It was a long day. At 830, we left Sandpoint, Idaho and about 12 hours later, we arrived in Big Sky, Montana. We rolled past wildlife reserves — rush filled ponds with platforms for birds, still water reflecting the mountains around us. We drove through ramshackle little towns and past mountain resort marinas, the boats tied up under blue tarped shelters. Sometimes we’d pass through a wide meadow where cattle were grazing or horses stood around flicking their tales and in those wide open places the windsheild was spattered with inch long grasshoppers. Sometimes there’d be a town on the map and there’d be nothing but a boarded up roadside diner. At one point, the landscape was flatter than a table top, makes you wonder why they stopped there, but later, we wound up over a pass of giant sand colored boulders. One town of decaying trailer homes had a huge for sale sign out front facing the highway, making me wonder if it was the land or the whole town that was for sale. A huge pile of coal lay black and dusty next to the highway, and later, the river threw diamond reflections into the air. Once there was a line of spiky stone pinnacles, and then, a blanket of grass punctuated with round bales of hay. We saw a dozen, maybe more, kinds of landscape, changing every 50 miles or so.
The air changed everywhere too. For a while we crawled through road work that smelled like tar and dust, the truck stop minimart smelled of fried food and mop buckets. When we turned south towards Yellowstone along the Gallatin river, the air smelled of pine so strongly that we all thought it couldn’t be real — I rolled down the windows just to be sure. The bar where we stopped to buy beer stunk of cigarettes and spilled drinks –three drunks were singing along with a Beatles song and calling us darlin’ and sweetheart.
This morning, I’m looking out over a high granite peaked valley, a few stubborn smears of snow and ice still mark the dark gray at altitude. The dense pines are still making the air smell like a Christmas tree lot. Things will change again today as we wind out of this mountain valley and into Yellowstone National Park.