It’s 3:00 a.m., ten hours into another journey, passing through Poplar, Montana, then Glasgow, on towards Saco under the bowl of a moonlit sky, passing a farmhouse with a lit upper window, two horses in a small corral, a pickup in the driveway, everything bathed in dreamy strangeness. Who is it in that room? Are they alone? Is he or she wondering who we are, our tires humming, heading west, speeding on through the night towards the mountains whose tops will be lit before sunrise?

This could be any of the fifty trips on the Hi-Line I’ve made since 1970. The first was with a couple of high school friends. I was stunned, my life changed forever by the vast open spaces, the endless horizons, the beautiful loneliness culminating in the mountains, witnessing rock thrust into the sky, waterfalls thundering in the distance, brilliant wildflowers, the tracks of the grizzly and the wolf.

For over a decade my wife and I drove the trip nonstop except for gas and bathroom breaks, 900 miles from Bemidji, Minnesota to Glacier National Park, the details of the route etched in memory--that place with the pick-up truck and horses in the yard now unoccupied, the abandoned motels, movie theaters, bars, an rocky outcropping like a nose on a hill, a rest stop in poplars morphing with time, swarms of middle-of-the night insects at rest stops, the rise and fall of horn blasts from trains punctuating late-night thoughts of time and distance.

The essence of what was once lingers, but is no more along this strip of asphalt stretching to invisibility, marked now by cell phone towers and dollar stores. Oddly, the quite long-ago dinosaurs figure prominently as kitschy roadside sculptures, along with museums in Malta and Choteau. The more recent past of the Plains Indians can be seen in the various forts, monuments, and reservations--Fort Peck, Sleeping Buffalo Hot Springs, the Blackfoot Reservation. With each crossing of this expanse and its relics, the more recent the destruction of Native civilization feels. The length of my lifetime, 75 years, flipped backward from my birth in 1949 to 1874, puts us late in the near eradication of the bison, and just three years before Chief Joseph famously said, “I will fight no more forever,” at the Nez Perce Bear Paw Battlefield.

Travel and time move together–where we are going–where have we been in the rear-view mirror; the time my wife and I were on our last trip and knowing it, our life together on this road coming to an end, a last hurrah to the mountains that once strengthened our bond, but this time knowing the attempt at renewal was beyond hope. A sense of loss was along for the ride after that, but eventually those journeys offered some erasure of loss as I set out again, alone this time, under the big sky towards those jagged peaks, emblems of time and the majestic power of their indifference.

Marsh Muirhead lives and writes on the banks of the Mississippi, near the source, not far from Bemidji, MN. His work has appeared in Cutthroat, Deep Wild, Water~Stone Review, Rattle, Southern Poetry Review and elsewhere.