They awoke the next morning to slowly clearing skies. They found the land around the motel was a dairy farm with milk cows grazing nearby.

One by one they exited their room to survey the scene. This land was domesticated, neat, pastoral and pleasant. This landscape was everything yesterday’s was not.

It was after they had packed up their motorcycles and about ready to begin the day’s ride when Rex looked at Augustus and Marlow and uttered the phrase reserved for those who have shared the special bond of having been to hell and back together. “We did it.”

They never talked of those hellish moments again.

There were fewer crop-filled fields this day. More than half of the tillable plots seemed have been left fallow. As they moved northward, the landscape became sandier, rockier and more prairie like.

They were delighted at how plentiful the wildlife was when their course veered westward on state route 200. The critters seemed distinctly unfazed by the thunder machines’ presence. Grazing and skylarking along the roadside were deer, elk, buffalo, sheep, rabbits, antelope, pronghorn sheep, lambs, and a single, outsized bald eagle swooping just ten feet over the earth targeting some tasty morsel for its morning repast.

Mountains became smaller and more isolated from one another. During one 80 mile section of route 59, there were fewer than a dozen vehicles total, including two twenty mile segments with no car or other human presence visible whatsoever. Big sky country was indeed the emptiest void of the trip.

For a good part of the day they encountered stiff headwinds en route the day’s destination at Glacier National Park. As they had done since the trip’s beginning, they compared gas mileage at the day’s first gas stop. Rex’s and Marlow’s mileage had dropped around 10%. Normal. Augustus’s plummeted 40%. SNAFU again?

As a precaution, they agreed to make more frequent fuel stops. After doing a little more than 120 miles, they refueled a second time and discovered that Augustus’s tank was near empty. His bike had become a serious gas hog. This was not a good thing. They were facing upcoming stretches of road with no service stations for upwards of 130 miles. Augustus’s 5.1 gallon gas tank capacity would make these segments dicey at these fuel mileages. After a third shortened leg and continued crappy mileage, they stopped at the Great Falls Harley shop for some emergency doctoring on the fuel sucking Ultra Classic.

After two hours and a $200 diagnosis fee, everything checked out within specs. They departed Great Falls to face afternoon winds which had strengthened to a steady 40 MPH. Hoping to extend Gas Hog Augustus’s range, they slowed their pace down to a stately 55 MPH.

Given the state’s generous 75 MPH speed limit, they dined for nearly three hours on the dust of every passing car, farm vehicle, and semi-tractor trailers laden with pigs and cows. One dilapidated, aluminum-clad, rental RV delivered the ultimate insult. As it lumbered past, two of its young male occupants mooned them from its rear window while its pedal-to-the-metal engine wheezed muffler crud upon them. It was a moment that shall live in ignominy.

The Brawling Cantina

They made their way to Browning. From its outskirts, the town looked serene. This book’s cover was deceiving.

Browning is located just outside the eastern portal of Glacier National Park. Its dozen motels and lodges held not a single vacant room for the trio. They needed to gas up before heading into the park. They assumed that they might be shut out of lodging there as well.

While at Browning’s Town Pump gas station, they were flabbergasted to observe nearby repeated dust ups amongst the local crowd of Hispanic, Blackfeet Indian and paleface cowboys. Scores of people were standing around drinking from barely concealed open containers.

At least twice by their count, several police cars came wailing into the service station lot, disgorging mammoth, barrel-chested. blue shirted cops. Striding into the crowd, these B52-sized Johnny Laws quickly calmed things down. Just as suddenly they would depart with a cuffed perp in tow and the car’s lights and flashers on.

After gassing up his FatBoy, Marlow went inside this Exxon Express’s large mini-market to use the men’s room and buy a bottle of water. What he found was a dissolute scene straight out of the famous Star Wars cantina. It was crowded to almost mob level conditions. Long lines at the cash registers were obscured by a smoky, dark and dank atmosphere. Smells of stale sweat mixed with urine. Almost everyone had alcohol on their breath but no one made direct eye contact. The place possessed a surly edginess bordering on savage. Marlow quickly weaved his way into the bathroom and then departed the store without any water.

They swiftly departed the brawling cantina. Sitting on their bikes kitty corner from the gas station while waiting in traffic on Central Avenue, they watched a stumbling female drunkenly careen off the sidewalk and bounce hard off the side of a stopped van. The women slowly whirled revealing a bruised and blood caked forehead underneath her knitted watch cap. She righted herself, regained the sidewalk and crossed at the stoplight.

They gladly left this wasteland village of the damned in their rear view mirrors.

Tommie/Tommy

It was past 7 PM when they entered the park. Light was fading as the sun grazed the peaks of the mountains. They likely would sleep this night on the couches in the three-storied lobby of the park’s East Glacier Lodge. After they parked directly in front of the lodge’s welcoming doors, Augustus and Marlow hurriedly engaged a front desk woman about vacant rooms. She was truly apologetic when she reported that nothing seemed available within 50 miles.

They asked her to check again. The second computer search bore fruit — a cabin in the park with two single beds was available north of St. Mary, forty five miles away. Their luck was changing. They snapped it up.

As Augustus finalized the reservation, Marlow went back outside to check on Rex. They had just started discussing where they should eat when Tommie loped into view.

Taller and meatier than them, Tommie inquired as to who owned the bike with the Iron Butt Association license plate holder. After proper introductions, they told Tommie it belonged to the absent Augustus. They had just briefly compared itineraries for the day when she told them that she’d been riding crotch rocket bikes for years.

