Tuesday 26 May 2009

Monday 25th May 2009 – Flowers, Flags, and Tourism

This Glasgow is on the Milk River.  It looks a bit like milky tea, which is, indeed, how it got its name.  When you see it from Tower Hill, emptying into the Missouri, you can see why Lewis and Clark, on the great expedition of 1803 to 1806, gave it that name.  I walked up Tower Hill.  There is a road, but it looked like four-wheel-drive territory.  Anyway, I've been neglecting my exercise program for a while.  Very bracing it was too.  I passed a woman coming down, taking her dog for a run.  She was, indeed, in a for-wheel-drive.  The dog, poor thing, wasn't.

I got to walking up Tower Hill because I had gone to see the Spillway of the Fort Peck Lake.  If you were on your own, with nobody to guide you, looking for the Fort Peck Dam, you would probably think the Spillway was the dam.  It is, in fact, the overflow vent.  The dam itself now looks rather like part of the countryside.  It is hard to conceive of circumstances where the lake will ever have that much water in it again.  They are hoping to raise it by twelve feet this year, but I think it would take another forty or fifty before the spillway operated.  The spillway has a vestigial railway system running across it which looks like it is dual-gauge.  I must try and take the official tour, see if I can find out about that.

I got to the Spillway because I had come for another look at this enormous dam, see if I could be more impressed than I was last time.  But I think the truth is that if you want to be impressed by it you have to read the statistics of the building of it.

But it all got me 3000 feet up (I think, but then I started at about 2000 plus) on a beautiful day, looking down at the confluence of the Milk and Missouri rivers.  And at last finding a place with good GSM cell phone reception: all the masts are up here.

 

Being Memorial Day, I had started with a look at the cemetery.  It really was simultaneously impressive and touching, simply a field of flowers: such a contrast to the cemetery I overlook at home, which, except for about two graves, is subject to nothing but neglect.  Perhaps if we had a similar day set aside, we might use it the same way.

There is a large military section (they call it 'veterans').  It is, of course, much more ordered; and full of flags.  There are veterans of many wars.  I think all former soldiers are entitled to a military funeral.  There were certainly stones indicting service as far back as World War I (with dates showing they had survived).

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