The Ho-Hum Bar is located on Firehole Avenue between Bud’s Rod & Reel, and Ruby’s Flowers. This is a bar for the locals mainly, and for tourists who do not think they need stitches in order to remember their vacation.
Claire parked the professor’s truck along the curb out-front. She arrived early.
The Old Faithful Laundromat is across the street. Through the broad, clear windows of the storefront, you see rows of white appliances pushed against white walls, and arranged back-to-back to form aisles. Having the bar and the laundromat across the street from each other is an arrangement that is good for business on both sides of the street. These Westside blocks are still standing today.
Most folks most always came in for a quick one between loads. Sometimes they forgot about their clothes altogether. There was a standard four-dollar charge per load for taking care of them overnight. This includes a free laundry bag with drawstrings. This is posted on the front door of both places. The bar and the laundromat get along very well.
The Ho-Hum Bar did not see many tourists—back in the days when they still had tourists—because visitors stay mainly downtown and on the Eastside, to be closer to the park. But you can often hear the few tourists that they do have exclaim as they walk back out of the bar. A sign on the side of the door, which you would not see coming in, advises, “Don’t get drunk and forget your clothes.” The bartender says that he had not heard an original rejoinder in years.
Claire had not had a drink since she left Indiana. She felt tight from the first swallow of her favorite campus cocktail of bourbon, pineapple juice, and 7-Up. If the drink had a name, she never knew it. At first, it was not intoxication, but the memory of intoxication that came flooding back to her, long before the cocktail had reached her system.
Claire sat at the bar. After years of friendly campus life, this business of camping out in middle of nowhere with a college professor has taken her by surprise. It is now week number seven. Five more to go. She swears that, when she gets back, she will sit for a week in the busiest lounge of the Purdue Union, awash in its thronging enthusiasms.
After Bennington’s blow-up, Claire started seeing her summer’s study as just plain isolation—rather than the earlier idea of adventure in the great outdoors. She probably started seeing her new lover as more and more threadbare every night. She began to understand women who were locked into a marriage. She wondered how she would handle it when they got back to West Lafayette. She wondered how she even wanted to handle it.
She knew what she felt, but not what to call it. The Eskimo has 32 names for snow. The American has 32 names for lie, and yet we have only one name for love, even though there are many kinds. English is sometimes short of nouns.
The human mammal used to think only with instinct, but now he has evolved to think with language and that is why folks are always so confused. You tend to stay lost a lot longer if you don’t know the name of where you want to go.
Claire did not yet know how to understand what she had seen that one particular morning in the forest west of Chickadee Lake. Claire tried to think of the monster that arose from out of Bennington as crossed wires or stripped gears, too little sleep, or too much sleep.
She did not yet understand the simple and exquisitely awful truth that it is all a single thing—a range, within which each person exists and within which everything about him is true. The broader this range, the less can be seen at any moment, and so the more confusing it is.
The lucky ones, at peace with themselves and with the world, have a narrow range. Nearly all of it is showing nearly all of the time. The troubled ones have let their range metastasize out of control. They struggle to inhabit the right part of it at the right time.
Like the poet said, we learn truth in our sleep, and against our will. Pain cannot forget and falls drop by drop upon the heart until, at last, comes wisdom, too late for anything but regret.
This is not unlike the Rhodochrosite, which now rides forgotten behind the passenger seat in the Professor’s truck. It, too, was formed drop by drop within a cold hollow of volcanic stone.
Something is telling Claire what she needs, and she is trying to listen. She hears that it is not good to be so alone. The voice tells her that a beautiful woman has more choices. But she cannot imagine any of this if she cannot first be called a geologist.
Claire knows that she needs some company even if that means she gets hassled by drunks. But she will learn that the men in the Ho-Hum Bar are always well behaved. In fact, here they are careful about saying much at all. These are the locals and they know that when winter comes you need to be on good terms with your neighbors. In the mountains, the summers are too short to let them forget.
It was the bars located among the motels closer to the center of town that had the rowdies and the bikers. The Geyser Saloon was one of those. You went there either to have a fight or to watch one. That is why they put the police station there. Back east, that is urban planning. Out west, it is common sense.
Soon, the town would have to join two doublewide trailers together in the parking lot behind the jail. This became the new drunk tank and processing center. They did this on the cheap, figuring to only need it for a year or two—until the construction workers left.
