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In a recent conversation with a friend, Glacier National Park in Montana came up for discussion. And my friend informed me that the glaciers were melting and would disappear shortly, adding for emphasis that the entire earth would be inundated within a few short years of the Glacier Park meltdown.
It is true the glaciers in the Park have been receding for many years, but I have vivid memories of how stunning the area looked during my last visit in 1974 while I was still a student at the University of Montana. The Park was beautiful and the vistas from Going to the Sun Road were breathtaking. My indian friend Dan (Cherokee mother, Italian father) and I drove up to Kalispell from Missoula in a beat up old International Travelall van that I had at the time, fishing all the way into the Park. Dan was tying his "famous" black ants on the spot, trying different variations to emulate what we were seeing on the water for fly fishing. We hardly caught a thing, but we were drinking and carrying on, not seriously fishing.
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You could drive inside the Park boundaries, stake out a campsite, and then hike deeper into the Park wilderness on day trips, which is what we did. It was so pristine at the time. I had a bed in the back of the Travelall. Dan and I alternated, one of us sleeping on the bed, the other in a sleeping bag on the floor of the van and the reverse the next day. It was cold as hell at night, with brilliant, sunny snow-capped mornings.
I've lost track of Dan over the years, even though he was best man at my first wedding. He was working in an underground (vs. placer) gold mine in Virginia City, Montana, living in an isolated cabin out in the woods, gnawing on mushrooms and experimenting with peyote. He did not have a phone, so I called the local bar on main street in Virginia City and left a message with the bartender that I was getting married on such and such a date and needed Dan to drive to Missoula to be my best man.
They wrote such messages on a blackboard at the entrance to the bar because a lot of folks in the area didn't have phones. Everyone came into the bar on weekends, and that was how you got a message to them. Dan saw my note and called from the bar to say he would be there. He showed up with two bottles of homemade dandelion wine as a wedding gift, a vintage so skanky it was fit only for use as anti-freeze! But I was thrilled to have him there.
Dan later went to work at the Homestake Gold Mine outside Deadwood, South Dakota, long before Deadwood became a tourist town. He lived in a turn of the century boarding house where he shared the bathroom down the hall with a girl with long wavy black tresses who worked in one of the local saloons. Like all the miners, he found clever ways to smuggle small amounts of gold out of the mine at least every other day using clandestine methods that were likely to escape detection. Some of the miners used small plastic tubes filled with gold dust that they would lubricate and stick up their butts. Others tamped down gold in the bowls of their tobacco pipes, and a few inventive souls had false crowns on one or more of their teeth that would serve the purpose.
Later still, Dan became a high paid dynamiter in a uranium mine in Wyoming. During this uranium period, he visited me in California and we took a trip to Baja Mexico for a jai alai game and then had a good time carousing in San Diego.The last report I got of him involved a drunken fight at the bar in Virginia City, and I then heard that he had wandered up to Alaska to settle a homestead.
He was a brilliant guy with a double degree in economics and computer science, an avid student of Marx and of Native American culture. I remember that he used to go to an annual 4th of July indian powwow in Arlee, Montana near Flathead Lake. His stories from these excursions were of wild drinking and dancing around night fires in long, trance like celebrations with drumming, chanting, games, and rituals for the recently departed.
(Photos courtesy of Wiki Commons and the US National Park Service. Map courtesy of Nations Online.)
