Missile of Love

Missile of Love

Back in 1984, I married my college sweetheart. Actually, we didn’t really meet until our last year in college, and we never really knew each other at Virginia Tech. At the time in 1981, she was living in Terrace View and student teaching at an elementary school in Roanoke, and as it happened, I was living back at home in Roanoke and student teaching at the same elementary school. We became friends, then fell in love.

In April of 1984, after a journey fit for a novel, we married, but deferred our honeymoon. We had managed to keep making payments on our affordable white Ford Escort with no air conditioning despite earning peanuts as teachers while we paid rent to live in a
beautiful, yet fly-infested dairy farm trailer. That newlywed summer, we decided to create our first grand adventure.

As soon as school let out, we launched out across America in that hot Escort with a Coleman stove, cooler, two sleeping bags, and a pup tent. I must say, that life was an experience as we crossed America. Neither of us had ever been further west than West Virginia, so every mile brought us a new vision.

One day, we were traveling from Mount Rushmore in the Badlands of South Dakota into the interior of Montana. We blew through the Custer National Monument and paid homage to the arrogance of America’s first rock star general. From there, we traveled a brown road between Billings and Great Falls, Montana. The sun began to set as we passed our 350^th mile on the road that day. It’s funny how distances sneak up on you when you are traveling in Montana. Big Sky is more like a sneaky sky. Mile after mile, we plodded onward on the straight northwest road. The hot Escort’s four pistons were whining full out on the speedy road.

As the sun began to bake behind the endless blades of golden wheat, my wife was behind the wheel, and I was staring out into the horizon. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a movement in the grass; a cougar was hunting mice beside the road and pounced just as we passed his hunting place. I screamed at my wife to stop, but it was too late. The big cat had disappeared, and I was left wonder if I had just imagined him in the first place.

Soon we crawled into the quaint town of Harlowton, Montana. What a town. We pitched our tent down by the river below the bluff where all the cowboys stayed during rodeo. Then we hiked about a mile back into town and found the Stockman’s Bar on the main drag lit up with a neon and blinking “Rainier” sign. We pushed through the saloon door and nestled up to the bar, relatively sweet smelling and clean shaven compared to the coots hanging out in there. I decided that I deserved a beer after having driven 1500 miles across the country, so I ordered a Rainier in a bar bottle. Never has beer tasted so good.

The next day, we pulled out early in our quest to get past Great Falls and on to Glacier National Park. Mile after mile, we slipped past missile silo’s, future museums to the cold war. These sites were small fenced cubicles stationed every ten miles or so. Each underground missile looked to have an old fashioned trash can lid where you walk past and pop the lid by pressing the lever with your foot, except each was surrounded by an intense barbed wire fence in the middle of a nowhere field of grain. Each missile was numbered on the fence surrounding its pen…M127, M128, M129, M130, M131…M252…M253, etc.

We stopped in Great Falls and bought a case of Rainier Beer, then continued our journey into the west.