Foaming at the mouth for summer travel, any travel - I cashed in on Emma's Montana IOU this July, following our Kenyan detour. "We will go to Montana, Tay. I have family there. We will go." It was within the United States, reachable by car, and far enough from home. We manufactured an entire road trip around the destination visit.
I rented a truck from Enterprise at a rate so low its employees asked if we had received a friends and family discount. We will come in contact with the Enterprise folks on such a constent basis over the coming months - adding drivers, extending our rental, claiming damages, etc. - they answer the phone by stating my name. When I arrive to pick up the car - they tell me they only have white trucks available. I tell them where I am going, what I plan to do with this truck, who I plan to be - and how looking like a general contractor does not fit any less within the paramaters of that fantasy. A blue truck materializes.
I pick up Emma in The Cobalt Blue blaring Alan Jackson. She has many canvas totes that we fling into the truckbed. Last minute, she considers aloud if she should bring her juicer. We decide against it. After a quick spin around the block so that she may feel the luxury and power of the ride, we switch drivers to break free of San Francisco - an incubus of viral plague, chronic fog, and nests of hypodermic needles.
We enjoy the freedom of space, the stretch of open road and the feel of life in a truck. We like who we become in one. We fawn over the changing landscapes of America - dusty stretches of white sand and rolling desert hills, lush forest and lakes. We stop in Tahoe, Reno, and some old BLM Properties in Nevada. We eat to-go burgers in the truck, leaving sweating fountain sodas in our cupholders and throwing our trash like stadium peanuts on the floor. We gawk at affordable gas prices. With the WiFi hotspot and a truck cab the size of a gondola, Emma sets up a mobile home office, taking calls and working 12 hour days while I crawl us up the highway. In the times between, we create our Montana To Do List, as outlined at the bottom of this post.
The newfound romance with life on the road proved a quick fling, suffering its quick and painless death in Idaho whilst towing our beloved truck out of a children’s recreational lake at Shoshone Falls National Park. This small miracle took one battle rope and three dads with the noble sacrifice of four slack lines. Emma had wanted to “get the tires wet,” and tipped them over a concrete shelf, effectively hooking them behind it before realizing our truck was not 4WD. We thanked the dads with provisional bottles of wine, and bounced back from the mishap, contining the Tour de Americas with front yard camping in the Grand Teton’s neighborhood of billionaires, visiting bison and hellish tourist traps in the day, and stargazing out the unzipped doors of the tent come nightfall. The Founder of Patagonia lived next door.
But our eyes were always set on Montana.
Uncle Frank, former rodeo bareback rider and one of the handful of cowboys of Emma’s family, lives in Hamilton, Montana on a hillside overlooking the Bitterroot Mountains. There is much about him that is classically Western - his overgrown moustache, his atrocious hearing, his man crush on Teddy Roosevelt. On his fabulous land, he hosts a convoy of females with French names - Babette, Claudette, Stella, another Stella. Three cows, three horses, two dogs, two daughters, and his wonderful wife - Uncle Frank has successfully quarantined himself on a lonely island amongst an unrelenting sea of estrogen, except for a fourth horse, Ollie - a surprise baby boy who probably thinks he’s also a girl. The animals garner constant accusation from Frank of "Tawdry behavior."
Uncle Frank had worked diligently at placating us over the year, putting off our threatened summer visit for a better time, better time. Life was passing before our eyes, and well before he was ready, Emma and I invited ourselves to his home, bombarding him via guerilla warfare tactics and charm. We commandeered his home, guest home, life as he formerly knew it, and sanity.
We fell through the front door of Uncle Frank’s guest house in the middle of the night, high after mainlining episode after episode of Yellowstone on the road. He invites us in for a tour, pushing his handlebar moustache theatrically from the corners of his mouth while telling us we’ll “knock ourselves stupid” if we don’t watch for the low hanging beam leading to the rafters. The moustache bit additionally surfaces when delivering punchlines or the town’s “hot goss.” (He does not say this, but I do).
Hours after our descent, Emma’s brother Ian, lands on prem. We weren’t sure if crossover was in the cards, but given Frank’s luck, he should have assumed. Ian resembles a gypsy of a french-colonized surf town, but is in reality, a wildly successful CEO. Once he smells blood in the water, he segways his own Western road trip with a Brazilian supermodel to join in on the cluster at Uncle Frank's Moulin Rogue. Parking his luxury camper van in the front yard and setting up basecamp, the scene likens a Goofy Movie where the RV parks itself, chops down all the trees surrounding it, and a bubbling jacuzzi pops up on the roof. The model books a return flight to Los Angeles the next morning.
Paradise among us kids is realized almost immediately. On our first day, we walk the length of irrigation ditch upstream with Ian’s wolf-dog, hit the property line and find a place to fall in. The lazy water drifts us back to the start. We go to Murdoch’s to buy cowboy clothes, parading our new finds around the town market to test their efficacy. Thirty minutes pass before an old rancher tells us his father would “roll in his grave” if he “ever wore a hat like that.” He should know, as a famed swing dancer at the Sunrise Saloon owning “$600 shirts, and 18 pairs of boots.” We write the bar down on our list, and catch the name a couple more times during the week. Impressed with the level of our outfits' attention, but disappointed in the direction of the sentiment, a full day won’t pass before Ian and I are exchanging our once-treasured western finds back to Murdoch’s for store credit.
Banded together in our three-kid summer camp of California misfits, Ian, Emma and I begin ticking off our Montana list items like beer bottles in a target practice. The days involve Emma and Ian toiling through Zoom meetings, work obligations and shoddy internet until the closing bell rings. There is always plenty of daylight left for us to roam. We fish the Bitterroot River in the afternoons with spinner rods (“Let me try the slayer!”), fly reels and a cooler of chilled seltzers. Lacking wading gear but compensating with enthusiasm, we sink up to our necks in the Bitterroot river in gym clothes, digging our heels into the silt and stone and falling with all of our weight back into the current. We emerge with wet, clinging shirts, radiant with fists of rainbows to take home. After a gutting lesson on the porch at sunset with Uncle Frank, we brine and poach the beauties, serving them sizzled and crisped on sourdough toast for breakfast the next morning.
The three of us carry on in the country, dreaming out loud, imagining ourselves in these porched homes in these open fields, as easy neighbors with big gardens and dogs in our trucks. We help with chores, ride Uncle Frank's horses, go to the Coffee Cup Cafe. We break into the Yellowstone set, toast sundowners on the wrap around, and bitch incessantly about mosquitos. And Ian is our keeper, our eyes and ears, telling us what to look for in the men we meet, and what to look over, while each of us fall in love a little bit with everyone around us.
------
Montana To Do List
X - Ask for help
X - Drink black coffee
X - Watch a sunrise
X - Lay in a field
X - Smoke cigarettes off the truck bed
X - Run a horse
X - Buy a round of drinks
X - Bathe in a river
Swim in a lake/ pond
X - Hear a real cowboy story
X - Fall in love with something new
X - Forget about sleep
X - Order stack of pancakes from a diner
X - Pick flowers
press flowers
X - Buy ammo
X - Catch a fish
Shoot guns
X - Rodeo
Eat steak off of hanging beef