Billings

[This is likely to feel a bit different. First of all, we’ll all be in places I’ve got stronger memories of, so in covering the same distance I’m likely to have more to say. Second, in this one the travel and the places matter as much as our being there. Third, instead of trying to escape anything, I’m trying to capture something before it gets away entirely. Finally, and probably most important, I’m not taking you along for you this time (though you might still enjoy the ride -- they’re beautiful places we go through once we get going); I don’t think I could go by myself, and I wish you would come too just to lend enough momentum to get me all the way through to the end… ]

The Minneapolis airport is an odd collection of divided spaces and narrow dark corridors. Each shop, or bar, or restaurant has it’s own little cubicle set apart on it’s own. The people here also have little to do with each other -- just travelers on their way through.
“I wasn’t expecting Minneapolis.”
It’s just an interchange, a hub, a leaving off point of departure -- speaking of departures, we ought to check the board to see when we’re sheduled to dee-part.
“You mean scheduled to de-párt?”

/Yeah, I know, I do like to play with pronunciation when I speak. He used to do that all the time, exaggerating the vowels, moving the emphases, even making things up -- called me ‘skeeziks’ sometimes. They were both examples of how you could own the language. As a kid, I always thought it was funny how they called each other ‘Mother’ and ‘Dad’. Like they were the originals. Even when I’d grown up it’d catch me by surprise . Every other thing had a different name, whether it was the hamburgs (never hamburgers), on the griller or the need to ‘heetch oop your soospenders’./

Let’s see, Northwest flight to Billings -- seems like we’ve got about a half hour before we’ll be able to board. [This time of year you can expect it to be cold -- and probably snowing, so I decided we ought to be going in May when it’s about 60’s during the day and 40’s at night and spring is getting into gear. So, you’ll need a jacket or a sweater.] Come on with me to buy a crossword book, and then maybe we’ll stop in one of these places and I’ll offer to buy you a drink.
“How about this time you let me buy you one?”
Okay, thanks. I could use one to keep me going on this. You’re running the risk of my talking through the whole trip though.
“That’s what I was counting on -- didn’t you say this trip was for you anyway?”
How do you do that?
“Do what?”
So frequently anticipate me or read my mind.
“You’re the one who’s always saying, ‘It’s not that deep.’”
To the gate; then board (if I’d thought of this earlier, maybe I could’ve gotten us first class reservations); our bag in the overhead bin; take our seats. Do you mind sitting by the window? I still have to stretch my knee out in the aisle sometimes. I grab a few things out of my backpack before fitting it under the seat -- the puzzles, pens, music, your book (what’re you reading now anyway?). We ought to get one of those little pillows since your back thing wasn’t that long ago -- and turn off that icy cold blast of a vent over us; pre-flight presentation; safety belt, tray table, and seat back; runway; acceleration; rush of blood from my hands and feet as the plane throws itself into the air.
“You don’t like flying?”
The flying part I don’t mind, even the landing is okay, but the taking off is not my favorite. I can prove to you that it will work, but it still doesn't look like it should work. Why do you ask?
“You’re squeezing the feeling out of my hand.”
Sorry, I just meant to be holding it. Here, I’ll put something on for us to listen to, and you can help me do a puzzle.
“Sure, but you’ve got to let me hold the pen.”
How about we take turns? Two words each?
“There’s no 38 across in this one.”
It’s too early in the day anyway. What’ve you got that’s five letters for ’fantasy’? Starts with a ‘d’..., ends with an ‘m’, I think.
“Why, what’s the ‘m’ word?’
Four letters for ‘plateau’ = ‘mesa’. If we could see far enough through the clouds out left there, we could see what I always think of when I hear that word: Devil’s Tower.

/They drove my sister and I out here from Pennsylvania. Riding in the Suburban with the Scotty trailer hitched to the back of it. I still have the coring from the gold mine we visited in the Black Hills -- you can see the thin threads of gold in it. The Black Hills, the Badlands; it was an adventure just being places with names like that (at 8 years old). Marveling at Devil’s Tower and Mount Rushmore. My sister trying to keep track of whether she could spot a license plate from every state as we went. Finding the next trailer camp, hopefully one with some shuffleboard or pinball, hooking up the trailer at the site./

