where the hell is Roscoe?

Somewhere in Joe's house is a bumper sticker that says "where the hell is Roscoe?". Even Yahoo maps doesn't know where it is. I know this because Joe sent me directions to Roscoe and they were wrong.

I drove up to Montana on Sunday. My timing was good because the weather was great the whole drive up. I arrived at my destination around 6, only to discover that I wasn't at my destination because the directions were wrong. After a brief call to Joe I back tracked and met him at a gas station, moved all my stuff into his car, and we drove up to his cabin in East Rosebud. I will readily admit even with good directions I doubt I could have found Roscoe, a small town that consists of maybe 5 buildings on this little back road.

On the way up we ran into two climbing friends of Joe's. They gave us some screws because we were going to do a long route called California Ice and Joe wanted to make sure he had enough. He invited them to crash at the cabin but they didn't want to wait for us to eat dinner so they left to sleep in a tent somewhere.

Joe's cabin is up by a lake literally in the middle of nowhere. It has electricity in the winter, but no running water. Joe got water from the well so we could flush the toilet and have something to drink. There's an outhouse but Joe said not to use it because it was "scary". I kept offering to help him because I thought it was a real well that he was pulling water from. The next morning, in the day light, I discovered the "well" was actually just a spigot sticking out of the snow.

While Joe was starting a fire inside the cabin I stood outside and looked up at the stars. The sky was a little cloudy at first, but it's very windy in East Rosebud so they soon blew away and there were lots to look at.

Then something strange happened. The cabin used to be a little one room deal, and then Joe's family added onto it, building a second section on to the cabin that is twice as big as the original, and that goes up two stories. From where I was standing, outside the original cabin door, I could look directly into the second story windows. That room is a loft. It was back lit by lights on in the down stairs. As I looked at the windows I saw a person walk in front of them. At first I thought it was Joe, but then I realized the person was too small. The person turned as if to look out the window and disappeared.

Right after that happened Joe came out of the cabin. I told him what happened. He said that right after his grandmother, who lived up at the cabin every summer, died he was walking towards the cabin one day and saw her standing at a window looking out at him. So I think the person was probably his grandmother. Her presence is all over the cabin. She saved every letter she ever sent or received, and after we opened a bottle of wine I read through some of her books. She also painted and wrote poetry. It was very cool to read letters from back in the day.

After we killed the wine Joe decided it would be good for us to walk out to see the lake. I almost broke my ass walking around the side of the cabin as there was a huge build up of ice and we couldn't see anything because it was dark with barely any moon. The lake was covered in snow drifts. I wanted to run through them but the ice was too slippery. So instead I smoked one last cigarette and we went to sleep.