A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg by Tim Cahill

Author:Tim Cahill [Cahill, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-77838-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-01T16:00:00+00:00

Things began looking up the day before the eclipse. A slight northerly shift in the jet stream and the storm riding in on it doubled the chances of clear weather in Missoula from 10 to 20 percent. East of the Continental Divide, along a line roughly from Great Falls to Livingston, meteorologists expected a chinook, a warm, dry wind that could rip big holes in the cloud cover. The chances of clear skies in that area were 40 percent.

In Livingston, at 3:30 A.M. the day of the eclipse, I could see stars shining through the cloud cover off to the north. Up that way, over some pretty substantial hills, was an area of high plains. I ran for it.

The sun rose off to the right, coloring the sky a pale pink and orange pastel over snowy fields. There were high cirrus clouds, wispy and insubstantial. The mountains dropped away, and the roads rolled out over the prairie, straight and dry, only now and again dipping into shallow river bottoms. Once, at 80 m.p.h., I hit a two-hundred-yard patch of black ice and had rocketed over it before I realized how nearly fatal that little ride had been. I had a strong urge to pull over for a minute to let my hands stop shaking, but there was no time; I shot along the black ribbon of highway thinking about Mike Kelley and machines on ice and how death and destiny make no allowance for good intentions.

Diarrhea doesn’t either, for that matter. I was clutching an open, economy-size bottle of Pepto-Bismol between my thighs; it served as a blunt reminder of a solemn oath I had taken the night before: I will, forevermore, avoid restaurants advertising “Mexican Cuisine” when they are situated near the Canadian border. Just before that oath I had consumed, to my almost immediate dismay, what the special menu described as an “eclipse enchilada” and a “totality taco.” At present they lay in the bottom of my stomach like a pair of poison army socks.

Towns, restaurants, and motels along the track of totality were cashing in on the eclipse the way Seeley Lake prepared for the snowmobile races—and for all the same reasons. In Manitoba, for instance, locals had built an ersatz igloo village to draw more eclipse addicts. In Winnipeg, the Colonel was selling eclipse-viewing goggles along with fried chicken. And at the Big Sky Resort near the entrance to Yellowstone Park, 550 people had paid $385 apiece to stay for the weekend and make a run for clear skies in a caravan of buses.

At Harlowton, where U.S. 191 crosses U.S. 12, I passed seven or eight of those same charter buses, parked on the side of the road. They were obviously trying to decide whether to run north toward Lewistown or east to Roundup. There were several CB-equipped cars and trucks parked along with the convoy; I tried them on the road channel.

Of course, I hadn’t paid a cent for the services of the convoy’s eclipse meteorologist, and the answering silence let me know that quite clearly.

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