Lunch with Buddha by Merullo Roland

Author:Merullo, Roland [Merullo, Roland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AJAR Contemporaries
Published: 2012-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

21

A night of dreamless sleep, a Kalispell Grand Hotel breakfast of cheese quiche, strong coffee, huckleberries of course, and sour cream coffee cake, and we were on the road again, my spiritual teacher and I. Rand McNally puts a line of small dots next to roads it considers particularly scenic, and the route we took south on that day, Montana 93, certainly deserved that distinction. Shortly after we set out, there was a sign by the side of the road announcing a pole-dancing contest at the Outlaw Inn. I was sorry to miss it. Then a sign for a livestock auction, another piece of Americana we’d have to forgo. To our right were open pastures and clumps of pine. To our left, after we’d gone a little ways, a thirty-mile lake with a bluish mountain range stretching north-south beyond it. The peaks were snow dusted in spots, with quilts of lavender clouds gliding over them. Gray stone at the heights, green forest below, and the blue lake stretching beside us, mile upon mile. Though it wasn’t radically different from the scenery of the afternoon before, it seemed, and I use the term guardedly, like sacred land. I looked over at Rinpoche.

He was his usual contented self, leaning sideways a bit on the front seat, watching me shift gears, from time to time taking a deep breath and letting the air out slowly in a long, contemplative sigh.

“Very special, isn’t it?”

“Special, man!” he said.

At the bottom of the lake we passed through the town of Polson, which I read at first as Poison. We skipped the Polson Bay Golf Course, skipped the Miracle of America Museum. I noticed that small, fenced-in areas stood in front of many of the trailer homes. Horse corrals instead of yards. This was the Salish and Kootenai Indian Reservation now, and the signs were in English and some other amazing language—Salish, it must have been—that looked like a combination of word and mathematical formula. Some letters were raised, as in Q to the Wth power. There were apostrophes and accents all over the place, high and low. It was a linguistic work of art. I’d never seen anything remotely like it.

Farther along, in Ronan, came a sign in plain English: WE ARE ALL BROTHERS AND SISTERS. GOD LOVES YOU.

At a rest area there I decided to stop and admire the view. Rinpoche sat on the open tailgate and meditated while I fell into conversation with Sam and Johnny, two well-tanned and tremendously friendly Montana Fish and Wildlife agents who were checking the towed boats of passing motorists for evidence of the zebra mussel. A young woman colleague of theirs joined them on the way to her car. I inquired about the language. She told me her boyfriend had grown up in Arlee and had taken Salish in school, “even though he‘s white.” She knew how to say “squirrel”, and demonstrated it for us, and it was easy to see why no ordinary combination of letters could capture that sound.

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