There was also the possibility that one day soon they would not need a jail at all, or a town hall, or anything else. West Yellowstone sat only seven miles from the Yellowstone Caldera—and 500 feet downhill.
Despite the fact that their local Supervolcano is awake, no one moves out. On the last day, Marshal Blevins and the army will load them all on railcars. The locals will finally get moving in a hurry. There will be no arguments. All they will have to do is to look up in the sky and they will know it is time to go.
The town is 21 miles from the new bulge beginning to reshape the uplands south of the Norris Geyser Basin—and Claire is camped eight miles south of that. The new shield volcano that she had discovered is three miles southeast of the campsite, although it had been more than twice that by road along the Continental Divide, back when the road still went through.
Now that the Park is closed, business should have been dead, but new men are streaming into the Madison Valley jobsite by the hundreds each week. They live there in rows of barracks—replacing tents—next to acres of parked cars. Only the Army officers—along with the locals—frequent the Ho-Hum Bar.
The Ho-Hum is still standing. It has a narrow storefront, but it goes back a long way from the windows. There is knotty pine paneling as far as the eye can see.
They say that so much knotty pine paneling is intoxicating, and that you should count it as your first drink. The only electric light comes from beer and liquor signs and a wall sconce every twenty-feet.
By reflex, nobody stares out the windows because the glass is not tinted. The folks around Yellowstone love their sunshine. But if you are sitting in a dark bar with bright windows, your eyes can stay dazzled all the time. So, unlike most taverns, the patrons of the Ho-Hum Bar never look up every time the front door hinges squeak. All of this combines to give the place a calm meditative quality.
The owner of the Ho-Hum still had one chest freezer left over from an oversupply of buffalo and elk. The town’s power lines came in low and from the west through Targhee Pass. They remained standing, unlike the new, tall power transmission towers on the east side that the Colonel had erected to serve the Industrial Village. By the time I would arrive, they were able to serve stew for quite a while. I ate it twice a day for a month. Not only was it the best thing on the menu, it was the only price that did not triple.
It was also a very good thing that the Grand Teton Brewing Company was nearby. I never got tired of Old Faithful Ale—only now, if you want to see it erupting, you have to settle for the label.
Claire did not notice that Cherry Brady had walked in with two men. They wore baseball caps. Cowboy hats do not fit too well in aircraft. They had run into each other at the airport, which is nearly walking distance, just a little north of town. Cherry rode with them. Her truck was back in Bozeman.
It turns out that Cherry Brady is the type to take in strays. She saw Claire at the bar. “Hi there, stranger.”
Claire would have been glad to see her worst enemy—if she ever had one, which I doubt. Cherry was standing in the glare, between the bar and the front window. But Claire could tell from the unmistakable outline of her figure that this was a woman, and since she only knew only one woman out-west, she made an educated guess.
“You’re the helicopter pilot.” Claire sounded surprised.
“Yeah, and you’re the college girl that was camping out in the park. Where’d you relocate once they closed it?”
“Oh, we’re still there.”
“You are? You and that old guy?”
Claire primly corrected, “He’s not old.”
“Well, old or not, out in these parts, come winter time, he’ll start looking good to a lot of the women around here. What is he to you, anyway?”
“I’m his PhD candidate. He’s my prof.”
Cherry ignored the two men she had walked in with and swung a leg over the bar stool next to Claire.
“And your lover, too?” She asked quietly, leaning in.
“Why would you say that?” Claire asked primly.
Pulling back, “I’m not as dumb as I look.”
“Oh, no. I never thought that.”
“Sure you did. It’s these big boobs. They fool everybody—until I get ‘em up in the air—passengers I mean. So anyway, they let you two stay when they shut the park?”
“Yeah, we’re still there.”
“I thought it was dangerous.”
“Maybe, school’s going to start soon, anyway, and we’ll have to go back.”
“Back where?”
“Purdue University.” She brightened. “They’re giving me my first class this semester. Introduction to Earth Science.”
“Way to go professor. What’s your name, anyway?”
“I’m Claire. Claire Cheviot.”
“A regular Indiana Jones,” Cherry marveled. “He was a college prof, too, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah, but I’m a geologist. Indiana Jones was an anthropologist.”
