To Blackfoot It

Trip Start Jun 19, 2010

Trip End Sep 01, 2010

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Flag of United States Choteau, Montana
Tuesday, July 6, 2010

DAY SEVENTEEN: We wake to foggy windows, my feet curled away from the freezing edge of the soggy sleeping bag, and everyone rushes off for a coffee. We try for some research before our departure, to better aid Navin in his adventure into the dark future, but he doesn't demand it and asks nothing from us but a ride as far as we’re willing to go. We drive deep into the Albertan countryside, take a few wrong turns, end up at a marvelously clich� country store selling everything from ground mace to fireworks to romantic comedy DVDs, where the cashier coolly warns of the perils driving down this unnamed road to disaster. As we’re leaving, an old man in a Hawaiian shirt, sporting a feather in a baseball cap – he danced all whack – approaches ol’ Pearl with a smile. He reminds me of Terry Gilliam in his grinny mania, and pleads us, "you should go back down the road: I’ve got the best Frisbee Golf course in the world. You know, I was a bus driver for over thirty years," and when we invite him to take a look at our baby, he immediately starts cooing and gasping with excitement

So Long David?

. Without hesitation, he hops on the piano to play a song that is, “going to be the next great ring tone,” and with his young daughter leaned against his station wagon, rolling her eyes as she licks her popsicle, he cuts into an enthused rendition of a song about the necessity to legalize marijuana, singing or reciting and certainly explaining every verse. We tell him we’ll visit his disc course some other time as he brags of how this part of the country is the only place impervious to nuclear attack so unavoidable, and we drive on.

We drive up and down the local logging roads, mostly unsure of our direction as Navin confidently guides us along with his iPhone, until we reach a meadow and a fork in the road. With the piano bopping violently up and down with every pothole and rock over which we tread, not to mention the two hours drive off into the nothingness, we decide that this is the place to see our friend off, and don’t need to tell him so, to where he’s already packed and out the door before the dust settles around us. We take a few group photos arm-in-arm, and I’m so amazed at how quickly Navin, who was a stranger (to all but me, that is, though he and I were hardly close friends) slightly unwelcome in our crowded bus less than a week prior, is now a family member so difficult to let go. We are somber and fearful, and Captain Filigree pleads with him a few more pointless things, and he nods and pretends to listen, and is sad to leave but mostly unaffected, his eyes cast on the road ahead

. We hug and watch him leave, and just as he’s a spec in the distance, Shmark and The Beard rush desperately with their cameras to capture one final shot of that untouchable figure, appropriately clutching a copy of Krakauer’s “Into The Wild” as he disappears into the horizon, backpack full of granola bars and stolen coffee, and we wonder if his mind is racing as ours are so nervously; of course it isn’t, we realize, and drive on once more.

At once we deem our business in this part of Canada as finished, and drive toward the border of our homeland. The imposing peaks of Jasper and Banff fade for a bit as we cross the border, stopping at the Duty-Free store for a few spots of Canadian whiskey and fudge, and the stern border officials soften again from stern and skeptical to bemused and mocking. They see us off like friends and the log cabin plains and Craig T. Nelson lakes of Montana click into view, and then morph into the amethyst mountains of Glacier National Park. The roads run red like clay and as the rain starts, they glimmer and chase alongside the miner’s railroad, and we feel the land return to Native American hands. When we see a fur trader’s post, we see it in the hands of the Blackfoot Nation, and it all unfurls like a great clich� of the Great American Wilderness; I’m so glad that it does.

            Pearl begins heaving as we hit the hills more and more, then even as we accelerate on flat ground, and the men begin to worry and deconstruct the mechanic potential of it all while I chew on Jim Beam sunflower seeds and concentrate on keeping the bus centered from the cliff. Captain Filigree breaks from his analytic breakdown of turbochargers to shout, “watch the mirrors!,” and Cornbread dives instinctively out of the way of a road sign I narrowly miss.

            We cruise through a big Blackfoot Reservation and stop at a trader, hoping to buy a hatchet, but settle on the neighboring supermarket, dreaming of sweetbreads and kidneys, settling on tuna and rye bread, and return to the bus in search of whatever it is we ever search for. The bus now smells of festive blend of vomit and campfire and deodorizer and salted meats and moldering undergarments, but the plains are guiding us along with cotton candy and cosmic light, and David Gilmour’s “Smile” is playing, and life is as it should be. We look over the land and wonder what it could have been, what it was before the settlers ruined it, the in balanced with the out, and quietly back into a grassy plot in plain view. The truth is, even as The Beard goes off to perform his human duty, out here everything is in view, from the weather systems miles away to every thought and emotion we could ever hope to hide on this bus. Thankfully, all movement within is good thus far, but the daylight is fading and the horizon is long.

            They’re cooking dinner tonight as I write this. Cornbread remarks that in the moonlight, I look devoid of any bullshit, and The Beard offers me, a writer, a slug of whiskey, which I graciously accept. They joke and prod and run outside, and I sit and pour, and fade away...

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