Nothing breaks the hysteria of spring fever like a road trip to a tiki bar, in the middle of the northern Great Plains, complete with a Mai Tai and mermaids blowing kisses from the blue waters of the O’Haire Motor Inn pool.
There were three of us women who would usually be working in the evenings together. Filled up with tales of the Sip n Dip Lounge, dubbed the number one bar in the country worth flying for by GQ in 2003, we decided that last Wednesday was our moment. We all had the night off – probably the last time this would happen until the end of summer. And so began an overnight pilgrimage from Philipsburg to Great Falls to see the landlocked mermaids for ourselves.
After a long, ocean-less winter, I don’t know if there is anything that makes me feel more like myself again than driving off in a direction I’ve never been before. With Helmville behind us, and hours to get to our final destination – where the only plans we had were to order drinks with maraschino cherries stabbed by tiny umbrellas – there was that rare chunk of time when you can just cruise with your feet on the dashboard and watch a fresh landscape unfold as you listen to a podcasts.
We stopped for coffee. We stopped for fudge samples and beef jerky. We listened to NPR stories that featured themes revolving around the five senses. Leaving Lincoln, we drove past a shiny structure on our left, barely visible through the trees and spotted a sign for Blackfoot Pathways: Sculpture in the Wild. The car reversed and we entered the circular driveway for an exhibition that we hadn’t heard of, featuring international artists creating pieces inspired by the landscape and history of the Blackfoot Valley. We started off in a cluster, but broke off to wander down the path through the woods on our own, stopping and taking all the time we needed to pause in each clearing, or just keeping walking. I had left all electronics in the car – I only knew it was after 2 p.m. but sometime before 5. Sitting on a bench in the quiet afternoon, I realized how much I missed being unhurried. I couldn’t remember the last time I wasn’t aware of time.
A few hours later, the mermaids had just descended into the pool when we arrived and took a shell-shaped padded booth in the back of the Sip n’ Dip, watching the women in goggles and home-made fish tails swirl around in the glass behind rows of liquor bottles. One of us had brought the complimentary rubber ducky from our hotel room to be signed by Piano Pat, when she went on break from playing songs like “I Love this Bar” and “Sweet Caroline,” setting the scene at the start of the night as her fingers glided over the keyboard with her spoken intro: “Great Falls … Wednesday night …”
It’s hard to say who is more famous here – the mermaids, who attracted a guest appearance from Daryl Hannah in 2004 to reprise her role from the 1984 movie “Splash” – or Piano Pat Sponheim, who was a divorced single mother of three at age 28 when she started playing evenings in 1963, while still holding a job as a medical transcriptionist. Everyone around seems to know the story about Pat  – and  it’s as fun to see her live, singing Elvis, while I’m sipping a Blue Hawaiian as it is to see her crooning on a segment of NBC. By midnight my eyelids had started to droop and I was ill on sweet alcohol, but I still had that weird satisfaction of making it to a place that had always seemed like one of those bucket list items that just needed to get done.
Now that I’ve been christened by Sip n Dip mermaids, a few drinks the color of windshield wiper fluid, and a night of listening to Pat from a padded booth the shape of a sea shell, I remember how fun it is to think you know a corner of the country pretty well. Then you take a back road one Wednesday afternoon, allow yourself a few detours, and end up in a motor inn with a complimentary rubber ducky for a night. And you realize that you’re just scratching the surface.