When I began planning this trip in February, stopping in Missoula seemed to be not merely a logical and reasonable choice but a nearly ideal one. A mere 300 miles from Canyon Village, it was close enough to allow plenty of time to make a last stop in Yellowstone NP, at all the other places I planned to visit along the way, yet still arrive in Missoula with some daylight remaining. It also placed me in a good spot to enter the west side of Glacier National Park so it coordinated well with my planned stay at Lake McDonald in that park.
Nearly ideal that is, until I received the phone call from the folks at Lake McDonald Lodge telling me that it had been closed because of the heavy smoke in the area and the encroaching wildfires. Had my planned stay been on the east side of the park – where the hotel was able to relocate me for my three planned nights – Helena would have been a better intermediate stop than Missoula but the switch came to late for me to economically change my other booking. Additionally, I’d pegged a few places I wanted to visit on the western route north and I wasn’t inclined to research what I might be able to see on a more easterly route. So I stuck with the original plan.
I don’t know if the drive would have looked considerably different had I gone to Helena but the drive to Missoula was generally no more scenically appealing than the drive from Billings to Little Big Horn had been.
Missoula’s Squashed Cat.
There was, indeed, still sufficient daylight when I reached Missoula that I had time to check into my hotel just west of downtown, engage in a bit of banter with the distractingly pierced young woman with eggplant colored hair at the front desk and have her assure me that the Tamarack Alehouse and Grill where I planned to have dinner was a “great” choice because it was her favorite restaurant in town. As it turned out, the restaurant is only two blocks or so from the squashed cat I so wanted to see.
Okay, I’ll come clean. It’s not a real cat. It’s a sculpture of a cat. And it’s actual name is Cattin’ Around. The sculpture was initially installed in the early nineties as part of the Missoula Redevelopment Agency’s public art project. As often seems to be the case with public art, the design was at least somewhat controversial from the outset sparking a debate in the city council which had to approve an $18,000 payment to Great Falls artist Mike Hollern to complete and install his work.
Curtis Horton, a councilman who voted against the funding, opined, “Missoula’s going to be stuck with this thing. The title of this is ‘Cattin’ Around,’ but it looks to me like it will be a 7-foot-high, 18-foot-diameter dog that’s been run over by a truck.” Curiously, in the winter of 1993, it almost was run over by a truck. (It was actually a snowplow but the plow hit the concrete sculpture and moved it several feet.)
Unfortunately for Councilman Horton by that time, motorists and pedestrians traveling along Main Street as well as most of Missoula’s cat lovers had become fans of the sculpture. Thus, the city council had to authorize an additional $3,500 to repair the statue and move it a few feet to a safer location.
According to Geoff Badenoch of the Redevelopment Agency, children like it because they use its head and back as a sort of beginner’s rock climbing course and, “People who own cats look at it, and they’ve seen their cat do it a million times. So they dig it.” Still, he concedes that the people who don’t like it just think of it as a squashed cat. I’ll let you decide.
Dinner on this night before my birthaversary (I was a breech birth in the days before C-Sections became common so my mother was always quite happy that I had only that one birth day.) had an interesting twist and not because of the blackened salmon sandwich or Bear Bottom Blonde ale I had with it. (This is Tamarack’s Kolsch style ale and I tried it because it was their menu’s recommendation for this sandwich and because I’d had their Wakeboard Wit at lunch in Butte. Like the wit, the ale had a thin head. It also had a malty sweetness with hints of fruitiness at first and finished with a medium hoppy-ness that I liked.)
The interesting aspect occurred when I struck up a conversation with Roy, the fellow sitting next to me. It turned out that he and three others in the bar were firefighters from out of state who had come to Montana to try and help contain the blazes that were consuming an estimated 1,000,000 acres. Roy was from Michigan and he told me that the days were typically long and tiring but that he enjoyed the challenge. He wasn’t thrilled about leaving his teenage daughter but felt it was something he had to do. I bought them all a round of drinks (and, per the bartender, wasn’t the first to have done so that evening).
In the Garden of One Thousand Buddhas.
Those of you who followed me through this blog on my trip through Utah in May and early June might recall that, despite my professed atheism, upon discovering the presence of a large Krishna Temple in Spanish Fork I felt compelled to visit there. I was equally surprised to discover that a bit less than the distance of a marathon run north of Missoula, in the community of Arlee in the Jocko Valley, I could find the Ewam Garden of One Thousand Buddhas. (I’m drawn by the apparent incongruity of locating these institutions in unexpected and rather remote places.)
In the same way that I avoided an in depth discussion of the underpinnings and belief systems of both Mormonism (Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints) and Krishna, I won’t delve too deeply into Buddhism. However, since it might be unfamiliar to some readers, in the next post, I’ll try to provide an overview – albeit a necessarily superficial examination. Even if you know about Buddhism and Buddhist traditions, you might want to look at the post for the photos of the garden.