Road Musings

It takes a journey to make a journey

Drive long enough, for so many decades, to so many places, and everywhere you go you’ll start seeing ghosts. Some of them are your own.

I spent the better part of last week driving west from St. Paul to Corvallis, Montana, where I ended up cooking and hunting at one of my culinary hunts. The roads to get there, Interstates 94 and 90, are familiar ones. Many memories, many ghosts.

First to Fargo, a great town where I have a few friends — some of whom don’t have the accent you’ve mentally assigned them. Then to Bismarck, where I have more friends — some of whom have the accent you’ve mentally assigned to them.

Interstate 94 there can be breezy, literally and mentally, depending on the day. Howling winds are not uncommon, and when they come out of the West, you can basically watch your gas gauge drop. It’s worse with snow.

I pass the time by inventing backstories for invented people named after exit signs. Buffalo Alice once defeated Annie Oakley in a game of marksmanship, which was only natural because she was Ojibwe from Turtle Mountain. Cleveland Gackle was the notorious crime boss of Fargo, setting up a fearsome network of gangs after Al Capone banished him from Chicago; folks still talk about his famous Grain Elevator Massacre of 1937. The wheat ran red… And we won’t get into the shenanigans that Tuttle Steele got into during the go-go 80s.

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Bis-Vegas, I like to call it, because long before you enter it from the east you’ll see the city’s glow on the horizon. Then, crest one last hill and there she is, the shining lights, casinos, nightclubs and dens of sin. OK, I made that last part up. But the lights are real.

Bismarck is home to an emerging food scene, as well any number of excellent places to find old-school German food, specifically food made by the Germans from Russia, a major ethnic group in the region. Hearty and almost devoid of vegetable matter (unless you include potatoes and the rumor of onion), this is the perfect food for a North Dakota winter. I do love me some fleischkuekle…

I’m a big fan of the Mandan village restoration outside of town, as well as the other nearby native sites. Well worth visiting. The Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara are three North Dakota tribes historically skilled at farming, and I am hoping to grow some of their seeds in my garden next spring.

Cross the mighty Missouri River and you enter the West, spiritually speaking at least. Life gets hillier and oilier — the famous Bakken Range (We Frack Till It Cracks!) lies just north of the highway in the state’s northwest corner, past Salem Sue the Giant Cow and the “Geese in Flight” statue that’s really a statue of flying swans. Rangeland and wheat roll past, until, all of a sudden: badlands.

Badlands are really not so bad, unless you’re trying to haul a covered wagon through them. They’re beautiful rock formations, coulees and buttes and lots of colors and scrub and general arid coolness. I’d love to hunt deer there someday, but apparently it’s tough for an out-of-stater to get a NoDak deer tag, alas.

Cross into Montana and soon you’ll be in Glendive, Paddlefish Capital of the World. I know this because I am a fan of a place called The Beer Jug, where Holly and I once bought Beer Jug hats that had paddlefish on them. I loved that hat. Wore it for years, until the brim ripped off one day.

They have a sandwich there, the Swiss Brat, which is a really good bratwurst, split, served on inky black pumpernickel, with what seemed like homemade sauerkraut, Swiss cheese, and good mustard. So simple, so good! I know more than a few people who’d love that sandwich…

A few more miles and you hit Miles City, the town where I shot my first ever deer, more than 20 years ago. I can basically retell the hunt in real time. My friend Tim and I pulled up to an abandoned farmstead near Jordan, north of Miles City.

TIM: Shoot that deer!

ME: What deer???

TIM: THAT ONE!!

A doe is standing there looking at us, maybe 100 feet away. I open the passenger door, rack a shell, drop to a sitting position, line up the shot, squeeze the trigger… boom! and the doe runs off. Hit.

I run after it, around an old barn. Drop a cartridge in the mud. Several cows gaze up at me in between munchings. I turn the corner, see a deer standing there looking at me.

TIM: Don’t shoot that deer!

