Dear friends and family,
I think I can say in confidence that the couple of days this post chronicles definitively ends Leg 2, if only because they sucked so much that I want to leave these days in Leg 2, and get a fresh start on Leg 3 without them. It’s not worth beating around the bush, so let’s get down to when I could’ve died in a house fire and when my car exploded on the same day.
After leaving eastern Washington, I cruised through Idaho and into the bottom end of the Rocky Mountain Trench, around Flathead Lake.
The lake was quite beautiful, and remarkably placid for its size. It took probably 45 minutes to drive around, which is a long ways to go around a western lake. I booked a yurt at a nearby campground because it was honestly as cheap as the campsites themselves and I needed to unload my car somewhere so I could do a desperately needed deep clean of the thing (the first in two months on the road):
Today: Montana. Tomorrow: Mongolia.
I got the car cleaned out and did some laundry, etc., then moved up the valley to a hostel in the town of Whitefish, which was the newest town to Glacier in which I could find a cheap place to stay.
Now, I don’t have any pictures of this hostel because I kind of tried to block it out to get over the bad vibes, but it was named the Whitefish Bike Retreat. Do not stay there.
It was a weekday, and there was only me and an old guy and two other people staying at the hostel, which was an extremely nice guest house/bunkhouse built in only the last 5 years or so. I struck up a conversation with the old man that night since we were staying in the same bunk room, him in a single bed and me in an upper bunk of a bunk bed because I am secretly 4 at heart and will always pick the top bunk.
I set an alarm for 7:30 AM and went to bed around midnight. I woke up first at 7:00 AM, a bit before my alarm, so I decided to go back to sleep until my alarm went off.
When I woke up again at 7:30, the room was completely filled with smoke. It was dark, black, choking smoke that smelled like burning tires and chemicals. It was awful and acrid, and my first thought was that my car has caught on fire and spread to the house somehow. I leapt out of bed in only my underwear and raced to the door; in the rush out I went to go wake up the old man, but neither he nor his stuff were there. I ran downstairs and the house was full of that awful smoke around the ceiling, but not as bad as it had been upstairs. I didn’t see a fire anywhere as I ran out of the house, thinking it must be my car, or the roof, or something, but I couldn’t find a fire anywhere! I felt better now that I was in the fresh air, but I was thoroughly confused about what was going on. I walked around the house and finally found the old man sitting at a picnic table around back. Here is a paraphrased summary of our conversation:
“Holy shit man, what’s going on here? What part of the house is on fire?” I said to the old guy.
“Oh, yeah, that was my bad! I went to make a pot of coffee and put the pot directly on the stove, but the pot was made of plastic and rubber and caught on fire.” He said. The coffee pot he was talking about was really a plastic carafe. The stove he set it on was one of those glass top induction stoves by the way, so don’t believe those myths that they only get metal pots hot and nothing else.
“Oh, I see. Wait, why did you put the pot directly on the stove? There’s a coffee machine in there.”
“Oh well, you know when I grew up I was so used to the metal percolators you put right on the stove! I thought it was one of those metal percolators like that. I didn’t know. I waited for it to burn out.”
He repeated this a few times while I talked to him, which was confusing. I next asked “wait, I didn’t see you or any of your stuff upstairs when I ran out, what happened to all that?”
“Oh! I went back upstairs to get all my stuff, I didn’t want it getting all smoked up.”
“And you didn’t wake me up?”
“No no, you looked like you were sleeping peacefully, so I didn’t want to wake you.”
What the fuck, sleeping peacefully?! Yeah man, I was nearly sleeping forever! Is what I thought to myself. I wanted to yell at the guy, but I realized by the way he was talking and how he kept repeating his story so much (unprompted), that he may have been having some kind of memory episode. I calmed down enough and just asked “Well, did you call the owners to tell them what happened?”
“No, no. I knew they were coming around 8 so I figured I would tell them then.” He said it with the same, confused, slightly afraid lilt that he’d used when talking about the percolator. I think he was definitely having some kind of memory episode/attack/something.
So the owners finally got to the house at 8 AM, very startled and concerned with what was going on. The house has cleared out of smoke by then so I was able to go back up and get my stuff, which was pretty choked with that acrid smell. But while grabbing everything, I realized something that made me absolutely furious: in that whole hour where the house was filling with smoke, the smoke detectors never went off! Not upstairs, not downstairs, not anywhere. I looked around briefly for them while grabbing everything but couldn’t find any. I confronted the owner on this while I was packing up my car:
“Hey man, does Montana not require you to install smoke alarms?” I asked.
“What? No, we have them, in every room as a matter of fact.” The owner replied.
I was skeptical of this, since I hadn’t seen any with a cursory walk through the house. “Well, if you do have them installed, they absolutely never went off.”
“Oh” they replied, and they looked kind of askance when they said it. “Well it must have been a malfunction. Or the batteries must have run out.”
I smelled bullshit. “I don’t know man, the smoke alarms at my house have to be hardwired into the wall on top of the batteries. And how could all the smoke detectors in the house malfunction at the same time?”
The owner didn’t have an answer. “Well I don’t know, they should all be working, I don’t know why none of them went off. But for now, I need to go get this cleaned up.” They seemed very eager to get out of that conversation, which thet left hastily. At this point, I was drenched in smoke and my eyes and hair and skin felt so gross and I just wanted to get out of there, so I didn’t press the issue. I left and got a shower in town. Eventually, I called the local fire department and told them they story in the hopes they would look into the place.
Looking back, that was probably the closest to death I have come on this entire trip. If it hadn’t been for my 7:30 AM Alarm, already a much earlier alarm than I normally set, I might have died in my sleep from the smoke. Or I might not have. The burning carafe probably could have very easily started a fire in the rest of the house, trapping me upatairs. Or it might not have. I don’t know and I get really skeeved out thinking about it.
I was originally going to write about the rest of the bullshit that happened on that day but just revisiting that memory took a lot out of me. I’m sorry, I’ll get the rest of the day on the board in another post in the future.
That’s all for now,
Stay well everyone,
Evan 💙