"And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea."
T.S. Eliot (The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock)
We roll to the sky then dip to see the water, the 5.0 liter Cummings diesel engine wines as Flathead Lake bounces in and out of view. I notice silver lining on the fur and pines along side the road, the light doesn't look this way but only in the spring. Something todo with being washed by winter and reflected with both the cold and the recreation of spring. And the clouds tower in cumulous mass trailing showers over the Rockies.
"This is more like a roller coaster ride than a road!" Dennis states flat and Fig and I laugh and agree. A new road is going in and it will be easier to reach our destination the next visit we make. That and for who ever else wishes to go and that is the bitter sweet part of a new road. I spot sheep up the rocky slope and we slap into the ditch to pull binoculars from the center counsel and watch what was lighter specks of rock become Big Horn's. There aren't a lot of them left so there is always general excitement when they are spotted. We cot site of four more little clusters and counted up wards of fifty altogether, for any of us this made the drive worth while and we settled back for more "roller coaster" action.
The Symes Hotel in Hot Springs Montana still feels to hold the belief of the mystical healing power of the Thirties, when it was built. The Spanish never found El Dorado nor The Fountain Of Youth, they packed their armer from one end of the country to the next and down into the jungles of South America. They were to be eaten alive by worms, never finding everlasting life on earth or unquenchable wealth. By the time the nineteen thirties rolled around Percy Fawcet had disappeared into the Amazon, never to be seen again, totally convinced a lost city did exist. By the time they got done looking for him, the searchers had ether died or found nether Fawcet or the Lost City but had pretty much been over the entire region. By the time the Symes was built W.W.II was just getting kicked off and W.W.I had shattered the belief that the industrial age was going anywhere special. So I guess the investors of this new resort, in the middle of nowhere, must have thought that the sacred indian hot springs and their bubbling waters would be an irresistible draw to the disillusioned but fabulously wealthy cattle, mining, and logging barons of the new state. If they couldn't find El Dorado or The Fountain of Youth then maybe they could believe that some bubbly water could heal their gout.
As I sat watching the little bubbles attach themselves to my leg hair I felt I maybe understood why they would feel healed. People spoke in whispers here and those whispers felt like echos in a vast space. It was early afternoon by the time we had arrived and there were few people to disturb the soaking. Rain showers filtered down on all four sides of the valley yet our island of bubbles sat untouched. A gentleman of the late nineteen seventies/early eights sat beside me and made a comment on the massing rain clouds. I said how much I enjoyed them and he whispered back "oooooh, yaaaa". I felt happier, strangely, that I could share a moment were some one else was enjoying the clouds as I. Then he started to talk, a little louder with each sentence. There was Fig, Dennis, man with smudged skull with rose tattoo on his arm, chubby wife, empty eyed local indian woman and white toothless boyfriend, me and my want-a-be Jimmy Buffet talker getting baked and fizzed. The silence being broken, the speed of acceleration is a wind fall. Through the gate walks two women in ripe early twenties with a bearded man who might be the same but looks early forties. I scoot closer to Dennis as much to get away from the enlarging mouth of Mr. Buffet as to be polite to the new arrivals at my back. They slip in, giggle, two day old booze oooozing from there smooth round skin. "Don't look!" I tell my self but the peripheral is to close and you see with out seeing. The Faded look at them with envious eyes, I feel sick from the contrast. Conversation is moved to the Mandan Indians, El Dorado that was mountains of corn, and Karl Bodmer's paintings. A speech for the new arrivals ensued, moving to what is truly art; he looks at me to agree. Or maybe at the breasts behind my shoulder, his sunglass block the movements of his eyes. I overheat and sit back up on the ledge, ask Dennis if he wants to go. He nods yes but doesn't move. Her pink toenail brushes my leg slightly as she swings her long legs out. "Shit" I think "I should have made eye contact, and then she wouldn't have done that." To not accede to beauty is a personal affront to the holder, it is cruel and punishing to them, for their beauty tents to be all that they have and Ponce de Leon never found the Fountain of Youth. The three move to the cooler pool and Dennis says he is ready to go. I ask him if he had used the shorts, he had lent me, as an oil rag as we move clock wise around the bathers. I make a fateful glance at the pool as I leave, she stares holes in me. I wonder who is profaning beauty more; me for refusing to notice or her acknowledging to flaunt it?
Stopping at the Tamarack in Lakeside we eat our fill, Fig and I share a pitcher of the newest brew on tap. Pulling out of the parking lot we stop to wait for a man with suspendered pants pulled to his armpits and three gallon size growlers clutched in hand. "He has got two!" exclaims Fig "No, he's got three." I respond. "Ya.......... we should mug him." says Dennis.
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