The end of the trip … really, truly, honestly

(Continued from a previous My Turn.)

I swear this is the last one.

I promise.

I really promise.

Yes, this story has taken longer to tell then it did to actually drive the distance from Maryland to Washington.

Where was I?

Ah yes — I wasn’t ready for Montana.

In fact, thinking about Montana makes me wonder what those explorers first saw when they managed to get across the plains.

I’ve got an idea. I think they stood on the edge of Montana wondering what they got themselves into.

I know that’s what I was thinking while my car was going down the side of a mountain. (OK. It wasn’t necessarily a mountain, but it might as well have been.)

Of course, the wide-open vistas and the death-defying drops were fine. The long distances between towns and the snow gates were expected. All-in-all Montana would have been a great, if disconcerting, state to drive through.

If it wasn’t trying to kill my car.

Really, Montana was trying to kill my car. Why else would there be giant hills where my car would end up slowing down to about 45 miles per hour and barely make it up the hill?

That was just the start of the state.

The further I got into the state, the worse my car ran. I could stomp on the gas and barely make my car manage to get to 55 miles per hour. Now I’m not saying I drive a state of the art car, but when I can’t even see the hill and my car is slowing down, there’s something wrong.

When I finally got to Bozeman, I didn’t think I was going to make it the rest of the way. There’s nothing quite as frustrating as standing less than 500 miles from a final destination and thinking, “Am I really going to make it?” 

I started to think I was at the moment right before a story resolves. The point where it doesn’t seem like the hero can possibly win. Now normally in my life, this is the point where I’m generally forced to accept reality and turn back.

So I spent a sleepless night in a hotel room in Bozeman.

Then I started driving at 6 a.m. the next day. Somehow, my car managed to survive going up the side of a real mountain in Butte. The roads leveled out a bit and I managed to cruise into Missoula.

All the time, I watched my knuckles get whiter and whiter. I just kept reminding myself I only needed to get through Montana. Once I got through Montana I’d be in Idaho, then Washington.

That’s when I started going down hill. Then I went down hill some more. After I went down hill for a while, I went down hill some more. I started to think the entire state of Montana must be on some higher plane of existence.

The most amusing part of going down hill was after I went uphill over Lookout Pass, I saw the sign for Idaho sitting at the edge of a curve, on the side of a cliff, without a guardrail in front of it.

My car survived Montana and I didn’t even get a T-shirt. The rest of the trip was easy in comparison. Before I knew it, I was pulling onto Pioneer Way for the first time and driving around looking for a motel.

I survived.

Sure, that was self-evident.

But boy am I glad I managed to make it to Moses Lake.

Cameron Probert is the Columbia Basin Herald county reporter. Knowing his Chevrolet Cavalier as we do, we find his pioneer spirit and bravery much larger than we ever suspected.