My mom has been writing about her experiences on the trip to Montana that I said so little about. Her most recent post describes a drive from Bozeman through Yellowstone and to the Beartooth Highway that I also did, a day later. I declined to tell you about it and described Montana only as a mysterious land of pelicans and red beer.
My mom does a better job with the lush description than I could. A day later, I saw some of the same scenes -- two bears, pronghorn and bison. No wolf. I was taken with Yellowstone but rendered speechless by the beauty of the Beartooth Highway, the climb to 11,000 feet and the curving road opening onto vistas, fields, drops, and waterfalls. Truly amazing.
Four years ago, in the spring of 2000, I went out to Montana to visit my friend Tony. (It was on that visit that I first suggested he might like my friend Autumn, who he married a few weeks ago.) We drove up a mountain road, talking and listening to music and looking at sloping hills with dark green pines and sunshine on bright patches of snow. There was a moment that I remember because the beauty just made me cry. We were descending a steep hill, winding along through the trees, listening to a Son Volt song that twisted and descended along with us, lonesome and hopeful. "I would meet you anywhere / Western sun meets the air / hit the road, never looking behind." A stream rushed along on our left, the snowy spots were sublimating into patches of mist that hung in the trees, the piney slope rose sharply to our right, and as the valley opened up below us and Jay Farrar sang about the traveling hands of time I was overwhelmed with a sense of how lovely life can be sometimes and tears trickled quietly down my cheek.
So this time, I was driving along through Yellowstone with my lifelong friend Drew. We were in a convertible and it was sunshiney and dry with the bluest of skies. We drove through a narrow gulch, shady and cool, with a waterfall on our right and the smell of stone and pines and water all around us, and the road turned and the view opened up to sun-dappled hillsides and a steep dropoff and a vista of openness and possibility and birds circling on the air currents. And Jeff Buckley was singing Hallelujah and the minor fall, the major lift pulled my heart open and I cried again. Sometimes I feel so lucky to be alive in a world this beautiful.
One of my close friends when I was a teenager was from Missoula, Montana, and I went out there to visit her. She always insisted that New England is too "cute" and "quaint" and couldn't possibly compare to the grandeur of the west. While I disagree with her about New England (she was really comparing apples and oranges), I have to admit that I have never experienced anything quite like "big sky country" before or since, and it was really something.
Posted by: cmc | July 23, 2004 at 08:59 AM