Dealing with infection, the U.S. Open, and the end of a sizzling summer, my energy has been minus. I tried to learn more about my new digital camera, but mastering that will be a large accomplishment, or I now would be posting pictures with these entries.
To continue the trip with my grandparents and mother, I should note that motels then weren't at all like modern franchises but usually mom-and-pop affairs with separate small cabins, huts, often with cooking facilities, often with only the bathroom a room unto itself. I was surprised--happily--to discover one of these on the shore of Lake Superior when I made a Minnesota trip in the 1980s, because in my last years of traveling I discovered that families were taking over "worn-out" franchise structures, the reverse of my earlier years. Sometimes in small towns, these separate cabins can still be seen; some are even still in use but generally rented out by the month for construction workers and the like. I know Plainview still has a set at the east end of town. I always made a point of looking for these old-fashioned remnants when I was traveling, much cheaper than Holiday Inn or Best Western, perhaps not modern, but I didn't care as long as they were clean and had air-conditioning of some sort besides open windows.
I might interject here that anyone who sees the 1934 winner of five Oscars, It Happened One Night, with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, will see precisely what I'm talking about, with its one-room motels and shared outdoor toilet/shower facilities. I just recently rented it through Netflix and was disappointed in this famous comedy, which, in the plotline, centers on a rich spoiled young heiress who smokes too much, is egotistically accustomed to ordering everyone else around, and a journalist who sees a big story in her attempt to run away from her controlling father--too familiar a modern headline for me to comment on further.
I should also note that traveling with Grampa was like traveling with Dad decades later--well, not quite as bad, because Grampa at least recognized different time zones whereas Dad never changed his watch and we were thus always on Center time, very awkward when we were two time zones west in Page, Arizona, and he's upset because it's 7:00 a.m. already and I'm still not up--when it was merely 5:00 a.m. there with everyone else still soundly sleeping. I suppose my grandparents were in a sense accustomed to time zone changes because the boundary between Central and Mountain Time Zones ran down the middle of Long Pine's Main Street (Nebraska). Good family friends, some of the Peacocks, lived there, and it was always a big topic for us when we visited out there, with the town split by an hour's difference.
So, maintaining farm time, we rolled out early in the morning and, as I noted, rarely had breakfast in a cafe but ate along the roadside after an hour or two traveling at a convenient, preferably scenic spot. We also always stopped at every historical sign pullout--the Peters family loved history--and Gram had decided we should see all the state capitols we could, though I don't remember our detouring to see Pierre. It was the only reason we went on to Helena and came back through Cheyenne and swung way around by Lincoln, as that decision guided us.
After leaving Aunt Ella's, we headed into Montana on the way to Uncle Forrest's at Deer Lodge. Looking at my atlas, I'm surprised, because the highway from Belle Fourche to Billings goes past Custer's Last Stand/Battle of the Little Bighorn, where several decades later I was to spend a whole day and at least ten rolls of film. But I don't remember anything about it--a slight detour would've taken us to Devil's Tower too--only Pompey's Pillar, which means we came into Billings from the northeast. Pompey's Pillar, named by Captain William Clark for Sacajewea's little son, whom he had nicknamed Pompy, "Little Chief" in Shoshone, is a circular butte on which Captain Clark inscribed his name in 1806, now protected and a national landmark on the Lewis & Clark Trail. It obviously made a deep impression because it's the only one I remember of all the historical sites outside the Black Hills and Yellowstone.
We stayed in Billings overnight, at that time probably not Montana's largest city but certainly its smelliest. The pervasive stench of natural gas from its refineries gave us headaches and a poor night of sleeping. The only other place I can remember being as unpleasantly malodorous was Artesia on one of my New Mexico trips decades later, also a town of refineries. Billings since has sprawled far beyond that childhood memory and its shallow bowl and has no odors other than the usual city ones of 100,000 population.
Oddly, I remember nothing of my first experience of true mountains; having been to Montana so many times since, covering the whole state, must have overwhelmed any memories I had. Certainly we all would have been awestruck with Montana's rugged beauty, as I have been every trip since, and we surely saw some of the sights, probably the merging of the three rivers--Madison, Gallatin, and Jefferson--forming the Missouri at Three Forks. I do recall Butte as being an up-and-down place and viewing its great Anaconda open-pit copper mine and the other mining ecological disasters we didn't think about back then. And I am still struck by the paucity of photos, none at all from Montana.
It seems we arrived in Deer Lodge in the dark, for I remember its being like arriving at Great Grampa Koftan's residence in Clarence, very dark, scary, with only kerosene lamps. Uncle Forrest LeRoy Peters was the oldest of Edward LeRoy and Mary Jane Maher Peters, born in 1882. Glen Elmo was born in 1884, Nellie M. in 1888, Myrtle Ida in 1891, and Fern Effie Adelaide in 1895. The oldest was also considered the family black sheep and certainly left home early to make his own way, working for the railroad in Montana. We have photos of him, strong-featured, good-looking, as muscular as Uncle Glen was slight, with jaunty hats, bold jaw forward, one group photo at some kind of tent/work camp, as well as two handsome early black-and-white postcards. (But in those years family photos were also in postcard format.) One photo has "You see I still retain my girlish beauty Haw! Haw! F." One postcard looks across the Kootenai River into Libby, Montana, with "This is a picture of Mane [sic] St I marked X on the Depot roof," and another of beautiful Kootenai Falls has "This is Kootenai falls 12 miles from Libby we were there twice last summer [sic]." (We also have photos of him when he visited his baby sister at the Bloomfield farm.) At some point he was married to a pretty woman Celinda/Linda; we have duplicate wedding (? )photos.
I might add that, were it not one of our most infamous ecological disasters from its asbestos mining and resultant cancer cases, Libby would be the Montana town I would love to live in (so I had to settle for Bozeman or Missoula in my dreams). And Kootenai Falls is so spectacularly gorgeous, I used my photo of it for a Christmas letter.
I suspect Uncle Forrest was a state penitentiary guard when we were there, because that was one of Deer Lodge's major institutions, and I know he was a prison guard in his later years. We talked more than toured the place, staying at his house. On one of my last Montana trips, I deliberately scheduled myself to stay there in memory of Uncle Forrest--and recognized nothing, not the long valley meadow it sits on between mountain ranges, a large mountain just to the west, not the old penitentiary, now a museum along the main highway, and the town seemed small. Its name is from the Indian for "lodge of the white-tailed deer" and the French trappers' "La Loge Chevreuils."
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