Tommie then started mildly busting their chops as bikers are wont to do over who had ridden more, longer and harder, who was older, ya da, ya da, ya da. Rex took the bait. They compared driver licenses with Tommie being about a year older than Rex.

Casting the die as to where they would sup that night and ever the gentleman, Rex offered to buy her dinner at the lodge in compensation for losing the bet.

Augustus then appeared and urged them to mount up and head out. Marlow and Rex immediately sensed that Augustus considered Tommie an odd duck.

Upon Rex’s explanation of his indebtedness to Tommie, Augustus relented and inside the crowded lodge restaurant they went for burgers. They found a table in a rear corner of the café and hailed a waiter to take an express order.

Tommie had what seemed to be a well-practiced shtick. She proffered nonstop tales of her many motorcycles, sports cars and long distance, 2 and 4 wheeled touring. Some of the details didn’t ring true such as motorcycle engine displacements and sports cars that had never been offered for sale in the US.

As the bikers wolfed down their burgers, other Tommie discontinuities came into focus. For instance, her posture at times was all wrong for a woman — her legs would rest splayed out. Having hurriedly eaten their burgers while conscious of the approaching darkness, Marlow and Rex halted their search for other telltale signs when Augustus said they had to go.

Later that night, all three agreed that Tommie was a Tommy, L-O-L-A, Lola.

The Edge Of The World At 60 MPH

The trail to their cabin digs took them onto state route 49 and US 89. Jointly they form a 31+ mile long corridor along the eastern boundary of Glacier National Park. The first 12 miles of this twisty, bitchy piece of pavement is called Looking Glass Hill Road.

If one were to traverse this road during daylight hours, it would have rated in their minds a major league road 4D designation. To explain:

• a numerical scale of 1 to 5 represents a road’s technical difficulty with 1 being a road with gently sweeping corners while 5 is extremely technical journey with challenging corners and off-camber surfaces;

• a letter scale of A to E describes the quality of the surface with A being a perfect surface while F would be a degraded, bumpy and crumbly surface with rolling joints, tar strips and gummy worm filled cracks.

In retrospect, since they were doing it for the first time at night, it was a solid 6F.

Leaving the park, the road immediately narrowed and began climbing through tight, blind corners that narrowly missed thick and shadowy stands of aspens that lined both sides of the road. Much of the route’s initial portion seemed prone to rockslides. Its pavement was poorly maintained and interspersed with long unmarked stretches of gravel and huge frost heaves.

As they climbed and the sun descended, the evening chill intensified and penetrated their summer leather jackets and blue jeans. They could feel the cold gradually reduce their perceptual horizons.

In the lead, Augustus was pressing. Rex and Marlow obediently followed. Banshee-like, they accelerated well past 60 MPH on the straightaways, downshifted hard into the corners and accelerated out of them. Marlow’s 2-into-1 pipes barked loudly with hard-edged brrraapps bouncing furiously off the stone face cliff to his right with each throttle twist for more power.

The waning twilight caused Marlow some trouble with divining the curves. He backed off a bit and observed the lead pair’s lean angles to discern a suitable plan of attack. This worked. He was able to keep pace, shift for shift and throttle twist for throttle twist.

There were several scenic pullouts. With the light vanishing fast, they did not stop. Luckily the road was devoid of traffic. Was this a warning?

After the pullouts, the road became very challenging. It narrowed to around 20 feet in width with 1 to 2 foot high mortared stone guardrails offering the riders the only protection from a 500 foot drop. Many times they sensed that their bikes were barely clinging to the edge of the earth.

Falling into a rhythm, Marlow’s mind now drifted to his bike Wilma. He had named her after the 2005 hurricane which had totaled his 1999 FatBoy. A generous insurance settlement had squired the silver and black 2003 Harley into his life. Wilma did his bidding that dark and frosty night. He kept her exclusively in 2nd and 3rd gears for maximum throttle responsiveness and contact patch adhesion. The road’s frost heaves had Wilma’s suspension working overtime. Lots of quick kicking corners skirting the sheer rock face on the right complicated leaning her into the turns. They became one.

When the road zenithed and started dropping, the difficult cornering tailed off. Relaxation, however, proved to be a bad idea, when they nearly blasted through the middle of a herd of gi-normous Black Angus cattle that was squatting in the middle and along the side of the road. It is important to note that they were attacking this road after more than 11 hours of saddle time more than 40 minutes past sundown on a moonless night.

Upon reaching St Mary’s, they turned left into the park and putted past the empty park ranger ticket booths.

After checking into their rustic cabin at Goose Island Point, they downed a large slug of iced Blue Sapphire each under the glowing Milky Way overhead. With nerves still jangled by their Looking Glass encounter, they crashed from exhaustion — Rex on a complete rack, Augustus on a mattress and Marlow on a set of box springs.

It would be a long and restless night after another day of road terror.

They felt cold winds on their shoulder
And the touch of a world that is older
Turned the switch and checked the number
Left it on when in bed they slumber
They heard the rhythms of riding music
They’d buy the product but never use it
They heard the talking of the DJ
Couldn’t understand, just what did he say?

It was French-Canadian radio
It was French-Canadian radio
– from Marlow’s journal that day

Copyright © 2017 From My Isle Seat/Wall of Voodoo
The complete “Four Corners” adventure is at www.vicsocotra.com