Our trip began on Wednesday September 5, 2001, two days after Labor Day. Our plan was to meet Paul and Jean Galburt in Missoula Montana. They arrived in Denver a couple of days ahead of us and drove up to Missoula in a rented Ford Excursion SUV. We had just finished a Blizzardgate square dancing weekend - square dancing in our garage with close friends and great dancers.
Our original plan was to tour Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks, possibly Pike's Peak, and other sundry places in Montana and Wyoming. We had been scheduled to fly home from Denver on Saturday the 15th, but we changed that to Friday the 14th so we'd be in town for Scott Morton and Cathleen Seiler's wedding on Saturday. After dropping us off at the Denver airport, Paul and Jean were to continue to southwestern Colorado to visit friends, including Paul's friend Jerry, who owns a ranch and saddle making company. They were scheduled to fly home on Wednesday the 19th. Little did we know when we began our "excursion" how our return plans would be altered, and how our little adventure would be dwarfed by the cataclysmic disaster at the World Trade Center. But blissfully, we began.
| Paul, Jean, Carol, and I share a love of a great discussion, an exchange of ideas, the opportunity to peer into someone else's mind and see the world from his perspective, to gain a little more insight. We had many of these on this trip. Since they don't necessarily follow the flow of this write-up, I will place them in chronological order in boxes like this. |
We flew to Missoula with a plane change in Minneapolis. On the flight to Missoula, we sat with a man from Raleigh who had graduated from North Carolina University. Well . . . what else could I do but strike up a conversation about college basketball in the sport's biggest hotbed. He was on his way with a couple friends to a fly-fishing trip in Montana.
Galburts picked us up in Missoula about 2:30pm, and we drove north along Route 93 to Kalispell. We passed through the Flathead Reservation and Lake Flathead, a huge lake that's 28 by 15 miles. The change in altitude was affecting my ears, a situation that would continue on-and-off for most of the trip. I was surprised by how brown and dried-out the grass was, a result of a two-year drought in the area. This same drought was mainly responsible for the forest fires which were currently being fought in the Northwest section of Glacier - they didn't affect our trip at all.
| Paul was reading a book
entitled The Death of Common Sense which he summarized for us
as we drove. The author's premise was that our laws started
getting specific about 1960 and took any discretionary power out of
the hands of law enforcement and judicial authorities
For example, there was a forest fire in California headed for a tract of 13 houses. The residents wanted to bulldoze a trench to thwart the fire, but the authorities wouldn't allow it because there were Kangaroo Rats living in the area to be plowed, and they were an endangered species. These bureaucrats didn't have any discretion to alter the laws, even in an emergency situation. |
We checked in to a motel in downtown Kalispell. Our rooms backed up to each other on a U, on the second floor with an outside entrance. I liked our room because it had some personality, not just a vanilla motel room. We walked up and down the main street checking out stores. One thing that surprised us, and continued to do so throughout our stay in Montana, was the prevalence of gambling casinos. They were all small, like little clothing stores, but what they lacked in size, they made up for in number. Man, they were everywhere.
Carol bought a purse with a shoulder strap in one store, and we spent a fair amount of time in a large clothing store (not a department store, those haven't hit Kalispell yet) which had a picture of itself hanging on the wall from 1904. Now that's permanency. Paul and I were fascinated with the cattle brands which covered the wall over a prodigious display of cowboy boots. We had a discussion with another patron about the abbreviation "Alta" which appeared on many of the brands. We finally surmised it represented "Alberta" - never before saw an abbreviation consisting of the first two and the last two letters of the word.
We ate supper at the King Buffet, a Chinese place, then just had to sample the Dairy Queen to verify that they were being true to the franchise. We, of course, consider ourselves experts in this field. We really didn't want to waste the time for this tasting, but duty called. They passed our inspection, as did all the DQ's on our trip.
