Road Trip Day 2: Clerks

Outside our motel in Drummond

Whew. I'm catching up on the road trip business as fast as I can so I can move on to actual life in NH. Sorry for the flurry of posts--soon I'll slow down.

Everybody in these Montana towns seems to know each other. The night before I saw the motel clerk chatting up the good old boys about trucks, and before we left Drummond that morning we stopped at a gas station where the clerk and the customers all seemed to know each other. I guess that happens in a town of 318 people (thanks Wikipedia) where the biggest thing that happens every year is a cattle meet.

Montana's mountains flattened out and we drove, drove, drove. Montana is BIG. I-90 stretches for 552 miles across the state (again, thanks Wikipedia) and for more than half of them there's not much to look at. We stopped in a town called Columbus to buy food, and felt like total out-of-towners when we got lost and bumped our Taurus and U-Haul trailer through tiny residential streets, searching for the grocery store. When we did find it, we rushed in to locate the bathroom and speedwalked a full circle around the store before realizing the bathroom was right next to the entrance. We bought our food and checked out. The clerk, an older woman, had a friendly chat with the woman in front of us about finances, the economy, and her job at the supermarket--they knew each other. When we got to the front of the line she stopped talking, ran our food through the laser and shoved it in bags, and wouldn't make eye contact. She only responded to us when I asked if I had to sign the receipt. At first I was puzzled--what had brought this on? There could be a number of things:

The rude clerk left me in a bad mood for the rest of the drive out of Montana. Were we really such obvious foreigners? And was it normal to treat foreigners with such disdain? Then I realized what had probably brought this on: Ashley's dress. The woman glared at it a few times. It's a red dress, very cute, not too flashy, but definitely out of place in Columbus, where most of the women (and all the shoppers in the IGA were women, many with kids) wore mom jeans and blousy shirts. I don't think the red, slightly low-cut dress went over well in the little town full of rural Montanans, kids, and churches.

It made me think about standards of taste. What is perfectly acceptable in Western Washington (Ashley wore the dress to her sister's wedding for God's sake) is viewed as too dressy, too revealing, too whatever, in other parts. It made me nervous for arriving in New Hampshire—I might have to relearn all these little social codes I'd never really thought about. I might piss people off without even realizing it. More thoughts on stuff like this as it comes.

Here's a lovely brochure from the Sky Motel in Drummond: