We’re in the final stretch. We left Montana Wednesday morning, drove more or less straight through North Dakota, and arrived at our friend Kate’s cabin at Stalker Lake, in Otter Tail County, Minnesota in the late evening.
The motel we stayed in on Tuesday night was the Yellowstone River Inn, in the town of Glendive, Montana. If you’re ever in Glendive and need a place to stay, I’d recommend it. It’s surrounded by standard, soulless chain hotels: the Holiday Inn Suites; a Comfort Inn; a Super 8. The Inn, though, was comfortable; the rooms were spacious, clean, and comfortable; and the staff were friendly. It’s also attached to restaurant, bar, and casino. And, a short walk away, you can look out over the beautiful eastern Montana landscape.
The food is good, but if you’re looking for small portions of delicately prepared vegetarian food, this won’t fit your bill. We had dinner there, and, because we wanted to hit the road straight away, breakfast the next morning. I’m sorry I didn’t take a picture, because portions were… huge, probably three times bigger than anyone really needs.
There were a fair number of other people in the restaurant at breakfast, but they didn’t seem to be travelers. Most were older men, with trucker caps, mostly, wearing overalls or dungarees with suspenders. I’m always struck, in places like this, how our clothes help identify us. Subtle differences say a lot. A baseball cap and a trucker cap look a lot alike, but they don’t mean the same thing, do they?
No one was wearing a mask here. Three of us have all our shots, but one of still needs to get a second. And, given the surge that seems to be happening in the U.S., it seems sensible to wear them. But the only people along the way sporting masks were employees of chain fast food places .(Subway and Starbucks–and yes, we stopped several times at both along the way; I for one will be glad not to set foot in a Subway for a long, long time). Donning a mask in a place like this is a statement, even if it’s not meant as such. And people notice. There’s no hostility, but people do stare, just a bit, just long enough to make it plain that this is strange behavior.
One of the curiosities of this part of the country is the kind of public sculpture off the highway. I’ve already posted a picture of the metal horses (the “Bleu Horses”) near Three Forks, Montana, but there’s more. There’s a giant cow further east on I-94.
Kate told us to make a detour through Fergus Falls, Minnesota, so we could see “Otto the Otter.” This is a forty-foot concrete and steel beast, made by high school students in 1972 as a centennial gift to the town of Fergus Falls. (Why choose an otter? Well, Fergus Falls is in Otter Tail County.)
There’s also an egret rookery in this park, which is pretty cool.
From there it was a short drive to Kate’s cabin, but we managed to get lost. Waze, it turns out, isn’t perfect. It had us drive in a big loop, and once we were near the end of the loop, seemed to suggest that we do it all over again. (We didn’t. Sophia got in touch with Kate, who set us straight.) We had a cabin to ourselves, which was lovely. And we had a kitchen, so we could cook our own food, which, after a few days of road fare, was really welcome.
Yesterday we took a day off. Kate and her partner Bob took us to a swimming lake. (Minnesota doesn’t just have ten thousand lakes; there are swimming lakes and fishing lakes and oh-my-god-it’s-just-leeches-and-mosquitoes-lakes and lakes where people go to jetski and… well. You get the picture.) And then Kate and Bob took us to dinner in the metropolis of Battle Lake, Minnesota, population 875. (To be fair, the summer population is a lot bigger; lots of people go to their cabins in the summer but don’t figure in the census.) Stub’s, the restaurant, has a big sign out front proclaiming that it’s the “second best restaurant in Minnesota.” (The sign doesn’t say what the best restaurant is.) And the food is damned good, though definitely not good if you’re vegetarian. (When you order a main dish, you get a choice of potato or green beans.)
Sophia and I last drove across this country almost twenty years ago, on a journey that would bring us first to Eugene, then to Adelaide, then to Squamish. The landscape hasn’t changed much, and the fascination with huge statues of animals was there, too. (Also the fascination with large anything; I remember driving through Darwin, Minnesota, and stopping to see the world’s largest ball of twine.) There’s a sense of whimsy here, I think.
That sense of whimsy tends to come crashing down when you see a picturesque barn, weathered beams sagging with age, emblazoned with a sign that shouts “Trump!” in huge red letters. Or when you see billboards along the side of the road that command, “Choose Life!” Or the billboard back in Montana (Billings, I think) that has a picture of rioters and warns, “If you don’t want Billings to be like Portland, vote Republican.” And there’s the overwhelming whiteness of this part of the country. Every single person in the restaurant in Battle Creek was white: servers, host, clients. Every single one. All the patrons in their caps and their dungarees in Glendive were white. And at truck stops and gas stations, the overwhelming majority is white. And I worry that the word in red on the dilapidated barn represents all of these people, that that is some inexorable force pushing this country into the hands of intolerant and unpleasant people.
Then I stop. And I reflect. This country has changed tremendously since I last lived in it. Yes, there’s Trump and the anti-vaxxers and horror of white supremacy. But I remember, too, that if the country changed for the worse in 2016, much good has happened here since we headed for Australia back in January 2004. I remember that DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, was the law of the land. And remember, too, that Barack Obama was still a state senator then; he wouldn’t win the primary until March of that year. I remember that people thought that no African American would be president in our lifetimes. Bad things happened in our absence, but important strides were taken, too. I remind myself that a couple of days ago I was smiling about a billboard advertising, “Adam & Eve, Your Romance Superstore.” And I have to tell myself that we’ve only seen a handful of Trump signs, and that the changes in America since we left for Australia in 2004 haven’t all been bad.
Leave a Reply