Montana or bust
... thirty years later.
Dear Kula Diaries,
The year was 1994, and I was 13 years old. At 4:30 AM on a morning in August, my mom taped a piece of paper to the back of our blue minivan with the following words written on it:
My parents loaded me and my two sisters into the aforementioned minivan, and we hit the pavement for a National Parks road trip that would forever change my life. Prior to this trip, we had ‘tested out’ our camping abilities by staying for one night in a local State Park — Hickory Run State Park in the Poconos Mountains of Pennsylvania. On that trip, we had rented a tent from the Navy base, and they had forgotten to include the rainfly. This wouldn’t have been a problem, except that on the night of our camping trip, the region experienced a record-setting storm — both in the quantity of rainfall and the number of lightning strikes (over 3,000). When we woke up in the morning, my dad was floating in the tent on his sleeping pad. Later, we would go on a tour of a coal mine and then subsequently visit a pizza restaurant for lunch, where we all fell asleep at the booth and had to be awakened by the server.
Needless to say, we were not experienced campers. And yet, my parents went ‘all in’ on our big Montana camping trip — purchasing all of the requisite camping gear, including a brand new 6-person tent (that mercifully came with a rain fly). At ‘O-Dark-Thirty’ one day in August, 1994… our family piled into the minivan and departed our suburban home in Pennsylvania — embarking upon a journey that would arc through all of the ‘big’ National Parks in the Western United States. In the 5 weeks that we were gone, we would only stay in hotels for 3 nights. Waking up at ‘O-Dark-Thirty’ was one of the ways that my dad subjected his three daughters to character building experiences. He’d pop into our rooms and hold his index and middle finger together and he’d twist his wrist back and forth as he enthusiastically shouted, “Reveille! Reveille! All hands heave out and trice up!”
My mom would nestle us into our assigned spots in the minivan — my sister Mare and I were in the back seat, and our younger sister was positioned in the middle bench. In the pre-dawn hours, my dad — sipping on the first of many large mugs of coffee — would back the van out of the driveway and we’d disappear from our neighborhood. I’d lean my pillow against the window and I’d drift to sleep — excited to find out where we would be when I woke up. “We’re in Ohio”, my mom would tell me — and I’d revel in the knowledge that we were going somewhere.
Most of my friends didn’t go anywhere for trips, and so this trip — in particular — felt like the adventure of a lifetime. Most of my friends spent their summers at the Jersey Shore — the same family vacation that they had done on repeat, year after year. Once, I went on one of these vacations with a friend’s family, and her parents spent the entire vacation so drunk that I’m not sure if they remembered much of the trip. “Where are you going?”, my friends asked as they watched in awe at the sleeping bags and pads that my parents were throwing into the gigantic Thule that was attached to the top of our van. “Montana,” I’d reply, “It’s really far away.”
As a kid, this trip was the highlight of my life. Infamously, I even tied myself to a tree at Glacier National Park and refused to leave — my parents had to cut me away from the tree and force me to return to the minivan as we were departing the park. Over the course of this trip, we visited The Badlands, Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Grand Tetons National Park, Yellowstone National Park, Glacier National Park — and a host of other parks in between. We camped for several days in each park — taking the time to explore the places that most people do not get to see when they only have time for a ‘drive by’.
When I reflect on this trip now, I also realize how much work it must have been my parents. Cooking for two people in a jet boil is an inconvenience at best. Cooking for a family of five on a Coleman propane camping stove is exhausting. Packing up 5 sleeping bags and pads — because little hands weren’t able to roll them tightly enough — and putting a giant tent up and down … over and over again… is a thankless job. As a 13 year old girl, I obviously had no idea how much work it was to pull off this trip — but it remains one of my peak life experiences, even decades later. It was on this trip that I completed Junior Ranger programs at every single National Park — which inspired me to design my own Junior Ranger Program for Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site, the park where I was an active volunteer. It was also on this trip where I saw backpackers for the first time — a group of folks heading into the wilderness at Glacier National Park, with massive packs strapped to their backs. In awe, I remember thinking to myself, someday… I’m going to do that too.
When we left the house that day at O-Dark-Thirty… and when my mom taped the ‘Montana or Bust’ sign onto the back of our minivan, I remember feeling a little bit embarrassed about it. What would people think when they passed our car on the highway? Would they think it was silly or ridiculous? On the first night of our trip, our excitement was high and we were anxious for the adventures ahead. As I looked at that sign each time we got into the van, I wondered what it would feel like to arrive in Montana — a place that seemed impossibly far away and different from our cookie-cutter neighborhood in Pennsylvania.
