the dharma blog

When you’re driving through the night your eyes start playing tricks on you. Then your mind does. Then it’s time to switch drivers.

I had gotten us all the way to eastern Montana and now the reflectors along the freeway were beginning to streak across my vision and sometimes I couldn’t remember where we were. I told Fisherman it was time for him to take over.

So he drove and I slept. An hour or two later, dawn, I woke up as Fisherman was slowing down. He told me he was getting tired. We pulled off at the lonely freeway exit in the vastness of that part of the country, one that just said “Ranch Access” instead of the name of a town on the sign, and a blue sign underneath bluntly stated, “No Services.” We drove over the cattle guard at the bottom of the ramp and over the cattle guard on the other side and then he pulled off and we both went to sleep.

I slept an uncomfortable hour after that, then we switched spots and he went back to sleep and I drove with the sun rising behind us across the plain. The hay had just been mowed and I saw Black Angus and antelope scattered across the tan expanses grazing on the stubble.

There is perhaps no better driving than a gravel road through the mountains on a quiet, sunny morning in September.

To travel from Bozeman to Yellowstone National Park, we exited halfway across Bozeman Pass and, after waiting for a miles-long train to pass, eating a bagel and sitting there amazed at its magnitude climbing the long gradient of the pass, we headed down a dirt road that I was told was much shorter.

I don’t know if it took us less time, but that route was definitely worth it.

The road was narrow and heavily washboarded at times, dusty all the time, and surrounded by mountains. Far ahead of us towered the Absarokas, jagged and gray-blue in the haze. Many houses were being built in this narrow valley, but it still felt quiet and remote.

We arrived in Yellowstone around mid-day and drove east through the broad Lamar River valley. At times it narrowed where the river shot through a canyon, but most of the road went through or along the edge of a golden valley 10 miles across. We saw buffalo here and there, sometimes in herds, often a lone bull laying in the grass, appearing just as a massive brown head emerging from the earth, the smaller hind quarters hidden in the tall grass.

More roads come and go in my mind like a blur. Roads across plains where the mountains were ghosts on the horizon or where they were so close they blocked the sky and seemed as if they might reach out and push the car off the winding road. When surrounded by such fantastic scenery I often spend a little too much time scanning the view and not enough with my eyes on the road, making my passenger a little nervous at times.

We drove over Bozeman Pass several times. Most of the time we drove over the pass at night, on our way back to Sarge’s from fishing, but when we were able to see what we were driving through it was a lot of fun. The mountains attempt to conceal the possibility of any road passing through. But it does. And it goes up and up through those mountains and then plateaus and there are some little ranches and then it drops down down down to Livingston where the Yellowstone flows through.

And then there was that drive home. The alarm went off at 3:45 a.m. Mountain Time on Sunday, way too soon in so many ways. I was asleep in my clothes on the couch, Fisherman was on the other couch and Sarge was asleep in an easy chair. We threw the last of our gear in the “Belafonte” and hit the road in the dark. Fisherman slept. I fought back exhaustion, hangover, sadness at pointing the car east for the last time of the trip. I didn’t have coffee and didn’t get any until we’d been on the road for more than an hour. After that I was good to drive all the way across the state.

Fisherman took the wheel for North Dakota and I dozed a bit and kept him delirious company for much of the way. Huge storms appeared on the horizon, heading the same direction we were but slower, and there was no sitting them out but each time as we approached they seemed to part and as we passed through, huge rain clouds were to our north and south but we slipped through with just a few sprinkles.

Then, after that final thousand miles of the 3000 miles we traveled during the trip, there was the last stop for gas in Fargo, then the last CD chosen, then another thunderstorm, this one we skirted just behind as we angled southeast, then the widening of the freeway as we approached the Twin Cities, then rocking through the curves of the metropolitan Interstate, everyone in a hurry all of the sudden, then the final exit, laying off the gas the last time, turning onto my street, stopping, turning off the car.

It was a drive. I don’t know what I think about driving for driving’s sake, especially in this day and age, but we were driving for fishing’s sake. The roads and the mountains, the plains, the corners of civilization we passed through were an essential part of the trip. The road is a looking glass, a mirror of a trout stream, its twin. The antithesis to the untouched rivers where everything moves at current’s steady pace.