There almost always seems to be one or two squares left over that I have to guess at: somebody’s or someplace’s name usually. My head’s getting heavy anyway, don’t think I can read either (not even the in-flight magazine; though there’s a piece here on Barcelona -- you wanna go there next?). If you’re okay with your book, would you mind if I get my armrest up and out of the way, put my earbuds in, pulled my cap down and nodded off for a bit? We’ve still got some driving to do, so it’d be good for me to nap a bit. When the cart comes by, would you get me a tomato juice?
Hmm? What? Oh, thanks for letting me sleep. Time to prepare for landing. Don’t forget your book (I probably lose a book to the seat back pocket every time I fly). The Billings airport is up on the Benches, a big plateau just above the city. So, when you’re watching out the window, you’ll be flying along and all of a sudden the ground jumps up and grabs the plane and you’ve landed already.
Pull in to the gate, unfold myself out of the seat and we’re down the jetway into the terminal. The Billings airport does everything it can to remind you you’re in Montana. There’s the little wooden buffalo you can sit on and ride (if you’re under about 12 -- you know what? If you brought Snowman along that’d be a near-perfect place for him to pose), there’re the horse sculptures in the middle of the baggage carousel. I don’t know where the model airplanes fit in to be honest, but they do draw your eyes up to what are supposed to look like the exposed ceiling joists. Makes it look like you’re just in some big log cabin that someone hand-crafted all the joinery for.

/He did so many things with his hands. You could see their expertise and skill by looking at them. Trained as an electrician, he ended up mostly doing carpentry and cabinetry. I barely remember the first time I got to help him: I must’ve been maybe 6, and it’s not really a memory so much as it is a few flashes of scenes of the work site and the tools out. I broke at least two folding rules that one day (they really seem like they should fold the other way to get flat like that). I’ve got the broken-off end section of one (he saved them, and they moved with him from Pennsylvania to Wyoming) hanging on the pegboard in my workshop -- it reminds me not to ruin anything with haste. Measure twice, cut once: I heard it from him first (although I still hear him say “meesure” or sometimes “meesure tweece” and I’ll bet somebody’s heard me say it that way at some point). By the time I was 16, I’d developed a few skills beyond mastering the folding rule, and I rode the bus up to Uniontown to help him reshingle and repaper (I guess we ought to have repapered first -- maybe I don’t have as many skills as I suggest) the roofs of some of their properties. He was the brains of the operation and I followed his lead and carried whatever had to come up the ladder. We’d go sometimes over an hour without saying anything, just doing our dance with each other. The chalk line, the paper, the shingles, the nails, the mastic, and gravity; just wordlessly sequencing row by row up the roof. I got a little beyond myself trying to drive the nails like he could -- tap once to set, hit once (maybe twice) to drive -- and I drove a big flap of skin off of my thumb. He just looked over and said, “Hit the nail on the head, not the thumb on the nail” and that was it. Didn’t fuss over it, didn’t worry about if a doctor should see it, just go on and get that bandaged up man and then we can get back to our work. He also taught me that you don’t try to hit the nail on the head (regardless of what you may have heard): you try to hit the point the nail enters the board through the head of the nail. That summer, and in all the other projects we worked on together he transferred to me a confidence that with imagination I could build whatever (wooden, organizational, personal,…). I’ll show you the monuments some time (they’re disguised as a footbridge and a trellis, but I built them to him as much as I built them for me./

We’ll have to rent a car to get to Powell. Something small and overpowered so we can take advantage of the 85 mph speed limit. Can you drive a stick? They don’t have anything red either -- I’m not sure if you or I can look good in a car that’s not red.
“Oh, I can.”
That’s right, I’ve seen you stylin’ in the green machine.
"I’ve got some CD’s if you can get one with a CD player.”
Yeah, well, I bet I can -- do you have anything that needs to be played loud? I expect to be roaring down the road with all the windows down, singing along.
"Yeah, I think we'll need to turn it up loud if that's what you're going to do."
It takes about 15 minutes to get from the airport at the north end of Billings to the far southern suburbs. From there, we just keep flying south on 310, just about right between the Crow Indian Reservation off to our left and Yellowstone National Park to our right. At any time you could easily count every tree within view. The horizon seems so much further away here. If you stare out for a bit, you can almost make out the curvature. I could imagine bringing my bike out here, leaving the road and just taking off, maybe heading on a spirit quest into the reservation. Never seeming to get any closer to anything, just forcing a journey out until my lungs burn and froth and legs scream and arms just won’t hold the handlebars anymore. Just go till I drop to see how far that could be and to see who I was when I got there.

