“Good morning, officer, how can I help you?” I asked sweetly as I rolled down the window, heart sinking because my driver’s license had expired on my 18th birthday and I had never gotten around to renewing it. Mercifully, he didn’t request the usual paperwork. Instead he asked if we were the daughters of a certain Marion Conlin of Bismarck, North Dakota. Why, yes, we were. He authorized us make an illegal U-turn on the interstate and high-tail it back to Wibeaux, Montana, so we could call my mother for an emergency message. We tracked down my mother from a pay phone. The emergency? My unemployed sister Molly had finally landed a job interview in Minneapolis. She called the headmaster of a private middle school to discuss the possibility of becoming their next art teacher. An hour passed as a lengthy phone interview was conducted. He thought she sounded promising, but had other candidates to interview. If, at the end of the day, he was still interested in meeting her, he offered to fly her back from Montana. They agreed she’d call back in the evening. Finally back in the car, we got back on the road toward Glacier. That brought us to the gas station in Circle and the bizarre, unforgettable inquiry: “You gals wouldn’t happen to be nuns, would you?” I was stunned by the gas station attendant’s question. No, we are not nuns. We know some nuns. And one of us is a Catholic (that’s me, bralessness, cut-offs, and cigarette smoking not withstanding). Well, we are from North Dakota but that’s about all we have in common with these missing nuns. Apparently, he had overheard on the police scanner that there was an alert to be on the lookout for three nuns from North Dakota, so he was checking out anything female in a vehicle with North Dakota plates. Definitely not us. We continued westward bound on Highway 2, stopping to stretch in Wolf Point and eat lunch in Glasgow. More hours of driving. There was Malta, and Havre, and a stop at a quaint little shop at a gas station in Chester. By now the afternoon was melting into evening, and we had yet to lay eyes upon a mountain. Evidently, the Great Northern Plains were an endlessly undulating expanse we would never succeed in crossing. To keep our minds occupied through the hours of tedium, we invented a game: searching for the errant nuns of North Dakota. Perhaps we will be the ones to deliver the message that they are sought by law enforcement. We will ask if they know my godmother, Sister Hugo, who teaches English at the Catholic high school in Bismarck. After all, how many nuns in North Dakota can there be? Surely, they are all acquainted. In vain, we searched every car we passed for a sign of them. At every stop Page 53
54 Publizr Home