The Writer's Block

We finally had to say goodbye to Idaho and cross the border into Montana. We made our destination Polson, on the southern end of Flathead Lake so that we could dabble a while in a dream of buying property there. We took a day to sigh over beautiful plots of land with gorgeous views and comfortably sparse neighbors.

The second day we took the kids to see Ratatouille in a quaint older building. The movie quite refreshed us from our long fast from the swift moving currents of high tech, and we launched out on the street invigorated, only to discover that the solid movie house had muffled all sounds of a quickly approaching storm. Wind gusts lifted the hairs on the back of our necks as we hustled to our truck.

An impulse to utilize the town’s Laundromat was quickly stifled as rain began pouring out of the black sky. We dreaded what we would find when we returned to our trailer, and we all moaned as we pulled up and watched our awning sailing high and strained above the trailer. Though the kids didn’t dare jump out of the cab of the truck, my husband and I both barked out for them to stay in until we called them. Somehow, miraculously, we stumbled and groped in the dark, in the rain and in the high winds to reel that awning in, but it fought us for freedom the whole way, stretching itself tight toward the heavens. It didn’t surprise me that when we were finished, the awning material bulged, unevenly rolled, but secure. We rushed the kids inside and shivered as we changed into dry clothes and turned up the volume on the DVD we watched to drown out the thunder that seemed cruelly loud inside the small trailer.

The next morning we contemplated driving up to Glacier National Park, but decided against it, deterred partially by time constraints and also the fact that we could not tow our trailer through. We opted instead to visit a sapphire mine in Philipsburg, Montana, which was a drive not out of our way, considering we were heading southward again to Yellowstone. We didn’t hold out high hopes after our disappointment with the opal mine experience, but we were actually pleasantly surprised. We actually got to get our hands and the fronts of our shirts muddy, and we brought home with us a small collection of rough sapphires. Gem Mountain not only has an area where they bring out piles of gravel from their mines for purchase, but they also have long troughs of water where you can screen and pan out the gravel and tables to slap it down for sorting. They also have a free campground for dry camping, with fire pits, but watch out for the cow pies!