The Yellowstone Conundrum (41 page)

U.S 212 South of Billings, Montana

Yellowstone River

  At 3:45 Penny reached the intersection of US 212/310 and exit 434 on I-90, twelve miles west of Billings.

 
That is, she
nearly
made it to the intersection.  

 
The Yellowstone River, famously used by the Lewis and Clark expeditions, flows from Yellowstone Lake (now on fire) in Yellowstone National Park (now on fire) and goes mostly gently downhill eastward for nearly 400 miles before emptying into the Missouri River in western North Dakota, roughly 70 miles due east of Wolf Point, Montana (now destroyed).

 
The US 212/310 bridge crossing the Yellowstone now lay in the river itself, partially submerged in the deepest part of the river, entirely collapsed due to the earthquake.  Penny pulled up to the southern edge of the bridge, stopped, turned off the engine and got out. The collapsed bridge had spanned one of the widest portions of the meandering river.

 
“
Is there anything else you want me to do?
” Penny shouted into the cold afternoon wind, arms uplifted. “It’s not my fucking fault Jimmy died! I couldn’t save him!” Penny punched the air with her fists, her face red as a beet. 

 
There was a lot of Captain Dan going on.

 
Ahead of her the road abruptly dropped off the southern Rimrock ledge, down seventy feet to the sandy wash in the wide bend in the river.

 
Sometimes God speaks to us through our conscience, or in Biblical-type dreams where we wrestle Jacob-like with our own pillows of stone, the laments we’ve piled up in the back of our brain, one-at-a-time, like a stack of wooden pallets waiting for us to deal with them. Other times, God just says
here you go, dude
. Like two children in a desert being attacked by wolves.

  
Or,
there’s a car down there
.

 
“No, way,” Penny mumbled out loud
maybe God’s playing a joke. I swear that wasn’t here a minute ago.
She looked back to the mess in front of her. 

 
The Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad ran parallel to highway 212, then further south on US 310 with connections to Denver, Laramie and Scottsbluff, NB to the south, including a bump in the road opposite Pam’s Bar and Grill in scenic Edgar, Montana.

  What a mess.
The earthquake had cracked the three concrete support pillars that held up the sections of the bridge. The center support had done more than crack, as had the one on the north side. The sections of truss had simply fallen into the Yellowstone. The effect of the earthquake was similar to what had happened to overpasses all along I-25 and I-90 in Wyoming and Montana; one weak support column and down she came. When one section of a bridge falls, it tends to put so much pressure on the adjoining sections that they tumble as well. While an overpass on a highway may lose two or three sections of concrete, a bridge spanning a river could lose everything, which is what happened. The sections of the bridge fell straight down, and toppled on its left side, bottom side downstream. 

 
He’s got to be dead
. 

 
Between the carcasses of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe and US 212/310 bridge failures was a single vehicle, a red 2003 Chevy S-10/GMC Sonoma. The bridges crossed a 1400-foot section of riverbed, flood plain and actual river. The Sonoma was on its side, passenger side down, but tending toward road-kill position, tires to the sky, smack in-between two fallen bridges. A workhorse in its day, the Sonoma had been discontinued in 2004 because of lower-cost equal/better-performance of Japanese brands; that and the Ford 150 series.

 
The truck had fallen onto the sandy riverbed at the point where the Yellowstone River made its upside-down U, half resting on the bank, half in the shallow water.

 
Penny walked to the point where the macadam had broken like a soft, doughy cookie, perhaps oatmeal; made less like a cookie with the yellow line down the middle. She turned back to her Toyota to see two moppets staring at her in confused wonderment; their heads just barely visible over the dashboard.

