eureka!

thursday 17th september
we left kalispell and drove up to eureka to visit bert’s relatives. bert has a very large family, which i had to take notes on to get my head round. en route we stopped by a lake to eat a sandwich and again exclaimed at how totally cool it is living in a motorhome and being able to stop and eat your lunch in it wherever you want. bert told me he used to ice skate and sledge at the lake we were eating lunch by.

the old school house in pinkham creek, eureka - bert's mum and her sister used to ride their horses to it.

here is a quick tour of bert’s family. his mother is called ellagene, and is married to bill. she was first married to bob combs, who she had robert (bert) and gary by. then she married corky and had 4 children by him - marsha, terry, rene, and clinton. then she married bill who she is married to now. ellagene was 1 of 9 children - of which 5 are still alive. she is really lovely and was very pleased to see bert and to meet me (i think/hope). we showed them photos of belize and our trip so far to montana. we visited gary and his wife and one of his 4 children (he is the one with the children whose names all beginning with tr - troy, travis, tracy, trevor). they have a huge wooden log cabin style house.


they live on land which is called homestead, which means it was given to them by the government ages ago as it is in fairly remote montana, and was fairly inhospitable. bert’s greatgrandfather’s job was to kill off the grizzly bears to make the land more hospitable. the point of homestead land is that you can’t sell it, you can only pass it down from one generation to the next. gary built ellagene’s house on the homestead land, next door to his one.

the original homestead where bert's grandparents lived and where bert spent a lot of his youth - it's not lived in anymore but they still have it.

we camped down the road in monty, outside uncle sid’s old cabin. uncle sid, one of ellagene’s brothers (they were 7 boys and 2 girls), is now in a nursing home, but he is totally compos mentis and plays the harmonica really well, he is 90 years old and i would say he’ll live to be 100 or more he’s in such good shape.

friday 18th september
this morning there were 2 coyotes over the other side of the road, eating a dead deer. some horses came nosing around to see what was going on, but they didn’t get to eat any deer, nor did the ravens that were hovering above. it’s amazing to be so immersed in wildlife up here, there were tons of deer around our camp last night, it really is like being in narnia. they are white tail deers, when they turn around to run off you just see these flashes of white which is their tails bobbing up and down. we’re normally too busy putting our camera on the video setting, or putting a new disc in the video camera, to actually get any good footage of all this amazing animal activity but i assure you it does exist as our usually blurry photos attest to.

after this wildlife show we walked up to see ellagene and bill again.

they used to travel around in their motorhome for years until they got too old to carry on, plus bill is connected to an oxygen tank now as he only has 28% of his lungs left. they gave us lots of motorhome tips, and some motorhome magazines. we went up the road to one of bert’s cousin’s house - she’s called sandy and is married to jon. uncle sid was visiting from the home, with sidneylu, his daughter. sandy is also his daughter. they all reminisced, and we told them about belize and showed pictures, and he told us about his time in england in the war. he had sailed to liverpool which had taken 3 weeks, then been posted in litham which is near manchester, for 2 years, then on to belgium, france, holland, and germany. sid told us also about how they used to have pet bear cubs when he was little in pinkham creek - they had found them in the woods, their mum had died, or been killed, so they trapped them and took them home in boxes on horseback. sid was only about 10 and his dad, charlie, kept shouting at him that if the bears tried to get out of their boxes he had to hit them with a stick so they didn’t scratch or scare the horses that were carrying them. they kept them in the yard in a big cage with a pole that they could climb up. they were called amos and andy.

sid played us 4 songs on the harmonica and was generally really entertaining and funny and happy - i have noticed that the old people in this part of the world all seem to be happy, not grumbly old stereotypical old people, which is very refreshing and makes a change. i suppose it’s not that all old people are grumpy, maybe it’s just that there are grumpy people in the world and there are happy people of every age, and maybe more of the grumpy ones live longer. i think quality of life in montana is high and therefore people are quite content and are living or have lived a fulfilling, healthy, outdoor life surrounded by amazing landscapes and animals and other equally happy and wholesome people.

after the afternoon at sandy’s house we walked back through the fields and along the creek - this area is called pinkham creek. a horse followed us along for a while, and nibbled my coat, we tried to feed him a werthers original sweet but he spat it out.

we walked past a really cute little cabin, like one from one of those little red riding hood type stories, and peered through the window - there was a stove and a bed with a homemade quilt on it, and a table with a flowery tablecloth. bert said i bet this is one of my relative’s cabins, and it turned out it was aunt lula and uncle randall’s.

lula is ellagene’s sister. bert hasn’t been back here for around 5 years and he loved being back, and telling me all his memories from childhood and talking about them with his mum. again, i could write a whole other blog about these stories, but i haven’t got time now. it must be brilliant having a family that big, bert has cousins he doesn’t even know about as he had all those uncles and aunts, and other extended family.

that night we cooked potatoes in the campfire, they were pretty burnt on the outside, i think the trick is it to put a nail in them so the heat transfers to the middle bits quicker. we wandered to the creek down a little trail and i freaked out when bert pointed out bear footprints on the trail.

the potatoes are the 2 silver blobs in the fire above, and below is me toasting some bread.



sunday 20th september
a day of much visiting. we started off by having coffee and pancakes with cousin leland (lee) (sandy and sidneylu‘s brother, sid‘s son).

