked to have inspected, but the place was overseen by two matronly women who hovered over me at every turn and wanted to know what I wanted to see.  I didn't think they'd understand, "I want to see what I see," so I left, but not before grabbing my free roadmap of Montana.

      I rode another fourteen miles to Brockton where I would spend the night.  When I was heading out from Williston, North Dakota that morning I was warned that I should avoid Poplar after dark and even during daylight I should use caution passing through that rough town on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. I heard of how a young canoeist hooked up with some locals and at the end of a wild party with the men, the guy was badly beaten with his own paddle. I found a rare patch of tree cover at the bottom of a narrow gully and after dismounting all my gear from the bike I crawled down into the cool and comfortable little space beneath the scraggly branches.  I knew that if it rained, I'd be in trouble.  Then I would have to move the tent and everything up the hillside and out into the open where I'd be exposed to all who passed further up above on the road.  But for now I was fine, once I escaped from the multitude of hungry mosquitoes into my tent.

July 30, 2004

      I slept very peacefully and awoke the next day to a cool, clear morning; I was very much refreshed. I made it to Poplar by mid-morning and rode through a small maze of streets in one of the residential areas of town--a sun-washed slum.  I found a grocery store and went in to get some supplies.  When I came out of the store, feeling increasingly nervous about leaving my bike unlocked out front, a car was just pulling up.  A woman got out and went into the store, while the male driver eyed me putting away my purchases.  I acknowledged him and he waved me over.  He asked all the usual questions about my ride and its supposed purpose.  Then his companion came back to the car with a case of beer.  "What do you do for fun?" he asked me as he cracked a can of beer and took a big swallow.  I knew what he meant, but I merely pointed at the bike and said, "This is it.  This is what I do most of the time lately."  "Well, you gotta do something...sometime..." he rejoined, and I thought, "Yeah, what I gotta do now is get out of this place, before more people try to commandeer me for their parties."  And sure enough, as I turned the corner and began pedaling toward the main road through the reservation, I noticed a dozen or so men sitting on an abandoned loading dock overlooking a trash-strewn lot behind the grocery store.  Some of the guys drank out of paper bags and one of them jumped up and came my way.  When he was within earshot, he told me to come on over and visit.  I said thanks anyway and sped off at eleven mph.

      Riding through this part of Montana is a challenge due mainly to the tedious rolling terrain and of course, wind.  Many cross-country cyclists choose to ride from west to east because they've heard that that is the direction of the prevailing winds.  Perhaps; but I found that wind direction varied quite a bit from day to day and I think that anyone cycling through the Northern Plains is going to spend a fair amount of time working against the wind regardless of their direction.  And whether someone is going east or west, wind gusts from the north or south are more difficult to deal with than headwind.  Because now the cyclist must do extra work maintaining lateral balance.

      The total lack of shade out on the open plains also presents a challenge to those foolish enough to venture through it at a snail's pace.  I always travelled with about a half gallon of water, and that was enough to get me from town to town without becoming dehydrated. But lacking insulated water jugs, I usually drank warm or even hot water.  Luckily there always seemed to be a bar or roadhouse out in the middle of nowhere; small oases between centers of civilization.  I would go in with my plastic bottles and ask the bartender to fill them with ice water.  Enticed by the air conditioning, I would usually linger at the bar for twenty minutes or so and drink a couple of ice-cold cokes.  With my body temperature back below the boiling point, I'd head out again under the merciless sun.

      On the plus side, out here visibility is virtually unlimited.  Except where the road rises and goes through a narrow cut in the rock, there are no surprises from traffic.  Still I had always to be on my guard.  As I was coming into Culbertson, the tarp on a large truck ahead of me was ripped open by the wind and a huge cloud of shiny particles went flying up from the truck and slowly rained down onto the highway.  I had no idea what these glittering objects were, some sort of construction material perhaps; I was glad I was far enough behind that none of it showered down on me.  The objects were in fact crushed aluminum cans most likely headed for a recycling center.

      I rode 65 miles that day from Brockton to Nashua.  After replenishing my water supply I set about looking for a spot to camp out.  It didn't look good.  Since Culbertson I'd been riding in the plain of the winding Missouri River.  I could see the spectacularly tall river bluffs a few miles south and I thought of how nice it would be to camp out by the river.  Just east of Nashua the Milk River joins the Missouri and Route 2 then runs along that river.  (The Milk River actually courses through the original bed of the Missouri, which was diverted by a glacier in the Pleistocene era.)  The bluffs of the Milk River also looked tempting, but I doubted there was any way I could get to the river here without trespassing on someone's farmland.  Besides, it was another two or three miles to the river and I didn't feel I could pedal another inch.

