A summary from Cheyenne WY

I haven't updated in months, and after this post I will be working in Glacier again, so this blog is perpetually on Snooze. Finally on the epic road trip with The Mom, aka Badger.
When we pulled on to the interstate to leave my hometown in VA, I flung my middle finger high up out the window and hit the gas hard.



So much driving.. Back roads in Kansas and Nebraska, checking out Oregon Trail sites of interest like Alcove Spring, California Hill...
Train trip from Denver to Sacramento where Dad surprised me by showing up; we three rented a car and went to Truckee and Yosemite - two nights and then back to Denver for us, back to TX for Dad.
Drove here to Cheyenne last night and we have decided to take Mother's Day off and relax, stay here tonight too.

Been on the road since May 2 and haven't spent the night in the same place twice since, so we are WHUPPED.

Coming soon: A trip to the Guernsey Ruts and to Register Cliff; a night in Buffalo WY, a trip to the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Miles City next, then I will drop off Badger in Missoula on Friday and will head up to see Matt before going to check in at East Glacier next Saturday.

WHEE!

I made it!
I didn't die back east!
I will stay west of the Mississippi for the rest of my days, I hope!

<3

Little darlin, it's been a long cold lonely winter!

...and with another several weeks to go of winter proper, The Beatles have resurrected my juju.

As any introspective existential gal should, I've been up to my eyeballs in considering what I could be learning from these months of stagnation in my hometown.

Monthly I've dipped beneath the frozen surface of the wintry world and dropped a few dozen feet into the pit of lolling despair, and last night it happened again. I have old friends here but whenever I move away, they never stay in touch. Out of sight, out of mind, I guess - so really there's nothing on the surface that I can get out of being here that will be lasting.

So I slip beneath the surface. Get down in there. Shimmy into it. Wiggle into the sand. Let the tide come over. Feel it cracking above me as I try to move.

I was just about to leave my cell phone charging and on silent downstairs last night, but right before I went to bed I decided to take it with me. After an hour's sob-fest with my mother, I was reminded that she can be perfectly stoic and can take my sullenness in graceful stride. She helped, which was unexpected. We are so much alike - I didn't even want to let her in on how sad I've been being stuck here and broke all the time, because I didn't want to bring her down after all she's done to help me.

Anyway.

My cell phone rang around 4AM - Whiskers Welch! Montana Matt! Calling from Portland with a buzz and a case of missing-the-Beth!

We talked for about an hour and reminisced about last summer and both of us counting down to almost the minutes we have to wait until our return to the St Mary Valley.

Rediscovering my love for The Beatles on the way to town today, it's been decided that Here Comes The Sun will be my anthem for the moment I crest over and into the valley from Duck Lake Rd upon returning in May. The mountains will return to view and I will probably sob and sob and kiss the ground, maybe even roll around on it before I go to check in with GPI for this coming season.

Hwy 89 at Going-to-the-Sun Road will be my address once again. Here Comes The Sun is an appropriate return song for this gal.

Eleven weeks and 5 days till I leave.
Thirteen weeks and 6 days till I check in.
Fourteen weeks tomorrow will be my first shift.

...and in 33 weeks, I'll still be there.


Whew.

I can doooooo thiiiiiiis.

everything sucked yesterday

I have learned a lot, dear bloggery!
Like, that I can still feel feelings! And that I can fall in love and that my fabulous and ferocious heart is still intact enough to be busted up! And that I was right in my superstitious decision to swear off the Pisces boys some years ago! I won't screw up that promise anymore, lord knows, and I don't give a single F regarding how adolescent that might sound.

He was about to get hired with me and we were making plans to go out west in four months. Travel, music, creativity, all the time this hipstery space giraffe watching over us. People we met in the beginning, they just assumed we were together. He says one night, "I'm falling in love with you," and I freak out and spaz for weeks because he lives with girl-of-three-years. Says it's flat-lining, he's not inspired anymore. Says I enrich his life.

Then, eh, he goes [essentially] 'Nevermind'.

There are more cheap shots I could take than all the rail whiskeys at the bar right now.

I am mad as hell. The worst part about it is that it wasn't my idea. It was his idea! It was a sticky situation from the beginning. And, yes, I have learned. Looking back it's funny that I didn't figure it out from the get-go. How could I expect him to be an honest person when everything about what he felt about me was indicative of dishonesty within his life?

It's this fucking small town, man. There's nowhere to escape, all our people are at all the same places all the time. I can't vanish.

I didn't gorge on ice cream and watch sex and the city marathons.

I woke at 4:40am, rose at 5:45, wrote till past sunup, and took a sick day.

If there's anything this gal can do, it's bounce back with a buoyant brilliance. Seeking shelter at a cafe in Harrisonburg where no one knows who I am.

mine one won 3rd place for ACC's annual collection!

I see my generation

in need of identification.

We are pioneers

directionless,

and without destination.

Our world is a snow-globe:

Unnaturally compact.

We look in, are cozily detached.

Our frontier is mental.

We take our love inside,

where we take our meds.

There's an App for this,

there's a pill for that.

I am too new

to feel so old.

I want to know a world

without excess.

Diagnosis: Blindness,

our eyes trained to screens

instead of to each other,

our faces illuminated

by laptops

instead of by

the brilliance of compassion.

Keep 'Being Back In Staunton' Weird.

Here's an aerial image of my hometown. It's on the list among Durango, CO as one of the top twenty small towns in America. So it goes.. 

Went to the usual bar downtown with a book the other day.

