The Summer that time stood still--Part 4 - On the way home
Friday, May 25, 2007
The Reunion
I won't detail it here, but the reunion was most satisfactory and all told a good fraction of the 16 of us got to get together, although not all at the same place at the same time. I dropped Robbie off at the airport and started my journey back.
Rosebud County
The trip back was no more rushed than the trip out. There were a couple of memorable events that seem appropriate to tell here.
One can't help notice the cellphone commercials that talk about who has the best coverage. Did you ever have one of their young salesmen butthonole you on your way through a mall? Next time one does, ask him or her how their coverage is in Rosebud County MT. They probably don't know, but you can offer to them you have it on good authority that it is pretty much zero.
That is ok with me, as I have my ham radio. Works around the world with about as much power as a 100 watt light bulb.
So I am driving towards the end of a day through Rosebud county, and as I come up to a bridge over a wide creek (pronounced crick, if you don't already know), a substantial family of deer, including two rather young ones step out in front of me. I hit the brakes, and pretty much everything in the truck goes flying. Fortunately, they and I escaped any injury, but I did get to stop and take in a very magnificent sunset.
Sioux County
One of the hams I talked to several times lived in Colorado. He needed did have a need for Sioux County, North Dakota. A quick check of the map showed that this was a little out of the way, but what the heck.
It turns out that there isn't much general traffic to and from Souix County, North Dakota. So you need to make a detour to go explicitly there.
So even though it was late in the day, I thought I would help this fellow out. We would chat my Morse code from time to time, keeping him apprised of my location. Finally, I found the county and pulled off to the side. I had perfected the routine of finding an access road, even a short road used to access fields, and backed the truck into this road, facing the road.
This segment of Sioux county was a Reservation. As pickups came and went, one can only guess what they thought of the Suburban with a large array of antennas that made it effectively 14 feet tall parked alongside the road, engine running.
At the appointed hour, two stations came on and contact was successfully made, earning a large Thank You from my new friend from Colorado.
I had already made a motel reservation down the road before making the arrangements for Sioux County, so I called them (luckily finding a cell) to say that I would be a bit late. No problem. I had learned my lesson on US 2 coming in. It had been a Friday night and wanted to stop earlier, but I was told in Glasgow that on the Hi-line in the summer on a friday night, you better reserve ahead. I had to drive on, and managed to snag the very last Motel room in Malta. Ever notice how when you do crash at a motel that the next morning there are lots of interesting details around you that you didn't see? Not very pretty in this case.
So I am heading east from Sioux County on the interstate on a clear night, destination motel. In the east is the rising moon, and right next to it is a very bright star. As the hours and miles tick by (believe me, there were more than a few), the moon rises, but the position of that star relative to the moon was slowly changing. What I did not realize at the time and my friend Jim later pointed out that this star was actually Mars, and what I was seeing was a reasonably interesting astronomical event. Given this information, you could probably remind me of what the exact date was.
At some point, I stop in a rest area and put my head back for a good half hour and snooze.
I get to the motel about 5 am, finding that my name was scratched, but they had rooms anyway. So I guess it was the next day. Too tired to figure that out.
Back home
Having sampled a bit of timelessness, I managed to keep up the tradition for the rest of the summer, and a bit of next. It turns out that there is a 75-acre grassland Savanna called Middlefork just a few miles from my home. There is a four mile gravel trail suitable for bikes and hiking that runs through the middle of this, and is very quiet. This is also a good place to loose track of time.