“Be that as it may…” Cherry pulled a business card—a little worse for wear— out of her back pocket. “I’m Cherry Brady. You got anywhere to go in a hurry, you call me. How come they let you stay in the park? The army runs Yellowstone now, right?”
“Yeah. That’s Colonel Jeter. Yeah, we’re still camped out on the same hilltop since the middle of May. We’re taking measurements and making images a mile or so beneath the surface.”
“Except today you felt like you needed some civilization, huh?”
Claire nodded wearily. “Yeah…yeah, but I like the work. It’s very interesting.”
“You like rocks, huh? I like rocks, too, really just one particular rock and I sure am a long way from getting one of those.”
“What rock is that?”
“What else, sister? Diamonds. Hell, I can get any man I want west of Omaha, for like a month. But half of them I don’t want and the other half run off once I get their horns clipped. Course, their horns grow back, and they need another trim, but I tell them that this is one landing strip where you do not get to make a second approach. So just what do you do for that old guy besides clip his horns?”
“I set dynamite charges and take pictures of the reflections. I’m the one that discovered the volcano.”
Cherry did a fist pump, hissing “Yes. I like hearing a woman did that. Don’t mean to pry, but just what are you doing in here alone at three o’clock in the afternoon?”
“I got laundry across the street.”
“And he’s not treating you right, either, is he?”
Claire sighed and pulled out a complaint from the list she had been assembling on her barstool. “You know what pisses me off?”
“Good. I didn’t think you cussed. Always glad to hear a woman cuss. No, sister. Tell me what pisses you off.”
“I discover that there’s a fucking florist next door. I’ve been sleeping with him for two months and he never gave me flowers.”
“Not even wild flowers?”
“Not even them.”
“Yeah. I don’t get many either. Once prom night is over with, most men figure we can just go out and pick our own. Is he getting cranky on you, too, Claire?”
“Just once. But it was real bad. Since then he’s been falling all over himself apologizing.”
“Well, at least he’s doing that. He hit you, too?”
“No. He just said things. But they were totally uncalled for.”
“Like what?”
“Like he thought I was trying to take all the credit for our discoveries. And like he thought I was flirting with those men up at the drill site.”
“Selfish and insecure. Oh where, oh where have I seen that before? And so now when you look into his face, you wonder if you see a man you don’t recognize.”
Claire is amazed. “How do you know that?”
“Well shit, sister, I got a pulse, don’t I? He still giving you what you need?”
“You mean my PhD?”
“Oh brother. How long you been sitting here?”
Claire wanted to hear about other people and was eager to change the subject. “So, what about you? Are you seeing anyone?”
“Oh, yes. A new man. A foreigner!”
“A foreigner?” Claire asked, unbelievingly. “Around here?”
“Yep. A genuine foreigner complete with an accent. His name is Victor.”
“Is Victor a spy?”
“Ha. Spy. He’s sending secret reports back on the buffalo. Naw. Oil Business.”
Claire exclaimed suspiciously. “There’s no oil around here!”
“Well, maybe not, but he sure is looking for it.”
“Then he’s either a spy or the world’s worst geologist.”
Cherry rose in his defense. “There’s oil up in North Dakota. And that’s not so far. If there was an oil forming climate up there at one time, why not down here, too?”
“Oh, there was indeed, at one time. But volcanism and mountain building has destroyed all that ground.”
Cherry became suspicious, herself. “Everybody know that?”
Claire made it final. “Yep. Everybody.”
Cherry shrugged. “Well, shit. Then maybe he IS a spy!” Cherry lowered her head and looked up under her brows. She whispered, “But he’s good in bed and that counts for extra points.”
The sun was getting low about the time Cherry Brady got Claire into her helicopter. Cherry’s men friends never interrupted the conversation except at the end when they said they had to get back to the airport. She told them to go on without her.
By that time, the conversation and the booze had taken their full medicinal effect and Claire was rehabilitated back into the land of happy souls. Cherry, too, had at least one more than she should have. She put a pint of whiskey into Claire’s purse, thinking that she might need a booster shot after she got back to the campsite. Cherry packed up Claire’s laundry. Some of it was wet and some of it had never made it out of the laundry bag at all. She stopped Claire at the door and pointed to the sign, “Don’t get drunk and forget your clothes.” Cherry drove Bennington’s truck.
