Good weather luck was with us today as it often has been on our odyssey – missing storms by a mile or two, or a hour or two – and we rode the Beartooth Pass (11,000 feet up) in blazing sun. As we approached the summit I heard a hawk’s quick cry above me and looked up to see what to me is a sacred sign: an albino hawk. We have one in Woodstock, the guardian of Mt. Overlook, which towers over us. I felt blest and infinitely fortunate. And protected: the Beartooth is not to be missed – unless you suffer, as I do, from vertigo. Today the panorama of the Rockies was a terror to me, seen from perilous heights (the Kalispell glacier, by contrast, I viewed in comfort from the serene flood plain beneath it, 2 days ago). For sheer scale it topped anything I’ve seen. Freezing – snowfields all around – my fingers painfully cold, trying to work the grips. Roads were twisty all right, as promised, although innocuous by the cruellest standards. I think of the damage I inflicted on the transmission and steering linkage of more than one car, on my four crossings of the Atlas Mountains via the Tizi n’Test, a dizzying test by any standards. No verges; sheer drops; but I was able to ignore them by focusing on cornering at speed, on 4 wheels. On two wheels this morning, slow and careful, the heights were all too present. Happily Joe was delighting in them, speeding down the mountain like a slalom king, and then taking off, on the flat, a bat newly released from hell. I hung in, on his tail, relieved beyond words to have descended to a mere 5500 feet, until we reached Red Lodge, a town in the grip of Western kitsch of all kinds. We resisted, but Joe did sample an elk burger (ELK! The burger!) while I wondered at the absurdity of my being content to eat beef in any form but distressed at the idea of raising an elk to be burgers. It tasted like beef, Joe reports.

We sped on to Cody, a town as dominated by and devoted to the memory of its namesake, Buffalo Bill Cody, as a town could possibly be. A miniature shower clipped us as we approached Cody and then, as soon as we were settled, a giant thunderstorm raged in and around this city so devoted to rodeo (‘The World Capital of Rodeo’!) that they hold one every single night, June through August. Your roving reporter will bear witness to this – if the thunderstorm ever lifts. (Since writing this: more storms, more sun.) Atrocious weather has been prevalent and is forecast. Happily Cody is the site of some great museums, which will steep us in Western history, deeper than an elk burger was ever fried.

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!