On the first night of the trip, we stayed at a hotel in a town so non-descript that I can’t even remember its name. We unpacked the car and then returned to it so that we could drive to dinner. My dad hopped into the driver’s seat … turned the key… and nothing. The car wouldn’t start. He tried again. And again. And again. The car simply would not work. Somehow, my parents were able to find a tow truck driver who was also a mechanic — they thought the battery in the car might be dead, so the tow truck driver arrived to jump the car. He attached the cables to our battery and… nothing. The car wouldn’t even turn over. Hours earlier, our car was heaven-sent chariot, propelling us towards our wilderness dreams — and now, sitting at a random hotel parking lot in random town USA, it seemed more like a noiseless hunk of metal. Ahead of us lay an endless expanse of adventures that suddenly seemed very out of reach. I thought about the sign on the back of the van and realized, disappointingly, that this trip was living up to the ‘bust’ portion a bit too early.
To the best of my 13 year old recollection — I sat on the bed in the hotel room and cried. We had anticipated this trip for nearly 6 months — and now, I wanted to rip that stupid sign off the back of the van. The excitement that we had felt at the start of the day had devolved into hopeless confusion. Eventually, the mechanic gave up, telling us that we’d need to contact somebody in a few days, after the weekend. I watched the disappointment on my mom’s face as she attempted to piece together how we would salvage her detailed itinerary … if we could even get the van started. My dad paid the tow truck driver $50 for his time, and he left. I don’t remember all of the details of what happened next — except that my dad was not going to give up. We were not going to sit in this hotel room. Damnit, we had campground reservations the next day, and we were going to make it! I was lying on the bed in the hotel room, when suddenly, we heard something: the engine of our van starting up. My dad, a man who rarely expressed any emotions at all, burst into the hotel room to share the news. Our entire family erupted into a wild fit of joyful jumping and screaming — Montana or Bust, indeed!
As it turns out, one of the electrical connectors for the mini van had become disconnected under the front of the van by the bumper block in the parking lot. My dad, suddenly noticing this disconnected wire, had plugged it back in — and the van started up immediately. Later that night, we coincidentally saw the tow truck driver at the burger restaurant that we chose for dinner. When we told him the good news about our car, he looked at us with a funny grin, “You haven’t seen $50 have you?”. Apparently, he had lost the $50 that my dad had paid him. We hadn’t seen it. But we had fixed the car. We would make it to Montana.
Later, I would confirm to my questioning and curious friends that, "Yes, the sky is bigger there.” Over the course of the five weeks that we spent travelling through National Parks, we had countless experiences that made tiny notches in my heart. We narrowly avoided an encounter with a mother grizzly and her two cubs … I received a hand carved feather from a park ranger… we learned about wolves (before they were re-introduced in Yellowstone)… we ate excessive amounts of Dinty Moore beef stew on our Coleman stove… and we woke up to 24 degrees temperatures and a little bit of snow in the middle of August.
A few weeks ago, Aaron and I woke up at O-Dark-Thirty for a long drive from Washington to Montana. I’ve been back and forth to Montana many times over the past few years — particularly because it is a lot easier to get to Montana from Washington, than it is from Pennsylvania. We’ve been meeting my parents at a small lodge for an annual fishing trip — five days of exploring rivers and trails and spending time under a sky that seems to go on forever. Every time I return to Montana, I remember those five weeks that my family spent travelling in our tent — five weeks that seemed uncomplicated and completely free. Five weeks without any expectation — other than to see what we could see.
I don’t have many photographs from our five week trip ‘out west’ — for one, it was 1994 and digital cameras, let alone smartphones, didn’t exist. And sadly, when we returned home to Pennsylvania, my dad accidentally put all of the rolls of film from our trip in the washing machine. Somehow, I still have a few photographs that I managed to salvage — among them, a photograph of our campsite in Yellowstone National Park. This past week as I drove through Yellowstone with my parents, my mom remarked, “You know… I can remember all of the campsites that we stayed in during the trip except for the campsite in Yellowstone.” When Aaron and I got home a few days later, I searched for my tiny, childhood photo album. I had notated the album with a handwritten index that included a description of each photo:
In the photo, my sisters and I are visible in front of our 6-person Eureka tent … with the nose of our family minivan poking into the photo on the left. A fire burns in the fire pit. My sisters and I are perched on a self-constructed bench that we had wedged in between two trees. I’m wearing a green howling wolf sweatshirt that I bought in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Much to the chagrin of my parents, I’d continue to wear the same sweatshirt — almost daily — for the next decade. I only gave it up because it finally fell apart. In the aftermath of being severely bullied, I often felt lost and out of place — and that sweatshirt reminded me of a time and a place where I belonged.