      So I rode through the center of town and about a quarter of a mile down a farm road I ended up trespassing in some cornfields after all.  The work day was over and I didn't think I'd be discovered by anyone driving a tractor through the fields, so I quickly walked my bike through the rows of corn. I came upon what I thought to be a dike.  I lugged the bike up the steep wall of the supposed dike and discovered that it was actually a dry irrigation ditch.  I found a section where vegetation had filled in the ditch and I was able to ensconce myself within some brush and was further hidden by trees on either side of the ditch.  Good, I thought, now even if some farmer happens to come along through this cornfield he wouldn't even know I was here.

      After striking camp and eating some grub, I lay down on my sleeping bag and listened to the radio.  It was seven o'clock and the weather was quite pleasant.  Occasionally clouds would drift by and block the sun which still had a couple of hours left to shine down.  At 7:30 a storm warning came over the radio.  The announcer said that a 35 mile wide band of thunderstorms was working its way southeast across the county at a rate of fifteen mph.  I consulted my map and determined that if the storms didn't die out, they would reach Nashua within about an hour.  I knew it wouldn't be safe to be beneath these trees in a thunderstorm, but I decided to wait and see what evolved before undertaking the cumbersome task of relocating my campsite.  I fell asleep and woke up about an hour later.  The sky was dark and I figured it must be after sunset.  Storms must've gone somewhere else, I thought.  It was real windy though, and when I looked at my watch and realized it was still 45 minutes before sunset, I knew I was in trouble.  I got out of the tent, stood on top of the dike and looked toward northwest.  There they were, that band of rolling thunderstorms the weatherman had promised--estimated time of arrival: mere minutes.  There wasn't any time to take down the tent and move it; everything would get wet in the process.  So I covered the tent with the rain fly, put on my rain suit, walked a couple hundred feet into the cornfield, and sat on the ground to wait out the storm.  I wasn't concerned with getting zapped by a lightning bolt here.  I just didn't want to be under the trees in that wind.  It didn't rain too much...but a lot of lightning bolts touched down around me.  The wind got to whipping about rather furiously.  After a half an hour the storm departed and I returned to my tent and to my slumbers.

July 31, 2004

      It was still a bit damp when I decamped at about six a.m.  I stopped at a picnic table on what I couldn't figure out was town property or private property.  Must be the "City Park"--as these things were generally called out West, even in places with a population of 112--I don't think anyone would build a small war memorial statue in their own backyard, but who knows.  As I sat there having my breakfast of instant coffee, Raisin Bran, and bagels with peanut butter, townspeople drove by and stared but no one stopped and said anything, which was fine by me.  After I was done I got back out on Route 2 and followed it as it rose up from the badlands of the Milk River.  This day's ride was uneventful.  Wind was moderate and the temperature had dropped down into the seventies.  Although the road followed along the course of the river, the hills weren't too steep.  I did notice that I was gradually gaining altitude as I ventured west.  Indeed, the easternmost end of Montana is about 2000 feet in altitude and by the time the rolling high plains meet the Rocky Mountain Front the altitude is about 4000 feet which means someone going up into the Rockies is already over halfway up by the time they reach the Front.  But the Rockies were still 300 miles away and for now the livin' was easy.  This day's ride also brought me through another Indian reservation, Fort Belknap.  I didn't travel through any towns on this reservation; in fact Route 2 runs a mile or two north of the rez's northern border.  Hats off to the fine folks down in Missoula at Adventure Cycling for providing some relief to cyclists from mean ole nasty Number 2.  (The only major problem with pedaling in the shoulders of U.S. 2 is the sheer tedium...sometimes the volume of traffic gets a little too heavy, lots of big rigs.)

      At Fort Belknap, the Adventure Cycling route detoured off of 2 and through reservation roads.  The roads were macadam surfaces, long and straight and unmarked; thousands of gallons of gooey sealant covered miles of cracks--and as the day grew hotter, the ribbons of sealant started to melt and run like shimmering black snakes: fifty foot long Anacondas! Occasionally I would cross over an exceptionally wide swath of the sticky tar and find that, despite the stickiness, I could slide suddenly and unexpectedly sideways if I hit a thick enough patch of the stuff. (Fortunately, I had long ago learned to use caution crossing diagonally over white lines along road shoulders, especially ones recently painted with reflective paint--sometimes they're slippery whether wet or not.)

      I rode through farm fields which didn't look all too productive this year, perhaps casualties of ceaseless drought.  At distances of perhaps half a mile to a mile from one another were the small houses and trailers in which lived the Native Americans who worked these farms. It was a beautiful place, especially when you looked out at the surrounding badlands. You couldn't see the actual Milk River from any vantage point on this huge area of level land, but you could make out, a couple miles off, through the haze of the heat, the magnificently sculptured bluffs which the river had carved as it sought its way, somehow, someway, to the Missouri, to the Mississippi, to the Gulf of Mexico, and finally to its goal: the Atlantic Ocean. (It's seems funny to speak of that eastern locality out here in the Wild West!)

