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into the horizon. Happily, though, the kick of conquering the Divide, the prolonged ef-
fort to reach the Pass, and the breathtaking glide down the other side linger. I didn't
describe much of the descent yesterday, but it was exciting: tumbling mountain streams
that spilled chutes of water over rock ledges, splendid and towering buttes of gleaming
rock, and Saint Mary Lake, deep and violet amid the peaks, majestic as an inland sea. I'm
carrying yesterday with me, and the mountains, too; if I can't see them in the distance
any longer they're in perfect focus in my mind's eye.
Cut Bank, meanwhile, is a surprise after so many miles of Montana air and space,
a legitimate town with banks and hardware stores and restaurants, houses with yards,
people with daily schedules and responsibilities, an air of competence, and if not exactly
prosperity, then pride and durability. It is, in other words, an island of sorts, a true prair-
ie oasis; when you're in it, you're in it, safely at home. Get to the edge of town and you're
surrounded by emptiness; the next thing in sight is the horizon.
The sheer expanse of the continent has never been more evident to me than it has
been just about all day today. I woke in Saint Mary, a crossroads town just down the
road from the east gate of Glacier. There was a beautiful view back into the park from the
parking lot of my shabby motel, and just as the sun came up I said good-bye to the six
men I'd met the day before, professional men, all of them longtime friends, from Idaho
and Montana, on a weeklong cycling vacation. All were older than I by a decade or more.
We'd ridden over the Continental Divide together, or rather, they'd all passed me on the
way up and I'd followed them down. We had reservations at the same motel, it turned
out, and last night we celebrated our achievement at dinner at a restaurant in a roadside
log cabin that has been there, evidently, for more than sixty years. Johnson's Cafe—or
as it says on its website, Johnson's World Famous Historic Restaurant—is a family-style
place, obviously a local landmark, and we gobbled down huge platters of pork chops,
fried chicken, and steak, and the biggest slices of ice cream cake I've ever seen. A meal
to match the day—I was stuffed.
This morning my new friends were headed north, into Canada. I was going south and
east. Though I'd made it over the Divide, I wasn't done climbing, and from Saint Mary
I rode once again up—straight up, it seemed—maybe five miles, through a forest land-
scape that had been devastated by fire not so long ago. I ascended for well over an hour.
The views back toward Glacier were eerie, striking, and I stopped two or three times
to appreciate them, the broad and majestic stony peaks rising behind a vast meadow of
ruined trees reduced to ash-colored, upright needles. It was a brilliant day. At the top of
the climb was a rounded hilltop that seemed strangely empty and lunar—aside from the
billboard advertising a restaurant called Two Dog Flats. The road was wide, as if some
sort of rush hour were to be expected, but this seemed unlikely, and as I crested the hill