I do not think that Cherry made a habit of drinking and then flying, but this was also not her first time, either, and you do get better at everything with practice. Flying out of the West Yellowstone Airport seemed to sober Claire up right away—a fifteen-minute hop that included a little sightseeing.
The hill three miles north of Craig’s Pass was not hard to find, as long as there was daylight. By now, the valley next to the continental divide was smoking continuously. It was filling with a wide circle of smooth stone that had erased the Lodgepole Pine and leveled and smoothed the landscape. Cherry stayed over it for half a minute so they could observe.
The vent had rounded into a crater with an opening about a dozen feet in diameter. The fresh lava was red-orange. It was extruding from the hole without a pause. Once, it hiccupped twenty feet in the air. They watched it splatter, like chunky spaghetti sauce hitting the kitchen floor.
Claire knew that the magma pipe that was feeding the volcano was enlarging. The longer the eruption persists, the more of the surrounding country rock becomes melted, and the bigger the magma pipe becomes and the greater the flow becomes.
Claire heard Cherry squawk into the headset. “How big is that thing going to get, anyhow?”
“Some of the ancient volcanoes around Pocatello ran their magma three hundred miles.”
“But that took millions of years, right?”
“We think it took a week.”
“Oh, shit. Could this stuff reach Bozeman?”
“Well, Bozeman is 3,000 feet lower, and it is at the end of the Madison Valley. But I was talking about a Basalt flood. This stuff is half Rhyolite. I don’t think this will flow more than a couple of miles. It’s too gooey.”
“So, nothing to worry about, right?”
“Maybe a gas wall.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad. What’s a gas wall?”
“It travels at the speed of sound with the force of an atomic bomb.”
“Be that as it may…I think I liked you better when you were drunk.”
Bennington had been sitting on a campstool in front of his tent, staring up at the sky thinking about the temptations of the town. He knew she was taking way too long. He had it figured that Claire had gone into the construction camp again.
Being a scientist, Bennington did not need any further proof that acting like an asshole did not work with Claire. He had made up his mind that, this time, he would pretend that it did not bother him in the slightest. He knew that this would become very tricky for him back at Purdue. He understood that college towns are one part academics and two parts Peter Pan.
When the thumping sound of the chopper reached him, Bennington first cocked his head in surprise. Then his head sank in worry, when he realized that the little speck in the late afternoon sky was getting larger—heading straight for the camp. The tree line and the hillside were a little close together, but Cherry set it down between them nice and easy, just like a bush pilot is supposed to be able to do.
The professor probably ran the gamut of the usual guesses before Cherry’s chopper started to sink down in front of the trees. By then it was close enough for him to see Claire sitting in it safe and, by and large, almost sound. She gave him a shrug and a little wave, as if to say, “Okay, shit happens.” When he did not wave back, she braced herself.
“Big grump,” she mumbled.
The dogs ran down this hillside, but Bennington called to them. They obediently retreated to gaze intently at this new marvel of humankind. As Claire stoically watched through the window of the cockpit door, Bennington grinned. Surprised, she gasped a girlish smile in relief.
Bennington waited outside the blurry outline of the blades. Cherry kept Claire inside. She knew that uneven ground beneath a helicopter is dangerous and that the blades dip lower the more they slow. Bennington waited as he watched them talk. Finally, when the rotor stopped, Claire opened her door, rotated her long legs, and slid out.
Bennington took Claire by the shoulders with great delicacy. “Are you Okay?”
Claire smiled the type of flat smile that she had seen Bennington often use and then shimmied her shoulders to shake his hands off. Then she thrust her chin aloft and shut her eyes as if to say, “Who needs you?” Bennington watched her walk toward the bear dogs.
Cherry stepped around the front of the cockpit carrying a laundry bag. “I’m putting the word out that the Brady Aviation pontoon plane is available for a lover’s getaway up to the 4th of July fireworks on Flathead Lake.”
Bennington raised his eyebrows to suggest an interest.
Cherry shrugged. “Here, better hang up this laundry. It’s still wet.”
“Thank you. I’ll be sure to do that.” Bennington wore his best cocktail party smile.
Cherry looked up the hillside, surveying the campsite. “So you two have been living up there how long?”
“About seven weeks.”
