Monday - July 17, 2006

We slept in this morning, departing at the unusually late hour of ten. When I entered the office to drop off the keys, it was empty. A moment later, the manager popped her head through the open door and asked, "Anything I can get you? I'm taking my parents to the dentist." After wishing us a safe trip, she departed - leaving the door wide open. Havre must be a pretty safe town. Already the sun promised a hot day along the asphalt. Ever on the search for roadside architecture, I kept my eyes alert for diners, coffee shops, and motels, and was awarded by the sight of the Modern Cabins whose fading paint revealed an aging relic. Nearby a demolition team was busy tearing down the Midway Tavern, and it looks like they had their sights on the Cabins next. One shot for history's sake and we returned to the car. A bit later, we spotted the Bear Paw Motel in Chinook; it is next to a converted deco gas station-turned ice cream shop whose nautical balustrades and 90 degree curves of glass block offers a tiny slip of the 1930s' future.

Here, the Hi-Line (the nickname for US-2) parallels the railroad, which carries long trains stacked with containers heading for the Pacific. Across Montana, we spotted billboards, posters, graffiti, and three-dimensional object lessons about the ravages of Crystal Meth. Given the close proximity of many rural folks to ammonium nitrate, a key ingredient in the manufacture of the drug, it's little surprise that the Meth crisis has reached epidemic proportions. For us, though, the most serious medical conditions that afflicted us were ever-deepening sunburns. Vienna, who is becoming quite adept at long-distance highway travel, occasionally asked to switch from passenger to driver now and again to "even out her burn."

East of Chinook, MT	Glasgow, MT	Culbertson, MT

In Glasgow, we stopped for lunch at the Johnnie Cafe, a diner that manages to feel both quintessential and utterly devoid of kitsch. The server's beehive was unaffected, the gravy was thick enough to be a meal by itself, and the pie was cheap and filling. In the words of William Least Heat Moon, this is a classic two-calendar diner. Back on the Hi-Line, we settled into the numbing routine of dusty driving and slowly undulating roadbed that leads to North Dakota and - more of the same. Every once in a while, we'd stop by a hotel that advertised free wireless internet and borrow some bandwidth to check email or check the news from the Middle East where it seemed that all hell was breaking loose again.

We continued along to Minot, North Dakota. We'd called ahead to the Hub Motel in Rugby and secured our room ahead of time. We were lucky to do so because they closed their lobby at nine. In Minot, we pulled off at Kroll's Diner. With its kidney pattern tables and sparkling vinyl booths, its black and white checkered floor and neon trim, this is not so much a diner as the idea of a diner as imagined by clever marketers and savvy investors. The walls are covered with framed advertisements of cars and popular figures from the middle twentieth century and the coffee mugs are for sale. Even so, this pastiche fantasy manages to produce a pretty decent meal for the price. And we arrived on two-for-one shake night, so we must have been in the right place.

The sunset transformed the sky into smoky amber as we cruised along the highway lined with wildflowers and prairie. At 70 miles per hour, we raced through asteroid fields of dragonflies that darted out of the way with surprising agility. Sadly, the tinier bugs were less able to avoid our vehicle. To Vienna's dismay, I found an all-too-ready reason to explain the meaning of "road lotion" as the steady rain of bugs formed a light mist all over the windshield and on our hands that hung out the windows. Within an hour, we reached Rugby, a town that proclaims itself the geographical center of North America. We grabbed our room at the Hub Motel and took a walk through the downtown before calling it a night.