# montana part 2



## wokofshame (Jul 23, 2008)

Well I rolled into the state this time hitching from PDX, it went pretty cool, met nice people and drank a lot of coffee, landed in Butte just in time for the free national folk festival. A lot of awesome music and I stayed in the mission eating awesome food and resting my significantly weary ass, met some people who stand out in my mind : Looch, Martin, Stuart, Louie,Drew, Chad, Josh, Cameron and Jarl.
This is my favorite of 44 states and 6 provinces as everybody seems to have a case cracked as they pick you up so I'm glad to be back, it's like the South with a lower IQ and higher degeneracy rate.
Saturday I went around the farmer's market asking for work and I got a gig just helping this guy Josh who was mad cool unload produce, set up, and cash people out as well as running errands. 
People with packs gravitate to each other so I talked first to to this kid Drew who'd hitched up from Dillon and then this kid Louie, who played banjo like a gangster; his Shady Grove rendition was the shizznozzel.
This guy Martin at the mission had hoboed it for 3 years in the 80's and it turned out he'd ridden pretty much every route I have and a lot more so I had a great time listening to him every night in the mission basement and his stories.
It was all a good crowd and I practiced my knitting and met this kid Chad who showed up late one night after he'd ridden a Greyhound into town with a kid who he thought was his friend but just abandoned him, he wasn't traveling or anything so much as just that things weren't working out for him in Wyoming and he was popping lots of pills so he he just went with this friend to get away from that crap. 
We hung out and i made a "KNIFE SHARPENING $1.75" sign that we flew by the stage. No luck, oddly enough but we meet this guy Jarl who incidentally used to live 30 miles from my hometown. He offers to take us back to his ranch. Chad has been contemplating suicide and is real torn up mentally so I wanna go with him, off to Central MT on a real awesome drive.
 We stay there for a week, I was trying to find work baling hay or something but the only gig we get is small and we work a total of 2 hours. 
We saw the movie Hancock with the money we made and that movie is the SHIT!, The twist on it prevents it from being cheesy or anything. Chad and me explored the abandoned rail depot and get some scores: stickers, overalls and a hoody for Chad, a sweet paint marker, earplugs and an ammo can for Jarl. Went to a free christian rapcore concert in the park that was opened by some young Jesus folksinger dude with a drum machine. 
Jarl is a massage therapist and gives us both full-body massages where Chad and me both suspect he was feeling us up. I've gotten great massages from gay guys before so I said yes when he offered but it basically ended with him putting his hand on my cock which I wasn't all that cool with having done. He was a really great cook though and we ate great all week- bison, maple syrup and goat cheese. Plus the glutes/butt part of his massages was really awesome. I'd never had my glutes get massaged by a pro before and it does feel great.
I came close to getting popped one night stealing some more bison at the supermarket, I think it was a message to chill on the racking. Showed Chad how to sign up for food stamps and we drank a bunch of beer and went floating on inner tubes and fishing and walking and shit, meeting cowboys and neer-do-well ex-hutterites.
Chad finds a permanent job welding right up the road now he's in way better shape mentally so I take off.
Some more cool peeps pick me up, including an ex-BN crane operator and freight clerk named Amos who looks like my old neighbor the town legend Bert White. Bert wore a hard hat for 40 years straight , only taking it off to sleep, and could fix a diesel engine by spitting on it and rubbing the spit in with his finger.
Amos tells me about the amazingly dirty tricks BN would play on him and folks to get them to quit, apparently management has always been some real cockstains at the RR unsurprisingly. They had a thing called the "Rubber Room" in which people came to work and had to sit at this table for 8 hours without reading, walking around, anything, no food, no TV, the whole thing was an attempt by management to make his team quit. The crew (originally freight clerks mostly)had been downsized after the 1980 merger with Frisco Lines and then the Supreme Court itself had ordered BN to fulfill their contract and rehire them, 3 years later. The Great Falls freight sheds had been closed in the meantime so there was no work for the 60 or so people. Management openly stated in meetings that they are trying to do everything can to make these rehired clerks quit. They put most of them out in the yard sorting tie plates from spikes and throwing them into piles in the subzero Montana January. BN had the Rubber Room in Missoula too and one rehired freight clerk commited suicideafter a month straight of it and so the tricks ended for a while just before Amos quit.
The line from G. F. to Helena is inactive and is being used for railcar storage. (A ride tells me "People are kvetching about this eyesore". Ha , I call that a good setup for puttin' pieces up on TTX well cars. Shows just how backwards some folks are.
I get a ride with some kids in jacked-up Chevy's and we get passed beers from the other Chevy at 80 MPH on a curve, driver grabbing the beers from a kid sitting shotgun in the other truck and almost crashing and killing us all in the process. 
All the guys are in some branch or other of the military and all the girls have "tramps stamp" tattoos. 
We go swimming and get drunk and jump off cliffs and blast Lil' Wayne from the truck speakers at this chill-ass swimming hole. This mad cool kid JD who's from NC and is up here guarding Nuclear Missile Silos for the Air Force was rapping like a pro. I spin him my favorite Young Jeezy line " Who? Me? I emerged from the cracksmoke"
"That's what's up".
I ride back Southern Comfort'd off my ass, drivers drunk and I'm scared and kissing this girl Sam who's even more wasted than me if possible, her friend Rachel tells me Sam's too drunk, she takes care of Sam and pulls her to the front seat where she (Sam) started making out with this kid Josh from Hawaii who was driving.
She's too drunk to make decisions and I really shouldn't have been macking on her and Rachel saw that, basically what happened is that Rachel cared for her friend enough not to have her sleep with some random hitchhiker while she was sloshed.