 
Penny was a semi-professional skier; she could recognize the fall of the land and see the path of least resistance to the objective; the poor schlep who happened to be in a Chevy Sonoma at 7:20 MST this morning, had been there for nearly nine hours. With a small hand wave to the children, over the edge she went and found she was on a slick slope, the frozen south side of the Rimrocks, the cliffs above the Yellowstone River that the water had carved out from the high prairie over the ions. The bank on the south side received only moments of sunlight each day in February, roughly at 12:30, which had long since passed; unlike the banks on the north side of the river which received sunlight for six or seven hours a day, making the soil composition completely different.

 
Professional skier or not, Penny found herself tumbling down the seventy-foot embankment to the riverbed, out of control. Moguls-schmoguls, these bumps on the frozen tundra weren’t easy to negotiate. Seventy feet later of E-ticket ride down the southern slope of the Rimrock, Penny found herself on an elongated beach at a point where the Yellowstone River had carved out a new U in its long path.  She looked back up to the edge of the road, then back at the debris of the collapse of the bridges. It was up-close-and-personal. On her feet, but staggering, Penny started to jog toward the truck; the massive backdrop of the fallen bridges towering above her by thirty feet.

  Her hands and feet were cold.
Up close, the Yellowstone River ran a lot harder than it did from on top of the bluff; and it was noisy. The smooth rocks made walking a turn-your-ankle possibility with every step. There was natural debris everywhere, tree trunks, limbs, and logs; and man-made junk, fishing lines, water bottles, Styrofoam coolers, kid’s toys, even a refrigerator that must have been there for twenty years.
If this is a fast-moving river in Montana, what the hell must our oceans look like?

 
As she approached the Chevy, the mangled Chevy, she saw that the rear of the vehicle was now in the soft, slushy part of the riverbed and sinking, or was it sliding? The rear flatbed was now half into the river and the truck was making creaking noises, sliding across gravel noises.

  “Hello!
Anyone in there?” Penny shouted as she approached.

 
“It’s about fucking time!” a man’s voice returned the question. “Get me the fuck out of here!”

 
“Are you hurt?” Penny asked.

 
“I’m upside-down in fucking car—
whatthehelldoyouthink
?” The man shouted.

 
Penny’s hackles started to rise a tad, “Looks to me like your truck is starting to slip into the river.”

 
“Well, get your butt over here and get me outta here, god-damn it! How old are you, anyway?”

 
Penny approached the truck, stuck between two gigantic mounds of bridge debris. The rear of the truck was making gurgling sounds as the Yellowstone River started ever so slowly to push the flatbed rear-end out toward the main stream.

  “I’m 22.
How old are you?” she replied, not moving an inch, in fact standing a bit taller than her 5’10” frame normally did.

 
“What the hell does that matter?” the guy was genuinely pissed. 

  “Are you Clint Eastwood?
Is this some kind of Candid Camera thing?” Penny shot back. “You sound like Clint Eastwood, just not quite so, manly.”

 
“Fuckin’ pussy,” he said, but not really loud.

 
“Pardon?” Penny pretended not to hear. “You sound OK, sir. Perhaps I’ll just wait for some additional assistance, seeing I’m a pussy and all.” Penny’s hackles were in full annoyance. “You know, I haven’t had a really good day.  Don’t know about you,” she replied. “How was your day?”

  “Get me the fuck out of here!
You god-damned slit, fucking
puta
whore. Do what I tell you to do!” the man, obviously older, spit the words out,
puta
being Spanish for whore.

 
The sun was tipping toward the yardarm, another 45 minutes or so and it would be 4:30 and nighttime would be upon them; the cold night comes early in Montana in February. Penny didn’t take the bait.

 
“You know, I’m pretty tired.  I’m going to sit down for a few minutes. I’ve got two kids I saved from wolves today; they’re up in my truck at the top of the ravine. I can throw a tent up and crawl into a nice warm sleeping bag and sleep the night away. There’s a hooters bar a half-mile down the road. Maybe I’ll go down and see if they have some Jack Daniels, then crawl back into my tent. Tomorrow might be a better day. Doesn’t have to be much of a day to top this one,” Penny laughed to herself, and sat down; her heels made a rustling sound on the rocks. 

