1 July 2003

I was halfway on my return journey from Olympia, WA (where we attempted to relocate and thought the better of after about 2 years) to Rochester, MN (where the record label started). During the previous day's drive, I had a few problems with my radiator. Early on into the heat of the day the radiator boiled over, causing the engine to produce uncommon amounts of smoke and steam. Once I realized how hot the engine was running, I decided to take it kind of slow and do most of the driving at night. I was going through the mountains of western Montana in the July sun in a 1982 GMC conversion van with 246,000 miles on it (also known as the relative tour van). After the first incident of the radiator boiling over the temperature gauge stopped working and I was forced to pay close attention to the feel of the engine and the output of the exhaust to be able to tell when the engine was overheating. It wasn't that hard though because once the radiator started to boil it was pretty easy to feel. The second time it over heated it twisted up the radiator fan belt and threw it off the pulleys. I got that replaced and waited until sunset to go any further.

Once the sun set I started out again heading east and the going was much smoother. By this time I was through most of the mountains and into much more flat terrain. The van was running well and I thought I was home free as long as I kept my driving confined to the evening hours (as it was much cooler). As I approached the eastern edge of Montana I had two options: follow I-90 which cuts south into Wyoming and then back north into South Dakota, or take US 212 which cuts across the gap and saves about an hour of driving time. US 212 is a smaller highway mostly used by locals and by truckers who want to shave off time but it's a highway that has very little civilization on it. I wanted to shave as much time off the journey as possible to save wear and tear on the van, so I decided it would make more sense to take US 212.

Maybe you've had this experience before -- sometimes you have a thought pop into your mind and you're not real sure where it came from and you're not even real sure if you agree with it, but there it is anyway. Now by nature I'm not a supersitious person (apparently not nearly superstitious enough) but right before I took the exit to 212 I thought to myself, "If I take this, the van is done for." I don't know why I had that thought and I didn't even really believe it. I play these little games with myself sometimes though where I make up scenarios and I figured this was just symptomatic of that old habit. So I took the exit and was on my way. I made it maybe 20 miles down US 212 before the radiator was boiling over again, only this time it was night time and cool out. It had been a bit of an incline so I didn't think too much about it. I set my alarm for 4:38, two hours to sleep and let the van cool. I didn't really sleep much and by about 4:00 I was restless enough that I figured if it wasn't cooled off by now, it wasn't going to be.

Again, I'd like to repeat that, in general I am not a superstitious person, and up until writing all this down I told no one this part of the story, in part because I'm not sure that I actively remembered it until just now trying to recall all the details. As I got back into the driver's seat I thought about the fact that the alarm was still set. For some reason, I had the following thought: "What if you could set an alarm and go on two separate paths simultaneously and when the alarm went off, you would pick which was the right path. When I set the alarm, the two paths I chose, one was sleeping until the alarm went off, the other (the real world) was being unable to sleep and continuing to drive." We'll come back to this.

I kept driving, I made it probably 20 or 30 more miles at most before there was smoke coming out of the engine again. I opened the hood and this time not only was the radiator boiling over but there was a small fire in the dog house (the part of the engine that protrudes into the cab). At this point I was tired enough that this was really unreal. I grabbed my jug of water and started throwing water in the engine, but you obviously can't put out an oil fire with water. I tried to get at the screws to take the cover off the doghouse in the cab but everything was packed too tightly and the fire was spreading too fast. At approximately 4:35 A small semi truck came along the road. US 212 is a two lane highway and this truck was coming from the opposite direction. He saw the fire head on and I was in his path waving him down, but he kept right on driving. Truckers are required by law to have extinguishers in their trucks. It could have been all over right then. But he just kept on driving. The next truck wouldn't come for more than an hour.

