The Big Open ...

Today's quote is a paragraph from the Dayton Duncan book, Out West: American Journey Along the Lewis and Clark Trail. It nicely describes part of a drive from Fort Peck down to Jordan and beyond ... a wonderfully desolate part of the state that in recent years has been called "The Big Open":

Highway 24 is a patchy stretch of asphalt through choppy buttes and valleys ... there are few trees, not even much sage. In the fifty-nine miles between Fort Peck and Highway 200 I see seven cars, two ranch houses, and an unending string of barbed wire near both shoulders. Twenty-five miles north of Highway 200 [the truck] loses radio contact with the world again. I switch to the tape cassette. Merle Haggard sings, "Turn me loose, set me free, somewhere in the middle of Montana . . . Big city, turn me loose and set me free."