The Long and Winding Road

A tale of a spontaneous trip into the pristine and magical Glacier National Park

I woke up with a jolt. The car was propelling forward at rocket speed. I was sitting in the back and decided that maybe it was time to put my seatbelt on. It’s not that I believe being forced to wear a seatbelt goes against my God-given (American) right to freedom. It’s a lot less complex than that. If I can get away with not following the rules, then I’m going to do just that. It’s the Indian way.

The landscape outside was flying past me in a blur of grey and white as the car’s headlights temporarily illuminated the tall trees that passed us by. In front of the car’s bonnet, on the road, were orange cones to mark out the driving lanes. Continued, pestering road construction meant that the lanes were a lot narrower than usual. Didn’t they know they would be inconveniencing us with their holier-than-thou road improvement duties? I sensed that my American spirit was alive and kicking as I groaned at the minor annoyance. We were meant to drive more cautiously on narrower and windier roads. The orange cones indicated just that. That, and the fact that it was nearing midnight with not a car in sight, or streetlamp to help guide us through this darkness.

Not that the driver really cared. He was barrelling forward as if there were no tomorrow.

Creaking my neck, I happen to catch a glimpse of the speed limit sign on the side of the road. It read 40 miles per hour. I looked at the speedometer; we were cruising at a mere 80.

Not that I was afraid or anything, but it was about now I wished I had the power to fall asleep on call. I forced down my feelings of concern and said a silent prayer to the gods. I hoped we made it through this alive.

It wasn’t like we were on a time crunch, but the driver —my so-called friend—seemed to think it best that we test the limits of speed and sound for no reason other than he seemed to get a kick out of it. Didn’t he know this was dangerous bordering on madness? The fool.

It was 11:38 pm, pitch black outside the condensation-soaked window, not a single car on the road.

Nobody would find us if we toppled over.

We had had our dinner in Spokane in a funky, but empty restaurant inside a refurbished factory. The food had been wholesome and filling — ginormous in portion sizes, as one would expect in America. The plan had been to drive through Idaho and hit this sleepy motel town, St. Regis, in Montana. It was a supposed to be a two-hour drive, and it was late.

But we already had our hotel reservations, and could check in at anytime. There was nothing forcing us to reach any faster than we needed to.

After dinner, as soon as I had gotten into the car after dinner and hit the back seat, I passed out instantly despite the blaring music and turns being hit at breakneck speed. It wasn’t the Great Red Shark that Hunter Thompson and Raoul Duke had driven in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but our car seemed to be holding up. German engineering at its finest. Even though we were driving 40 miles over the recommended limit, the car felt incredibly well balanced. The Germans had built these cars to drive on the Autobahn after all. American roads must have felt like a bunny hill.

I pulled out my phone and opened Google Maps. Already on flight mode, now there was a roof over my head, no WIFI, a dense fog, and I was pretty sure we were in a no service zone. Bottom line: I had no fucking idea where we were. The boys up front looked like they were having a good time, laughing as they stared into the abyss in front of them, the car headlights brightening no more than ten feet ahead.

A memory popped into my head. It was a memory of another trip I had taken many moons ago, where a similar situation had almost led to our death at 3000m altitude. If I survived that, I can survive anything.

My pangs of nervousness ceased as quickly as they arrived, and I closed my eyes again. I must enjoy; a decision had already been made and nothing would change that.

Unexpectedly serenaded by the blaring progressive rock, I fell back into a rest.

We rolled into St. Regis just past midnight; 20 minutes faster than what Google had predicted. Even with the thick, cloud-like fog on the road blocking our visibility, there didn’t seem to be a spooky vibe in the air.

My brain —saturated by horror movies and media-led fear porn—had already jumped to the worst possible scenario. Small town in middle America, three brown guys driving in late at night, freezing temperatures, not a person in sight, you could hear a pin drop, all of which meant we were going to get brutally dismembered and buried—our body parts left in different corners of the state.

But of course, my over-enthusiastic imagination had gotten the better of me. We smoothly pulled up to the motel, no drifters to dodge on the way. The parking lot was filled with trucks twice the size of our two door BMW. We didn’t belong here; everything around us painted a certain picture. But here we were, too far into our journey to turn back.