      As the day's riding was coming to a close in the late afternoon I noticed a sign indicating that one could fish, swim, or camp, if they so desired, at Nelson Reservoir a few miles down the road from Saco...just follow Beaver Creek till ya' see a whole mess o' water.  Hmm, looks well worth my time investigating, since there are no woods--just a lot of barbed wire--out here in which to camp.

      This was welcome news—a legitimate campsite.  It was a daily challenge finding a suitably discreet location to spend the night.  There was only a thin strip of land on either side of Route 2 hemmed in by barbed wire—no trees, no cover.  Furthermore, unlike the equally barren West Texas plains three and a half years earlier, there were no dry creek beds under the highway where I could safely hide from the prying and suspicious eyes of civilization.  So I happily turned off of Route 2 and followed Beaver Creek a couple of miles to a nice spot on the reservoir maintained by the Bureau of Land Management.

Nashua, Montana

July 31, 2004

      I retired to my tent at around 8:00 that evening.  I listened to the radio for a bit, hoping to catch a local weather report.  All I could get was a faint AM signal out of Alberta, so I turned off the radio and rolled onto my side facing the reservoir.  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the air was rather still.  As I watched the sun descend lower and enlarge over the smooth, sparsely vegetated hills on the other side of the man-made lake, I thought, Well, I think tonight will be a little more peaceful than last night.  As always, I had the rain fly rolled up and attached to the front of the tent, ready to be unfurled in any contingency.  Right before I closed my heavy eyelids for the night I gazed out at the scene over Nelson Reservoir—squadrons of small birds were circling about and then dive-bombing the water…going after fish or insects, or just playing, I wasn’t sure.  I thought, this is like a living postcard, and then my mind’s shutter finally closed with a soft click.

      A bright flash and a loud boom stirred me from my slumber a couple of hours later.  The gentle scene of the lake by which I had fallen asleep earlier had been replaced by one of majestic violence.  Lightning flashes illuminated tall billowing clouds over the low hills on the opposite shore.  On this side of the lake the wind was picking up and the small scrubby trees were beginning to quiver.  Occasionally a dry leaf, or twig, or piece of paper would skitter by on the ground and scrape the side of my tent.  The storm clouds, still a few miles off, were absolutely magnificent—there was a long line of them; in the dark sky, I couldn’t see how far they extended to either side, but when bolts of electric fire issued from them, I could see the middle bulk of the clouds in vivid detail.  They shared a common flat floor, but a hundred different mushroom roofs.  And the mushrooms were still growing, puffing out and spilling over the front and sides of these heavily breathing, living masses of moist air.  Sometimes huge indentations would appear in the cloud fronts and lightning bolts would pass horizontally through the gaps in these constantly shifting partitions.  The colors—only apparent for split seconds when the bolts flashed—were those of fireballs: orange, red, brown, charcoal gray.  The bulbous tops of the clouds rolled forward and tumbled down to be sucked into the cloud mass and be recycled; new bulbs of vapor shot up in their place, extending the overall height of the victorious cloud.  I half expected the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to come galloping out of the cloud front on their rip-snorting steed.

      I must have sat up in my tent watching, enthralled by this spectacle, for a good twenty minutes before I started to consider the practical implications which such pageantry had in store for me.  The storm was now in line with the far shore, about a mile off.  The wind on this side had picked up considerably and the skins of my tent oscillated.

      I tried to convince myself that the storm was moving off at an angle and that I would be spared the brunt of the wind and rain.  This was wishful thinking; the storm had such a wide front and it was obvious that it was going to include all of the reservoir and everyone camping out in its wrath.  I had wasted time—already fat drops were falling as I covered the tent with the rain fly and hastily secured the guy lines.  I knew I didn’t do an adequate enough job tying down the ropes in my rush to take cover from the imminent deluge.  As I worked, I could see my neighbors, a middle-aged couple down at the lake’s shore with flashlights, dragging their motorboat out of the water and tying it to a couple of trees.  On the other side of me, a large family was likewise making preparations for the storm that was due to arrive within minutes.  They took their boat out of the water and secured it; they rolled up the awning on the side of their camper and took down the mosquito net canopy they had erected over a picnic table.  I could hear car doors opening and slamming as they gathered up gear and threw it into their vehicles.  Then one of the cars was started and driven off.  Were they fleeing the scene because they’d had experience with these Great Northern Plains storms and knew better than to hang around?  Maybe they were just hungry and drove off somewhere to get snacks.

