Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
felt terrifically grateful for and impressed by her kindness—New Yorkers aren't exactly
used to that from our public employees—and a couple of hours later, after I checked in at
the M X (“Oh, you must be my cyclist,” Judy said as I came in the door. “You made good
time”), I dropped into the sheriff's office and thanked Ellen personally. A heavy woman
with an earnest face and a beleaguered but competent manner, she pulled on a cigarette,
shrugged, and said it was nothing, and that it was nice to meet me and she was glad I
had arrived safely. Then the phone rang and she picked it up: “Nine-one-one,” she said.
“What's your emergency?” A small fire had broken out someplace, apparently; I waved
good-bye and let her do her job. Then I decided to take a rest day, though Chester, a
speck on the prairie, wasn't the place for it.
Havre, not quite sixty miles down the road, was the more natural stopping point, a
reasonably sized town halfway through the state. The population is between nine and
ten thousand, making it, remarkably, Montana's eighth largest city. It was named, al-
legedly, after Le Havre, the French port, though Montanans pronounce it HAV-ver. The
names of many Hi-Line towns have Old World antecedents—Chester, Glasgow, Harlem,
Inverness, Malta—because of the immigrants who found their way out here on the rail-
road, I've been told.
The main commercial thoroughfare here, weathered but seemingly sturdy if not inar-
guably thriving, is more than a mile long. I walked it all last night to get to Uncle Joe's, a
steakhouse that is, by general consensus, the best restaurant in town. (Let's just say this
doesn't reflect well on the competition.) I stayed up as late as I could watching televi-
sion—I didn't quite make it to the 11:00 o'clock news—and this morning I stayed in bed
flexing my knees, which are stiff and sore.
Jan called. She's been invited to a wedding in New Orleans in early October, and she
asked if I could join her there. Her oldest friends will be there, and she'd love to intro-
duce me to them. Where will you be by then? she asked.
“Ummm,” I said, “you tell me. Pittsburgh?”
And we laughed.
I said I'd try to figure it out and let her know. If I was going to take any time off the
road again it would be to see her, I said, and a wedding in New Orleans sounded like a
delight after a funeral in Los Angeles.
“Good for the topic, too,” I said, only half kidding. “Love and death. Death and love.”
Of course, I've been thinking about Billy and Catherine and my mother and that other
fellow I've barely mentioned, my father. He died of lung cancer in June 2003, shortly
