and sometimes things are just like you claim they will be in new york magazine.

oh montana. big sky country indeed. we hit it at sunset, a pretty spectacular thing. then we stopped for the night after a looooooooooong day of driving in glendive, montana. somehow we ended up with pretty much the last room in town. a town where seemingly everything shuts down at 8pm. and also a town where teenagers step right off the set of a tv show, forehead piercings and brightly colored hair streaks a requirement for the role of small town, dissatisfied rebel without a cause. most of these rebel clones seem to be working at restaurants and convenience stores, where they can show their angst and display their piercings to locals and travelers alike. but i guess that's what life is as a teenager when you are in the middle of nowhere that is seemingly also a "destination" for lots of other folks. montana was also the first of the ever-so-popular gas station-truck stop-convenience store-casino with bar establishments that populate the sides of highways in many parts of the country. when we encountered our first of these, still early on sunday morning, there were people who had been sitting at those game machines in that casino for a real long time already. and ryan was probably the only person all day to sit down, play one quick game, and walk away with the couple bucks in cash he made. it was mindblowingly desperate inside that truck stop, from the casino to the bar to the washing machines to the showers to the dirty vagabonds buying whole changes of clothes to the semi-toothless locals roaming the aisles of the convenience store to the forehead (right above the eyebrow) pierced, hot pink and black streaked hair checkout girl ready, eager and waiting for the dirty vagabond boys picking out tee shirts and underwear to try to pick her up.

but soon enough we were back in the penske and back on the road. and it was awesome. it ranged from farm to prairie to plain to mountain. it was lush, it was barren, it was in between. ranches dotted the landscape. herds roamed. the sky was huge and magnificent and unstoppable. it was driving across montana, on a sunny sunday morning that i had my new york magazine prophesied moment: listening to the national's high violet while sitting in a u-haul* (i didn't know about penske back when i made my new york magazine claims), the sun warming my arm, moving to the other side of the country for love. and it felt precisely as i thought it might, the land so big, the sun so warm, the sky so massive, my heart bursting with excitement and fear and love and being alive. montana held a lot of a-ha moments for me, i was pretty good at having them when ryan was napping or i had sunglasses on, best for everyone that way. but me and montana, we bonded. the landscape, the reality, the unfolding new chapter brought me to tears many times within her borders. she took it, she took it all in her magnificent and massive expanse. in a matter of simple osmosis, so much of the tangled saturated volume of everything that was tied up in tight, confined, new york-paced, high-strung julia poured out like simple scientific law demands from higher concentration to lower, in an attempt to create a balance. i am not religious, in the traditional sense of the word, i never have been, it's never served me, it's never been there for me, and too much has happened for me not to know with all my heart and soul that it is people and words and actions that matter and make things better or worse, not lip service to an institution. my break with belief in someone else's god and someone else's set of rules came young and is a conversation for another time and place. the point here is that there were moments on this road trip when the natural world around me gave me an experience that was, for me, what i can only describe as religious: a moment of clarity, a moment of alignment, a moment of peace, a moment of understanding. there is so much simplicity and so much complexity in the natural world, and it's breathtakingly beautiful if you stop to see it from time to time. i know now that though i may be quite adept at diving beneath the surface, jumping on the fast train and being a slave to the grind, i will not ever feel at peace with myself and i will not ever feel truly fulfilled if i can't have more time like i had in montana (and then in yellowstone). i am grateful, to my core, for my time in big sky country.

keep on truckin'...

ah, back on the open road. for narrative's sake, let's just say it felt great to get back in the penske. and, also, for narrative's sake, let's kind of jump cut right over minnesota. there was construction and traffic and it was lackluster. i say that understanding that it's a brash and glib judgment, i am positive that those 10,000 lakes exist somewhere, not anywhere you can see from the highway, mind you, and that they are absolutely lovely. but we took the highway, and the scenery was mediocre in comparison to the other farmlands i had seen and the sky was in transition, and sometimes transition is not a pretty site. the magnitude remained. it was definitely bigger and more open than the skies i am used to, having grown up in massachusetts and having spent the last nine years in new york. but the color lost some vibrancy, it became a more muted, paler shade of light blue. not nearly as complex or exciting as the blue skies of wisconsin. and the clouds thinned out and spread out. they were smaller, less dense, further away. gone were the mammoth puffy monsters. but we were not quite at the take your breath away enormity of north dakota or montana skies yet. and so we pressed full steam ahead, anxious for north dakota. fargo fargo fargo, i could not wait to drive through fargo. my favorite accent, one of my favorite movies of all time. i was amped. i'm not sure what i expected. but it was magnificent, whatever it was i had in mind.

and then we crossed the state line.

and i don't know what i was thinking, but it certainly had nothing to do with anything in front of my eyes. wow. you win some, you lose some. i lost this one.

the landscape of the country changed and it changed fast in north dakota. spread out, wide, open, more gold and amber and brown and yellow in the landscape as we drove through in our big ol' penske. the fields were bigger, more calculated, more industrial. signs of energy plants and oil drills crept into the picture. but not a lot of signs of life. where do all the people of north dakota live? the fields of sunflowers were amazing, i will definitely give eastern north dakota that much. and the skies stretched on forever in all directions. it felt limitless. gazing at the horizons it felt as though when i exhaled, i poured out in every direction, rushing hundreds of miles out in all directions at once, taking up more space than ever before, than i ever thought possible. it seemed limitless. everything seemed absolutely limitless out there.

the best part of north dakota is that clearly it carries some sort of napolean complex and has a real competitive streak. who can blame it? south dakota has got mt rushmore, montana has got all those ranches and yellowstone, not to mention dibs on the phrase "big sky country", minnesota claims to have 10,000 lakes...and so driving through north dakota it's constantly screaming out at you, "hey! i'm special too!! look what i've got!" everything is "home of the biggest _____" we've got the biggest cow! well, we've got the biggest buffalo! well, we've got the biggest dinosaur fossil! and they all have gigantic statues to commemorate their peculiarity and visitor shops/museums where you can learn more (*if learning more means buying souvenirs). it's kitsch and gimmick on a grandiose scale. and that is awesome. weird, but awesome.

it was not until we had long since passed bismarck and hit the western edge of north dakota that it became truly awesome. the painted canyon? i had. no. idea. it was a scene that could not have been better orchestrated and devised, driving through the badlands and the painted canyon heading due west towards montana watching the sunset. (friendly reminder for the non-directional savvy readers of this oh-so-captivating blog: the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. or, to be obnoxiously direct, we drove right into the sunset.) i don't think i will ever forget that sunset as long as i live.