The blue of your dreams
Novelist Eric Puchner on a lake just off Highway 35, the latest in our There's a Street in my Neighbourhood series
Highway 35 runs along the eastern shore of Flathead Lake in northwestern Montana. A glorious drive, in a car, but a harrowing ordeal to cross in a bathing suit and bare feet. It’s like that video game from the 80s, Frogger. The road is a major trucking route, the shortest route between Kalispell and Missoula, which means a steady stream of rental cars and Harley Davidsons and logging trucks rattling by at 50 miles per hour. My in-laws’ house is on one side of the highway, just south of a blind curve; the gorgeous, beckoning lake is on the other. Getting from house to lake means spotting an opening, saying a hail Mary, and dashing across the asphalt like a frightened rabbit.
If you survive the crossing, you find yourself at one of the most beautiful spots in the world.
The lake is ringed by mountains, big ones, and the blue of it is the blue you see in your dreams. Imagine if an ocean somehow decided to retire. If it’s the weekend, though, it’s also quite noisy. One person’s church is another person’s playground. Jet skis and wave runners and speedboats blasting classic rock send waves crashing against the dock. (Americans like nothing better than to fly across water at flamboyant speeds.)
The house itself was built by my wife’s great-grandfather, a Lithuanian Jew who emigrated to the States in the 1920s, so destitute he lived for a while in a packing crate. Apparently, the carpenter was a drunk; when anyone comes to work on the place, now, they invariably comment on how there isn’t a right angle in the house. My wife and I don’t mind. What would we do with an idyll in the woods? We share a driveway with our neighbour, a libertarian who uses traffic cones to keep us off his land; further down the highway, there’s a bar called The Sitting Duck where people whoop along to cheesy cover bands on the patio, sometimes till two in the morning. Lakes are like amplifiers, and Flathead is the biggest one in the West. On weekend nights, it howls Bon Jovi to the moon.
It’s my favourite place on earth.
Eric Puchner’s novel Dream State is published by Sceptre on May 8. It’s the 111th pick of Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, and film and television rights have been acquired by A24