The check in was uneventful, but by the state of the motel, it seemed like we were in for a rough night of sleep. We were pleasantly surprised by the room, however. For 100$ a night and the tattered state of the outsides, we were not expecting two double beds, fresh pressed sheets, and juicy feather pillows to greet us. I stripped down, changed and jumped straight in under the covers. I was out like a light.

***

We were up and out the door by 7 am the next morning. The fog had thinned out, and the first rays of sunlight broke through the clouds. We were almost there. Glacier National Park beckoned. The route up was to take us through some forests, state highways, and half the circumference of a lake, but it would have been impossible to predict just how beautiful this drive was about to be.

But breakfast and supplies first.

Famed for its huckleberry milkshakes, St. Regis was a pit stop of a town in Montana. Located at a fork between the winding state highways, and the one national highway that took you from East to West, the town was at the perfect location for wandering travellers to meet and have short-lived trysts in public bathrooms.

St. Regis had character to it, and perhaps also something more Lynchian to offer than what was on display on the surface, but we didn’t have time to go digging. And sadly, no romantic endeavours in the bathroom. We were here for the essentials – gas, goodies, and milkshakes – served and sold by some of the nicest people you might ever come across.

I had been in Montana all of five minutes and I was loving the feel of it already.

Fully juiced up on petrol and a good night’s sleep we took off down the first of highway of the day.

Barely two minutes out of town and we saw it, over there on the horizon coming closer, a huge, white, shadowy cloud. It was set to engulf as, sapping us of our first bit of sunshine of the day.

As we drove closer and through it, we realized it was steam from the river – a natural hot spring – so dense and powerful it took the shape of a cloud. I felt a shiver run through my body as we drove through this black hole. It felt cosmic, yet, strangely friendly.

Inside, it was warm and cosy. I imagined this is what living in an igloo would be like. It was its own little world hiding in plain sight from the one outside it. And we were the explorers in our metal tube glued to the screen of our phone, for documenting it was a must. It felt as though Einstein’s theory of relativity was in play, the world outside this cloudy spaceship was travelling at a speed faster than us.

And then in a flash, just as quickly as we had entered it, we were through it and out on the other side.

We were blinded by a flash of bright, mustard-like yellow. The sun was shining fiercely and to either side of us began vast, infinite hillocks. The leaves of the trees were now sporting their autumn line—rust, pale yellow, orange, and bits of green painting the landscape beside us. And what a scene it was. Everything seemed to carry on for days. This wasn’t the carefully crafted expertly engineered, concrete surface of the national highway anymore. We had now entered interstate territory and it couldn’t have been more different.

Completely contrary to the flat, unobstructed view of the horizon, we now saw ranches and hills vast and bumpy. Occasionally, placed perfectly on this vast terrain, a house sat—lonely, accompanied only by a tractor, a barn, a few horses grazing on top of the hills, a boundless sky behind it. Giant swathes of land, perfectly manicured, preserved, and left alone to live; this was the great American landscape of old. Montana, The Great Plains, sleepy towns, saloons, Native Americans on horseback warring with neighbouring tribes, and fighting hard against the settlers looking to expand. There was so much history here, so much to be seen and studied. You could feel it in the land and the air around you. A land so alien to the one I grew up in, a land that required you to be strong, rugged, known for its harsh winters that could trample anyone weak-willed.

There was something special about this place. Its proximity to nature perhaps, the philosophies of simple living, community caring, and self-reliance put into action for many a generation, and the special, give-and-take relationship that man and nature had built between themselves here, the American West had grabbed a hold of me.

Lost in thought, and in awe of the untouched, serene beauty around me, I hardly noticed that we had reached a lake. The long, winding, state-highway began circumventing a lake so big it could’ve been an ocean. To the other side of it (almost on the horizon) was yet another national forest. Perfectly drawn onto the sky were mountainous peaks, shadowy under the noon sun above it. The phone was out filming whatever I could see despite knowing that nothing could really capture the majesty of it all.

Our quest had progressed to its second day, and as we got closer to the West entrance of Glacier National Park, the tension in the car began to rise. It wasn’t an unbalanced, fractious atmosphere, but one created by pure child-like joy.

There was more to see, and more to do. We would find out soon enough just how calming the mountains could be.

Part 3 will be out soon. Check out Part 1 here.