Chapter 2
First Stop – Boulder, MT
Eloise wasn’t home – but Sally was mollified to see the mail box had her name on it. Max left a land-line phone message, and we headed to town to maybe find the high school. It turned out to be the first test of how much attention to a roving commune on wheels might be too much attention.
Boulder, Montana, is a tiny town, unless you go by Montana standards, so there were not a lot of choices for where to park and check out the local coffee shop scene. We decided to park right in front of City Hall on the square with the County Courthouse and shops across the street. Boulder is nestled on the Continental Divide at the intersection of Interstate 15 and Montana 69. The sun was just starting to disappear behind the spiral with the court house clock. It was a sunny, mid-September mid-afternoon.
At the one open coffee shop, called the “Chat & Chew,” the waitress was excited to have any kind of a crowd, but a jovial one at that, and quickly learned what we were up to, exclaiming “Oh, can I come with!!?”
“Yeah,” she did know Eloise the teacher, and “Yeah,” Eloise was still teaching, “but I think Eloise is back east, a sick relative, or something,” she added.
Being mid-afternoon there were not many customers, and we kept up a lively conversation with Susie, our friendly waitress. We all admired the photos of the town on the walls with the picturesque Boulder Mountains in the background. There were plenty of hunting and fishing photos as well, plus an old Hamm’s Beer sign with flowing, sky-blue waters. After finishing-up a small bite to eat, some of us snuck out back for a quick smoke. As we paid our bill, Susie the waitress volunteered to let us park the Land Yacht in her driveway – even offering a couple couches – if we wanted to stay in town until Eloise was back.
Walking out of the Chat & Chew, we saw that a group of teenagers had gathered around a park bench not far from where our RV was parked. “Where you guys heading to?” the smallest of the group hollered out. He was wearing a hoodie with “SkateCat Jack” embroidered across the front.
“Yeah, you live in this thing?” the one female in the group remarked, not so much as a question. She had a pixie-square haircut and nose jewelry.
We told them we were on our way to California staying with friends along the way. “You must know Eloise Johnson. She teaches at the high school. I was in the Peace Corps with her,” Max said to them.
The teenagers all knew Eloise, and the one we got to know later as Gregory told us Eloise was running for school board as the Forward Party candidate, pointing to our Forward Party bumper sticker. “We could use some more volunteers,” he told us.
In short fashion, the teens engaged in a lively conversation with us about the message crayoned on our back window [“Have Love, Will Travel,” a tribute to the Richard Berry song]; about pot [Did we have any?]; and how did we get involved with “the Yang Gang.”
Skip explained how he was an Andrew Yang for President volunteer in the 2020 election and asked if Boulder was more or less a Trump town or might there be some independent Yang-types, ready for better choices? [Definitely a Trump 2024 town].
Leaving the teenagers to themselves, we clambered on board the Land Yacht, Max saying, even before he sat down: “Let’s stick around a couple days. I’ll go back to the Chat & Chew and make sure Eloise’s friend, the waitress, is really okay with us crashing in her driveway a night or two.”
Skip piped in, “You know, I like the way this trip is starting out, catching up with old friends, making new friends, and best of all cross-germinating political ideas across the generational divide!”