Day 22: Missoula to Darby, Montana
My route out of Missoula took me along state road 12 through the Bitterroot valley, passing through the towns of Lolo, Florence, Stevensville, Corvallis, Hamilton and Darby. As I proceeded through the valley, the surrounding countryside grew more beautiful. Now these were mountains. Beyond green fields lay pale blue peaks, ghostly faint with distance.
And for once, the wind was with me. I fairly flew through Bitterroot, even with a slight ascent, maintaining speeds between 15 and 20 miles an hour. I felt fast and powerful for the first time in days, racing along highway 12, my inner ear filled with the lyrics to Thomas Dolby's The Key to Her Ferrari (with numbers revised substantially down to match my true speed):
And then I saw her...
she was a bright red '64 GTO with fins
and gills like some giant piranha fish,
some obscene phallic symbol on wheels...
little rivers of anticipation ran down my inseam
as I kicked those five hundred Italian horses into life
and left reality behind me:
fifty, sixty, seventy miles an hour...
my hand slipped inside the belt of my trousers
as we hit eighty, ninety miles an hour...
and as we passed the magic100 my love exploded
all over her bright pink leather interior...
In fact, I was making such good time that at the end of 20 miles I stopped for pie. Glen's Cafe sits on the outskirts of Florence along route 12, enticing travelers to stop and sample from among 20 varieties of pie. Apparently they'd been busy - most flavors had sold out when I arrived. I was served a whopping slice of blackberry pie with vanilla ice cream, which I followed down with a decadent glass of milk. I couldn't even tell you the last time I drank a whole glass of milk. While I ate, the mother and daughter serving staff taunted each other and gossiped about family matters with the various locals who came in and helped themselves to items behind the counter.
Shut your pie hole
It was a better timed break than I knew, because coming up was a nasty piece of business. Of the twenty miles of road between Stevensville and Hamilton, approximately eight of them were the subject of major earthworks. In patches up to three miles long, the road had been scraped away prior to being repaved, leaving course, graded substrate, gravel, and sand, barely two narrow lanes wide, edged with road crews, dividers, and heavy equipment. Sadly, I did not notice until afterwards that the bike route deviated around this section of highway. I toughed it out, eking out my bit of space on the devastated road, jostling and cursing and swearing through each mile of it.
At the end of the road construction, I reached Hamilton. My first sight of Hamilton was a scar in the earth: a gravel quarry, fronted by enormous yellow banners along its length, which read, "AMERICAN OWNED. MONTANA OWNED. LOCALLY OWNED. THANK YOU FOR BUYING AMERICAN." I imagined that the fruits of the quarry would be filling most of the road I had just suffered through; no doubt a lucrative contract.
Beyond the gravel quarry was a bridge, and beyond the bridge, an abomination: Hamilton, Montana. Population 3,700. A five mile strip of wide, asphalt highway, flanked by parking lots and chain stores. America's ugliest creation, defacing its most precious lands. I imagined that the value of that gravel contract must be truly astronomical for those LOCAL OWNERS to sell out their heritage this way. I did not stay in Hamilton as planned, but continued through, and did not give it a backwards glance.
The horrible joke of Montana's growing blight is that the people who recognize the problem and would like to solve it are held in check by rabid property rights advocates. I'd been following news in the local papers about an initiative in Ravalli County to introduce zoning laws, to control the size of new buildings, the spread of gravel mining and timber harvesting. Fighting the initiative are landowners who argue for their "god given rights granted by the constitution" to exploit their land however they choose. The zoning plan, now in its third draft, has already been defanged to the point of absurdity; the anti-zoners are unwilling to settle for any zoning measures, and have aimed to entirely quash the issue. They would rather risk everything they love about this land than give up their divine right to exploit it.
Montana is large. It will take some time to pave it all. See it while you can.
Don't get thrown in the hoosey-gow!
Darby is a quaint little restoration town, not unlike Winthrop, Washington, but more practical and less kitschy. While Winthrop seems like nothing more than a Disney-like facade that everyone leaves at night, people actually live in Darby. I rolled in early in the evening and came to a weary stop in front of what looked like a set of rental cabins. One of the cabins was being painted by a couple, and as I peered blearily through sweat stung eyes, she ran over and asked if I was looking for a room.
Traveler's Rest Cabins
The owners, it turned out, were avid cyclists. They'd been running the Traveler's Rest for six years. They were friendly, inquisitive, and environmentally forward thinking. I chatted with the wife for a bit, and without any prompting from me, the subject of Hamilton came up, which gave me a brief opportunity to rant. Her thoughts about Hamilton: "And it's a complete failure." I took a room for the night.
Darby's Seven foot cock
It was still early - my incredible speed had cut my day almost in half - and I hardly knew what to do with myself. I unloaded my bike and took a brief spin around town. Antiquing seemed to be a big business. I made stops for takeout food, a few groceries for the following day, returned to my cabin, and collapsed into bed.
posted by Ivan at
8:20 PM
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