Moving around Montana
It's a 1,900-mile drive - one way - but it's always worth a visit to my wife's home state, where her family has a cabin in the woods and way too many Minutemen missiles are still snug in their silos.
Since July 21 we’ve been in beauteous and friendly Montana – nearly 2,000 highway miles from our new home in sleepy Bethany, WV.
On the way to the Logan family cabin in the Lewis & Clark National Forest southeast of Great Falls, wife Trudi, daughter Lucy and I stopped at the Minutemen Missile National Historic Site in empty South Dakota.
It’s an excellently designed place to be reminded of how horrifying, stupid, wasteful and culturally embarrassing the Cold War missile race with the Soviets was.
A few miles away from the “museum” on what looks like a well-fenced parking lot you can peer into a decommissioned and disarmed Minuteman still in its silo.
Sticking to the military theme, after a few hours of driving at 70 mph across the dry and rolling plains of eastern Montana, we stopped at the hot, wind-swept hilltop where Gen. Custer and the last of his doomed troops died in 1876
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It too is a great, almost sacred memorial and a place to learn about why John Steinbeck was right to call Custer a stupid bastard in his 1962 book Travels With Charley.
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Small Worldism:
When I asked for a supervisor at the Custer ‘pro shop’ so I could complain that their answering machine was telling people (us) that the site was closing each day at 4:30 instead of 6, out came the ranger-in-charge.
.It took me a while – I had to read his name tag – to realize that the ranger was Michael Hasch, the much loved former Pittsburgh Tribune reporter I had worked with in the 2000s.
I hadn’t seen Mike since I quit the newspaper biz in 2009 and had no idea he lives in Pittsburgh but spends his summers working at the Custer memorial. Michael, by the way, wrote a fine obit for my father with he died in 2008.
I’ve said many times it’s a shockingly small world — especially if you live to be old. The meeting with Michael Hasch was amazing.
But 10 days later in the former silver mining town of Neihart, MT., population maybe 50 (down from about 5,000 in the late 1900s), I had an even more incredible encounter.
In the empty middle of a gigantic state, in a country of 330 million-plus, two miles from our cabin, I met a 75-year-old guy from Pittsburgh named John who grew up in the same suburb (Mt. Lebanon) I did in the 1960s.
We were only a year apart, and I didn’t know him, but we knew the same people and same places. The more we talked, the smaller the world became.
It turned out he was the older brother of the guy named Jim who married my cousin Mary half a century ago.
Mary now lives in Marietta, Ohio, and I haven’t seen her or Jim in about 30 years but the guy I met — who lives in Michigan and has a cabin in Neihart — visited her over the July 4th weekend. He had pictures.
When John and his wife Linda did that drive to cousin Mary’s house last month, they went through Wellsburg, WV., on the Ohio River. That means they passed about six miles from where we live in little Bethany. John and Linda have been in Bethany many times because Wellsburg is her hometown and one of her cousins lives about half a mile from us in Bethany.