June 11, 2010 – Anaconda, Montana
Idaho became the twenty-fifth and final State in our US visit when we said goodbye to Wyoming, Yogi and Boo-Boo following our grizzly Yellowstone experience. We crisscrossed back into Montana, where our American exploration began last October, and coasted into the Bozeman Wal-Mart parking lot.
Wal-Mart Supercentres are now ubiquitous throughout the US. In addition to selling the vast majority of China’s plastic exports, Wal-Mart now also provides feedlot-style groceries to the masses. In the morning we decamped — last out as usual — after stocking up on Supercentre pulpy chicken.
We jumped on the I90 bound for Anaconda, Montana; home to the Jack Nicklaus designed Old Works Golf Course. We played two rounds at this fabulous layout that features black-sand bunkers constructed on the remains of a long-abandoned copper smelter’s slagheap.
Our two days golfing in the sun more than compensated for our one night at Billy’s Blue Sky RV Park and Sewage Disposal Station “in the heart of Anaconda country”. More like the bowels I’d say.
A dummy manned Billy’s front desk…literally. Billy evidently passed on to the great honey wagon in the sky some years back, leaving a mannequin to oversee his campground and sewage empire. A tin can served as the till.
I dutifully inserted my sixteen bucks in the former tomato soup container and, as directed by the placard hanging from the dummy’s neck, placed a plastic bucket over top the electrical connection at our chosen site to demonstrate to the world that the spot was now reserved.
It was a lovely sunny spring day at the Old Works. The $29 green fee was one of those sweet deals that leave you wondering how in hell they could ever charge two hundred and fifty bucks for a round of golf in Mexico.
We were paired with a couple of elderly hacks, Jim and Carol from Great Falls, whose golf skills and general etiquette reminded us of babysitting a couple of eight-year-olds at mini golf. Jim had apparently been inadvertently issued a golf cart driver’s license without passing the requisite test but to his credit was able to avoid driving into all but two of the water hazards.
Upon our return from golf we were surprised to find that our site had been usurped. I went in to have a word with the mannequin about this breach of park ethics and was surprised to find the real Billy alive and well, feet up on the front desk, expertly employing a toothpick to extract a chunk of corn-fed chicken from his molars.
I tried to remain calm when explaining my disappointment that our spot had been given up to an overweight tenter from Colorado.
“I paid my money precisely as instructed. It’s in the soup can,” I complained. “And did you not see the ‘reserved’ bucket over the electrical outlet?”
“Oh, I seen it all right, but anybody could have put that there” he replied, looking vaguely at the mannequin.
We ended up camped next to some of Billy’s permanent residents who, if they had stayed in school another decade or two, might have eventually graduated from the sixth grade. PhDs in philosophy they were not. But that didn’t stop them from expounding to the world at large on how things worked.
Their trailer window was open, the Coors and cigarette butts were (respectively) flowing and flying freely and we were treated to an uninterrupted high-volume debate about the ongoing success of the woman’s progeny:
“Mary Joe just don’t respect what I give her,” declared the woman.
“Well she better not sass me,” said the man. “If that girl crosses me I’ll whop her upside the head. I don’t care if she is 34 and your kin.”
Our female neighbor interjected cleverly, “She ain’t no 34. She was borned in 1986 so that makes her… now let’s see. ’86… that’s one. In ’87 she’d ‘a been two…” Soon we could hear the sound of socks being removed as she labored to complete this complex mathematical task.
“She is 34,” announced the woman in due course.
“No shit Sherlock,” said he.
The woman offered the following diplomatic retort, worthy of Nietzsche or Schopenhauer at the top of their existentialist game: “Why don’t you go fuck yourself Ralph?”
This erudite conversation continued more or less in the same fashion for the next couple of hours until they ran out of beer and smokes, eventually heading over to a neighbor’s — out of hearing range thank Christ — to re-stock supplies.
I suppose Canadians as a whole aren’t a lot better. The crowd we hang around with up north generally out-IQ’s the residents of Billy’s by a point or two but I shouldn’t be too glib in my assumption regarding the superiority of the average Canuck’s cranial capacity.
In the morning — inadvertently failing to bid our philosopher neighbors adieu and bon chance with their doctoral finals — we began the last leg of our spring trip, spending our last night Camping America at an RV park in Great Falls before crossing the border into Canada at the point US I15 becomes Alberta’s Hwy 4.
Every couple has the same nervous discussion as they prepare to cross the border: “Shall we declare the jewelry and the rum?” “I think our max is $500 each but we’d better put down an odd number like $472.84 so they won’t be suspicious.” Even if you didn’t buy anything and have nothing to declare one writes down $126.70 — or some such number — to preempt a potential strip search.
In our case the Canadian border guard was half-asleep with boredom and waived us through with only a few lame inquiries. Damn. All of that rehearsal and scheming for naught.
“The Milk River Project” is not a water diversion scheme designed to bring irrigation to tens of thousands of parched acres in southern Alberta. It is much bigger than that. It is Raymond and Yvette Baril’s attempt — now in its fourth season of full-time occupation — to build a house from foundation to finishing.
I pledged when we left Canada that I would never again work at the pleasure of others. Fifteen minutes after crossing the border my vow was broken. We were slaving away in my brother-in-law’s backyard hauling eighty-pound Allen block, loading and dumping wheelbarrows full of gravel. But even our half-day of well-intentioned labour put barely a dent in their landscaping needs.
Our last venture before pulling into our Red Deer driveway late on a Saturday night was a final fishing/knitting outing on the Bow River at the Carseland crossing southeast of Calgary. Tired of running from the law as “the fugitive fisherman” we stopped in Lethbridge where I actually acquired an Alberta angling license.
Big mistake. My perfect (but highly unlawful) success rate trolling the waters of America came to an abrupt halt. I think there’s a moral here but I can’t for the life of me think what it might be.
Gerry & Florence
