bert went to see the rv we now live in, down the road from jessica’s place. he snuck out early having read the mountain trader newspaper, and came back saying he’d put a deposit on an rv. i tend to make decisions over a much longer period of umming and ahing and weighing up all the pros and cons, whereas bert makes instantaneous decisions, and doesn’t like my constant questioning of them. he cleverly had figured out the best time for him to make his decisions therefore is first thing in the morning when i am asleep and unable to question them. it took me a while to come to terms with being an rv resident, but it was definitely the right decision as we now have a vehicle and a house too, all for not very much money, and it is totally cool being able to move your house every day to a whole new view. i don’t know why everyone doesn’t do it actually.
that evening we watched legends of the fall, which is a great film, set in montana and starring brad pitt and anthony hopkins and aidan quinn. jessica and toby have a huge tv screen so it felt like we were at the cinema. we watched the credits roll along and out of the corner of my good eye i noticed a word that looked like pickles - could it really be there’s a pickles in america in this film, i thought, out of the corner of my brain, and looked closely to see it was christina pickles, my dad’s cousin - i yelped in amazement and said well golly i can‘t believe it, a few times. she stars in friends as monica and ross’s mum, and was in the baz luhrman romeo and juliet film as juliet’s mum, and in legends of the fall she played isabel, the mother of the 3 boys - not a big part, but definitely more of a part than i’ve ever had in a mega film. i met her once at a funeral in england, she was very nice - she lives in LA and has done for a long time. her father wilfred pickles (my dad’s uncle) used to have a very popular radio show and wrote a few books and was generally a bit of a celebrity - on his radio show was a section called what’s on the table mabel (mabel was his wife), where you had to guess what was on the table. i may need some of the details clarifiying by any pickleses reading this please. anyway it was very exciting, so overall today was a pretty cool day, i would give it 9/10. weirdly as we were leaving kalispell a few days later, bert happens to remember, when we’re at least 200 miles away from the area, that he’d heard on the radio that christina pickles was appearing in whitefish (7 miles away from kalispell) that night….it was too far to drive all the way back for that, but how very strange is that, we both thought and to be honest i’m not sure he heard the radio announcement correctly but i gave him the benefit of the doubt anyway, as i’m generous like that.
friday 4th september
we went on a harley ride with vic, bert’s cousin - as mentioned on a previous blog with a picture. this was really fun, i‘ve never ridden a motorbike before, we went up to eureka near the canadian border, ate a burger there, carried on down in a loop past the koocanusa reservoir, and back to kalispell, probably around 200 miles or so of a trip altogether. the bugs hurt your face when they hit you at that speed, and it feels like your eyeballs are going to blow out of their sockets so i wore some flying goggle type things which helped but also made me look ridiculous, but this is something i care less about these days. you wear leather trousers/jacket to protect you from the wind and if you fall off it is quite protective. whenever you ride past another harley on the other side of the road you do a little secret harley wave, kind of low down like under the table if there was a table there.
this weekend jessica toby and madi had gone to spokane as jessica was being promoted to a captain in the airforce. she does something called weekend warriors which is where you are in the airforce/army etc, but not full time, but you give a certain amount of weekends to it. she has been posted overseas to far away places, i think iraq, dubai and others, but didn’t write it down and my memory has so many other facts in it that this one got muddled. anyway it’s very impressive, she does that and runs her own business (tanning/clothes shop), and brings up madi (so does toby of course, as well as working as a loan officer and doing lots of kayaking),
and is doing a teaching degree in her spare time, so she can hopefully go into that and sell the business one day. what a contrast to my current inactivity, but i used to be busy when i lived in london, so i still get points for that i think….saturday 5th september
2 for 1 labor day special on dvds at blockbuster video! also visited lone pine visitor centre, where we looked at animal skins and little displays about animals and mountains etc, and talked to the man working there. he showed us a stoat and a weasal fur, and said a stoat is the same as a weasal almost, and a stoat has dark fur in summer and white in winter, for camouflage reasons. we nearly bought a small stuffed bear thing from the gift shop, but after a bit of deliberation decided it was not worth the money given our current financial situation. it’s interesting and challenging being on a big budget, and it makes you realise the relative value of everything - like whereas i wouldn’t really think too much about spending a bit of money on a coffee and a muffin, when you really weigh it up you realise that you need that money more for fuel and proper food, and is it worth the little kick you’d get out of eating a nice muffin in a nice café if it means you can’t fill your rv with fuel. not that i was going to spend $150 on coffee and muffins in one sitting but you get the picture. in a book i read recently about the nature of modern life and people’s happiness and often wrong perceptions of what will make them happy in the future, it mentioned this scenario: if you were going to buy a new alarm clock radio, and you found it for $100 at the shop near you, would you bother going across town to another shop (around 20 mins away by bus for example) that had the exact same alarm clock radio for only $50? most people say yes of course. if you were going to buy a new car for $20,000 and found the exact same car across town, for $19,950, would you still bother going all that way to save the $50 this time? most people say no, because relatively you aren’t saving very much so what’s the point. But the fact is is that your bank account is absolute, not relative, so it doesn’t care where the $50 saving comes from, only that it is there, and in both scenarios you are saving the same amount, so why differentiate between them? interesting point.
