Day 1: Thursday, May 15th, 2008
Calgary, Alberta to Glasgow, Montana

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In May of 2008, my parents came to visit me at my new home in Calgary. That inspired a feverish bout of spring cleaning, which left this, my living room, in a more or less unrecognizable condition. I figured I ought to take a picture to commemorate the occasion.

As soon as they left, I went on a road trip back to Indiana to see *them*, along with several ports of call in between. Since my temporary work permit was expiring on May 15th, that seemed like a good day to leave the country.

I had a harder time getting out of the country than I anticipated. On the morning of May 15th, I went in to work for a talk, and then spent the early afternoon packing and running around town to stock up on supplies for my trip. I also made the mistake of getting an oil change just before I left, which took approximately 60 minutes longer than I thought it would. Ultimately, I didn't pull out of my driveway until just before four o'clock in the afternoon, and then a conspiracy of rush hour, road construction and a freeway-less city prevented me from escaping the city limits until about 5:30.

I was headed that night for the remote border crossing at Wild Horse, Montana, which was supposedly going to stay open until 9 p.m. On the way there, I stopped only briefly in Medicine hat (the "Gas City") for dinner at McDonald's, passing the "World's Largest Teepee" as I did so, and then drove south from there towards the border, pushing 70 miles an hour on the edge of the night.

Before long, I arrived at the Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park, which straddles the border between Alberta and Saskatchewan. The park, I discovered, consists of rolling hills and fir trees and surprisingly beautiful lakes that quite effectively break up the amber-brown monotony of the southern Alberta plains. Much to my surprise, however, there was also a cordon of police cars at the entrance to the park, waiting for me.

One of the policemen flagged me down and informed me, in an earnestly friendly, Canadian way, that they were doing a spot check of everyone's license and registration. At this point, I was 50 miles from the border and had about 50 minutes to get there. I frantically dug through my glove compartment to find my "registration"--the temporary importation receipt for my car that I had neither seen nor thought of since I first received it, back in August of last year--but I couldn't find it for about five minutes. After the cop had run a check on my license, I was left with only about 40 minutes to spare.

"I don't know if you're going to make the border in time, sir," he said, "I think you're going to have to sleep in your car tonight."

I tried to reassure him by telling him I had brought a sleeping bag along with me.

"Don't hurt yourself trying to get there," he added, a little less reassuringly.

As soon as I got out of his sight, it occurred to me that there was little chance of me crossing paths with another policeman before I crossed the border. There was, in fact, no human habitation the rest of the way there. So I pushed the speedometer up to 75 through the Cypress Hills, hugging the corners of the roadway while I passed wild turkeys and patches of old snow in the darkness. And then, suddenly, I crested a hill and burst back out into the plains, where nothing but endless fields of tall grass and a lonely mountain, far away on the Montana horizon, stood in front of me.

I think I drove between 90 and 95 the rest of the way, passing not a single human being on the entire 50-mile stretch of perfectly flat, perfectly straight highway. The only danger I had to contend with were the numerous herds of deer, grazing by the roadside. Each one of them would temporarily terrify me with their cautious unpredictability.

But I safely got to the Port of Entry with almost 10 minutes to spare. It consisted of only a couple of unadorned houses, out in the middle of nowhere.


I waited in my car while a grumpy, middle-aged border patrol agent stepped out of the customs house and greeted me. He wanted to know what I was up to, and he took a look at my passport, as usual.

And then he asked me to open my trunk. I did so but felt compelled, for some reason, to get out of the car and look over his shoulder while he rummaged through my stuff. When I opened my door, though, he abruptly told me that I should "stay in the vehicle"--which I did, deciding to pass the time by taking a picture of the telephone pole across the highway, fading in the twilight.

When he was done investigating my trunk, the border patrol agent asked me when I was returning to Canada.

"Memorial Day," I said.

"And where are you going to cross?"

"Northern Minnesota."

"Good move," he said, ominously.

And then he sent me on my way.


About five minutes later, rolling through the tree-less, fence-less plains of northern Montana, I stopped to look back behind me and decided that I ought to take a picture of the sunset. Something about it reminded me of another sunset I had seen, a long time ago, when I first crossed the Great Plains by myself, heading west, in the summer of 1997.

I looked at it for awhile until a dog started barking at me from a farm, somewhere in the distance. Impelled by visions of canine fury, I got back in the car and drove for another 200 miles through the night, until I reached my final destination of Glasgow, Montana.

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