/They started doing a lot of riding when they took the trailer down to Florida and left it there as a winter home (they’d probably be coming back here about now). At different times, they found that one or the other of them couldn’t ride -- the knees, the balance, or the stamina weren’t there -- so he found a way to lash them together braced side-by-side tandem, and between the two of them they’d keep on going out to ride. A partnership like that leaves me speechless, makes me want to be better at it than I am now./

Here’s finally the intersection where we make a turn. I’d probably miss it, but it’s marked by an ice cream shop/rest stop/gas station (Hey, when you’ve got the property near the intersection, you make the most of it I guess). Maybe we oughtta go ahead and stop to eat. Prob’ly should’ve had lunch when we were in Billings, but I was anxious to get going. Now it’s mid-afternoon here (or late afternoon EST) and lunch is often optional for me, so I don’t really know if I’m hungry or not. I’ll make myself get some kind of sandwich so I’m not just getting ice cream.

/He’d always bring a lunch pail to the job site that she had packed for him: a sandwich, some fruit, a thermos of coffee that’d come out of the percolator that morning (I used to love to watch/smell/puzzle over that percolator going), and a whole tomato, maybe a hard boiled egg. Initially I thought that tomato was the oddest thing, but now I practically consider it summer only when the tomatoes are good enough to eat like an apple. That tartness and sweetness of that first wet bite, then trying not to have it run all down your arm as you finish the rest of it./

Stopping for a break here was a good idea. Can we just sit together on this bench and enjoy a cone? That’d let me relax a bit -- I can’t believe how wound up I’m getting as we get closer to where we’re going. That’s nice when you muss my hair like that. I’m ready to get going again. Down 14A towards Powell, almost there now.
Powell is inside this huge basin with mountains on three sides. It was mostly dust until they channeled the water into the irrigation system. It mirrors the road system in places (or maybe the roads came second?): running alongside the road it has it’s own intersections controlled by their own signals that switch the flow from one to another on some schedule. The melt’s far enough along that the channels are full, and all the fields are starting to green up.

/There were always gardens at their house in Uniontown. Every spring the vegetable garden had to get tilled and hoed -- it’d take two days because it was such a big garden. About a third of it was corn: by mid-summer it was a good place to play hide and seek. Another third would be tomatoes: every year we’d get crates and crates of canned tomatoes in Bell jars, which meant stewed tomatoes in your spaghetti, in your goulash, in that rice dish with your chicken (it’s a shame I can’t stand stewed tomatoes; I just can’t get past their consistency and feel). Fortunately, there’d also be canned peaches (which they must’ve bought), pears (from their tree), and applesauce (from the two trees in back). The apple trees were just the right distance apart to hang that hammock I picked out for them. She sent it back to me in that last year ‘cause they weren’t using it anymore, and I still have it. Of course, if you didn’t want to take the time to put the hammock up you could still just climb up into the trees and hang by your knees. The flower gardens were on the side of the house, and always included a big patch of snapdragons. She showed me how to make them do the snapping thing probably at least twice every time they were in bloom. Why can’t I remember how to do it? The back porch had a manhole cover in it which opened up into the cistern beneath. When it was too dry, you’d run a line down into it and pump some water out into the garden./

We’re not stopping in the town, we have to go past and to the first hills just beyond. Nobody seems to be around today, so we can go ahead and park pretty close by. There’s a stone bench, and the sun’s still pretty warm, though it’s going down a bit. I’ll leave you here for now, and go on myself. I won’t be long.
From here, there’s nothing to block your vision for miles. On the right day, you can look out and see it raining off in the distance; see the clouds and the rain falling out of them, and never feel a drop. At times it feels like you can see to infinity, at other times it feels like infinity can see you, and that’s what I’m hoping for today.
When I get back, the tears are still coming and my voice cracks a bit when I thank you for wiping my cheek.
“How’d it go? You okay?”
Yeah, I’m good. I couldn’t cry when we left them here. I didn’t want them to think,… I just needed to come back to tell them how much depended on them. And how I knew that.
Can we just sit here together for a bit while I settle? We can watch the sun go down -- man, it’s great here, like widescreen. Maybe if it doesn’t get cold too fast we’ll watch the stars come out too; maybe make a wish, and I’ll tell you another story…



[My G’pa passed in April ‘03. My G’ma took some time to straighten everything out, then left in August. At the time, I wanted to be solid so my mom could lean on me and didn’t give myself a chance to lose them.
They used to alternate years between the WY/MT/ID part of their family and the VA/PA/NY part. This Christmas they would’ve been here.]