Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
You climb to get into the park, and the first hills yield an eagle's-eye view of I-94, the
road I'd ridden to get here, and the proximity of civilization to wilderness is striking.
(Cycling on interstate highways in this part of the country is, if not entirely desirable,
legal and reasonably safe, with sparse traffic and wide shoulders.) As I rode the loop, the
sense of a remote West deepened. The scenery—dramatic rock formations and valleys
between them—would have suited a John Ford film; you could almost see cavalrymen
lining up on a distant butte for a battle, or Indian warriors gathering before swooping
down on a wagon train.
I crested a hill to a high meadow, where a herd of wild horses huddled together, ha-
loed by a bright, early-morning sun, and shortly afterward I rounded a bend and startled
a bison grazing in the shadow of a boulder. He seemed to lose his footing momentarily
as he acknowledged my tires hissing by on the road surface, then turned and glared at
me before going back to his meal. I watched him from a respectful distance for a bit, but
he paid me no mind. Did he yawn? I think he yawned. Eventually he lumbered out onto
the pavement and ambled downhill and out of sight, taking up road space like a vehicle
with an oversize load. Heavy traffic.
The bison wasn't the only Western representative I've come across serendipitously.
Yesterday, on the service road along I-94 on my way east out of Glendive, Montana, I
stopped to ask directions from a man out for his morning run. I was hoping he could
tell me whether the road continued or if I'd have to retreat and go back to the highway
entrance and ride the shoulder. He didn't know. Wasn't from there. He was just stay-
ing with some friends nearby. This was a part of town where some expensive homes had
been built in the woods.
He turned out to be Senator Max Baucus. I'm not kidding. I wouldn't have recognized
him but he introduced himself.
“Max Baucus,” he said, extending a hand.
“The congressman?” I said.
“The senator,” he said. I apologized. He thought it was funny, too, that he'd run into
me, a New York Times reporter, in that spot under these circumstances. He asked after a
couple of my colleagues that he knew from Washington.
When I asked what brought him to this far corner of his state, he said he got to Glen-
dive, which has about five thousand people in it and is a pretty big city by Montana's
standards, a few times a year to see constituents and supporters, by which I assume he
meant campaign contributors.
A note on Glendive. It's a genuine hub for the ranchers and farmers in eastern
Montana, the kind of place with a compact, nineteenth-century-looking downtown with
two- and three-story office buildings and a whole other, much more contemporary com-
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