“Jeeze,” she snorted. “I couldn’t take this for more than a weekend.” Bennington stretched another polite smile. Claire had finished greeting the dogs. She ambled back to the helicopter.
Still wincing, Cherry asked, “Where do you go to clean up around here?”
Claire answered. “We used to go into Grant Village before the road closed. Now we go into the visitor’s center at Old Faithful. Colonel Jeter got us our own keys. But actually, we discovered that the lake is warming up. Of course, lake water does not give you that squeaky clean feeling.”
Cherry wondered at the extent of the slack that the Army was cutting these two. She also wondered what Bennington would be like after she left. She faced him. “I’ll be back in the morning.”
“Oh?” He was surprised.
Cherry explained. “You do want your truck back, don’t you?”
The flat cocktail party smile switched back on. “That would be nice.”
“And I’m taking her to breakfast.”
Bennington was propping up his smile, which was beginning to sag. “That’s a long way from Bozeman just for breakfast.”
“Well, it’s my nickel, ain’t it? By the way, if I see any marks on her face in the morning, I’ll fly down to the sheriff’s office in Jackson and fill out a complaint.”
Bennington shook his head, smiling gamely. “Claire will be fine. There won’t be any problem.”
“I know. Just so you know, Professor.” Cherry spoke quietly. Claire is walking back.
“Miss me?” She asks accusingly.
With Cherry listening, Bennington sidestepped Claire’s question and clapped his hands together. “I had a wonderfully busy afternoon.”
“What could you do without the truck?”
Bennington’s hole cards were both aces. “I imaged the hill.”
Claire was instantly excited. “Our hill? This?”
“Yes, it turns out to be an igneous dike, after all.”
“I was right,” Claire exclaimed, smugly, twisting on her ankles.
“Yes. You were as right as rain,” Bennington chirped.
“So, what’s with the hill?” Cherry asked, doubting it could be much.
Claire’s answer was a half-beat behind Bennington. He stopped to let her finish. “An old arm from an old magma chamber that almost reached the surface, eons ago.”
“So this might have been a volcano?” Cherry asked.
Claire turned to Bennington. “How close to the surface?”
“Four feet.” He let her finish.
“Yep,” Claire announced, lifting her chin. “Just missed being a volcano by four feet. Just ran out of steam.” Cherry seemed surprised. “Yep. Yellowstone’s full of these, Cherry. Dime-a-dozen.”
The Professor tried a rhetorical question to indicate that it was time for Cherry to leave. “Stay for dinner, Cherry?”
“Sorry, Professor. Hot date.” In Cherry’s case, her reply was true, but she would rather have missed a meal than to sit at a campfire eating one. Cherry silently reflected that she had outgrown camping by the time she had outgrown pigtails, and Claire was still doing both.
It is a free country, she thought.
Bennington continued to smile politely. Claire looked wistfully at her new friend. A date, she thought. Where are they going? She tried to remember how long it had been since she had seen a movie.
Cherry stepped toward Claire and gave her a quick hug. “See you at nine in the morning, honey.”
Claire and the Professor backpedaled, anticipating the rotor blades, as Cherry climbed aboard. Cherry took it slow until well above the trees, then her helicopter raised its tail and sped off to the north. The thumping of the helicopter quickly grew faint.
The sudden quiet was depressing. Now they must confront whatever it is. They turned toward each other. Claire had intended to scamper up the hill ahead of him. But her feet felt like lead. She forced a cheery smile. “What’s for dinner?” She braced herself, expecting anything.
“Chipped beef and gravy over biscuits.”
“Biscuits?”
“Yep. Just made ‘em.”
“You made biscuits?”
“Yeah. Just like at the Triple-XXX back home. Got lonely. Gave me something to do.”
They each turned toward this hill and began a slow climb.
“You missed me, huh?” She sounded suspicious.
“More than you can possibly imagine.” Bennington betrayed not a trace that anything, ever, might have been wrong.
“I can imagine a lot.”
“Care to see the inside of our hill.”
“Do we have to talk business right away?”
“No. Of course not. Did you have fun?”
“No. Not until Cherry showed up.”
“What was wrong?”
“You know what was wrong.”
“Yes.”
“I missed you, too.”
He brightened into his first real smile. “You did?”
Claire put her arm around his waist. In return, he swung his around her shoulders. A moment passed and then they chuckled. A few steps later, he stopped them, midway up the hillside.
