The West….
a place I have tried to avoid thinking about since leaving it. For to think about the West, states like Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah would just make my time back East harder, so one just tries to forget those lost loves..and Move on.
But once Emily’s suggestion hinted that maybe just going back there would be a good thing… that maybe staying in Maine ... and ‘Caahhmden’, Maine at that…burning oil in an in-efficient in-law apartment all 6 months long might just not be the thing for us. So she hatched a plan…the Nordic ski festival at West Yellowstone the destination, and got on Craig’s list and found us a condo in Big Sky Montana, just a mere 50 miles down the road to save money (more on this later).
So we packed up, found a cheap storage unit just a convenient couple of blocks away, packed and stowed our domestic lives, for the promises of the open road, and Westward to where snows are reliable!
Well sounds easy as pie right? We had to do so many things to get this ‘Dream’ underway. The jobs that had to be finished were many-fold indeed. We had to get a car that was not a Pig! We had to sell the Pig (Subaru Forester)! Then the customary walk down car sales lane is no picnic… it is long and arduous. But we came out the end with a pretty nice car (VW Jetta wagon), although Phil, my Brother, needed to point out the snow tires that would be needed out on the mountain passes. But Emily kept her head down and she even, in the end, sold her Pig car for a nice Penny!
I got my jobs done too…I had to keep my head down right to the day we left, for we couldn’t leave until they were done…design, permits, find the right metal worker to assist in the project, get materials, do insane on the water metal fabrication, and in the end get paid my old friend Mike Morrill….and brother Jon, longtime high school friend and conspirator.
Then we said goodbye to everyone, the nieces, the geeses, the parents, the siblings, the aunts, and friends…saying all these byes is hard for it gets one to wonder how they will deal when these people are all thousands of miles in the past.
Our final hurrahs were with Jon and Kate… always a party. I mean, these two paarrty! And Jon’s Brother Mike was coming in. Steven too~! So, Emily and I left my folks Place in Liberty, Maine… and I must mention it was a pleasure staying there (even if the turkeys were roosting on the railing that we toiled so hard on and crapped on the deck, clawed around on the roof). But the architecture…! Just kidding… it was nice to finally ‘test drive’ the product that I designed and built for my folks.
The drive to Portland gave the car a shake down…initially it was packed to the gills, but we pruned ‘her’ down, stowed some more in my sister, Danielle’s attic. The second-hand Thule ski box that we put on the roof was covered with stickers of places only a ski playboy could go. No problem, “We have the whole trip across this miserable country to peel them off,” I said to Emily. But back to the blowout that occurred on our way out of Portland… Let’s put it this way: Emily, Jon’s doctor neighbor Sarah, and Kate wore black electrician’s tape over their nipples that night! And the dirty dancing…. I did not approve of it, much like an old man would not have. So the few days’ laughs were had and many more beers downed… the timing to leave was good everyone went back to work… except Emily and I… we drove away… away to our new lives for at least a winter.
We woke early and got on the road by 7 am… not easy to do in November… it was Nov. 11 and the wide-open road was waiting. All of our toll money in a row, we drove off. By the time we got to Connecticut, we had made a mistake. Missed an exit. ”Oh, well” Emily said. “We will catch the next road and reconnect.” But not so fast, we hit a slow in the road…. And time goes by sitting in traffic…my goal for that day was to miss the NY turnpike and go by the way of the good ole Pennsylvania turnpike- cheap and dangerous….plagued with mini deer I told Emily. And we did get to see a whole bunch of them. I told Emily, wait ‘till she sees an Elk!
We almost made it out of Pennsylvania that night, but we decided to call it quits and pulled into a lack luster Motel 8. “And not necessarily cheap either,” Emily confided to me. So, we watched a few crappy reality shows and called it a day. Oh, I forgot to mention….It was a dry town… No beer for Greeno!
We were up and a frost was on the car. The car next to us had two smashed out windows. We were thankful ours were not. We drove off checking our fuel gauge and mileage, for we wanted to verify that we were not driving another Pig. So far we’re averaging 28-29 mpg.
Well, the tolls of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois suck! We paid like 30 bucks to go through those miserable states. And all they had to show for it were a couple of Starbucks coffee joints housed in what I told Emily was the equivalent of a first year architect’s portfolio. We toiled on the road that day and drove through some of the most frightening places: suburban sprawl, electrical lines, choked highways, trash clinging to wasteland pedestrians’ legs. We achieved for a day’s labor: Iowa… the land of the truly lost. We pulled off the road when every trucker and his brother blew by in the early night hours….
The EconoLodge sign loomed and we suckered into it. I sat in the car thinking that I needed a beer, but all I had was smoke-ables… so I indulged. Emily came out. “We are room 215.”
We walk into the hall and its already a scene out of a bad horror movie. Our room is to the right… on entry an awful smell of pesticide hits my nose… I look for a window to open… its not operable, I say to Em “ look for bugs in the corner of the room” she looks at me oddly… In the meantime I see a brown thing on the floor, I examine….”looks like a husk”. “Lets look at the bed”… I say… On approaching the bed I see what appears to be a huge bedbug on the center of the mealy looking brown bedspread…. On closer examination…”Emily look at this huge bedbug” she runs over and the bug feels her horror and on queue runs across the bed and jump off into the dark….