Girl from my high school graduating class was at the bar with her boyfriend of a few years. I’m sure we recognized each other in a flash, and both decided to ignore it. 

She was being shrill, loud, and at least seemed fake when she saw another alum from the class of ’03. After the ‘hello’s and ‘You-look-so-good!’s, the girl from my class started out on a rant about how lame and weird her [our!] class had been. She went on about how our class just wanted to get through high school and sell drugs, and how most had been to jail. Haha! Then she raved about the woes of adulthood and missing the freedom of being a kid.

I was sitting there in grungy garb reading the memoir of Gail Caldwell, a woman who dropped out of college and traveled and spent a night in jail… and she, this drop-out author, she won a Pulitzer prize.

I’m a literate drop-out jailbird nomad, and I’ll probably never win a Pulitzer, but I’ll also never be an accountant and I'll never stop examining my life.

At this rate I’ll also never have a boyfriend-of-three-years… but my patchwork romance quilt is forever brightly colored with the very real love I hold to myself for a small handful of people, TX to CA to MT.. even for Austin’s M.P., because I got to see him through the gauze of his triple-Aries confidence. I knew I saw him, and so did he, and that’s a secret that will remain unstated between us forever probably.

I hope that girl from my class is happy in her world. Listening to her judge our class (and taking it personally), and just being around the judgmental culture borne of Valley boredom… I hope it doesn’t turn me into another gossipy who’d-you-see-them-with? kind of girl.

When someone at the other night asked what my goals in life were, what I want to do, I explained how I’m only concerned with going back to MT next summer. I don’t have any goals beyond that. I just want to live a happy life, and so far so good.

PS – How do the birds know how to quit chirping, all at once? In flight, how do they move in unison? They’re the epitome of a collective consciousness, and proof that everything is one, and that we can work together to benefit the whole.

Did that just happen?

Here I perch, at a smoking bar in my hometown. Virginia again. The last time I posted was from VA.

I have come back from a summer in Glacier Park.

How can such a season be summarized?

A too-close encounter with two galloping Grizzlies...
an adolescent moose crashing through the brush in front of me...
black bear with a cub on an afternoon stroll behind my cabin.

Bonfires, beers, a ride in the bed of someone's truck after midnight coming home from one of the only bars out in the plains on the eastern side of the Divide. 40 degrees, wrapped in a blanket.

First cliff-jumping experience while floating down the Middle Fork of the Flathead River. Sleeping in a snuggle-pile in the back of a friend's Jeep, crossing Going-to-the-Sun Road after midnight.

A mountain lion 50 feet away from me as I went to work in the eerie dark of 5AM.

Forcing myself to wade out and dip under the water of Iceberg Lake, the sense of my capillaries seizing and my lungs seemingly collapsing in the cold.

A couple good-hearted and easygoing love interests.

A few nights drunk and thumping down the hill in the darkness to my place on the bear trail. Such quiet nights - thickly quiet, like you could hear the wilderness watching you. I'd reach my door, place the key in to unlock it, and breathe a sigh of relief.

The Wind.

Twice in the middle of the night, the wind was wild enough to blow my locked door wide open and wake me up.

Granite Park Chalet.
Staying there overnight on a walk from Logan Pass to Swiftcurrent was the realization of a dream.


I arrived in MT too timid of the wild to go 15 yards into the woods.
I needed to fix that, and I did.

I learned a lot about the wilderness of the northern Rockies, and about the wilderness of my heart.

The people I met became my family, in an undefinable way.

"I'm going to Kalispell today, do you need anything?"

I became familiar with Single Shot and East Flat Top, knew their ways, and knew them to be coy on the days of low-flying clouds.

Tourists' comments: "We've been here five days and haven't seen ANY animals!"
"When do they let the goats out?"
"Is there a car wash around here?"

I am now 'home', in Virginia, and this past summer feels like a dream.

Rick Bass wrote in 'Winter' of north-western MT, that, It takes a long time to feel like you belong here.. but once you do, you don't really belong anywhere else.

I got a phone call last night from one of my best friends from this summer. He's a Montanan (lucky!) and mentioned that he was outside of a bar in Whitefish. From my place here in VA, I was melancholy to realize how far I am from that place. . .
. . . but I'll be back.

2013, I'll be back.

Friiiday morning at niiiine o'clock, she is far away...

Greetings from VIRGINIA!
Here I perch in my HOME-freakin-TOWN, feeling weird. Just about everyone here is white, there's no Cap-Metro, no Spider House, no Pride of Barbados bicicleta to ride around... just my beloved momma's car and a week for some much-needed R&R after the insanity of packing, storing, moving, flying, waiting, driving... Uff'da.

On Eastern time, y'all, and in a week and some change I'll be on mountain time. Montana time! Oh golly oh gee, once I'm out there this little town will seem gigantic.

God, seriously though, walking the couple-dozen blocks to downtown from where The Mom works today, I just felt so weird. Some kind of drug you can't take unless you've had the time to grow up in one place and come out of it in one piece. Mercy: Lord have it.

There's not enough Stereolab in the world to cover how it feels coming back here. I've got a grip on my own li'l interior love nest but woof, hello SVA, how are you.... white and weird, mkay.

Badger and I board the train next Friday. Whew.

Mom asked me last night once we'd settled at her house, "So does it feel just like coming home?"
I paused for a second with a little freak-out internal and realized and said, "I've lived in Austin for 5 of the last 6 years. I've just left home. So, no."             ...and 'tis true, it doesn't feel like home anymore. It feels weird.

Keep Austin weird? Um, otay. Keepin' up the weirdness outside of Austin? No prob y'all.