Disaster!

Dear friends, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I have very thoroughly explored a quintessentially "Montana" experience. This is in keeping with my mission to suck the marrow out of the adventure. The bad news is that the experience was fatal. Not for me. For Bambi.

That's right. I killed Bambi. I didn't mean it. I wasn't out in the woods with a rifle. I was on a highway in a Volvo. Turns out that the latter is perhaps even more lethal than the former. As I stood by the side of the road waiting for a tow truck and watching my battered cream puff bleed coolant everywhere, no fewer than four people pulled up to tell me that the same thing had happened to them quite recently. One woman, I kid you not, said "I hit one this morning and my car looks much worse than yours."

Even the State Trooper who attended the sad occasion told me that it happens twice a day on that stretch of road. There is apparently a special crew of municipal workers whose job it is to go around the streets picking up the deer carcasses. I don't know if there's any truth to the rumour that they then make them into jerky, but it certainly seems possible.

Everyone was remarkably cavalier about this catastrophe in my otherwise non-fatal existence. The tow truck guy was cracking jokes about throwing Bambi on the back of the truck for dinner. Even the insurance company guy was pretty jovial about it. I told him the cream puff was blue and he said "Blue and red now, ha ha ha." This seemed insensitive to my complex feelings since I was simultaneously mourning the loss of Bambi's life, my road trip and the cream puff's formerly attractive nose.

To make matters worse, the State Fair is on in Missoula at the same time. So every decent hotel in town is booked out. So are most of the indecent ones. The sole remaining room, a smoking room, is so disturbing that I'm not even going to describe it. It has three redeeming features in an otherwise appalling list of unfortunate ones, like burn holes in the sheets and very strange wiring in the lights:

1. It has a bathtub (remember my knees are still black and scabby, plus I've now been on a horse for several days and hit a deer)
2. It isn't really very expensive (although still overpriced)
3. The people there are actually extremely helpful and nice (which is why I have refrained from naming the hotel).

I had planned to meet up with Ducati Kevin for a late dinner on my way through town, but I called him from the side of the road to explain why I was standing him up. He immediately turned into a Road Trip Angel and asked if I needed a ride or some kind of help or was there anything he could do? Could he, for instance, pick me up at the tow truck office and convey me to my dodgy hotel? Yes, he could do that. He could also stop off so I could get a sandwich and a drink on the way.

So, at this point in my journey I am stranded in Godknowswhere, Montana. The cream puff's fate is unknown, but I'm certainly not going to be driving it anywhere soon. The whole adventure swings perilously on the point of cancellation and all I can do is wait in my crappy hotel room until the insurance case manager rings me with further advice "guaranteed by close of business tomorrow."

The only silver lining in this very black cloud is that tomorrow Ducati Kevin and his roommate Stan are going to take me to a firing range for another authentic Montana experience. Having killed a deer with a Volvo I suppose I am now a kind of inept hunter and should therefore learn to fire a gun. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but I promised myself that this road trip would be dedicated to experience. I committed to embrace every opportunity and welcome whatever the road threw my way, including Bambi, I suppose, and a Missoula firing range.