Road Trip Day 2: Biker Gangs

We just happened to be driving through South Dakota near the beginning of the 69th annual Sturgis Motorcyle Rally, an event that draws more than half a million Harley Davidson owners to a little town in western South Dakota. Harleys blew past us in the fast lane all day, riding in groups or by themselves, towing motorcycle trailers or flashing American flags.

As we approached Spearfish, where we planned to stop for the night, Harleys passed us in droves. They swarmed off I-90 to the fast food restaurants and bars. We ate dinner at Arby's and looked for a motel with vacancies, but no luck. It was almost dark, and I didn't want to drive the trailer at night, but we had no choice. We continued on past Sturgis to Rapid City, where the hotels were also full of Harley riders. Eventually we found a room (smoking, ugh) in a Days Inn I'm pretty sure was occupied exclusively by bikers. When I went out to get my clothes from the car, a big drunken group of them stumbled down the stairs from the second floor.

So Sturgis made our evening a pain, and we were both sick to death of seeing bikers and their bikes—especially when two of them set up camp directly outside our window in starred-and-striped folding chairs to chain smoke and talk bikes—but I liked the idea of it. I liked that without corporate sponsorship, an event can unify a culture like that. In the last few years, Sturgis's rally has drawn between 500,000 and 750,000 bikers. They catch up, carouse, compete in races and events, and generally have a great time. It's kind of a grass-roots American culture thing that doesn't happen that often anymore, and I'm glad I got to see a little bit of it.

Road Trip Day 2: Fellow Washingtonians

I-90. Love it or leave it.

In Wyoming, we pulled off the freeway to gas up and drove past a couple of hippies, a man and a woman, walking into town. He wore long hair and a guitar thrown over his back, she was in a skirt, dreads, and a Grateful Dead tee shirt. When we saw their nalgenes, we knew they were from Washington.

Nobody carries nalgenes around outside of Western Washington (and maybe parts of California). As we proceeded further and further west, we got weirder and weirder looks for filling our water bottles at soda dispensers and water fountains. In the New Hampshire welcome center, a man actually stared at me as I filled my nalgene from the tap. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

The woman smiled at me as she filled her nalgene at the soda fountain in the gas station convenience store, and I didn't see them again until Ashley and I were ready to pull out. Then the woman, sitting in the shade of the convenience store's awning, called out, “Hey, which way are you guys going? West?”

“No, sorry, we're going east.”

“Oh, I saw the Washington plates and thought you were going home.”

“Sorry, we're headed for New Hampshire.”

We said goodbye and got on the road. “I wish we could just turn around and let those hippies sit on top of our trailer, all the way back to Washington,” Ashley said.

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:

Road Trip Day 1: Montana at night

Montana was big, beautiful, empty, and, on a Saturday night, full of highway patrol. I saw at least one every mile. One followed me for ten miles and made me nervous, even though I knew I wasn't speeding (damn trailer slowing me down) or doing anything illegal. I pulled into a gas station and he followed me there too. We nodded at each other as we pumped our gas. Lightning flickered over the hills—Montana is gorgeous.

Also poor. Pulled up alongside the gas station was an RV with a table out front. A woman ducked in and out of the motor home and her children milled around the table. The cop walked over to them and asked, “What are you guys selling today?”

“Mugs,” said the boy.

The girl yelled, “Tee shirts!”

“Great. Where do you guys live?”

“Over there,” one of them said, and pointed up between two hills. “We're going home soon.”

The cop and I were the only people at the gas station, and I hadn't seen a single car pull off the interstate to investigate the little mountain town—they couldn't have been getting much business.

We drove to Drummond, Montana and stayed in the Sky Motel, which looked sketchy at first glance. It was seedy, the upstairs rooms could only be accessed by walking through the front office and up a tiny flight of stairs, and there were three good ol' boys out front talking trucks with the counter girl. There was some confusion among the staff when I tried to rent a room, and the counter girl—who they all called Booger—got really mad and said “Shee-it” under her breath. The room was great, Clementine was glad to be out of the car, and we were glad to get some sleep. If you're ever passing through Drummond, MT, I recommend the Sky Motel. Day two, with rude grocery store clerks and thousands of Harley Davidsons, is coming soon!

Road Trip Day 1: Your cat has died of dysentery

On the first day of the drive from Seattle to New Hampshire, there was a moment in Eastern Washington where I thought that this must be what hell feels like. Ashley was asleep, the iPod was playing some tired David Bowie song I'd heard a million times before, and the air was so hot it brought up those weird mirages on the concrete. For a solid twenty minutes I felt like a zombie. This is what hell feels like.

I wasn't the only overheated one. We stopped at a gas station Subway and ate sandwiches in the shade of the building (near a sign that read the time and the temp—107 degrees!). Our cat, Clementine, was in her carrier, acting kind of drunk and weird. Her nose had white flecks all over it and she was rolling around over and over again. She had pushed her towel all the way to the back and was lying on the bare plastic. We gave her an ice cube and moved on.

In an hour or so, we noticed her panting. We didn't get a picture of a cat panting, but it looks a lot like this:

Now imagine that but with the cuteness replaced by panic and fatigue, and you have a pretty good idea of what our cat looked like.

I had never seen a cat do this before, and it freaked me out. That can't be normal, right? I assumed she was dehydrated, but we couldn't get her to drink. About this time, the car was overheating from driving up a mountain in the Idaho panhandle so we pulled off into the Mullan Tree national historical site to give the car a rest and help our cat. We didn't know what to do (we weren't even sure she was dehydrated, although we assumed she must be), so we wound up holding her on her back, filling soda caps full of tiny cat-sized drinks of water and pouring them into her mouth. She looked pissed, licked the spilled water off her face, and fell asleep for a good five hours.

Later I looked up the symptoms. Turns out she was dehydrated—seriously dehydrated. If we had waited a few more hours we would have had to take her to a vet to get an IV, and since there's a severe lack of vets in the mountains of Idaho, our cat would probably have died.

Is it weird that this makes me feel somehow badass, like a pioneer crossing the country, enduring hardships, close to death? Like in Oregon Trail: Your cat is sick. Your cat has died of dysentery. Ashley drowned while fording the river. Well, the cat lives, and is currently climbing in and out of a box that I haven't unpacked yet.

If you want to know about dehydrated cats—and don't we all?—go here.