We thought it was a little odd that no campfires were
allowed at the Idaho State Park where we stopped on
the second night. It made sense, though, because the
brush was dry and the days were sunny and hot. We
didn't give it much thought when we stopped for
tourist information about Glacier Park and the map had
red dots showing fires burning up the road and ringing
Glacier.

As we drove toward the park, the air seemed hazy and
thick with dust but we didn't start smelling smoke
till we got near the Park. Glacier wasn't full,
indeed, there were plenty of campsites pull throughs
even.  Still, it was hot and smoky, the sites were
cheek on jowl and there were no hookups meaning our
water supply was, effectively, what we'd brought in
our tank.  Things didn�t look good.  With the vistas
clogged with smoke, one might as well have stopped at
Gifford Pinchot National Forest, much less Glacier.

 We got lucky the first night it rained and cleared
the air. We drove up the Going to the Sun Road. This
is an experience not to be missed.  The road, an
engineering marvel, crawls along the cliff edges
bringing the motorist along a narrow road to 6,600 ft.
 The road opened in 1932. The vistas are just as
advertised.  Glorious, soaring peaks, deep misty
valley's, like a bunch of Romantic painters were given
the gift of mountain building and told to have at it. 
It can't be described, really.  Not even to one
another as you stand there gawking in awe.  This is
something that can only be experienced, not expressed.
It's transforming.

The next day we weren't so lucky. The smoke got
thicker. By this time the weekend was in full swing
and every trail we went on was chock full of people in
shorts and sunglasses clucking about the beautiful
scenery. We decided to move to another campground that
would be further from the main entrance. 

As we drove toward the new site, the smoke got
thicker. The air had a definite smell of burning
forest and it induced a slightly panicky feeling. You
know something really big is burning pretty close by
but you can�t see or hear the fire. We decided to cut
the Glacier visit short and drive south till we were
out of the smoke.

We drove for over 100 miles and the smoke thinned out
and then thickened again. By the time we got to
Missoula the sky was a blackish gray and it turned the
sun into an angry red disk that couldn�t burn through.
 We stopped at an exit called Ruby Creek Road to get a
bite to eat and maybe acquire some information on the
fire.  The restaurant, bar, casino, resort, gas
station looked like it could be part of a scary
Rodriguez film (think From Dusk Till Dawn) and was festooned with signs and
abandoned booths which were apparently part of a
recent event  called the testicle festival.  This
seemed to be some sort of celebration of castration.

The restaurant was spotless, largely because it was
essentially unused. The sign in the "gift shop" said
to pay in the bar.  Apparently everything revolved
around the bar.  The bar itself was full not the
tables, but the seats at the bar.  The bar tender was
about 24 and wore makeup that completely obscured her
skin and made her eyes appear to have no lashes.  It
look as though she might be like those folks in "V"
who could tear their skin aside to reveal scales.  

Oddly, no one seemed to have any factual information
or curiosity about the fires.  There's lots of them,
observed  one of the bar flies.  The bartender fished
around for the sheet the Forest Service had left with
them and finally handed it over. Ruby Creek Rd. was
closed to all but residents. We were literally
standing at the edge of a fire that had destroyed 10s
of thousands of acres, and was still out of control.  

The dark sky had blotted out the sun. A sense of
impending doom and disaster was impossible to escape.
It could induce a belief in the Apocalypse even in
confirmed atheists but somehow the happy band of bar
patrons didn�t seem the least bit interested. A
roaring inferno was creeping up on them. Just a short
way up the road fire fighters involved in an epic
struggle that covered the sky for hundreds of square
miles. 

It's no wonder that the Bush administration can
trample the constitution and loot the treasury with
very little reaction from the heartland of America. If
they don't even react to this sort of up-your-nostrils
disaster how could anything as abstract as a loss of
civil liberties be worth leaving the bar.

Retreating west seemed prudent.  We turned around and
headed back toward Missoula and Coeur D'Alene.  We
drove until we could see the end of the bank of smoke.
We drove until the sky turned blue and the sun was,
once again, impossible to look at straight on. It felt
like we'd just escaped from a land of the damned.  Our
clothes smelled like we'd be sitting around a campfire
all night. It wouldn�t be surprising at all if there
is a sudden increase in asthma and emphysema in
Montana soon.