Harry Travels: Painted Caves, or Writing on the Wall

August 4-5

After I sent the e-mail from Starbucks on Thursday, Joanna and I went back to the Museum of the Rockies. One of the permanent exhibits there is devoted to the history of the Earth and the evolution of life.

When I see these things, I am always reminded why I can’t remember the names of the geological periods. It’s like an extensive filing systems full of code words. Pre-Cambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic. OK.

But each one has several subsets, which is where (I guess) terms like Cretaceous and Jurassic creep in. Then each of those has multiple breakdowns.

On the other hand, the museum runs a recording of how, judging by anatomical features, some of the dinosaurs vocalizations may have sounded. That, and of course all the old bones and fossils of invertebrates, are very interesting.

There is also an exhibit of artifacts from villas in Herculaneum and the surrounding area that were uncovered from the ruins after the great eruption of Vesuvius in the first century A.D.

Not so interesting for Joanna. She has been in Pompeii.

We went back to Main Street in the evening and had dinner at Ted’s Montana Grill. This has no connection with Ted’s Corner Tavern on Third Avenue in New York. This one, we were told, is owned by Ted Turner.

The bison meat loaf and bison pot roast were both very tasty. The garlic mashed potatoes were very lightly seasoned with garlic, which is a very good thing. Aunt Somebody’s squash casserole contained bread crumbs and black pepper, so it had some flavor, too, and I rarely expect flavor from squash.

I had a Bent Nail IPA, a Montana brew that I had tried before from the bottle, and an amber, much like an English bitter, whose name I forget.

Several blocks were turned into a pedestrian mall for an event called Music on Main, part of the Sweet Pea Festival. We arrived as musicians were packing up, but there were still a lot of people there, including a table set up by the Green Coalition of Gay Loggers for Jesus.

Signs warned people that no alcohol was permitted past a certain point and the open containers were permitted only in the festival area between 6 and 9 p.m. And I had always pictured Montana as a wide-open live-and-let-live state.

It may have been at one time, but now it is getting as anal retentive as New York.

At nine, we were chased onto the sidewalk and four cop cars with lights flashing came through. I guess they were going to run over anybody with an open container.

Friday, we left Bozeman for Hardin, a small town just off Interstate 90 and about 15 miles from the Crow Agency and the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument.

It is a drive of two and a half or three hours. We took a little longer because we saw a sign for Pictograph Cave State Park.

Never heard of that before, so we took the exit and followed the only road till we came to the visitors’ center. For six bucks you get to walk up a sidewalk to a shallow cave that has yielded evidence of occupation for at least 10,000 years.

It was excavated over a several years beginning in 1937.

The pictographs are paintings on the cave walls. They have seriously deteriorated since the excavation. You really can’t make much out, but there are reproductions and indications of where the remains are.

Many were in black. Some, in red pigment, show up better. But at least one of them was drawn very late because it is an image of rifles.

I followed a side trail to another spot called Ghost Cave. Before the excavations in the ’30s and ’40s the park was named for Ghost Cave.

The cave creates strange echoes and amplifies sounds. I heard my feet on the gravel path, but also heard grunts and other sharp noises that were either distortions of wind or complaints by dyspeptic revenants.