It’s been thirty years since that trip, but I still feel the same sense of freedom when I arrive in Montana, although I’m no longer the passenger in the back of a minivan — instead, I happily chauffeur our group from river to river so that we can explore new fishing spots. My fishing methodology is simple: fish, nap, fish, nap, fish, eat, nap. I sink into the grass on the riverbank and occasionally, I look up and watch my dad and my husband — both casting smoothly into the river as it flows along. This past year, my dad took it upon himself to teach me how to cast a wet fly the correct way. He watched excitedly, as I stood in the Firehole River and perfected my cast at a 45 degrees angle — letting the bead-head nymph and wet fly swing with the current.
As I was napping on the shore, I suddenly heard a man’s voice that I didn’t recognize. “Hey, that doesn’t look like fishing!”, the voice quipped. I opened my groggy eyes and was surprised to see another fisherman who had wandered up the riverbank. I think he was just as surprised to discover me lying on the ground taking a nap in my waders in an awkward snow angel pose. For the record, my mom was sitting next to me and she was awake — I wouldn’t ever take a solo nap by the shore of a river in grizzly country. The wandering fisherman exchanged pleasantries and asked us how we were doing — I told him that I had caught a bunch of fish in the riffles of the Firehole river, and he said that he had not had much luck. “What are you using?”, he asked, motioning at my rod. Earlier that day, as my dad had carefully helped me tie on my bead-head nymph and wet fly, he had delicately held up the fly and exclaimed proudly that it was a classic partridge and orange. According to Wikipedia, the partridge and orange is a very well known fly with its roots set firmly in English angling history. It is an impressionistic pattern fished successfully during caddis hatches and spinner falls.
Still in a semi-river-nap-induced stupor, I looked up at the fisherman and very confidently replied, “Oh, I’m using a bead head nymph and a classic orange humphrey.” As I laid on the ground, telling the man about the fishing rig I was using, he scrunched his face in confusion as I recited the names of the flies. I could tell he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about — probably a total rookie, I mused internally. “Hmmm… maybe I should just take a look,” he said. I held up the line so that he could inspect it — he nodded knowingly and thanked me before heading back to the river to fish. Later that evening, as I was retelling this story over dinner to a hysterical group of experienced fly anglers, I could not possibly fathom why I thought this fly was called a humphrey… and, of course, the fact that I made sure to indicate that it was a classic probably confused this angler, who, without a doubt, had absolutely never heard of a classic orange humphrey… because it’s a fly that simply does not exist.
During our trip, we spent one day hiking a few miles to a remote alpine lake, and as it rained softly, I watched my dad cast his rig into what seemed like barren water. I was almost immediately convinced that there were no fish, and I was quick to give up casting — opting to hide under a tree so that I would stay dry. I couldn’t help but think back to that moment… so many years ago… when I had given up on the trip of a lifetime before it had even started. My dad, however, had not given up — he had not lost hope, and our car had miraculously sputtered back to life. I sat under that tree at the alpine lake and I watched my dad cast into the rain — over and over — each cast, sending out a line of hope into the blue water as rain dripped off his flat brimmed hat. Suddenly — a flash of silver from the depths — and a sharp tug. I watched my dad’s eyes light up with a glimmer that I didn’t often see — an excitement like the kind you might get when, against all odds, you plug two electrical connectors together and save the day so that you can tape a sign to the back of your van and hit the open road, which could take you anywhere. And then, leaving the world behind — you listen to books on audio cassette and you drive to a place called Montana that still holds stories you’ll continue to tell for a time that really is as big as that sky.
Friends — thank you so much for reading my stories and thank you for allowing me to share some reflections about a trip from my past, and a trip from just last week. It’s such a delight to have had the opportunity to visit these amazing places, and I’m so grateful that I’m able to share these memories with my parents. When my 74 year old dad is out-fishing me (as I nap on the side of the river), I consider that a win.
I hope that all of you have a beautiful week. Sending you all so much love!
Love everything about this story! I also road tripped/camped with my family growing up and it shaped so many great memories for me.
Another great reminiscense...Thank you. I love Yellowstone and go every year...now that I am retired from the BNSF Ry.