Along Route 2
Until the late 90’s, there was no speed limit on Montana’s highways. The language of the state law stated that motorists were to drive in a “reasonable and prudent manner,” a phrase later deemed unconstitutionally vague by the Montana Supreme Court.
There now is a speed limit in Montana, but there are residual effects of the reasonable and prudent era.
U.S. Route 2 runs through the northern United States, and Shelby, Montana is one of many small towns along U.S. Route 2 in Montana.
Its population of 3,000 see plenty of passersby on their way to Glacier National Park (for scale, Shelby is roughly as far from the Canadian border as it is the Glacier County line). And on July 18th, 2014, I biked through Shelby, Montana.
I’d been on the road 52 days, with the previous week being as miserable as the sum of the first 45. Between the relentless eastbound winds, long days, and not-so reasonable and prudent cars passing me regularly, Montana was a brutally hard state to ride through.
On the 18th, I stopped at a grocery store in Shelby, the only grocery store in Shelby, to rest up before pedaling on to Cut Bank. Like a delusional explorer in the desert, I kept riding west toward the mirage the mountains, and the idea of Seattle being just on the other side. I was so ready to get off Route 2. Shelby was just another rest stop along the way.
I bought some donuts and a chocolate milk (I took nutrition on the road very seriously). I’d grown numb long ago to the weird looks and slanted heads that come with walking around public in Lycra in Middle America, but in all my sweaty, disheveled glory, I must have caught someone’s eye. I swiped my card, picked up my calories, and found a nice parking block to sit on outside.
A few minutes later, a bag boy walked outside and toward me. He was mentally-challenged, couldn’t have been older than 21, and looked a little nervous, probably because I looked like a husk left out in the sun for too long.
He walked up to me, smiling, and handed me a bottle of water. I thanked him and he scurried back inside.
Sometimes I wonder what he’s up to. Whether he’s still in Shelby, and what his story is. He didn’t need to give a delirious cyclist a bottle of water, but he did, and that’s the kind of humanity you experience on a bike tour.
A few Montana Republicans have floated legislation that would effectively embargo bike touring through the state, and after it flopped, they said they’re going to try again next session.
Montana beat the hell out of me, and I’ve used some, err, colorful language to describe my time riding through there since. I learned my dog died there, for heaven’s sake. The road conditions aren’t ideal, and the high-speed cars on Route 2 make for some unnerving riding.
But in Montana, I also had that interaction with the bag-boy in Shelby, which was so uplifting and still serves as a nice to the amount of kindness in the world.
I don’t really know what the point of writing this was. What’s my point here? Well, I’m not a constituent of the aforementioned Montana Republicans, so they probably don’t care about my opinion or experience in their state. I guess, just, despite all of the mean things the state did to me, I really valued my time cycling through Montana, and it’s a bummer to see it take such a hostile approach to something that gave me so many cherished memories.
