Looking West

We'd already decided to spend at least the month of June in Montana, written our Hamilton MT friends, booked a little house on South Third St. there and found a house sitter here, when I attended an April concert in St Louis' historic Bellefontaine Cemetery (www.bellefontainecemetery.org).  Alex and friends had been asked to play some lively Baroque pieces in the renovated chapel. And afterward, while he and the others finished talking with guests and packing up instruments, I decided to drive around the handsome old arboretum.

With map in hand, I found myself in the vicinity of the grave of William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame. He'd once made a trip from St. Louis to Montana! I decided to check him out.


It turned out to be an emotional visit.  Clark's handsome face in a bronze bust looked so openly, optimistically westward that it broke my heart to think about his difficulties along the way. Navigating up the troublesome Missouri River in 1804 with heat, injuries, insects, plus the exhaustion of fighting a current or pulling boats from land by rope! Such an experience is so foreign to me, sitting in my air-conditioned car, navigating by Google maps or iPhone, listening to satellite radio and drinking the latest latte. But that's essentially the way that Alex and I will do it.


We leave on Friday!! Did I mention we're driving to Montana? Starting Friday!!! So exciting. We've packed up the eight-year-old Subaru with fishing gear and car-camping tent, air mattress, Coleman stove, folding chairs and other provisions and are luxing our way west. Full disclosure: We've booked nice rooms along the way -- most wonderfully at the renovated railroad hotel north of Yellowstone (www.gallatingatewayinn.com). And, we'll stay two nights with friends in Denver.  But once headquartered in Hamilton, we'll take a few days here and there to car camp in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness area (www.npr.org/programs/re/archivesdate/2004/sep/selway/), which the late, great Doris Milner (mother of Alex's childhood MT buddies) successfully petitioned Congress to protect!! We hope it's still as beautiful as our last camp there, way back in 1993.


(A footnote on Clark: I shouldn't romanticize him too much. He was of a Southern slave-owning family and brought a slave named York along with him on the historic trek. York provided many services for the entire crew, not the least of which was distracting and entertaining not-so-friendly native tribes and collecting many wild greens to supplement a mostly meat diet.  "Arriving back to St. Louis, Missouri, on September 23, 1806," says http://lewisandclarktrail.com/york.htm, "York asked Clark to grant him his freedom as payment for his services which was denied.")