 
A long two minutes went by then Penny took a fist-sized smooth rock and threw it as hard as she could at the Chevy, smacking it on the driver’s side door. Most of the truck was now in the slush from the river, lapping behind it; the truck now moving with every little ebb; a really good push and it would lose purchase with the riverbank and float a bit, eventually to the point where it would start to head out into the water, and make its way downstream. She threw another rock, this time hitting the driver’s side window; not shattering it, but giving it a nice ding.

  “Is that you?
What the fuck are you doing that for? I told you to get your pink twat over here and get me out of here. You’re not going to let me freeze to death.” Sounds of boots on rocks as Penny got up; then she threw a third rock at the Chevy.

 
“Well, Clint, I’m heading back up the hill. I’ve had a really bad day, but you know, it’s time to go to sleep.  The sun is going down in another twenty minutes, and I’m really fucking tired; and your act is thirty years out of touch. Maybe that’s the way men treat women in Montana. I don’t care. I’m tired and I’ve had a bad day. I don’t give a fuck if you die here tonight.”

 
Penny turned and started to walk away, pausing after ten steps to see if the old dude could show some level of contriteness; but there was nothing but the water and the wind. Hearing nothing, she began the hard climb up the Rim Rocks to the top, finally reaching the macadam of US 212/310 at 4:45. She turned back and saw the truck, still in the middle of two fallen bridges, but now surrounded by water.

 
Check you in the morning, Clint
.

  The sun had already gone down behind the black cloud to the south, which now spread 180 degrees across the horizon and stretched as high as thunderclouds. It was the end of the world. The children were overjoyed to see her return but sensed everything wasn’t OK and remained quiet;
new mommy’s not going to leave us out here is she?
 

 
Penny was hungry; she knew the children would be hungry.  Turning the Toyota around, she headed back toward a cluster of buildings a half-mile back from the new road-end. One was obviously a no-tell hootin’ tooter kind of bar, Slim Busters Tittie Factory; located out in the middle of nowhere, across the street was a summer seasonal business that didn’t look like it had been open for years. Penny pulled into Slim Buster’s parking lot; the place had been devastated by the earthquake. Everything had been torn down as far as the eye could see. Big Sky Montana was living up to its name; stars had started to pop out, even though it was just dusk. She got out; by now the children knew not to say a word, entered Slim Buster’s and walked through the debris of an empty building, not 12 hours old. No one had come to work today because the bridge had collapsed.

 
So you won’t mind if I borrow some Jack Daniels
.

 
And six bags of peanuts.
Yeah, what would the kids like?
   Clearing fallen ceiling tiles, she opened a refrigerator door and came out with 2 Pepsis, a Dr. Pepper and two Mountain Dews.
Why should I be the only one to piss every two hours?
With a sweeping arm she cleared the chips abd pretzels and returned to the truck. Yaaaah! The sound could be heard a mile away. Penny smiled.

  They ate everything.
She wasn’t a drinker, so about two really good slugs of Jack Daniels had started her head to spin. She turned the truck around and nearly returned to the edge of the fallen road, but instead turned right into Riverside Park, a six-site seasonal campground; now closed for the season. The campsites were nestled in amongst a grove of mixed cottonwoods and beautiful white-barked birch trees, right on the Yellowstone River. While the bathroom facilities were locked, it didn’t much matter. These kids were used to filth and Penny spent most of her adult life outdoors.

 
Quickly she set up Jimmy’s tent; his scent was still there, spread her sleeping bag out, told the kids to go pee, scrambled into the tent, and passed out cold, a child on either side. Two hundred yards to their left, a red 2003 Chevy Sonoma was turned sideways and wobbling back and forth with the activity of the Yellowstone River. Inside was Mr. Clyde Stillwater, 68, of Laurel, Montana; a life-long, professional pain-in-the-ass curmudgeon, apparently hoisted on his own petard.