That’s when I notice it is a button buck.

TIM: Here! You got her!

I walked around the barn a little more, and there she was, dead as Custer’s nuts. My first deer. The End.

As heartwarming as that story is, the coda is every bit as memorable. After dressing the deer, we rolled into Miles City for dinner, blood on our jeans. What the hell, let’s try the Chinese place. Pretty sure it was New Hunan.

There was the usual trough of steam table offerings, but I honestly couldn’t. I do like cheapy Chinese once in a while, like broccoli beef and Sichuan chicken, but I’d hoped for something better. Why I thought this might happen in Miles City I had no idea. But I opened the menu… and inside were real-deal Chinese dishes! Like, from China. This is rare outisde of places where there are Chinese American patrons, but I was stoked.

I orderd the hotpot and wor wonton soup, and I forget what Tim ordered. All I know is that the waiter asked us several times if we knew what we were ordering; Tim is from Tacoma, Washington and knows his Chinese food, so yeah.

Definitely the best meal of that trip. At the end, seeing our bloody jeans, the waiter smiled and congratulated us on getting a deer.

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Rosebud, Montana isn’t really a place. Only a dozen people live there. But it has a sign off Interstate 94, and I needed to get off the road. Bad.

Remember that west wind I was talking about? On this day, years ago, it was ferocious. I was driving my old Toyota Tacoma, which normally got about 20 miles per gallon on the highway, and I could almost always drive 300 miles between fill ups. Not that day.

Passing Miles City, I thought maybe I’d make it to Billings before needing fuel. But the gas gauge just kept falling. So fast I thought I had a leak. I was nearing empty when I saw the sign for Rosebud. Desperate, I turned off, glided down the road toward the Yellowstone River only to see… nothing. No gas.

I could feel my face getting clammy. Swallowing hard, I turned around, got back on the highway and drove exactly 55 miles per hour (in an 80 mph zone) toward Forsyth. The gas light glowed like the Eye of Sauron, all seeing, all judging. Idiot.

Never had I ever run out of gas. I started making plans to walk, Dr. Zhivago-like, through the gale towards the great city of Forsyth in search of gas and salvation.

But the gods smiled upon me that day. I rolled into the Town Pump with the motor just starting to choke and cough. Made it! Turns out the capacity of the gas tank of a 2000 Toyota Tacoma is 15.1 gallons. And that’s exactly what I needed to refuel.

Bullet dodged.

Billings is what passes for a big city in Montana. While not the capital (that’s Helena), it was until recently the only easy place you can fly into from out of state.

The vibe is blue collar, extractive — oil and coal everywhere — and, if you show up at night, eerie. Fog can descend on the town and shrould the nicotine-stain yellow of the sodium lamps in a haze that feels strangely appropriate for a place that hinges on fossil fuels.

Coal trains rumble past my hotel window on the hour, and driving around, the place seems to have a set jaw of determination to just… get through this. Chain restaurants dominate, beer flows freely and commerce is the name of the game in Billings.

But, like anywhere, gems lay hidden in plain sight. One is the Caramel Cookie Waffles bakery, which makes stoopwafels, a sort of waffle cookie with caramel inside. I bought a packet of them for the road. They are delicious.

The first time I ever hunted Hungarian partridges was just north of Billings, with my friend Todd. That day I missed my lone opportunity at those zippy little gray birds.

I had to check when. It was in 2011. (Damn, I’m getting old!) On this current trip, I managed to reconnect with Todd. He’s now a full-time hunting dog trainer (pudelpointers), and is a self-described political junkie. I learned much from him about Trumpworld, an ecosystem I am painfully ignorant of. I am less so now.

Next time, we’ll just chase partridges again. Or maybe geese.

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On to BozeAngeles.

It is between Billings and Bozeman where the Great Plains finally wrinkle into the whispers of the Rockies. Crops, mostly wheat and beans, still dot the roadside, but pine trees and rangeland start to dominate. Magpies frolic on the corpses of deer.

