Coming down the slope from the Bozeman pass east to Livingston, Montana, we look around, imagining. Once a shallow, wide sea lay over the lands at these longitudes and latitudes, splitting what would millenia later become the North American continent. The shore line rose in boggy, peaty marshes. Sand and silt came drifting down from the mountains to the west and built into enormous block of sandstone, pressing pressing down, converting biology into coal. The coke ovens of the late 1890s and early 20th century are scattered in ruins over those fields, like abandoned ships collapsed on the ocean bottom.

It’s a fine way to start a vacation. Out of the airplane and a quick visit back 70 million years in time.

We turn and follow south on Montana 89 towards Yellowstone, Wyoming and stop for the night at Chico Hot Springs, 20 miles north of Gardiner. Chico, like hot springs all over the area, south to Old Faithful, are fed by furnaces below, but close to the surface in one of the most thermically active zones in the world. A blast that could send ash and death as far south as Mexico could happen any moment, as it did 640,000 years ago. But we loaf along, with others, breathing in the mountain air and watching the knuckles of the western mountains glow golden in the the sun-set sky, then fade to gray.

A band called Twang, cowboy hats astride gray heads, is serving up goblets of sound in the Chico Saloon. We dance every dance, getting more fluid and daring as the beer works its spell and the couple sitting next to us urges us on by example: a sort of two-stepping jitterbug with the occasional three step thrown in for show. The floor is dusted with corn-meal and we feel Fred and Ginger deep in our feet. The tenor knows every song from Frankie Lane to Johnny Cash and we mostly do, too.

Coming back up the hill to make love in an old red, refurbished caboose, raised on the rails still beneath it wheels, dreaming as it rocks with us, of hauling coal and gold on the Northern Pacific Line. The curtained windows, four along the southern side, stir slightly as the mountain cool displaces day time’s heat.

Sitting outside on the attached iron porch in the morning, looking northeast across a high green valley lifting into gently, millennially eroded hills, also green. Tree swallows flashing their white bellies, turning and flashing iridescent blues and greens. A house finch going on endlessly in its pink tinged burble about the pleasures awaiting his lady fair. A short eared owl swoops by, annoyed by the crunching of hiker’s feet up the fire road.

It’s good to be away and being away to enter into otherness and elseness. Strange but still familiar, reminding us we are much more than we think we are.