Gigantic.28

Montana

The story later went around that I’d stolen a car. It didn’t feel like stealing, more like extended borrowing without permission, but it’s hard to argue with a good story.

I was the only fiction guy in Denis Johnson’s Whitman class. I’d taken to hanging with the poets because we’d smoke dope and talk mad shit, plus I loved Whitman. Denis was always exhorting us to take chances and live directly, but that wasn’t why I took the car.

It was spring break, but winter still had us in its grips. It was dark, cold. Everyone had flown off to exotic locations. I was in my basement apartment having just found out I was the only one in the entire program not getting financial aid next year. This is apparently what happens when you threaten people with a wooden rolling pin in workshop, but that’s another story.

At any rate, my friend Anna had a sister who needed a cat sitter for a week in Missoula. I was supposed to be watering my friend Lee’s plants while she was in Los Angeles but I took her car instead, after watering her plants. I’d always wanted to go to Montana.

It was a red Honda CRX two-door hatchback, and it liked me. You can tell these things about a car. I started much too late in the day, it got dark early, but I was determined to drive without stopping so day, night, made no difference.

I knew this part of the route from a Greyhound trip with Dawn, who’d almost killed me for dragging her halfway across the country on a bus, again, another story. I cut north just shy of Omaha, then continued west through South Dakota.

I didn’t quite make it to Belle Fourche as planned. Eyes closing, I pulled into a badlands gas station around 3am. I’d brought every blanket I had, and slept in the back of the car.

Back on the road at 6am, the Black Hills in the misty early morning light welcomed me, even though I was just passing through. They cheered me on, in their steady, quiet way. Keep going, look how far you’ve come.

The route cut through Wyoming for less than 40 miles, I stopped for breakfast along this stretch, mom and pop place. A couple of old cowboys eyed me but leave me be. I was cold and hungry, and the scrambled eggs were the best I’d ever had.

Crossing into Montana did not mean the final stretch. It’s a big state. My plan to go the rest of the way without stopping was not working. Three hours was not enough sleep and my eyes literally started crossing. I barely made it into a parking lot in Bozeman without driving into a telephone poll. Again, I curled up in the back of the CRX and passed out cold.

Maybe it was only a half hour’s sleep but it would have to do. It was sunny now, but wouldn’t be for long, and the Rockies were still ahead of me.

As we climbed higher and higher into the mountains, the CRX complained some, but I downshifted and kept ascending. What was remarkable was the number of semis who’d had to pull over along the way, smoke coming from radiator grills. The noise of straining engines from semis that managed to keep going surrounded me.

I was in a partial dream state. If the struggle of these diesel belching behemoths to cross the divide was as life-or-death as it seemed, could the little CRX possibly make it?

We finally crested. The next challenge became trying not to burn out the brakes flying down the other side, but again, the car was up to the challenge.

It was after dark when I pulled into Missoula and found the house, knocked on the door. I was delirious and talking gibberish. Anna’s sister and boyfriend could not figure out who I was at first, then realized it was their cat sitter, arrived two days earlier than expected. I had made the drive in 27.5 hours.

I collapsed onto their couch and fell into a coma. When I woke the next morning, they’d gone on their trip and left handwritten notes about feeding their cat and where they kept the bicycle.

It must’ve been Sunday. The first thing I did was find a church. I obviously needed to thank God for delivering me. The priest was friendly but I didn’t stay for coffee hour, I still wasn’t quite capable of carrying on a conversation with anyone.

When I wasn’t scribbling in my notebook with the cat on my lap, I spent the next couple days riding a bike around Missoula, wondering what life would’ve been like if I’d wound up here instead of Iowa City.

What impressed me most was the river. The Iowa River back in Iowa City had a calming presence. The Clark Fork by contrast was forceful, unrelenting, seemed like it would kill you. This seemed to sum things up for me as I contrasted the two places.

Anna’s friend Jackie met me for coffee one day. She found my hardboiled affectation amusing.

“I need a drink,” I told her.

“What you need is exercise,” she said.

Somehow she got me strapped into a pair of cross country skis. I’d never done this before. She gave me a few pointers then figured I wasn’t going to kill myself.

“I’m gonna to keep going, you go at your own speed,” she said, and took off ahead of me.

She soon disappeared, along with the gliding swoosh of her skis. My own skis made little clicking sounds as I sloshed ahead. I wasn’t sure if I was doing this correctly, but I was moving forward.

When I stopped, it took me a moment to realize that what I was listening to was actual silence. No planes overhead, no birds chirping, no rustling trees, nothing. I wasn’t sure I’d ever been in such a quiet place in all my life. It felt like my ears were imploding.

I suspected at that moment that this was what I was meant to be doing. Not cross country skiing, per se, but the skis had delivered me beyond where I would have taken myself otherwise.

Standing alone in the Lolo Pass, somewhere between Montana and Idaho. Not even thinking about my life and what I was doing with it. Not even thinking. Just standing there. On the planet.

When Jackie came back to retrieve me, we skied back toward where she’d left the car. She scanned the tracks I’d made and found them to be fairly parallel.

“I’m impressed you didn’t wipe out,” she said.

I stayed in Missoula a couple more days then headed back. I had it in my head that I should drive through North Dakota instead because I’d never been there. This was stupid. It added hundreds of miles to the trip and I was nearly done in by a blinding snow storm in Minnesota. But I made it.

Our Whitman class reconvened a day after I got back to Iowa City. The first thing Denis asked was:

“Did I hear someone stole a car over break?”

The rest of the guys in class turned to look at me, I kinda shrugged and blushed at the same time.

“That’s what I’m talking about!” Denis said, like his point was finally getting through to us.

I still did not know what I was doing in fiction workshop, and had no clue how I would negotiate my financial situation to make it through another year of school.

But I’d made it back from Montana alive. And Denis Johnson seemed to appreciate me.

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Addendum:

Understandably pissed at me for putting 3,000 miles on her car, my good friend Lee entrusted the watering of her plants to a much more responsible person the next time she went to Los Angeles. The Honda CRX, which had unflinchingly traversed the Rockies, sat parked, safely out of my reach, when the Iowa River jumped its banks, filled the car with mud and carried it several blocks. It was totaled.

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