Bozeman itself has become a strange island of Californians and wealthy, outdoorsy folk seeking a simpler life while at the same time complicating life within the town they’ve moved to. Real estate prices there surpass even many places in California — the current average is an astonishing $800,000.

If you have money, it’s a fun town. Trendy new restaurants, some of them quite good, like Chan and Blackbird, cater to the crowds, and Patagonia and REI are the labels of choice — unless you’re a hunter, in which case it’s First Lite or KUIU. Bozeman is ground zero for outdoor entrepreneurs, from the Meateater conglomerate down to my friend Shannon’s Gastro Gnome, which makes pretty decent freeze-dried stuff for backcountry adventures.

I’ve spent a fair bit of time there, and dominant feeling I get is of a soon-to-be-Vail or Park City ski town, where outsiders spend money and locals, well… move out.

Many of you know that while I like my fancy sometimes, I’m most at home in humbler settings. Like the Haufbrau House. It’s a dive, full of music and stickers from everywhere that seems to be the default decor of dive bars the world over. Wood tables and bar both slicked from the grease of thousands of hands and butts. A certain stale beer scent lingers in corners.

My friends Anna and Jesse, who are slaughtermen — meaning they kill livestock and butcher it for a living — took me there after I’d whined about how damn fawncy BozeAngeles had become. Was a good choice.

We drank dark draft beer on a table that had been a gigantic spool for cable at one point, contemplating whether we should carve our initials in it like so many before us had. Jesse makes knives when he’s not using them, so we were well equipped.

They repeated the lament of everyone who has lived in that town long enough: They’ve been priced out. Traffic. Urbanites who sneer at locals and drive poorly in snow. Yet they stay. It is really pretty there…

A few beers later, initials well carved — I carved in Hunter Angler Gardener Cook — we wandered out into the snow.

Beyond Bozeman, you’re really in the Rockies. Now is when you need to be extra careful about watching weather, because the passes between Bozeman and Missoula can be challenging on the best of days, nightmarish or simply impassable at worst.

The scenery starts to become what most people want to see on a road trip. (I, being the contrarian that I am, honestly prefer the vastness of the Great Plains.) Big, imposing mountains, capped with snow. Forests of pine. Signs reminding you that this is grizzly country — and they’re not talking about the University of Montana. It’s the part of Montana people who have never been to Montana think is all of Montana.

Smack dab in the middle of this region stands Butte, a mining town with a rough reputation and a monument to extraction at all costs: the Berkeley Pit. Formerly an open pit copper mine, it’s more than a mile long and is now filled with upwards of 900 feet of “water” so toxic that birds landing in it die.

I have only one story from Butte, but it’s a good one.

I was drinking a beer after a late lunch on the road at Maloney’s Bar. It was a few days before St. Patrick’s Day, which is a huge deal in Butte. The place was dotted with the sort of regular for whom drinking beer in the afternoon was as natural as breathing.

A guy walks in. Everyone turned to look, even me. Loafers with no socks. Chinos, polo shirt. A visor!? This could be good, I thought.

Turned out the guy was from California, and said loudly to the assembled drinking professionals that he wanted to buy their homes in cash. Didn’t matter what condition they were in. That he wanted to make Butte the next Bozeman. Oh boy, here we go…

Someone loudly told him to shut the fuck up. But Mr. California didn’t. He went over to a dude wearing Wranglers and a stained Carhartt jacket. His ball cap was of a fertilizer company I think, but can’t fully remember. Made the same pitch. Guy stands up, his three friends do, too.

Now you should know that Butte has a reputation as being a place where you can get into more fistfights than at an Eagles game. I was ready to watch these guys throw hands. But they surprised me.

Without a word, they grabbed Mr. California by his arms — him squawking the whole time about lawsuits — carried him outside, and, looking through the front window, I saw one open up the Californian’s car door (black Mercedes sportscar, of course), and the other two toss him into it.

