Ah Montana, such a wonderful state but so reluctant to let us go. We had perched ourselves down at the southeastern end and secured a ride the next day to the state line, thereby minimizing our exposure to fierce heat, strong winds and a brutally long and hard day.
Roger had met this guy, Rick, who was an interesting character, a Navy vet with a prosthetic leg living in a small trailer off from the IGA.
Rick is a hard-livin’ Cajun with more stories than make sense, but he’s a good guy with his own code about what it is to do the right thing. And he was happy and determined to help us out, but he had the Little Ol’ Red Truck That Couldn’t.
He came around to our motel and we put our bikes in and set off south out of town.
But the Truck That Couldn’t bucked and fought Rick like the dickens once he got it in third gear. It was a ’73 Chevy, and Rick had a cockamamie story about how the problem was the damned watered-down gas he bought up in Miles City.
Roger and I, no automotive geniuses we, nonetheless thought Rick’s explanation to be, well, bullshit, but it wasn’t like we were going to call him on it since he was trying to do us a solid, so instead we found ourselves in one of those social pantomime situations where you’re going through the motions collaborating on a palpably false narrative because, in this case, nobody wanted to say this truck is just plain f$@ked.
There’s a passage in Nathanael West’s immortal The Day of the Locust where the dwarf is doing everything he can to revive his dying rooster to keep it in the cockfight – it’s a short but indelible bit for anyone for whom that whole scene is entirely foreign.
Well, that was Rick and that truck and his insistence that it was watered-down gas causing the problem. We put in new gas, we put in something called Heet that was supposed to disperse the water or something, and three times we crossed the Powder River and climbed the little hill to the south of town before Rick admitted he was licked.
He took the loss personal some and stood with me outside the IGA, and as I went up to everyone who pulled up in a pickup truck to try to cadge a ride, Rick would point out his truck and recount the story of the watered-down gas making sure each time to tell them where the offending station was just past the overpass in Miles City on the left.
Well, Roger had better luck at the big intersection than I did at the IGA as he flagged down Monte, who was heading well past our desired stop of Alzada, MT. We said our goodbyes to Rick, loaded our bikes in the back and set out in style and comfort as it was an air conditioned king cab with room for me in the back.
Monte was Montana solid; he proved to be our Moses though we did not yet know it and he actually made it to the promised land himself. Monte was quite a personable guy with a good easy laugh and the self confidence of someone who is happy with where he is and how he lives. Beyond his family – a wife, Jill (whom we late met), and five kids, one adopted from Ukraine and one conceived after his vasectomy was reversed (ah the things that people will tell you) – part of what he most enjoys is being able to step out of his house and know that no one lives within a half mile of him in any direction.
He comes across as the kind of decent, reliable, rugged, capable and resilient guy that is the stock in trade of bad romance novels.
He and Jill home schooled their kids until they were in high school, and Monte has an easy breezy dismissal of anthropogenic climate change, but he wasn’t strident about it and correctly figured his east coast passengers had a different view on the subject.
Again, it was another great different lifestyles in passing moment, and we remain grateful for his generosity and assistance. We planned to get out at Alzada so we could ride the 40 miles out of Montana, across NE Wyoming and over into Belle Fourche, South Dakota. But we stepped out of the pickup into howling winds and immediately decided we’d stay with Monte until we got to Belle Fourche.
And that’s how we ended up biking down to Spearfish and back into the comforts of civilization, which we did not realize that we had missed so much.
Born in Baltimore and raised in Cincinnati, I have lived on both coasts and driven back and forth across the country a number of times. I now have the "midlife opportunity" to do so on two wheels.
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