Montana and South Dakota Trip by Ruth Paget
In 1973, my dad took me on a trip to Glacier National Park in Montana during the Watergate Trial. We left from Detroit, Michigan and set out for an overnight stay in Minnesota with one of his pen pals from Field and Stream magazine (their mutual interest was fishing in the wilderness).
I woke drowsily after the overnight stay in Minnesota, but became wide-eyed once I hit the van for a day’s worth of travel through the Badlands of South Dakota and Montana. Dad turned on the radio coverage of the Watergate Trial. He was a Republican and commented on the commentators, “Politics just ruins good people like Richard Nixon.”
“What about the robbers?” I asked. “They’ll be found guilty. No one will know them or know anything about the robbery,” dad remarked.
Prairie dogs raced in front of the car in the Badlands. I kept asking dad to slow down and not squash the prairie dogs. The speed limit was 75 miles per hour then, so we were flying and squashing away.
“I’ll get in an accident, if I slow down for all them, Ruthie,” he said.
We were both transfixed by the moon-like landscape. Vast rock plateaus were broken up by higher rock plateaus with caves in the landscape. I thought snakes might live in the caves.
I thought it took forever to get through South Dakota and Montana was a longer state I saw as we crossed the state line. Dad stopped at the visitor center where I picked up travel brochures. Glacier was the big deal in Montana. Dad gave me saltine crackers with liverwurst to eat in the car.
I looked at one of the travel brochures for Butte, Montana and asked dad, “Are we going to Butt, Montana?”
“That’s not how you say that,” dad said. “Okay, are we going to Booty, Montana, then?” I asked. “That is pronounce ‘byut.’ It’s a French word meaning ‘hill.’ The French were the original European explorers in this area, “ dad said.
I sat chuckling at my kid joke.
“We’re going way up north right to the Canadian border to see Glacier National Park,” dad said.
There were towering pine trees at the entrance to Glacier that cut off the sun.
“We’re going up the ice mountain now,” dad said.
We went up, up, and up. I looked down at the pine trees, which became progressively smaller the higher up we went. The pine trees looked like stick trees you put on a Christmas mantelpiece we were up so high. I was glad to read the summit.
We went to a picnic area where dad took out his Coleman gas stove and made a breakfast-dinner in Lodge cookware. He filled his Coleman thermos with coffee several times. We breathed in the thin, high-altitude air.
With a belly full of bacon, I agree to go to Banff National Forest in Canada, so we could see Canadian pine trees and say we’d been to Canada.
Even as a kid, I knew dad was thinking the Glacier vacation was ice, pine trees, and dead prairie dogs.
Dad carefully drove down the steep glaciers that had patches of water on them from melting snow. I fell asleep and woke up in South Dakota.
Dad turned on the Watergate Trial when I woke up.
I told dad, “I want to be president. I think I can do a better job than this.”
“It’s all headache,” dad said.
“But, I think I could do it. And, I’ve traveled internationally after this trip. I have a head start on international affairs,” I said.
We both were laughing about Canadian pine trees.
Surprisingly, my non-feminist dad said, “Study hard, and even if you’re not president, you’ll still be able to do something you like eventually.”
By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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| Ruth Paget Photo |
