I am back from a two week road-trip in western Montana with my sweetie, crossing the Continental Divide 8 times and slow wandering through towns with Pop. 1500. It was quite marvelous, and once the internet and cell-phone connections gave up, a voyage into the unknown. A dream of sorts, now that we are back in the land of three newspapers a day and all the e-opinion you can eat. Though of course, as Calderon de la Barca said centuries ago in La Vida Es Sueno, which is the dream and which reality? It was quiet and restful for us but once in a while I felt like asking a passing stranger: do you realize what is going on out there!?

Maybe the whole state is set up to keep all mention of war profiteering, civil liberties disappearing, soldiers dying, away from the ears and eyes of visitors and the residents are well in touch with events beyond the banks of the rivers and the rims of the valleys, I don’t know. Perhaps those of us who swim in the national news are deluding ourselves; perhaps if we made our livings gee-hawing cattle, fighting forest fires (25 reported on one day we were in the Bitterroot Valley), running three-river trips a day with knuckleheaded city-slickers we would nip less from the D.C. cup.

This is not to say that we care and they don’t. This wasn’t a tour to find such things out. Perhaps we were simply on the burrow tracks away from everyone’s daily concerns –checking out the bison on the National Preserve, the dippers in the St. Mary’s river, the glaciers grimly hanging on in the high Rockies. It was a fine trip and I hope to write more about it. There is something stabilizing, for me at least, to look at layers of rock, like blankets piled on top of one another, doubled over and broken into by yet other rocks, and to realize I am, with my own two eyes, looking at the results of events of 2,500,000,000 years ago. The whole animal kingdom was yet to be. Maybe we will survive this mess coming on us after all

Meanwhile, I keep pushing the blanket of vacation down from my much restored body and mind and aim to be fully attentive to the groaning buffet of bad news as soon as possible.

I will say that an idea for a mystery novel that had been barely warm before we left now is burbling up the percolation tube as a result of some research I did in Butte, Montana, home of one of my characters. It’s a novel that will be full of mysterious twists and turns, and lots of contemporary politics, if I can pull it off. Because of this on rushing compulsion to “see what happens” I suspect my daily blogging and sending out summaries will taper off from the past few years. Not to speak of desertion, but gotta go to work sometimes, you know…..