Montana I
Saturday June 29
After breakfast, we picked out another park to try. This time, we moved westward into Montana and then to the Makoshika State Park. Normally, this is an area where you can see fossils (and in fact, we did, although they were seashells). However, the lower trails at Makoshika had been washed out by flooding on the day before. It made our fossil hunting difficult.
We climbed to high ground on a central trail that switchbacked its way to the top of a butte. The view allowed us to look down on everyone else in the park (only in a literal way). There were a few other hikers but not many, not even for a Saturday morning after a storm. Most of the park guests stayed on a level with the visitor center.
Makoshika was nice enough but we had a schedule to keep in our drive across the country, so after an hour we hopped into our rental car and headed to Lewiston. There, we met our nicest AirBnB hostess. She showed us to a small but well-stocked room in her house.
Although the space was clearly dominated by the king-sized bed, our hostess made up for it by providing free coffee, tea, oatmeal, and recommendations about Lewiston. We asked where we could hike. She showed us a trail by her house that led "to the frog pond," which was part of a small but beautiful town park. After our walk around the southwest of town and the park, we asked about finding a good steak restaurant. We had come to Montana, after all, and we had been advised on what to try.
"Oh, I'm sorry," she said. "We don't have any fine dining in town."
"No places that serve steak?"
"Maybe a few." Our hostess gave us a half-dozen recommendations but she concluded by worrying that they weren't nice enough for us. I'm not sure how we had impressed her as being sophisticates.
One of the most promising places was a brew pub, so we headed there. The decor, as advertised by our hostess, was typical for a middle-class restaurant with a brewery attached. Once again, I felt a bit surprised. This time, delightfully so, and the source of my eyebrow-raising was the food.
When I had a bite of salad, I encountered something long forgotten: cucumber has flavor. What's more, the taste of it has always seemed really good to me. Sometimes, as a kid, I ate cucumbers raw out of my grandfather's garden. Onions, too, and other vegetables but there was something subtle and fun about the cucumbers. These specimens in the salad must have come from somewhere local, a farm not a garden, but they were very fine.
I almost regretted my order of totchos (tater tots done up as nachos). But the totchos order continued my tradition of trying something new at every reasonable opportunity and they were good - almost top of the menu for most brew pubs - and I liked them. So I was okay with them until I tried a slice of my wife's steak.
The flesh was pink. It glistened. I chomped down on it and felt it separate softly between my teeth.
"What do you think?" Diane asked. She had an expectant look. She knew.
"I think this might be the second best steak I've ever tasted," I replied honestly. I checked my words. I was being a bit hesitant because it is hard to measure between bites fifteen years apart.
"Are you thinking Dickie Brennan's was better?" Her gaze narrowed. "In New Orleans?"
"Yeah." It was exactly the basis of my comparison. Diane knows about my pickiness with steak. There have hardly been any I've genuinely liked - only the best, really, or perhaps also the very good while in an extreme circumstance like not eating for a day or two.
"Dickie Brennan's did a lot to theirs. I think this place just grilled the meat. They sprinkled on some pepper. That's it."
I looked at the steak again. She was right. This local, grass-fed beef was so much better than others of its type that, in my mouth, I could barely establish the resemblance. All the other steaks I've had were, at best, reminiscent of the two finest, this one in Montana and the other at a fancy restaurant in New Orleans.
Probably, all over the mid-range restaurants in Montana, we could get steaks better than anywhere in the east. There's something wrong with our food distribution system to cause this, of course, but there it is.
That night, we tried to stay up to see the northern lights. We loved star gazing in our last two vacations. This time, the clouds looked grim but we felt they might clear. It was worth a try.
Diane fell asleep waiting. I set my alarms for 10:00, 10:30, and 10:45. The sun wasn't scheduled to set until 10:43 PM, but I didn't quite believe it. (The forecast was true, naturally.) The skies stayed bright and cloudy even at 10:30. After sunset, the moon rose from the northwest. The presence of the lunar orb always renders star gazing impossible. Plus the sphere itself was, on this night, merely a glow behind an expanse of clouds. So the lateness of the hour didn't matter. We weren't going to see stars, auroras, or anything but smoky greyness, not even a true inky dark in this town, on this evening.
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