First time I was really sorry to leave a campsite – the whole Livingstone KOA campsite was nice, every site nestled in trees, and the river’s edge site was so seductive I could have happily stayed another day. But we hit the road, got to the Yellowstone Park (visited a café in Gardiner in my daughter Rosie’s honor – see photo) and entered. Ultimately the Park was worth it for the wildlife and the Grand Prismatic Pool, a bubbling, boiling turquoise and sky blue sulfur spring that produces multi-colored vapors, described in his autobiogrpahy by my pal Bobby Bridger as featuring elongated diaphanous steam spirals [that] swirl to heaven, escaping thermal pools of unimaginable temperatures bubbling up from within the volcanic bowels of Mother Earth. The temperature from the pool’s deep, hot core cools as it approaches the banks, allowing various intrepid forms of living algae to defy the heat and flourish in rich, deliciously intense colors. Creating a steamy aurora borealis as a visual celebration of their bold survival, the algae pools mirror the heavens while simultaneously casting a ghostly reflection of their own translucent pastel hues into the spiraling vapor clouds. From my first visit, the Grand Prismatic Pool seemed to me the perfect mystical metaphor of a human: light shining through vapors, creating rainbow prisms of color…

The remaining landscape of the Park was disappointing, nonetheless, mostly impenetrably dull pine woods (with no peaks visible above them) decimated by fires and storms and, on top of this, suffering from a severe infestation of hugely-fat-tourist beetle. If you drive the whole Park you eventually reach some fine lakewide vistas at the furthest southerly point, but these too recede as you follow the figure-8 main road back northwards. The best and most interesting part – with the exception of the astonishing sulfur pools – is in the Northeast quadrant, where moose and bear and deer and buffalo literally abound, and come in close, to the delight of the humans snapping away like paparazzi who’ve chanced upon a naked, horned rock star. A lone young wolf trotted up the road, looking lost and confused; several buffalo mooched along the tarmac too – and they’ve been known to attack cars. We saw some frisky males leaping and kicking out backwards to keep vehicles at bay.

It’s a long day on two wheels at 35 mph, 215 miles of constant vigilance – the concentration is the tiring part – to reach Cooke City, an old mining town where Brendan and his outstandingly comfortable & clean High Country Motel provided a refuge. A little on the cold side for camping, at 8000 feet, and if you’re as weary as we are, oh for a bed. What takes it out of you is the strain of focusing on possible animal intrusion and, worse, possible driver-suddenly-seeing-an-elk and braking abruptly. The elk were very far away, tiny dots they would have been even if our fellow-tourists had had telephoto lenses, which they didn’t. God help their families at home movie time. There’s an elk in that shot somewhere, godammit, I swear there is.

The one giant outlet, at Ol’Faithful, king geyser, featured accessories stretched across immense stores. The buyers looked sad and uninspired by either their purchases or the sights, or the travel. It’s hard not to feel sorry for people whose journey is so devoid of the smell of the landscape they’re passing through that they’d almost be just as well off watching a travel-video. Tomorrow, for us, the famed Beartooth Pass. And by tomorrow sleep will have sewn my legs back on.

260 miles of speedy interstate, holding due SE and darting between heavy thunderstorms to the South and to the East. Some rain on leaving Butte, soon over. And our reward is the nicest campsite since we left the California redwoods behind, Pine Creek KOA on route 89, nestled in woods on the very edge of the racing Yellowstone River, its surface overtaking itself all the time as the Clark Fork River did yesterday.

