Dateline June 26, 2018, Evel Knievel and Old Friends
The bison range had left our white RV the color of the road, a reddish-brown all over, and it wanted a wash in the worst way. That is easier said than done with a rig standing eleven feet tall; few wash bays will take it. We were working our way east toward Billings and found a place in Butte that might, took the exit, sailed right past the entrance, and went looking for somewhere to turn around. The light up the road was no help, so we pulled into a cemetery to swing about, and what happened next was something else.
Evel. Right in front of us was a little sign with an arrow, and on it one word: "Evel." We looked at each other and said, "No way." We had to go and see, and sure enough, the wrong turn had brought us to the grave of Evel Knievel. It goes down in our book alongside the time we stumbled on the world's largest ball of twine out in the middle of Kansas. There was a young man at the graveside who had driven all the way from Portland just to pay his respects, though he was far too young ever to have watched the man jump.
For anyone too young to remember him, Evel Knievel was the great American daredevil, a man who went from stealing motorcycles as a boy to flying them through the air before huge crowds in the 1960s and 70s. Dressed in star-spangled red, white, and blue, he would gun his motorcycle up a ramp and sail over a row of cars, ten or fifteen or twenty at a time. His most famous leap, over the fountains at Caesars Palace in 1967, ended in a terrible crash, and his most ambitious, an attempt to clear the Snake River Canyon on a rocket-powered cycle in 1974, ended badly too. He died in Florida in 2007, at sixty-nine, having broken just about every bone a man can break.
Our rig would not fit the Butte wash after all, so on we went to Bozeman for the night.
A night at Walmart. We did find a wash in Bozeman, and then made for the local Walmart to sleep in the parking lot. We never did figure out why, but Bozeman turned out to be one of the priciest towns we found anywhere for an RV park, which went a long way toward explaining the crowd of campers bedded down at the Walmart with us. As it happens, Walmart has a standing policy that lets anyone park a car, truck, or RV overnight unless the town has a rule against it, which makes their lots a popular sort of free campground.
Billings, and an old friend. We drove on to Billings the next morning. The front left tire had gone low along the way, so we topped it off, and once in town, it being a Sunday with little else open, we took it to the Walmart again. They pulled the tire, filled it a few times, and finally found the trouble: the wheel rim itself was cracked, and that was where the air was going. A new rim for a Mercedes Sprinter would be a Monday errand, so they fitted the spare and off we went to see John and Nancy Bohlinger.
We had come to Billings to spend the evening with John Bohlinger, a dear old friend of John's family; he and his late wife Bette had been close to John's parents for many years. John had just married Nancy Cooper that May, and it was our pleasure to meet her at last. Nancy comes from one of Montana's founding families; the Coopers have ranched near Billings for more than a hundred years.
The Cooper Ranch is a working cow-calf outfit on Blue Creek, about ten miles south of Billings, homesteaded by Nancy's forebear Nate Cooper back in the late 1800s. Nate raised draft horses until the work for them dried up and he turned to cattle; his son Homer ran Herefords after him, and Homer's son Dick has had the place for some forty years now, raising Red Angus. What a spectacular lady Nancy is, and we enjoyed every minute; she has known John since their school days, and it was a joy to hear the old stories about our dear friend. John, rest easy, she did not tell us everything.
On Monday morning we tracked down a rim at the local Mercedes dealer, got the tire put right, and set out for Medora, North Dakota.