Paul and I stopped in the office when we returned to the motel and I started asking questions of the woman proprietor. She said that many people would not drive Route 93 at night because drunken Indians have been known to force cars off the road - seems like the route's ok for the locals in daylight. I asked her who owned all those homes, some elegant, in the Flathead Reservation we passed through. Were non-Indians allowed to own property on a Reservation? She wasn't positive, but thought it likely that the owners were non-Indians. She explained that many of them have an "attitude", like non-Indians owed them something. I asked if she could tell an Indian from a white man by looking at him - after all these years of possible inter-breeding, maybe the distinct qualities of both have blended together. Not so, according to her.
She mentioned a town on the East side of Glacier called Browning and warned us not to be there after dark. Especially, she said not to stay there in a motel because likely your car will be gone in the morning. Whaaaat?? I thought. This is Montana, for gosh sakes, not the ghetto in New York or Chicago. Turns out that Browning is on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, and according to her, they're pretty mean. A bell went off in my head. I've read considerably about the West of the 19th Century, and now I remembered that the Blackfeet were the tribe of the Northern Plains most feared by the settlers, and by most other Indian tribes in the area. Wow, you'd think that a hundred years of civilization would modify the tendency to be aggressive and warlike? Guess not.
We retired to Galburt's room and talked for a couple of hours.
| I raised this question:
If a man hires a prostitute for oral sex, she completes the act, then
subsequently the man finds out the prostitute is really a Transvestite
(a man dressed like a woman), has this man in reality had a homosexual
experience?
In other words, how much does intention count? This was an act between two people of the same gender, but at the time of the act, the man in question thought his partner was of the opposite gender. Later at Scott's wedding, I posed this question to friends of ours, a Psychologist and a homosexual man. Both of them thought it was a homosexual experience, the deception of the prostitute didn't matter. Interesting, especially coming from those two particular backgrounds. |
| Paul and Jean had recently
attended a party given by a married couple who are close friends for
theirs. The male friend just returned from a fishing trip in Alaska with
several dozen pounds of salmon. So, what else to do but host a
Salmon Party, right?
The party was fun and a great culinary success. Paul and Jean did notice that, other than themselves and a few others, the guests broke into two groups, those interested in tennis and those interested in horses, a major interest of the hostess. The point was that people just seem to feel more comfortable with "their own". I had just heard an experienced reporter interviewed on a radio sports talk show, and he stated that he has always noticed in professional team's locker rooms that the team seems to segregate itself in to cliques of White, Black, and Hispanic players. For sure there's harmony on the team, the teammates like each other, but socially they just seem more content with "their own kind". This got me to thinking, just exactly what is "our own kind". I mean, those people at the party could have broken up into groups differentiated by gender, schooling, state of birth, height, book readers and non-book readers, color of eyes, nationalities, professions. In fact all sorts of classifications. Why did they choose tennis and horses? We all seem to be more comfortable at times with people like us, but like us in what regard? Maybe I'd be more comfortable in this party situation with people who share a common interest, like baseball or history, but a classification like height or professions would never occur to me. Why do some categories seem much more important to us than other classifications? Is there a hierarchy common to us all? Is this personal hierarchy in any way dependent on the particular situation in which we find ourselves? |
| I raised another point that's
been on my mind lately. Our society seems to have a prejudice
against people it classifies as "opinionated". From my
perspective, I enjoy people who have knowledge on a subject, general
knowledge to balance a specific event against, and the ability to
communicate their thoughts. On the other hand, there's a certain
negative stigma associated with people who are considered
"opinionated". Why do I seem to be so out-of-step with
society on this point?
Certainly their are people who are obnoxious about their opinions, and they're closed and narrow-minded about certain subjects. These people annoy me too. I'm not talking about them. But how do we distinguish between the kind I'm talking about and this later group? Paul thought perhaps there's a difference between "opinionated people" and those with "strong convictions". That's a thought, but I'm still not sure why the world seems to be turned off by anyone who has a strong conviction about anything, regardless of how that opinion is expressed. |
We retired to our room about 10:00. I feel asleep watching a quarterfinal match of the US Open tennis tournament between Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, a match which will probably go down as one of the greatest in history. Sampras won in four sets, each a tie-breaker, and no one broke serve in the entire match.
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