I discovered another benefit of the Internet yesterday, while getting organized for the day’s drive from Banff to Polson, Montana. We had planned to drive past Calgary, and then down through the Waterton Lakes-Glacier National Park area, which straddles the Canadian border. But I vaguely remembered that the high mountain passes in that area are sometimes closed until late May or early June because of snowfall; and with a couple of quick Google searches, I was able to find the road-status page for the Going-to-the-Sun road from St. Mary to West Glacier. Lo and behold, it’s closed; good thing we found out before leaving.

As a result, we retraced our path back toward Sandpoint and Couer D’Alene; but just before Cranbrook, we turned southeast on highway 93, and crossed the border into Montana at Roosville. From there, it was an easy drive through Eureka, down to Whitefish and Kalispell; and then we zoomed down the west side of Flathead Lake , through the little towns of Somers, Lakeside, Rollins, Elmo, and Big Arm, until we finally reached Polson around 6:30 PM. As with the trip up to Banff a few days ago, I had been hoping for spectacular scenery along the way; but it was so foggy and rainy along the way that we barely got a glimpse of any mountains at all. C’est la vie.

I spent two wonderful summers in Polson in 1996 and 1997; it’s where I wrote the first edition of my Death March book in 1996, and the first edition of Time Bomb 2000 in 1997. And while I spent the entire summer season in Polson, from Memorial Day to Labor Day, it turns out that what I really remembered was the nice warm days of July and August — when the water was warm enough to swim in, and the sun shone brightly nearly every day. There were rafting trips down the Flathead River, jet-ski rides out in the lake, and pleasant evenings listening to outdoor concerts by Steve Riddle and a couple surviving members of the Mission Mountain Wood Band.

But today — on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend — it was 41 degrees and raining steadily when I got up. The marina at the edge of the lake, where the KwaTaqNuk hotel is situated, was empty, and there was noone around. After breakfast in an empty restaurant, I decided to go out for a drive. Seven miles out of Polson is the Kerr Dam which I enjoyed visiting in previous years. All of the floodgates are open at this time of year, and the roar of the water is overwhelming. While the dam is visually impressive, some of the statistics are even more impressive: it’s 204 feet high, which is 54 feet higher than Niagara Falls. Constructed by roughly a thousand workers during the Depression years, it was inaugurated in August 1939 and now provides power for some 125,000 local homes and businesses. You can read “all you want to know” about the dam by clicking here; meanwhile, I got back in the car and headed into town again.

Polson turns out to be a good example of the metaphor suggested by Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again: it just ain’t the same as it used to be. The El Rancho restaurant, which looked out on the Flathead River below the bridge, and which served the best steaks and prime ribs in the area, is gone. The local bank on Main Street is gone, replaced by some kind of government office. WalMart has been replaced by Safeway; a new Thai restaurant has appeared, and some flashy little slot-machine casinos have sprung into existence (the town is located on Indian reservation land). And both residential and commercial “sprawl” is evident everywhere: where a single home used to grace a large, open meadow, now there are five or six “development” homes. Well, such is progress in modern America.