The memorable contrast of the day was between sad, bleak, forgotten Butte, haunted by its mining-town past & seemingly with nothing to re-invigorate it, and plush Bozeman, site of the Montana State campus and home to every fashionable franchise under the sun. Bozeman has skiing, fishing, hiking, kayaking, climbing, and it’s the gateway to Yellowstone Park. Butte… well, Butte has a personality. It’s a drunk, unemployed, shouting-in-the-street (we saw some) personality, but give me that every time. And give me M&Ms, the 24/7 Butte bar/cafe/diner, over Starbucks any time. Not that there’s much choice, in Butte. Try finding hot food in Butte on a Sunday. We scoured the steep, boarded-up streets until a friendly drunk, proudly waving his beer bottle on the sidewalk, pointed us at M&Ms (thanks to a gloriously un-revoked city ordnance, you can drink openly in Butte – how long would that last in Bozeman? – and, as our beery pal explained, you can offer a passing cop a swig of your poison of choice). Tell me you don’t love Butte now.

M&Ms has nothing on its aluminum-sided front to tell you it’s a bar, much less that it’s a Serbian Irish bar. (Yeah just another ol’ Serbian Irish bar.) Sam the Montenegrin will be your bartender, he owns the place – refurbished it 4 years ago to bring it back to life – and keeps it open 24 hours. Serves good burgers and even better wings (‘Rat Wings’ the menu calls them, and they come from pretty fat rats). These are the places that have made our tour of America the sweet journey it has been; these and the landscapes – Montana finest of all, for my money.

I was going to call this update Zombie Apocalypse Refugee Camp, a term used online by a campsite customer to describe one of the campsites hereabouts (not this one we’re in). We’ve never yet encountered a ZARC, though we fully expect to, any day. But today the road ran through Paradise, literally and metaphorically – the tiny hamlet called Paradise and the most wonderful scenery I’ve ever come acoss, not excepting South Africa’s Eastern Cape. Route 200 from Sandpoint to Missoula follows the thrilling green waters of the Clark Fork river, streaming southwards from the depths of ocean-deep Pend Oreille Lake. I’ve never seen a river like it. Photos couldn’t possibly convey the shades of swirling forest green or the curious mantling – no other word except this ancient one will do – as if for a hundred miles and more whirlpools 6 to 10 feet wide were spiralling underwater, creating sliding surfaces, some shiny and some matt… with the effect of water about to freeze, or else a kind of fisherman’s dream of underwater shoals coated with midges. Perhaps these sliding surfaces are the effect of the immensely deep and cold Lake Pend Oreille water coming slowly to the warmth of day.

All around this, broad summery valleys hold snow-flecked peaks at bay, and finally the climax arrives: the immense panorama – the full width of the horizon – of the Kalispell glacier-ranges rises over the calm green flood plain like a backdrop of the Himalayas, snowy peaks from end to end.

After the ultimate luxury of our Sandpoint lodgings, back to reality with the Yogi Bear campsite (I kid you not), very pleasant; up with the tents. Cereal for supper. Yum. Freezing night. Ugh. Well, it is the shortest one of the year.

Heavenly peace overlooking Lake Pend Oreille, the fifth largest body of freshwater – so our host, Darwin, was recently told – on the planet. The shock of this! – after the ghastly tri-cities of eastern Washington where we spent the previous night, a conurbation of mile after mile after mile of identical food outlets and gas stations as if belched out by some stadium-sized 3-D printer – at night I got lost in its entrails and rode 63 miles around Kennewick and Pasco, a brightly lit vision of hell. Only the liquor stores and the gun shops retain a faint, seedy human quality. The rest service the great dis-acculturated mass of Americans, in this strange country where the rich are thin, by choice, and the poor obscenely fat, wobbling from outlet to outlet.

Susan and Darwin farm their acres – they make hundreds of bales of meadow hay for local goatkeepers and owners of a few cattle or horses. Much of the hay made around here is shipped to China and Japan – as strange an export as I could ever have imagined. Otherwise the ships from the Far East would return home empty; so they prefer to haul hay, and from West Coast grassland farmers’ point of view, provide a market easier to ship to than it is to send the hay east across America. Most of Darwin’s 200 acres, inherited from his father, are forest; with a beautiful lake shoreline; a walnut tree his father planted, now huge and majestic; a broken-down barn and an abandoned house and a new, glorious house resplendent with glass.

