In Montana

The passage out of Seattle is sudden.  One minute, you're amid the gas stations and cubist housing estates of Issaquah.  The next, you're up in the misty clefts of Cascades that David Lynch chose as the setting of Twin Peaks.  And then you're out in the country beyond Cle Elum, a flat empty brownness.  Our little Hyundai is a mercury bubble on a strip of highway across a windswept plain.

The radio stations faded out in the mountains, and all the stations in Seattle became superseded by country and ranchera music.  We find a remnant of a previous era, an AM station playing old Brill Building songs with strings and horns.  Someone singing about a rose that grows in Spanish Harlem, dutifully broadcast across the desert for 50 years.

I'd forgotten about highways as escape routes.  About the joy of getting out of town for a while, kicking around gravel parking lots and diners with hand-painted signs.  When your life is defined by cityspace for so long, you forget about the vastness that separates here from there in America.

Glacier National Park is a place so gorgeous that it looks barely real.  Narrow waterfalls cascade down snow-capped mountains, shimmering in the late afternoon sunlight above lakes as translucent and blue as sapphires.  It is almost disconcertingly similar to James Hilton's Shangri-La, to the vision of paradise described in the Qu'ran. The peaks are named Almost-a-Dog, Going-to-the-Sun, whole mythologies captured in simple map references.

We walked along the shore of Saint Mary Lake, along contorted sedimentary cliffs with pale bushes clinging to the sides.

On a sunny day, it's something like Lake Como, a slender body of water lined with bright pink flowers. Squint and you can see characters from Tender Is the Night traipsing along the shore. A pink ribbon flies off a hat in the July wind and is caught by a columbine.

On a gray day, the mountains reveal themselves to be jagged and barren.  The sheer cliffs are barricaded by gray scree slopes, a landscape fit for witches and ghosts.  The heavy log buildings of the park brood, entrenched into the bases of the Lewis Range.

The two images of the lake are holograms of each other. Separated by a perceptual veil of light and color, they occupy the same space, the same contours, facing each other, never touching.

This was our funereal tour.  I wanted to see the glaciers that gave the national park its name before they finally melt.  That last piece of glacier will fall apart 10 or 15 years from now.  It will absorb enough energy from the Sun that it will enter phase change, transform into free-flowing water, and that last little transfixed piece of a previous geological epoch will swiftly dissipate in the waters of the river.

And yet, despite the inevitable demise of a place I was falling in love with, I tried my hardest to put my fatalism behind me.  Here we were, away from our lives and obligations for a few days, drinking screw-top red wine and sunning ourselves on cliffs. We immersed ourselves in a fading summer out on a windy high mountain aerie on the edge of America.