Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
7
If I Were Your Father . . .
Wednesday, August 17, Havre, Montana
M
ontana is so enormous it makes a cyclist feel as though he were riding a stationary
bike. I crossed the border from Idaho nine days ago, and I've been eating up reasonable
chunks of daily mileage this week—except for the day of I took today—but I'm barely
beyond the center line of the state.
Since descending from the Rockies, I've been traveling a region along the Canadian
border called the Hi-Line, a stretch of prairie and wheat fields, cattle ranches, remote
small towns, and Indian reservations. Wrapping them all together like a couple of gi-
gantic bungee cords are the highway I'm riding, U.S. 2, and the railroad tracks running
more or less parallel to it just to the north. Sometimes the two cords nearly coincide;
sometimes I can't see the tracks from the road until a train passes by in one direction or
the other, the engine sending of blasts of its horn into the vast sky and pulling dozens
and dozens of boxcars. This happens three or four times a day, maybe more.
The terrain is still largely treeless with the gentlest undulations. A couple of small
mountain ranges, the Sweet Grass Hills to the north and the Bears Paw Mountains to
the south, are bluish shadows on different horizons. Now and then, in places where the
train tracks approach the road, you come across weather-beaten storage buildings stand-
ing sentry, and occasionally there's a phalanx of gleaming grain silos far out in the wheat
fields, reflecting the sunlight and seeming, from a distance, like miniature cities on an-
other planet. Stark and beautiful, this can be nonetheless an austere, even threatening
landscape; storms appear in the sky miles away and you can watch them approach or
sense them over your shoulder catching up to you. I've been lucky that way, though; the
serious weather has passed me by, and I've had mostly sunshine and reasonable temper-
atures, only a few passing showers the last couple of weeks.