lee was who bert had joined the airforce with when he had just finished high school. they had gone down to the army offices to sign up, this was during the vietnam war. they were going to sign up to the marines, but when they got there, the marine recruiting officer’s office had a sign on the door saying out for lunch. the man next door was the recruiting officer for the airforce, and he saw them looking at the marine door and he said you better come and talk to me first before deciding you want to join the marines. so they went to talk to him and they joined the airforce instead. thank god, as i’m sure they would surely have died had they been sent to vietnam as marines. they were then transferred to wichita airforce base in kansas, which is where bert learnt to fly, and became an air traffic controller. he stayed in the airforce there for 3 and a half years, and was never called up to go to vietnam, again thankfully. one day they did call him up to go there, and he went to get fitted for his uniform and the uniform fitter man noticed that the number was wrong, and it turned out that there were 2 robert combs, with id numbers just one number different, and it was the other robert combs they wanted. talk about a lucky escape.

lee said he liked the sound of belize, and maybe he’d go and live there too.

next we went to visit uncle jack and aunt carol. jack was the youngest of the 9 workmans, so robert had pretty much grown up with him as a child. jack took us for a ride in his old car, as in one of those really old cars, i think it was born in 1923. robert had learnt to drive in it when he was little and remembered driving it into a stump. their dog taz came for the drive too, he loved it.

we drove down to eureka in it and looked at an old log cabin which had been reconstructed in the town like a little museum, it’s original location was up in the woods somewhere. they mentioned charlie workman on the little information board (ellagene’s dad, bert’s grandfather) as he used to pack supplies into the woods on his horses.

jack and carol showed us loads of old photos of various family members, i took photos with our camera, so now we have photos of photos which generally came out well but you have to hold the camera really still and hold your breath when you take them and not wobble or they go blurry. jack and carol had an rv just like ours but 5 feet shorter.

after this we went to the home to visit uncle sid, and aunt vivian who was uncle chuck’s wife. also carol, jack’s wife, her mother carla graves was there. sid played a tune on his harmonica again. it was meal time so we only stayed a little while. it’s kind of sad that old people sometimes have to go to homes like that, when really they must prefer to be in their own homes or being looked after by their families. sometimes i guess they need full time care, but sometimes they don’t and they could be elsewhere. it’s funny how some cultures don’t do this at all, like india or mexico, where lots of generations of the family all live in the same house and look after each other - seems to make more sense to me and be a lot nicer. plus you can’t just ignore old age and death and put them away somewhere and never think about them again, old people are really important and have lots of wisdom and stories.

we stopped for a sandwich in town and a rest from all the visiting.

we then carried on visiting. we went to aunt lula’s and uncle randall’s. they lived up on tobacco road, by the railroad at the end. lula is ellagene’s only sister, the other 7 of the 9 were brothers. lula and randall were really cool - they have a house with a great view of mountains and fields. their first house burnt down, but they built this one, exactly the same and on the same exact spot around 20 years ago i think. lula paints pictures, mainly from old photos, of lakes and bears and horses and mountains, and packing supplies into the wilderness.

she worked for the forest service when she was younger, and her and randall used to go square dancing up in canada. randall has cancer and wasn’t doing so well, but he told me too about going to england in the war, seems like he got a faster boat over than uncle sid as it took him only 5 days. he went down south, then on to europe too. lula had tons of old photos, though tons more she had lost in the house fire she said. we spent hours taking photos of these too.

we slept in monty outside their house, and it got freezing in the night. lula warned us that if we heard gunshots in the early morning it would be her shooting at skunks as they’d had a lot around recently and they were a real problem.

monday 21st september
we didn’t hear any skunk gunshots. we had pancakes with lula and randall at their house and looked at more photos. lula and randall didn’t have children so they had adopted all the other children and done loads for them and with them, so bert is very close to lula. she’s really cool, kind of hippie ish. she had a really warm looking thick green dressing gown, i told her i was once making pancakes and my dressing gown sleeve caught fire, she said the same thing had happened to her once too.

photo gallery of some of the old photos we got photos of:

robert as a young boyuncle sid in the armyellagene at her graduation

bert, his brother gary and his half brother clinton, on a motorbike

grandparents charles and alta workman

all the workman 9 siblings and charles and alta the parents

we left lula and randall's after breakfast, and left eureka, which was quite sad having met so many amazing people there. there were more we could have visited, but you only have so much time to do these things, and we had to get on the road. so from here we drove down to glacier park, to apgar campsite, the one we had camped in before setting off on our hike. this was practically the only one open as it’s late in the season now and lots of them close. we set up our site and then cycled to the atm as we didn’t have any money to pay the ranger with for the site. bert gets a free pass to all the national parks in america, and half price camping too, as he is a bit older than me and something you get when you get a bit older is free things because the idea is you have worked a lot and paid your taxes all your life and this is your reward. plus they like to see older people doing things like going to national parks.

we cycled over a river and looked at some fish all lined up in the current, it was weird, there were about 60 to 100 of them all in a line, a few would break away and go for a swim, but the others were all there. it must have been a particularly nice bit of water for them to be in, or maybe they’d had a tip off that some food was going to be there. we had left abi a note on the door of monty as we weren’t sure when she was arriving, as we’d only been in touch every now and then on email and she was travelling down from calgary with her friend andrew. when we got back our note was still there, so we figured they would arrive the next day.