That one time I was briefly stranded in Montana

Red-haired Caleb was in the backseat, sleeping. I was in the passenger seat, enjoying the music and looking out at the vast empty Montana prairie in front and on either side of us under the late afternoon, early evening summer sun. The car smelled of junk food and sweat. It was Day 2 of the trip, still early in the morning, a day after we had left Portland in a rented car.

Jake, dark-haired, features sharp, was driving, hunched forward, hands gripping the steering wheel, face suspiciously blank.

The car, a 2000-ish Subaru Legacy, lurched a bit as the engine backfired. The blank expression on Jake’s face shifted almost imperceptibly into worry.

I turned the music down a bit to facilitate conversation. “Everything OK?”

“Could you check the map and see where the closest town is?”

I reached down into the footwell and picked up the paper road atlas. Omnipresent portable GPS was still a decade away. It was the afternoon of 20 July 2002, and we were about fifty miles east of the Montana-Idaho border on I-90. It hit me. “We didn’t get gas, did we?” Jake glanced over at me, and nodded. I craned my neck and saw the gas gauge, needle dead on empty, the orange gas pump-shaped light on, steady.

Gleefully wasting gas

Three hours earlier, I had been resting in the back seat, having driven through the night on one of the first shifts of our epic road trip. We had all gotten out of the car to take pictures of the famous Montana Big Sky at sunrise, marking our progress toward our destination, Mount Rushmore, formerly The Six Grandfathers (Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe to the Lakota). We stopped in Butte (hehe, butt) to get gas and breakfast. At some point over the next few hours, I had laid down in the backseat to get some rest, Jake taking shotgun for Caleb driving.

I got maybe 20 minutes of rest before I heard my friends giggling, the engine at full speed. Jake was leaning over toward Caleb, holding my digital camera to get a picture of the pegged speedometer without obstructing Caleb’s view of the road. I laughed, sat up, and we commemorated our breaking in of getting the rental to an indicated 120 MPH. Caleb and Jake explained that we were taking advantage of the Montana freeways’ lack of speed limits, a plan they had hatched shortly after we had crossed into the state and without consulting me, the person financially responsible, on paper, for the car rental.

Legal intervention

Around 10:20 AM, east of Billings, a state trooper pulled up behind us, red and blue lights flashing. Caleb panicked; he wasn’t yet 25 years old and technically not a legal driver for this car, at least as far as Hertz was concerned. After we pulled over, with the trooper looking into a car filled with the detritus of three white guys on a road trip, he asked the question all cops ask: “Do you know how fast you were going?”

We learned that Montana did have speed limits on its freeways. In 2002, the posted limit was 75 MPH, and the trooper ticketed us for exceeding the limit by 25 MPH or more; his radar clocked us at 102.5 MPH, according to the ticket. I still have a picture of the ticket, which I won’t post because it shows info about Caleb I’m sure he doesn’t want on the internet. We pulled $40 from our gas fund and paid the officer immediately in cash. The ticket was our receipt, and we continued into Billings.

As we were coming down from the high of speeding and the stress of legal entanglements, and as we looked for a place to eat that would meet our agreement (no fast food chains, only local establishments). We made another stop, to top up in Butte. Then we got lunch in Butte, because all of us were men and could not resist a city called Butte. As we pulled in to town, Jake reminded us “We should fill the tank before we leave!” But we did not.

The consequences of forgetting

Now, 300+ miles and almost five hours of freeway driving after filling up in Butte (hehe, butt), and an hour past Billings, as we neared the Montana-Wyoming border, we faced the consequences. The car’s backfiring increased in duration, jolting Caleb awake. After we explained to him the situation, he shared our worries. The map showed a possible exit ahead, Exit 544, and a town named Wyola. We coasted to the top of the off-ramp on fumes. Down below us, at the bottom of the off-ramp, a sign mocked us: “No Services”.

We used the universal signal of car trouble: hood and trunk up, emergency flashers on. I worried that we had created a new problem with the car, thanks to incomplete information: I thought fuel injectors were damaged by running empty. We joked about Jake’s luck, and how he always seems to land on top of things. Except this time; he was driving when he noticed we needed to fill up, and was driving again when we failed to fill up. Unlucky.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if some bus full of the Swedish Bikini Team pulled up to take Jake to get gas?” Caleb joked. “That would be more his luck.”

Rescued

Not too long after, a large recreational vehicle pulled up alongside, and the nicest little old lady leaned out the door. “You boys having some trouble?” She was wearing a plaid shirt and faded mom jeans, not a silver bikini.

She and her husband, whose names I have sadly forgotten, took Jake up to the next exit, who knows how far away. Caleb and I held down the car, Caleb eating some of the cheese we had stashed in a cooler in the trunk, despite his lactose intolerance. Maybe an hour later, the kindly old couple returned Jake to us with a can full of gas. We tried to pay the couple for their time and effort but they refused. “Just pay it forward,” she told us. “We’re happy to help.”

The car ran fine after we topped up the tank, with no trouble with the injectors, for the rest of the trip.