I'm generally not the guy who's gung-ho for getting laid and all so this was the first time this had ever happened, it was a pretty important life lesson though and not the only one lately. 
We get back to the truckstop outside of Great Falls and I fall out of the truck on to my elbow, bid goodbyes, and stumble into a wheat field where I promptly lay out my bedroll, lie down, and puke my guts out.
The next morning I'm up at 6 AM to grab some coffee from the Pilot. I soon get a ride with a doctor, a nurse, and a Nurse's Assistant carpooling to the clinic in Helena, the NA gives me an orange and they drop me a few thousand feet from the catch-out. I walk over and read the tags, a lot of old-school riders from the 80's and 90's which is neat, I put my own up, some douche has written that Real Tramps Don't Stay in Missions so I write Go Suck A Dick, Summer Soldier next to that and my monicker. I'm not a big fan of elitism.
Within 10 minutes a BNSF run-thru junker pulls up to CC and add 3 front-end helper units supplied by MRL. I hop in a grainer and we soon get rolling thru the beautiful upper Missouri valley. Great white herons swoop and I swear angels sing my name. 
I need to drop a deuce and we stop on a siding in the middle of nowhere, not 40 feet from a porta-potty. It's one of these days where thangs just work out like you want them. I peel a sweet Potty Princess sticker for my journal off the nastiest porta-potty ever.
The urinal is filled with tampon applicators and the chlorine water has long since dried up leaving just blue residue.
We roll into Bozeman real slow for whatever reason so I hop off at about 10 mph in plain view of the I-90, ouch that shit hurts the knees, I talk to a old hippieish biker looking kind of dude who just happens to be hitching right there, he's headed to Missoula and I wish him luck.
Bozeman is the bomb, this guy Jeremy who lives in his 1973 Dodge Swinger motor home picks me up a ridiculous flash thunderstorm hits and drives me back to his gf's house to come smoke some weed. They show me their South American flying squirrel, which is definitely what's up even though she's sleeping.
Hitch lots of 1/2 mile rides thru town which is always fun, lots of neat folks, and end up sleeping in a shed next to the Bozeman Food Bank. There is a crazy hail storm and flash floods going on and it takes me a while to go to sleep for whatever reason, I wake up in the morning to some construction work guys stacking slabs in the shed. The Bank is closed so I just check out the Dumpster and there's like a million cans maybe a month or so past the expiration date plus lots of bread and a liem which I unfortunately lost. I fly a sign for a while, get a sweet trashcan score (steak and lemoned broccoli and potatoes in a white box), and buy a longboard at the thrift store which as it turns out will cause me The Havoc of Ages in less that 24 hours.
I head for the catch out but nothing is stopping, not even junk, which seems to be mostly empties (could be the reason). I start hitching near the catch-out there's another hitcher there. Steve mostly travels the country on Greyhound and is headed to Butte currently. I give him some granola bars I got from the Food Shelf and a thunderstorm starts with a double rainbow circling it which psychs me, I love rainbows. Two girls give me a ride. "We have a gun".
"That's cool, as long as you don't shoot me."
At the top of Bozeman Pass we see the MRL MISLAU stopped to remove it's rear-end helpers. Fuck yeah!
"Stop the car, that's my train".
Betsy and Lizzie pull into the breakdown lane, I strap stuff back onto my pack, grab the board in my arms and go with the quickness towards the tracks. I vault a fence like I'm Asterix on majic potion or something and cross an access road, start flying down a hill which- OH SHIT!- turns into a cliff. OH GOD NO. I see my death in a pile of rocks below by the tracks which lie in a deep cut. I scrabble to dig my feet in the 80 degree pitch of the cut and just barely stop myself from sliding over the rock face. Just then the train starts moving but I have more important things such as survival on my mind. I try and try and almost lose my grip a few times,it's impossible to get a foothold in the rain-soaked loose shale but eventually I pull myself up and thank the Goddess for this day's reprieve from the effects of my stupidity.
I take another route down to the mainline but by that time she's moving @ 15 and there's a tunnel right there so I just watch her pass and thank god I'm alive. I really really really wish I had a cigarette to calm my nerves.
The next morning it's coffee and ground antelope from the Food Bank and the wonderful idea of longboarding the entire way down to Livingston comes to my mind. 
Halfway down I come across a doe, just killed by a car and unfortunately lactating. Well I guess her kids are out of milk but I want her hide, I sprinkle some sage over her to thank her for her life and skin and gut the deer.
This nice lady Barb who lives right there lets me wash myself and the hide with her hose and she calls her neighbor to come pick up the deer to get the meat, at least some of it isn't bruised by the impact.
I get back on the longboard with the hide in a trashbag. My plan is to tan it and make something out of it as a wedding gift for my brother. It would be a nice vest with that thin hide.
I pick up speed on the board and calculate, or more accurately don't calculate that I can make it down to some flats I see below without hopping off. Things are alright for a while and then the board goes into a death wobble. Oh shit. I try to head for the road's edge to bail into the grass and just then the wobble grows worse. The board pitches me and I slam the same shoulder that had just healed after scraping it in K-Falls into the pavement, roll onto my pack, bounce, and hurl about 10 feet parallel to the ground through the air, landing on my left knee and leaving a large chunk of flesh on the asphalt.
I wave down a SUV and a couple gives me a ride into Livingston. The only thing damaged in my pack is my toothbrush which I'd snapped clear in half. A nice lady helps me bandage myself "We told our son to wear kneepads. So should you".
I grab some coffee and vow to think more about my actions before taking them.


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## Deleted member 2626 (Dec 6, 2011)

old post but i just read it, awesome man, glad to hear someone else who respects animals enough to throw sage to the winds for the soul of the animal and to take the hide well done brother


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