They walked back into the bar, again without a word, and returned to their beers.

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Drive long enough and everything seems boring. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not the countryside that’s boring, it’s you. Or more accurately, you lose your ability to absorb sights and create meaning from those sights the longer you see them. Life blurs. And slows.

There’s physical evidence for this. My heart rate can drop dramatically in a long drive, dipping below 55 beats a minute. My thinking slows, too, although this is not necessarily a bad thing. I find my mind will hold a thought, turning it this way and that, really ruminating. Sometimes this helps me solve problems. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Often I am in silence. I alternate between nothing and a very random playlist on my travels. Just today it served me “Found You” by Alabama Shakes, followed by “Blood in the Cut” by K Flay followed by Mexican cumbia followed by “Freaky Deaky” by Doja Cat and Tyga. If you really know me, then you know this makes sense. I am Large. I contain Multitudes…

Last stop, Missoula.

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Missoula is more of a mountain town than Bozeman, and while like BozeAngeles it is a blue dot in a sea of red politically, Missoula is the quintessential college town. The reality is that they both are — Bozeman hosts Montana State, and Missoula the University of Montana — but Missoula has retained that sort of shabby bohemian vibe you can find in most other college towns.

I’ve spent a decent amount of time in Missoula over the years, but my most recent trip stands out. It was last year, very shortly after I left California for good. I was living out of my car more or less, and I’d agreed to help cook for the Backcountry Hunters and Anglers’ annual fundraising dinner at their Rendezvous. You should know something about this group: They are well meaning, dedicated to preserving our public lands, but they’re nowhere near as competent in putting on big events as, say, Pheasants Forever.

So I knew there’d be some sort of curveball. But I wasn’t prepared for no water in the kitchen.

Yeah, you read that right. No water. And all of us were cooking for 100-plus diners. BHA had brought in a few water coolers to supply us all, although we had to boil that water to do dishes properly. Apparently the venue we were at didn’t turn their pipes on until later in the year… um, maybe someone should have checked? I dunno.

My job was to cook various bison bits donated by my friend Matt Skoglund at North Bridger Bison into a cowboy classic called son-of-a-bitch stew. It’s made from offal and tastes vaguely like chili, and I really need to put the recipe online one of these days…

Turns out the ovens didn’t work, and there were only two stoves for all of us cooking. Ope. (Only I hadn’t yet moved to Minnesota, so “ope” was not what I actually said. Think Jersey and you’ll get close.) Fortunately the event had a grill sponsor, so I managed to grill bison hearts, pre-poached tongues, kidneys, cheeks and tail outside in the freezing weather. Was kinda fun, to be honest, because people kept asking me what I was cooking, and I’d hold up a slice of bison heart. Cool! Gotta love BHA folks.

I could get into the weeds of this dinner, describing how I had to find surreptitious places outside to dump waste water after doing dishes, how a few of my fellow cooks nearly had panic attacks, but also how the diners upstairs never noticed a thing. All they got was great food — and that was the goal.

I didn’t intend to write something this long about this topic. But the words just flowed, and it reminds me of the rich web of memory that only comes into focus after layers and layers of memories accumulate in one place.

Imagine living in one town your whole life! The thought is hard for me to grasp, although I have lived in two separate places for 18 years each. Think about it: The strata of memories rising every year all around you. The people, the places, the sights and smells and sounds. You could see your former selves as shades lurking in shadows. High school you. Newlywed you. You’d pass the hospital where you gave birth to your child. Look away from a restaurant where you fought with your partner. Walk up a hill where you used to look out and wonder what might be out there. Then you found out, and then you returned.

I am both a nester and a wanderer, in need of routine but also a restless soul. I need growth and adventures and new chapters, whether they are in new places or with new ideas, or people. You may be different, and that’s OK. Hold those memories close, and share them once in a while. Your former selves will thank you.