      I sat in my tent and counted the seconds between lightning flash and thunder clap.  One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, kee-RASHHH!!!  It was getting close.  My tent was vibrating wildly in the wind now, and the rain pelted it in waves from front to back, left to right.  I waited for a pause in the rain, and then stuck my head out through the front flap of the rain fly for a little look-see.  I looked but saw very little.  The clouds were almost directly overhead now and blocked out all moonlight.  Then a magnificent bolt of lightning touched down on the shore just a few hundred feet away and for a split second I glimpsed the angry, roiling clouds above and beyond and all around.  They seemed so low that I could have touched them.  Now it started raining in earnest, and by earnest I mean torrentially.  The wind had really intensified—it blew in from the southeast and pushed the storm clouds sideways as they advanced from the west over the reservoir.  It was the mighty clash of air masses and we humans below could do little butch watch helplessly.

      I started to get a little scared.  I’d been in a couple of good and scary electrical storms in the Southeast the previous summer and during them I had just laid low in my tent and patiently waited them out, gritting my teeth and feeling the hair on the back of my neck bristle every time lightning struck nearby.  But the violence of this storm was new to me.  I imagined the wind yanking my tent from the ground and hurling it like a football, with me inside, across the prairie.  And I imagined that while I sailed thusly through the air, a lethal bolt from Thor would shoot me down and burn me to a crisp, leaving me a smoking pile of ashes blowing in the Wild Western Wind.

      So I decided to abandon camp and seek shelter in the only amenity which the BLM offered here: a nice, solid brick and steel chemical toilet outhouse.  It was only a couple of dozen steps from my tent, but in the few seconds it took to get there, I was completely drenched.  The wind was blowing so hard that each time I lifted a foot I was pivoted a little off course so that I looked like a very drunken chap staggering down the road.  Once inside the outhouse, I wished that I had thought to bring my wallet with me, because now I pictured my tent being blown away without me in it, never to be seen again, probably torn to shreds on numerous barbed wire fences.  Oh, at least I’d still be alive.  The rain rapped down incessantly and loudly on the corrugated steel roof of the outhouse and I felt like I was trapped inside Buddy Rich’s snare drum.

      Every few minutes I would open the door just enough to peer out and examine whether my tent was still there.  I saw nothing but black inkiness, save for when lightning struck—sometimes frightfully close—and then I would be afforded a brief snapshot of the area.  Each time I was glad to see that my tent was still there.  This went on for an hour.  Then the rain and wind started to die down somewhat.  I could still hear thunder but it was now a mile off.  Maybe I would return to my tent now.  I was scolding myself for being such a chicken…what kind of adventurer was I, running for safety inside an outhouse, my tail between my legs?  Had I been sucking my thumb as well, I wondered?

      I went back in my tent and took stock of the situation.  Some moisture had penetrated the floor seams of the tent and a couple of clothing items had gotten a little soggy, but nothing serious, no flooding.  Some rain had managed to splash in under the rain fly at the foot of the tent and had gotten in and made the bottom few inches of my sleeping bag a bit wet, but again, no big deal.

      I sat there on my sleeping bag, eating some cheese and thinking, Whew, I’m glad that’s over with.  But it wasn’t.  A few minutes later the rain started up heavy again and the wind started blowing even harder than before.  It came in strong gusts like the blows of a fist of some giant, hairy Nordic god—a big, brutish blacksmith god, ferociously evil.  The wind blew so hard this time, I was certain the tent would be uprooted.  So once more I fled to the safety of the brick outhouse.  And once more I forgot to bring along my wallet.  Oh so what, I thought, we’re all going to die anyway…this must surely be the end of the world.

      This insanity lasted another half hour.  Toward the end of it, I cracked open the door and waited for some lightning to illuminate what I dreaded to see: the absence of my tent, and maybe even my bike, which was forty pounds of metal and chained to a tree.  I rather expected to see nothing around me, just a void, the entire landscape stripped to smooth bedrock by the relentless and all-powerful wind.  But my tent was still there, and the bike, of course, and everything else.  However, in the split second of viewing time which the lightning flash provided, I thought there was something odd about my tent.  The next flash of light made clear exactly what it was: the wind had blown the rain fly half off.  Oh great, everything in the tent would be soaked but good.

      As soon as things calmed down enough, I went back to the tent.  Not only was the rain fly half off, but the whole tent was twisted askew.  Had some of the stakes come out of the ground?  No, they were all fine.  What had happened was that the wind had blown so strongly and consistently from one direction against the tent that it had deformed one of the aluminum poles that held it up.  The smaller pole at the rear of the tent was alright, but the front one, which fits together in sections like a blind person’s walking stick and holds up the front of the tent in the shape of an upside down “U”, was now in the form of an italicized upside down “U”—very italicized.  I tried pushing the tent back into its proper position, but it kept leaning back to the side.  Finally, I tied it back with rope just so I could get in the tent and remove everything for a good wringing out.