“We’re forgetting something,” he said, turning.
Claire ‘s eyes did not seem to focus. She seemed far away. “What?” She spoke snapping back into the moment.
“We left the laundry back down there.”
“Ooohhhh!” She began laughing, then trotted back down for it. “I’m sorry I didn’t finish. We’d better hang it up. I’m sorry it’s still wet.”
“That’s okay. I’ll rig up a clothes line with tent poles and a rope.”
“You’re not mad?” She asked unbelievingly.
“Why should I be mad? I’m just glad you’re back.”
She pushed him, laughing in relief and in disbelief—hearing what she needed to hear. The moment could have tipped either way. The Professor’s gut had told him to be careful. Wisely, he only laughed in return. He said nothing to spoil it. You gut will never lie to you, if you listen very carefully.
Another one in a string of luminous days greets Bennington and Claire, as he drives them out of the park at noon on July 4th to meet Cherry Brady at Earthquake Lake. After splashing down, Cherry taxies the floatplane over to the narrow end of the dock for boarding.
With her tourists safely on board, Cherry turns the du Havilland Beaver downwind and taxis to the upstream end of the lake.
Cherry roars down the lake to make her takeoff through that slot of blue sky between the mountains of the Madison Range. It is at this point, where the Madison River flows back out of Earthquake Lake to continue the search of every river to find the sea.
The treetops are level with the wings as they break out from between the mountains. Cherry climbs during two minutes to three thousand feet above ground level, emerging into the string of valleys that she will follow through the Rockies, north for two and a half hours.
Gone are the confining slopes of Yellowstone, which shorten daylight and stretch the twilight thinly. Here is a big sky, an ocean of light, as life-giving as any river.
One hour north, the Madison River, is joined by the Jefferson and the Gallatin to form the Missouri River. Cherry follows it above the path that Lewis and Clark had taken over two centuries before. They fly north past Helena to the west and past the Big Belt Mountains on the east.
Finally, the Missouri turns away, toward the east at Black Mountain. Cherry’s floatplane breaks out of the mountain valleys and onto the edge of the Great Plains on the east side of the Front Range of the Rockies.
She follows the Dearborn River across the grasslands, upstream to Steamboat Mountain, which Cherry rounds to the north, heading back inside, among the peaks and their wrinkled flanks. There she will search for the beginnings of the South Fork of the Flathead River, and use it to lead them upstream to the lake.
Once, while intently scanning back and forth across the valleys, she utters a short curse and pushes the throttle forward, winding out her engine RPM’s. She pulls the yoke back to rise up to five thousand feet above ground level before saying, “Yeah. There it is. Now we’re back on track. I knew they were hiding it around here somewhere.” Then she pushes the yoke forward to slowly descend to three thousand five hundred feet above the river, cutting across its meanders, and flying level with the mountaintops.
The continental divide here is not quite as tall as down south at Yellowstone, but Steamboat was one of the tallest at about the same elevation as Craig’s Pass.
Flathead Lake is twenty-seven miles long and fifteen miles wide. The du Havilland Beaver flew to the north end, to hang above the water, and finally to touch down lightly. Her pontoons divided the surface with two silvery wakes, and pulled the spreading blue ripples behind her. The flight ended with the propeller slowing, and in a silent glide up to a bobbing mooring buoy.
Cherry tied up, and then unlashed the rigid-hulled inflatable boat from atop the struts spanning the two pontoons. They pushed it into the water, and paddled to the steakhouse dock at water’s edge.
“If you care to, we can paddle back out to the plane for the fireworks display at ten o’clock. Or, we can watch it from here.”
“Oh, Jim, let’s watch it from out in the lake, can we, please?”
Bennington would have agreed to anything.
“I’ll take off for a while to let you folks have dinner and I’ll meet you back here about 9:30, if that’s okay.”
“No. Stay and have dinner with us, Cherry. Don’t run off.”
Bennington’s smile became broader the worse it got, but he would have agreed to anything.
“Thanks folks. You’re very kind. Maybe I’ll stay for a burger and a coke, but then I’ve got to paddle back out to the plane and taxi it into the marina for some aviation gas. But don’t let that worry you. We landed with a quarter-tank.”
After the waitress came, Claire and Cherry made the time-honored trip to the little-girl’s room.
