HOM: Sweet Chariot....

All of a sudden, I was taking on responsibilities. My only excuse is that I was younger, dumber & more innocent then. I took a long weekend and headed home, hunting for a house & a job for the summer. Robin Holmquist, Bonnie's younger brother, went with me and we pulled out early on a Thursday morning in Big Red. I was in a hurry ... Robin, later on, told me that it was strange, that he was relaxed for the whole trip but that afterwards, when he was negotiating the same roads with other people, the memory of our flying trip made him retroactively nervous. We got into Kalispell less than nine hours after we left Nampa, and this was in the old days when Highway 93 was still narrow and winding, and you still had to climb Whitebird Hill (eleven miles long, 23 switchbacks, 15mph). A reasonable driver usually made the trip in twelve hours if they didn't stop for lunch. The only stops we made were for gas. One car passed us in the whole 500 plus miles -- it was a woman driver and she did it on a blind corner on Lolo Pass. I chickened out when I saw what she was doing, braked, and swerved to let her by. Blind corners scare me a bit. Going through one of the tiny burgs between Grangeville & Kooskia I met a cop car going in the opposite direction. I hit the brakes the instant I spotted him, and when I met him he put his hand out the window and shook his finger at me. Index, not middle. I guess when a red car does a nose stand the instant a cop appears it is obvious that the driver was speeding. Luckily, he didn't stop me. After dropping Robin off, my first stop in Kalispell was the employment service, where I lucked into a job working for the street department of the City of Kalispell under some kind of special program. The Interlake classifieds led me to a brand new two-bedroom trailer for rent just off Bernard Road in Evergreen. Once I rented it I figured I had all my bases covered. I spent some time catching up on family visits and then Robin & I headed back south on Sunday. I guess speed was a habit - we had all day for a leisurely trip and still checked in at NNC less than nine hours later. And once again only one rig passed me, once again on Lolo Pass. This time it was an old Dodge pickup & the driver was male, but I still chickened out when he decided he wanted to get around me despite the blind corner we were flying up on. I chased him for miles after that before he finally turned off & I suspect he came close to destroying his rig -- we could smell hot oil and it was streaming smoke when he turned off. I'd love to know what engine he had in that old rig -- I am pretty sure it wasn't stock. I am also sure that the driver was an old redneck who couldn't stand to be shown up by a couple of young punks in a convertible. And in that same tiny Idaho burg we met the same cop in the same car on the same stretch at the same speed with the same nose-stand and got the same finger-shake as before. Index, not middle. I was lucky: Those who are too stupid to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. TBC (Me) (Blacktail Books)