By this point the light of the sun was starting to be faintly seen on the eastern horizon and flames were comfortably leaping out of the engine. It was only a matter of time before they were in the cab. I figured I had better start pulling my stuff out of the van, because this was it, the van was done. At the same moment, to make things more absurdly surreal, the alarm went off -- and I thought, "there it goes, except I've already made my choice and I chose the wrong path." I imagined myself sleeping peacefully in the van 20 miles further west of where I was. As it stood I was as far from either Olympia or Rochester as I could get, I was no where near a house or business or anything to call for help, there were flames leaping out of my vehicle which housed everything I owned in it, and with a certain sense of absurdity my alarm clock was blaring loudly.

From here on, alot of this is a blur. I remember trying to call for help on my CB Radio, to no avail, I was too far away from anyone else. The next thing was to open up the back and start ripping stuff out. This was harder than it seems because everything was packed in layers with soundproofing and carpet between to soften the ride. So I had to literally tear the carpet and soundproofing out and start throwing things on the side of the road. Alot of this was fragile stuff that I really had no choice but to literally throw out of the van. Right down to the computer that I'm typing this message on (one of the few things that survived the toss out of the burning van). I got most of the stuff out and on to the road and then I was able to get to where my cat, Lucy, was hiding. I pulled Lucy out of the van and put her down in the grass behind. The first thing she did was to run back into the van and head straight for the flames (which were now leaping out of the dash and into the cab). I quick ran and grabbed her and noticed as she was in my arms that the flames were eating right through the metal of the hood. It dawned on me in that moment that this was really the end of it, this fire would consume everything.

I put Lucy in her cat carrier and set her down for a minute determined to get more of my stuff out. I had just gotten to where Brian's amp (guitarist of relative) and my record collection were buried and I was determined to get both out. I got Brian's amp out and took it as far away as I could, just in case. I got the first box of records out as I saw the flames leap across the upholstery lining the top of the van. I knew I could get more out but I also knew that I would be taking a risk. I didn't really know all the variables and for all I knew the gas tank could explode or worse. I decided it was time to let go. It was just stuff -- just things. I knew I could have gotten more but it just wasn't worth the risk. After the first box of records, I took Lucy about 100 feet away from the van to try to calm her down. I wanted her far enough away in case anything exploded. As we were sitting there, the first two tires burst, each creating the sound of a 12 gauge shotgun resounding over the silent morning prairie.

The sunset that morning was beautiful, and it was destined to be a beautiful day. As I was watching the sun rise, the fire in my van was spreading to the countryside around it. This season has been a wet one for eastern Montana. Had it not, I could have started a much worse prairie fire than I did. As I looked back from the sunset, I noticed that the prairie brush was lighting up, and with it, everything that I had pulled out of the van. I ran back and started pulling what I could across the street. The fire was so hot at this point that I couldn't get very close and almost everything had lit up, my drums, my cymbals, the rack full of recording equipment, the PA system, my record collection, the filing cabinet with all of the paper history of Last Minute Records, all the relative and Stagnation in Progress CD's, all my clothes, my books, my guitar, my bike, everything I owned.

When all was said and done, I saved about 10 things: a bass guitar, Brian's amp, one box of records, a box of cables, a box of some things from my desk, one drum, the recording computer, the studio monitors, and one PA speaker. That's it. So the cat and I are sitting with this pile of things on the opposite side of the street of this burning van and what is now about a 600 ft brush fire in the breaking dawn.

Sometime around 5:30 another truck came by. This one stopped but by this time it was too late to try and salvage anything and the fire was much larger than would warrant attempting to use an extinguisher. The trucker tried to call for help on his cell but as it turns out, I caught fire right in the middle of a cell phone dead zone. He offered to help but I told him that I was alright and I would rather he head into town and call the fire trucks to put out the brush fire. Two more truckers stopped and the third was able to get through on his phone. He wanted to stay until the trucks came. I realized as I was talking to him that I had been hyper ventilating for the last hour or so and I didn't have any water, so I asked if he had anything. He gave me a bottle of Gatorade. I sat with him for a while and eventually went back to Lucy. He waited for almost 20 minutes before leaving.

