The Highline

Heading east away from Glacier we took Route 2, known as The
Highline, a nickname borrowed from the northernmost American
railway which largely remains within sight of the road.  Where
the approach to the park from the west climbed through foothills 
and gradually loftier mountains, leaving to the east was an abrupt 
drop into the plains.  The mountains in the mirrors formed a dramatic
skyline behind us, a purple wall erupting from the prairie.  

In western Montana, the vertical vacuum left by the mountains is
immediately filled by a spectacular display of towering clouds in
every direction, painting the land in great drifting patches of shadow
and sunlight.  In that vast flatness we were clearly able to mark a
storm's mountainous crawl across the land.  When its black 

downpour at last crushed over us, we could just as clearly see 

through to an advancing bath of sunlight, stark and cleansed beyond 

its borders.

"Ohh yaahh,"  said the North Dakotan gas station attendant, "If yuh
dohn't lake thuh wayther heere, weet fave minutes."  The truth is, I
love everybody with that accent just a little bit more.

The sky rules this stretch of highway, but the route is marked too 
by the steady presence of trains, some with lazily long strands of 
double-stacked cars.  Countless graying farmhouses, schools, and 
churches, abandoned and listing, are known as The Ghosts.

The sun was setting behind us just we as crossed the border into 

North Dakota and we drove into the heart of a storm we'd been 

watching swell before us for hours.  The rain was too much for 

the wipers, and the lightning bolts far too engorged as they arced 

onto radio towers.  Neither of us could believe the violence of the 

hail left the windshield intact.  In the midst of this uniquely 

midwestern fury, a dense double rainbow anchored itself to the 

plain on either side of the road.