December 4, 2007
Tuesday

 

 A Blue True Dream of Sky Near Lodge Grass, Montana
December 4, 2007

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky . . .
                   — E. E. Cummings, 1894-1962
                       American poet

People back home keep asking me about the weather. Evidently places west and east of where I am have seen some severe stuff, and there is snow expected tonight in the higher elevations of the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana. But it was 63º early this afternoon when I stopped to take the picture above on the area of the reservation near Lodge Grass. The reservation, it should be noted, comprises 3500 square miles, so I suppose there could be several different weather systems going on.

I was in Montana this morning because, like Wyoming, it’s there. The Montana border is not far from Sheridan, and I wanted to be able to say I had been to Montana. I set my GPS for Lame Deer, about 80 miles away.

I got only as far as Lodge Grass, half way between Sheridan and the Custer battlefield. I’d been on the road for an hour and a half, and the GPS said I had an hour to go. I knew that when I got to the battlefield I’d want to walk around, see what there is to see. An hour for that, and then two and a half hours back — that’s a lot of gallivanting when you have to prepare for a reading in the evening.

The exits on I-90 through northern Wyoming and Montana are quite far apart. Most of the land I traversed today was part of the Crow Indian Reservation. The towns on a reservation are tiny. Lodge Grass has a population of 500, and most of them were in the front yard of the Crow Indian Baptist Church getting ready for a funeral this morning when I got off the highway in search of a bathroom. I obtained that hospitality at the IGA just across the railroad tracks from the church, even though there was a sign on the door that said “Bathrooms Closed to the Public.” “Don’t pay any attention to that,” said the woman at the customer service desk. I’d asked her where else in town a public bathroom might be, since the highway sign had promised “services” (including lodging) at Lodge Grass.

I bought some crackers at the IGA and ate them in the little park between the store parking lot and the railroad tracks. And then I headed back to Sheridan. I had Montana Public Radio on in the car, and I rode back to Wyoming on Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. I lost that signal when I crossed into Wyoming and switched to a local station that gave me blue grass versions of some familiar Christmas songs. It’s almost escaped my attention that Santa Claus is coming to town.

Before I went back up to Jentel to get ready for the evening’s festivities, I made that return trip to Dan’s Western Wear, for the very thing I needed to stand at a lectern in a community library in Wyoming, to read my fiction out loud:

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