Distance travelled, 150 miles
Wildlife spotted, nothing, but learned how to bear tap.
I awoke on my 42nd birthday to find that Himself had gotten cold in the night and stolen all the extra blankets and most of our Coleman double sleeping bag.
And most of the air mattress.
This year, I thought, this year I will not stand for this shit anymore.
Just then the sun hoisted itself over the mountain and the temperature rose ten degrees, so I left him to swelter and got up and made myself some coffee and watched the sunlight dance among the tall pines shading our campsite.
A couple from Saskatchewan had pulled in to the site next door the previous evening. We checked out our licence plates and made friendly Canadian signals to each other. On the road, everyone does that. It's a human equivalent of the butt-sniffing dogs engage in, I think.
Turned out the Saskatchewanians were moving to Halifax soon for a year. I gave them my business card. Having moved to the city seven years ago with a bag and no contacts, I pretty much know what they're in for. It's hard to fly into a town blind.
In penance for the blanket-robbing Himself cooked me birthday bacon and eggs and then we packed up ane hit the road west again.
At Whitefish, we pulled into an arts festival underway in the town park. I took advantage of the day that was in it to buy two prints by Missoula photographer, Jane Goffe, who had a stall at the show. Both photographs depict quiet moments in rural Montana and will help me remember the trip for many years to come.
Whitefish was a nice town. Really really nice. If I had to live in the US, I think I would settle here.
We bought some lemonade from the Whitefish Skate Club stall and got back into the baking car. It was already 33 degrees, and it wasn't even lunchtime.
After a spell on Hwy 2, we turned off at MT37 and headed down into the Yaak Valley, a place made famous by the books of Rick Bass. The road took us along Lake Koocanusa, created by the damming of the Kootenai river. The lake stretches ninety miles, 40 of them in Canada, and the name comes from KOOtenai, CANada, USA. About ten miles down, a small bridge led over the lake. We got out of the car. It was too hot to breath. If we went over the bridge we would be three hours or more in the heat. If we stayed on the MT37, we could be at the KooCanUsa Marina and Campsite in forty minutes.
I had travelled all this way to see the Yaak Valley.
It was just too hot.
We headed her for the marina.
The owner, Randy, a man who had not cut his hair since 1974 (by my reckoning) checked us in and delivered a huge pile of firewood to our campsite for five bucks. We wondered whether we would even need it. We took a shower in the shower block. It was such an amazing feeling to be clean after three days of baby wipe hygiene in the mountains. I brushed and brushed and brushed my hair with the shampoo in it, thenwith the conditioner in it, then when I got out of the shower and finally it was tangle-free. (Prairie winds, while exotic, romantic and mysterious, are death to thick, porous hair follicles like mine).
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| Marina at Lake Koocanusa |
An hour passed.
That friggin' sun has not moved one inch, I said.
Yup.
I gave up and lay down in the tent until I heard Himself walking around outside and reckoned the temperature had dropped enough to be mobile.
We mooched over to the marina and had Montana steaks with tots and salad and drank Budweiser so cold the bottles sweated and finally it was cool enough to sit on the deck and watch the swallows skim the water for flies and dodge the boats and logs in the water without flinching.
We met a local boy, Dan, who was studying Irish by watching TG4 on YouTube.
He wanted to practice his vocabulary.
We invited him over to our campfire and gave him the beer we had bought in Quebec that was too strong for us and he pronounced it good and told us all about himself.
He was a mechanic. We had known that as soon as we met him because his fingernails were all short and broken, with grease underneath.
He was having difficulty with 'agam, agat, aige, aici, etc. Could I help? I reached into the depths of my memory and tried to help him out.
He was building a hydrogen engine for his boat. He went into great detail about this and I tuned out as I do when all things mechanical are being discussed.
He was wondering about how to pronounce the seasons in Irish. Could I help him out?
He kept bees and made his own mead. He had successfully blended a raspberry mead and was just about to top it off when his neighbour chased a cougar through his yard with a shotgun and blew the top off the jar.
He had come home and spent four hours cleaning raspberry mead off his house.
What was it about the druids in Ireland, how long did they have to study? I amazed myself by pulling that information out of somewhere. Truly the brain is an amazing organ.
Sometimes he and his brother went and found a black bear engrossed in a huckleberry patch or something, and crept up behind and grabbed its ass.
You gotta give it a good shake. Then you just watch that bear steak up a tree as fast as it can!
The other extreme sport in the region was moose-tipping.
After a while, when the stars came out, Dan said he had to go back to his boat because he was going fishing for some eel-like creature that tasted like lobster.
Himself stared mournfully at his receding back.
I'd have liked to go fishing, he said. But he was too polite to ask.
Maybe some day we'll hear of a wonder-kind from Libby, Montana who has solved our energy crisis. Or of an enormous explosion on the Koocanusa Lake.
Either way, it was a treasure to meet Dan the Irish scholar on my birthday.
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