Wide Montana Skies

Chinook MT; Mile 961

I've moved today from purple mountain majesties right into the fruited plain. The last two days have been so beautiful that a couple times I just started singing the doxology at the top of my lungs -- a poor imitation of the constant praise that the warblers, sparrows, robins et ali were already sending up. I also spent some time cursing, dripping wet, in a small inflatable kayak driven backwards by the waves. But to start at the beginnging:

On Wednesday, had a pleasant drive out of Idaho and into the Rockies. I got to pray the daily office inside an Episcopal church that was just down the block from a technicolor garden watched over by two giant pink flamingos:



And I saw an amazing set of falls, the ones (evidently) in the movie The River Wild. I didn't get a good still-shot of the falls, but I did get a picture of some of the saw-blade art that a woman was selling by the road at the entrance to the falls:



And then, I hit traffic. Hot, dusty snar'lled construction traffic, where I was stuck behind a logging truck with a diesel engine in ill repair. I'd include the photograph, but all you would see would be black clouds of exhaust mixing with red clouds of Montana road dust. So by the time I got near Glacier National Park, one of my goals on this journey/pilgrimage, I was pretty tired and cranky. Fortunately, just short of irrational, which is the next step for me, usually resulting in driving too far or camping stupidly -- the later was almost my fate, but instead I was saved by a couple of guys in a camping store who offered to look at my campingstove and see if it was working (it wasn't; they fixed it and sold me a great summer-weight sleeping bag). And instead of irrational stumbling, the day ended beautifully with me camped in Glacier National Park in my lovely, vivid yellow and purple tent:


I had a decent dinner -- OK, it was hot and filling, if entierly lacking in flavor, and then set and watched the sun set over a lake that is nearly the twin of the loch outside of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry:



The next morning, the weather threatned to turn. Stubborn Scot that I am, I inflated my kayak (which is perhaps 4 feet long, and rides on the water like a rubber duck...) and set off down the lake. It was beautiful and wonderful; I arrived at the Lodge, sat by the fire and met some vivacous Southerners (one of whom had a father who went to Andover Newton Theological School -- far removed from Hogwarts, but part of the same BTI that EDS belongs to, and not too far from Messiah). When I tried to kayak back, though, the wind had changed and kept pushing me to the north, away from camp. Jesus' warning from a few days ago, about the sign of Jonah, was in my ears and I turned around -- where the son of the Andover Newton minister gave me a ride back to camp. Ah always de-pend upon the kindness of strangers...

I had been looking forward to watching the majestic peaks of Glacier National Park. Here's a sample picture of the park in good weather:



And here's the view I had:



Part of the purpose of this journey (with its solitude, the attempt to read the Daily Office, the choice of books I listen to...) has been rediscovering prayer and awareness of God, which is easy to loose in business and noise. But the journey back also goes through a lot of superstition, fear, doubt and anxiety -- the noise I make inside my own head. So when the weather is rainy, or something breaks (and any number of things of mine broke the first couple days out), I jump to wondering what terrible awful sign it must be. I've been lucky enough to not over-indulge those fears; sometimes at my better moments I even look for the lessons I might be learning from the rain and the small setbacks. I might in fact be learning how to move forward in joy even when things don't go exactly to my plan. Which is probably a vital lesson for any parish priest to learn.

So the rain, while disapointing me in my desire for grand vistas, offered up other, unexpected gifts. There was, first of all, the beauty of the rain itself, whether the drama of clouds veiling and unveiling mountains, or the shock of lightening striking across a slate grey sky in the plains. And the rain brought about other gift: Montana, which has been in a long drought, is responding to the rain with rolling green fields, wildflowers, and rainbows. I'll close this entry for the last two days with some photographs of the gifts the rain has brought:





And of course, it didn't rain the whole time...