pickup truck?” I asked, stopping a few yards short of the red vehicle my father was heading straight toward.
“No,” he said. “It’s just a car that got its hind end stuck in a gate and got stretched out.”
I rolled my eyes, hoping the bad humor wasn’t a phenomenon that bubbled up to the surface now that my father’s feet were back on his home ground.
The drive from the airport wasn’t very long, and I was actually surprised when we pulled into a parking lot. I looked around. There wasn’t a single cow in sight.
“This doesn’t look much like a ranch,” I said.
For a brief moment, I held out the hope that the idea of the Dude Ranch experience had been a joke all along, a twisted and somewhat cruel joke, but a joke nonetheless.
But that was not to be.
“This isn’t the ranch,” Dad said. “Green Valley is still a ways off, and the ranch is a bit away from there. We’re going to stay here for the night, then drive out to Green Valley tomorrow. That way, we can spend the night in town and get to the Montgomery Ranch bright and early in the morning for the first day of the tour.”
“Lovely,” I said.
Either my father didn’t notice the sarcastic lilt in my voice or he just didn’t mention it. We pulled into a parking spot and Uncle Lucien’s truck pulled in beside us. Each of us grabbing our bags, we climbed out and looked at the hotel.
It wasn’t horrible. It was by no means up to the standards I was accustomed to, but it wasn’t grisly and dilapidated, either. Essentially a generic box with a middle-ground chain name splashed on the sign out front, it was the definition of mediocre.
The interior of the hotel continued on with that theme. A study in muted tones and nondescript patterns, the only attempt at any form of decoration or personality in the rooms came in the form of paintings that looked like whoever created them had churned them out by the dozens each day.
“Look at this,” Cecilia said, standing in front of one of those paintings in the room we were sharing for the night. This one of roses in washed-out pinks and greens. “It’s the visual representation of what a grandmother’s underwear drawer smells like.”
And such was the beginning of my experience in Montana.
The next morning, I got what I decided I was going to look at as a preview of my upcoming wilderness cooking when we went downstairs in the hotel to find other guests busily making their own waffles in the breakfast nook of the lobby. I opted for fruit salad and coffee instead.
My father was already apparently in full-on ranch mode when he sat down at the table with us. His plate was mounded with two waffles, a pile of scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, and breakfast potatoes. He ate with abandon, and when he was finished, we piled back in the car to make our way to Green Valley.
As we drove, I was rethinking my contemplation of whether there may still be gallows here in Montana. Only because there didn’t seem to be anything here in Montana.
I sat in the backseat of the truck and watched as the endless stretch of rolling hills and mountains streamed past. I was glad my father couldn’t see my face where I was sitting. If he did, he would know exactly how I felt about this place. There would be no way to cover it up.
I hated it. There was no other way to put it. I absolutely hated it.
Who would want to live somewhere like this? There was nothing but grass and sky and trees. At least, I assumed it was grass. The bitterly cold weather that bit at me in the short time I spent walking across the parking lot had reduced the fields to brown and yellow rather than anything green.
There was nothing else as far as I could see. No malls. No resorts. And no cars on the road besides big trucks hauling hay and junk. If it wasn’t for my uncle and cousin driving a bit ahead of us, I would think we had somehow managed to find our way to some private road used only by ranchers.
Essentially the same scenery repeated itself over and over with very little change for the next couple of hours before we turned off the main road and I saw a collection of little buildings ahead of us.