“How much is all this costing Jim?”
“Don’t worry about it honey. I cut him a deal.”
“What kind of deal?”
“If you tell him I told you, I might lose a customer.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
“Okay. Normally, $1,400 but for you guys, $1,200.”
“No. Really?”
“Hey, I don’t charge wait time and there’s no landing fees on a lake. Really, sister, that ain’t bad. We burned a lot of gas to get up here.”
“Oh, my. It’s the thrill of a lifetime.”
“That’s the spirit. If you want the truth, it’s exciting for me too. I don’t get up here very often. You see, flying inside the Front Range from Steamboat Mountain is the mark of a good bush pilot. This is what separates the bush pilot from the cab driver, which, to my way of thinking, is what most of my flying is. But hey, a job is a job, right?”
There are six gas tanks on a du Havilland Beaver. The marina has wheeled the first of two barrels of aviation gas out to the dock. One man holds the nozzle inside the gas tank while another man levers a hand pump up and down. Cherry sits at the end of an empty dock kicking her legs out over Flathead Lake. The back of her flight jacket reads BRADY AVIATION. She holds her cell phone to her ear.
“Hello, Cherry Blossom. What is it like up north?”
“Gorgeous. I should fly us up here before the end of summer. This is the cleanest, most beautiful lake in America with an island of civilization at one end surrounded by mountain ranges.”
“And I thought West Yellowstone was in the middle of nowhere.”
“Heavens no. Gallatin County is New York City compared to Lewis and Clark County. Victor, I need a favor.”
“Anything.”
“It’s a lot of trouble,” she warns.
“You have only to ask.”
“When do you have to be to work tomorrow?”
“Afternoon shift.”
“Good. Can you pick me up at the boat dock on Earthquake Lake about 1:30 in the morning? I thought maybe I could stay with you tonight.”
“Victor would absolutely love that.”
“Thanks, Sweetie. Otherwise, I wouldn’t land back on Ennis Lake until after two in the morning and then I’d still have to put the Beaver in the boat shed and that still leaves me with a thirty mile drive to get home. I mean I could do it, but…”
“Do not think such thing. Victor come for you.”
“No doubt of that. Set your alarm, now.”
“Sleep now impossible. Victor have joke for you.”
“Tell me.”
“What is difference between light bulb and hard-on?”
“I don’t know.”
“Victor can sleep with light on.”
“Why are we out so far from the shoreline?” Claire asks.
“Yeah, it might seem like we moved out a little far. The fireworks are on a barge. They will tow that out a mile from shore and we need to be another mile farther out than that.”
“Why so far?” Claire asks again. She does not want to miss a thing.
“For when the barge catches fire and explodes.”
Now Bennington is concerned. “Why would it explode?”
“Beats me, but it has twice before. Remember that we’re tied up to almost one hundred and forty gallons of aviation gas. Anyway, no mosquitoes out this far.”
Bennington continues. “How will you find our way back to Yellowstone in the dark, Cherry?”
“Okay. Fair enough. For openers, I’m instrument rated, but I’d rather fly visual plus compass. So first, we’re going to get up to a fool-proof altitude of 11,000 feet above sea level. Up there I won’t run into anything and we still don’t need supplemental oxygen. Then, I start on a compass heading that will get us within sight of the lights of Helena. Then the lights of Three Forks is next. Then comes the lights of Belgrade, Bozeman, and Ennis, and finally the lights of West Yellowstone.
“Then, at that point, Earthquake Lake is dark, and so I’m going to use the lights of West Yellowstone to find the Madison River. Moonrise is at one in the morning and the river will have moonlight on it and the current will be making it sparkle. So then I’ll follow the river downstream to the lake. Easy-peesy. Just connect the dots.”
It does not sound simple to Bennington. “Do you ever get lost, Cherry?”
“No sir. Up here, a girl had better know where she’s going. Flying in the mountains, you only get lost one time.”
They have stretched out their legs in the boat. Their heads rest against the inflatable tubes at the gunwales. It finally became dark enough at 10:00 P.M. The rockets begin.
“They’ve sheathed this year’s new fireworks barge with metal roofing to try to make it fireproof. The problem is they never seem to build a big enough barge for enough distance between the sparks and the unexploded rockets. Hang on to your butts. We shall see what we shall see.”