tonight we watched gran torino, the new clint eastwood film - it’s amazing, if you haven’t seen it yet you have to. interestingly, bert once had clint eastwood for dinner (not literally), when he was about 10 - bert’s dad was a building contractor and built clint a home in carmel, california. bert became obsessed with clint and his career after this, at that time he was rowdy yates on rawhide. after this he did the spaghetti westerns like hang em high, the good the bad and the ugly, then the dirty harry films. apparently john wayne has been in 250 films by the way, bert’s aunt lula told us - i think some of them he just has a small walk-on part though.
sunday 6th september
we watched touching the void in the morning - very decadent watching films in the morning, but it was sunday after all - i have seen this twice before, but it always amazes me. bert had read the book but not seen the film. the thing i find most strange about it all is that simon (the one that cut the rope) got so much abuse back in the climbing world for cutting the rope - surely it was either they both die as he was being dragged off the mountain with jo, or he cuts the rope and ensures at least his own survival. they show the making of the film too, and the reactions of jo and simon on returning to the place where it all happened (siula grande, peruvian andes) - jo gets pretty upset at the fact that the film makers seem to want him and simon to have an emotional breakdown whilst reliving it all, which he partially does but after a few days just gets bored and irritable at the whole process of filming. toby showed us a book called between a rock and a hard place, about the climber who recently got trapped with his arm pinned behind a boulder, and nobody else around in the mountains in utah where he was, and had to amputate his own arm with a tiny penknife to survive. it’s amazing what people are capable of when faced with survival situations. my most extreme survival story is getting a bit too cold in the night in my tent and having to put another layer of clothes on.
we went to an antique car show in bigfork, a little place south of kalispell on the north end of flathead lake.
bert has an amazing ability to recognize old cars by their make, model and year, but always getting it one year out in either direction. i was impressed both by his knowledge and his consistency in making that mistake, perhaps this is an interesting form of aspergers he has developed - he could go on that show you bet with this kind of skill. the guy that used to live upstairs to me and hermano pepinillo in crystal palace used to claim he could identify any car’s make and model whilst under tarpaulin (the car not him). we never put this to the test, but even if it wasn’t true it was quite an obscure invented talent, so either way it won points with us.
whilst looking at a beautiful ‘68 (could have also been ‘67 or ‘69) oldsmobile 442, painted in a metallic blue/purple/green paint, and remarking on how it was our favourite one at the whole show, we heard behind us a man shouting ’bob combs!?’ and there was an old friend of bert’s (bob’s), kirk burris - they hadn’t seen each other for 22 years. they used to hang glide together, and were pioneer hang glider pilots back in the 70s in montana, from 74 onwards. they stood there going ’bob combs!’, ’kirk burris!’ for a while, and reminiscing about the good old days. turns out the oldsmobile we were admiring was kirk’s too which was a pretty weird coincidence that it was our favourite. we had beers with kirk and his wife debbie for the rest of the day, and they talked about hang gliding and all their old friends and what they were doing now. i could write a whole separate blog with all these stories, and maybe one day i will, but not now.
kirk and debbie gave us a ride in the oldsmobile - imagine our excitement - to a bar up the road, called grizzly jacks, where we carried on the party. they had a very drunk friend who sounded like he was talking in portuguese but it was just that he was really drunk. bert used to know someone called duff king - sounds like straight out of the simpsons - and also someone called lyle lucky, which made me chuckle. him and lyle lucky had a cedar shake mill together - a shake is a wooden roofing tile - back before bert got all into flying as his career - cedar trees die naturally from the inside out, so you use the non-rotten wood on the outside of the trunk to make your shakes from and you don‘t have the added expense and hassle of having to fell the trees. bert invented the shake cutting machine, but didn’t patent it, which was his loss when lyle sold this machine all over the states. bert got the lady announcer of the car show to ask if lyle lucky was there, but he never materialised.
monday 7th september
went for a hike to glacier lake in the swan mountain range, with kirk and debbie.
we met up with them at an old montana bar called the roadhouse where there were a couple of old men already propping up the bar by 11am, perhaps it was their permanent position, one of the men even had his own bar stool - it was engraved with his name and a picture. he had also lived in sheffield once, perhaps that’s what had driven him to drink.our hike to glacier lake was nice and not too steep, i was hungry straightaway and asking when we could stop for our sandwiches. when i get hungry i get fairly grumpy and need to rectify the situation immediately. this used to annoy my good friend kathryn who told me i should always have some emergency food stashed in my bag somewhere for this eventuality, as she found it hard to deal with the mood swing. i think it must be a particular disorder i have as i have noticed that some people can be hungry but still function fairly normally. anyway we ate our sandwiches at the top of a steep bit, looking down on glacier lake. at the end of our hike, kirk produced the most amazing gadget ever - a gas powered blender for making margaritas with - it has a starter rope like you have on chainsaws or old lawnmowers, and you pull it and it fires up. he had a little bag with the tequila and margarita mixer in and some ice, and we all had a well deserved margarita in the car park. probably to the horror of other hardened hikers filling up on energy drinks and granola bars.
at this point i want to point out there is a strange word they use here in america - maybe only in montana - which is ornery - it means naughty, kind of like cheeky, badly behaved. i’ve never heard this word before, and wonder where it comes from? other notable differences are we say garden where they say yard - they call a vegetable garden just a garden; they say pissed meaning angry, where we mean drunk; and a purse here is a bag not a wallet type thing.
that evening me and bert had a pizza at moose’s saloon and burnt our mouths on it, which really upsets me. obviously i like to be able to eat my food as fast as possible, and it being hotter than the sun does not allow for this.
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