We quickly gathered our bags before the word was out in the bed bug community and practically jogged out of there down the hall and Emily was getting her money back.
Now I had to drive again… and where? So we see this sign over the interstate pass… ‘Newton Inn’ …. “ well hopefully there are no bed bugs in the Inn” I think we both said at the same time. I am now in my ‘Nth hour’ and just want to be done with driving. “Emily… Where do we go? … you’re my co-pilot tell me where…”
Emily takes control, “take a left”. We arrive at the weird entry of the Newton Inn… a blue canvas awning … into what looked like a swimming pool? But alas to the left a high portico marking the true Hotel entry…or so we thought…Emily finds her way through the maze of entry doors and is met by a very tired drywaller at day hotel custodian at night Black man. I am sorry I am from Maine… its customary to mention when men are black.
Again I am waiting in the car…. She comes out… and triumphantly announces room 154 … so we go in under the glowing blue awning, down a hall wide like on entering a football stadium… covered with exterior grade blue carpet…? Walking into the stadium we find the smell of Chlorine and a giant swimming pool roped off. We go into the room… close the door… immediately inspect the bed… rip the covers off, flip the mattress up and no bugs! We celebrate…oh and forgot to mention I did have a beer this night but up to this moment had not been able to open it….I hesitate to open it… the room is damp from the nearby pool so I turn on a air exchange unit… instantly the air has the smell of burnt wiring…acrid… and I open the door … the smoke alarm goes off… Emily comes back in… I try some lights and the TV and all wiring is poached…. Blown breaker… The hotel manager comes down in his last hour stand…smells the wiring and sends us to another room.
The second room in the Newton Inn … more isolated… away from the noisy room, but what about bugs? We go through the whole bed, mattress thing again… No bugs… I conclude that it’s the chlorine in the pool that keeps the bed bugs away… and most bugs really I suppose. I finally get to drink my beer.. A Fat Tire… ahhhh! A flavor I have not had since last out west… beautiful… my first beer since we left Portland too. We watch a few reality shows and retire in a haze.
The night was long in the inner catacombs of the Newton inn… no windows saw day break, the only window looked dumbly out onto the pool which had crappy lighting…we came out of our catacomb actually early for we had no idea of daybreak… The continental breakfast was great! If you like captain crunch, and toasties… luckily we made our own coffee in our room…. Not risking that one. I had seconds on no one item, Emily didn’t like her breakfast so much. On leaving we got to reflect once again on the overall Parti of this hotel convention design… bring the kids too, they can make friends in the pool that will hopefully drown them.
We marked time against another Newton Inn customer wearily leaving a just dawn… his eyes blood shot and blurry…The Newton Inn a place for
Iowa sucks…. Once on the road… Iowa sucks… the drivers hated our Maine state license plate… they knew we were on the other side…the McCain side and they were soar about the recent lost to Obama. We knew we were in their territory! So I drove fast, and Emily hung on to the convenient handle over the passenger door. At some point I noticed that I was having a deja-vu experience …I had been through Iowa before…The middle of this sad country is frightful, it seems as if its become one power grid like tinsel on a tree strewn all about. The road scape is bleak, apocalyptic in its industrial usage of land. The farms that once embodied this region have sold out to the big box stores. As far as the eye can see corporate chains, fast food courts, and industrial parks own the landscape. No one smiles, and if they do I wonder what they are on. At this point I yearn to see a semi load of shitting cattle over the industrialness of this land. Our dreams were answered when we saw the windmill of yore all over the hills …Brand new shining windmill…huge in scale…going up all over the hills….Emily and I feel that now we are getting somewhere…. As the land opened up to the west….heading into the never ending Nebraska…
Nebraska is boring, but in a calming way, I-80 starts to thin out, and commuters…where are they commuting? We see a sign that tells us that we are half way through the state, only another 200 miles till Good old Colorado.
We stay in touch with Billy Bentley who is going to receive us on the other side of Colorado, over the passes of I-70. We realize that we will be hitting Denver just as darkness fully sets in. As we approach Denver its maddeningly crazy, the lanes come in and everyone is driving straight out….tumble weeds roll as the winds off the Front range of the Rockies begin to roar. As the grade steepens up the first foothill, which are quit steep snow begins to fly….I could see it all coming, that we would have to pay our dues getting over Loveland pass, and then Vail Pass, the semi trucks were trying to beat the weather before it got worse… and we started to wonder about the Jetta Wagon with all season radials. It was a white knuckled ride, and through the Eisenhower tunnel we raced with the big trucks western folk love to drive. When we popped out of the tunnel the snow was blinding, and greasy and building up quick… this descent was crazy, and I was pushed from behind by every asshole and his brother….I would like to say that it got better, but Vail pass proved to be a white out, and even more snow….the climax was when a semi loaded with cattle flew by on a steep snow slickened downhill, he must have been going 85 mph! We just stayed as far right as we dared. By the time we got to Beaver Creek, the snow had died and we had a relatively easy time through the Glenwood canyon, winding this way and that with the huge talus slopes above towering in a menacing way. I remembered Glenwood well enough and before we knew it we sat with Billy, Pattie, and their 2.5 year old kid Charlie, and the two dogs. Whew!
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