Black Balloon

Chapter 25

It was the closing days of December when me and my reliable little Stoody plowed across the frozen wasteland of America's Northwest. I experienced a cold I never knew existed in nature. Autumn of '57 Florida had been an especially wet and dreary one. I'd grown tired of life in Hiawatha, tired of life in general, and so on the first official day of winter I woke up in a hangover funk and just said fuck it. I was done. I had to leave and I couldn't wait any longer. I was wasting my time in Florida. The summer vagabonds, the beatniks and burnouts that showed up seasonally to scour the rivers for clams, well, they'd all packed up and left for warmer weather, Miami, Key West, or Mexico, leaving me alone with the real fisherman, the old grey beards in big boats, and those dudes weren't much fun.

I took Stu to a local mechanic for a full tune-up and inspection. She passed with whatever the opposite of flying colors is, but the mechanic did tell me she'd, quote, "probably make it." I asked him if the car could handle extreme cold and he said he didn't see why not but he'd never been outside of Florida so couldn't say for sure. Three days later, in the early hours of Christmas Eve, I loaded up my things and I left, not bothering to give my landlord notice. He would eventually realize that his part-time maintenance man had flown the coop. I'm sure I wasn't the first to vacate the Indian View Motel in such a fashion.

I spent Christmas Day parked outside of Nashville, huddled in the backseat under a wool blanket and waiting for the gas stations to reopen. This was the result of poor planning on my part. But reopen they eventually did, and twenty hours later, I crossed from the frozen hellscape of North Dakota and into the frozen hellscape of Montana. It had been a hairy couple of days, constantly worrying if I had enough gas to get me through to the next town, knowing I'd freeze to death if I didn't. Somewhere between Broadus and Mill City my windshield froze over solid (despite the pitiful defrost running on full blast) forcing me to stop and scrape it clear with the sole of my shoe. As I climbed out of the car to do so, it felt like a boulder hit me in the chest, the bitter cold. If I blinked for an instant too long my eyelids would freeze together. It was brutal, almost enough to make a man miss the lukewarm humidity of a Florida winter, far preferable in that moment to this deathly chill, the kind that freezes the very marrow within your bones. I was regretting my decision. I could have spent the winter laying around in 70-degree Florida weather, arriving in Whitefish just in time to watch the wildflowers bloom. But no, I'd made another rash decision that'd probably send me to an early death.

On the 29th, with the sun barely breaking to my back, I spotted the sign for Whitefish. I'd driven through the night without stopping. The distant glow of streetlights was like an oasis, a beacon of yellow lights welcoming me in from the long cold night. The town was small, a grid of roads that quickly turned into wilderness if you ventured too far in any direction. It reminded me a lot of Shiloh. It was quaint, cozy, nothing at all like the ominous destination my brain had conjured these past two years. My imagination, with unlimited time to think and to dread, had begun to envision the town as a ghastly haunted place, eerie and unsettling, like Luna Hills had been. But it was nothing like that at all. It was cozy and charming, a perfect picture of small-town America.

It was not even 6am when I pulled into town. Most of the shops were still dark but just as I was glancing around a fluorescent "OPEN" blinked to life. It was hanging outside of a place called "Honey Creek," a narrow diner built into an alleyway off East 3rd.

East 3rd...

It dawned on me just how real it all was. This was it. I was parked on the very road of my clandestine appointment, a place that had taken on surreal importance in my mind. I had come to think of this town and that street corner, the same way one imagines the birth of Christ, a larger than life event that feels too big to be real. July 5th, 1958 had grown in my mind to become some legendary event, an epic juncture in the crossroads of history, and yet here I was, a mere 7 months from the big day and standing in the actual town and THE actual street no less. The thought was so striking it momentarily awakened me from my groggy brain fog, the effects of 26 sleepless hours. But this energy jolt didn't last long. What I really needed was coffee. (Well, what I really needed was sleep, but coffee was the next best thing.)