I’ve known Susan since we were college students and, later, colleagues when Susan was Chair of the Comparative Literature Department at UC San Diego, and she employed me. Strangely, I’d turned down a job there many years earlier when my Cambridge Ph.D supervisor, Raymond Williams, recommended me to Herbert Marcuse, then in residence at UCSD. The strange part is how I ever could have decided to stay in Britain, teaching at Essex University, over California and Marcuse; but I was newly married, and… and somehow unconvinced that California would provide a track to a settled future. Which it would have. But I wound up at San Diego all the same, in the end, thanks to Susan. (In Portland, Kara Grail reminded me that I always told her that things work out the same, in the end, regardless of the choices you make.) There I met Susan’s partner (now her husband) Darwin, a scientist who protests that he isn’t about to win the Nobel but I believe otherwise, 30 years ago – I knew of his Idaho summer paradise, but never thought I’d see it.

Lake Pend Oreille was so named by a Canadian fur trader 200 years ago, in honor of the ear pendants worn by the indigenous population. This is the northernmost point of our journey, and reaching here, only a few miles from Canada, has allowed us to feel that we are still on an outward trajectory, although in fact we’re already on the way home – which we’ll become of aware of as we now journey south and east into Montana. Much wonderful country still to see!

Setting off this morning with a wonderful bodily flashback to younger years of biking – to that centaur-feeling of oneness with the motorcycle… then off in the wrong direction (my navigational skills failed us utterly today, thanks also to failure to study the map properly, leading to 3 misroutings which caused us 80 miles and more of unnecessary travel), but which brought us to a very nice breakfast nook inside a filling station, which we’d never otherwise have discovered. Lovely eggs, marmelade, and an old-timer who recommended some good routes through Montana next week. Soon we were back on the right road, towards Spokane across 150 miles of vast, empty, sunlit plains (much of it uncultivated) under a gigantic sky, land yellowy grey in color – perhaps what the poet had in mind when he wrote of the ‘fallows grey / where the nibbling sheep do stray.’ (He really did, in characteristically foolish verses.) A few cows, a few horses, but no sheep. A propos Milton’s poem, and its setting by Handel, a year or two back I was amazed to meet – and in a parking lot – a lady named Euphrosyne; so she announced; hardly able to believe my luck, I immediately serenaded her: ‘Come, come, thou goddess fair and free, fair and free, in heaven yclept Eu-eu-phro-o-o-syne, i-in heaven yclept Eu-eu-phro-o-o-syne…’, something I had been waiting to do for 50 years. Was she impressed? Charmed? Not a bit. Faintly vexed. She either knew nothing of the origins of her name, or wasn’t used to anyone having a comeback to it.

My next, even more costly mistake, was to suppose that Route 2 going due north, the road I wanted, was more likely to be ‘Route 2 West’ than ‘Route 2 East.’ Wrong. In fairness, it could have been either. What in Britain is a prejudice in favor of a North-South axis, in America is a prejudice in favor of an East-West one. Any road heading NNE will be declared ‘East,’ and correspondingly with ‘West.’ Circular or beltway roads will be declared ‘East’ and ‘West’ regardless of those quadrants in which they are patently going North or South. This may be a practical solution – except when joining a northerly or southerly stretch and trying to figure out which way to head. Does this arise because east and west are axes of progress (railway, expansion, exploration) and north and south axes of war? In Britain it’s simply hard to cross the country laterally (especially by rail), except in the South; everywhere else is to or from London, a north-south journey.

My error cost 20 miles before I realized it, and 20 miles back, to Spokane now in the rush hour. North of Spokane, gorgeous mountains, forest and lakes opened out at once and gave us hours of wonderful biking, until I missed the turning to cross a bridge before the town of Priest River and wound up going the long way round, through Sandpoint and over the long, 2-mile bridge south. In return we gained many beautiful views and an easier route to Susan and Darwin’s spectacular house on the water. I’ll try to capture it on film tomorrow, but the views are once more probably just too vast to capture. We were greeted with a glorious meal and eventually fell into bed. 6000 miles now completed.