I first encountered the Big Sky country of the United States in 1975. When, with a starting point south of Boston, Massachusetts, I drove an old, dubious Ford Econoline van, with most of my worldly goods in it (a small load), across Montana on its way to a parking lot at the Anacortes terminal of Washington State Ferries, its battery dead, its alternator junk.

I remember being awestruck by the sight of puffy clouds in a haze-free blue sky, hanging so close, I swore I could almost touch them. Awestruck, that is, when the distilled anxiety that was me in those days could be distracted from the doubtfully sound car, or the doubtfully devoted girlfriend, or the dangerously doubtful state of our fresh-out-of-college finances.

Or the thought that the children which we were never to have would themselves graduate from college before we finally made it into Idaho. As naïve New Englanders who had hardly ever been west or south of New York, we were not prepared for the experience of crossing a state that could swallow Maine at a gulp and wonder what’s for breakfast and when the hell is it going to be served?

In 1975, Hotel Subaru was decades in the future, and I hadn’t yet mastered the necessary techniques. Not that my passenger would have permitted such a thing anyway. The demand was for a room, a shower and a bed. Not a bucket seat and a sponge at a rest stop. Even if the bucket seat was fully reclining. Trouble was, we were in a part of Montana where the task was not to find a motel. It was to find a habitation. Indeed, any sign of human life.

A couple of years previously, I had driven a windy Maine road, State Route 9, popularly known as The Airline, between Bangor and Calais. At night. Two hours. No other cars. No houses. No stores. No gas stations. Just me in an old 4-cylinder Pontiac with its gas gauge steadily dropping towards “E". This night in Montana was worse. Far worse.

We did eventually find lodging. The details are hazy. All that I distinctly recall was that it was after 2 AM, it was dark, and it was hard to tell which of us was more cross, the motelier, the girlfriend, or me. And that bright and early the next morning we were back on the road, making that final dash which ended with us being told “no, we couldn’t put our car on the ferry and leave the engine running" and “no, we couldn’t put our car on the ferry if we thought we weren’t going to get it started again." And the classes in the Friday Harbor Laboratories summer program started the very next day.

It was an inauspicious start to graduate school. There was worse to come. Not, I suppose, worse than, say, Iraq, or Darfur. At least Vietnam was off the radar by then. But still, there are days when I wonder how I survived. Or why.

Thirty-one years later, and I am in the Continental Divide basin of Wyoming, hundreds of miles south of Montana and going the opposite direction, trying to touch puffy clouds in a haze-free blue sky that are hanging just out of reach. There is no girl clamoring for creature comforts and a decent night’s sleep, indeed no other living things on Hotel Subaru but me, and a bunch of houseplants that I’ve forgotten to water.

Water would come the next day, in west central Nebraska, when Hotel Subaru caught up with a prairie thunderstorm, a hulking behemoth that spit lightning and rifts of black cloud overhead before finally releasing a lead curtain of rain that blotted out the cloud formation and then, like a mad wrestler, threw itself on the interstate, pinning its traffic and bringing it nearly to a standstill.

Unlike the puffy clouds in Wyoming, or all those years ago in Montana, the Nebraska thunderstorm was high and remote, like any I’d experienced in Ohio or Maine. Yet, until its rain curtain belatedly (and aggressively) preserved its modesty, I could see the whole extent of the naked storm, its edges to the left and to the right and straight ahead.

The view was astounding, for one who has lived among trees, or hills, or both. For these things block the long view, restrict the horizon – and the storm cloud that appears over that restricted horizon fills whatever sky space is left over, and therefore seems larger than it is. In the White Mountains of New Hampshire, thunderstorms are heard before they are seen, their thunderclaps rolling through the valleys before their heads pop over the crest of the intervening ridge and then dash across the hole in the ceiling left over from the mountaintops and take command.

For the same thundercloud that sweeps all before it in New England to appear as just another blemish on the Nebraska sky – well, with that sight it finally hit me, what Big Sky was all about. And I finally understood tree-huggers. They’re not environmental activists. They’re agoraphobes.

   - O Ceallaigh

Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.

All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

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