After about another 10 minutes the fire trucks finally arrived. They didn't have much to say, they got to work right away. The first law enforcement official who came on the scene talked to me shortly thereafter.

Here's time for another strange coincidence again. Now it's possible that this may be something that I created in my head but the locations are close enough that it's just possible that I may have seen what I thought I saw. This guy looked so familiar and I couldn't figure out why. I thought about it and I thought about it and finally I remembered three years previous to this I was on the road with Jessica Voss and we broke down in Wibaux, MT on the 4th of July. We were stranded there for two days and for the majority of those two days we hung out in the central park in Wibaux. At one point, a law enforcement officer of some type stopped and was checking out my van (which at the time was registered to my mother, Cyndy Peterson -- different last name, you know). He practically interrogated me and made it clear that he thought the van was stolen. He went so far as running the VIN number and everything before he gave up. Now I may be stretching it but I would have bet those last 10 things that I owned that this was the same guy. Now, of course, I wasn't about to ask him because he didn't like me much at our last meeting and I'd just as soon he liked me now.

This guy talked to me briefly and then John Blaine, sheriff of Powder River County, showed up and kind of took over. John was very nice and told me that they would take care of business and then bring me into Broadus, where his office was, and try to get me a rental or something. I talked with several of the firefighters including a big guy named Tiger, they all were very nice and expressed their sorrow at my loss. Someone found me a pair of shoes and someone else a bottle of water. Eventually when the fire was out and the pictures were taken of the scene, we loaded up my remaining stuff into John's SUV and headed for Broadus.

When we got to Broadus we discovered that there was no one in town who rented anything anymore and it was too early to call around to the nearby towns to see what was available yet. We left Lucy at the Sheriff's station and John dropped me off at a little diner for breakfast while he went home to shower and shave (he got pulled out of bed to come to the fire). The diner was typical small town fair, decent food, home cooked, the family is all hanging around. I sat at a table by myself in the corner -- the place was mostly empty. When I was done eating I wandered in a daze to the city park where John said he would pick me up when he was finished taking care of his business. I sat there staring blankly out into the distance until finally John came. He was jovial and good natured, telling me all the stories of the small town, stories I normally love to hear. We went a few places in town, ran into his deputy a few times, a funny guy -- no uniform, always making jokes about doing things on the county's money, making John buy him cokes and candy bars -- we gave him a ride to the gas station and then ran into him again when we went to the local wrecker's shop. They were dispatching two trucks to clean up the mess I had left on the highway. Not only did they have to deal with the van, but they had to clean up all the charred debris all around it that I had tried to save. The bill would end up being over $300. I begrudgingly paid it, even though afterwards John told me I should have put up a fight.

We went back to the Sheriff's station to figure out how to get me out of Broadus. John was hoping that I could call someone to come for me but the closest people I knew were in Rochester, some 10 hours away. As much as I wanted to hang out in Broadus all day after losing everything I owned.... well, I didn't want to do that at all. All I wanted was to rent something and get home. As it turned out the closest cities that I had any chance with were Miles City, MT; Gillette, WY; or Spearfish, SD; each roughly 100 miles away. First I tried to call around and see if anyone offered service enough to bring a car out to me -- I practically got laughed at by the companies I proposed that to. Then John suggested that I could probably ride with the mail up to Miles City that afternoon, so we explored the options in Miles City, and as it turns out all of the car rental places there had gone out of business.

I was running out of options. We talked about me hitching to Gillette and then driving whatever I could rent back to get my stuff and that seemed like the best alternative. Then John talked to the other folks around the station and got someone else to come on duty so he could drive me into Gillette. Well, as it turns out, the only place in Gillette that does one way car rentals is a Hertz. The woman at Hertz was less than kind to me and informed me that they take visa or mastercard and they DO NOT take check debit cards, even if they are visa, and they DO NOT take cash deposits and, yes if you do not have a major credit card, yes you are screwed. I told her that I hope her car burns down. I'm not sure that she understood. Finally I got ahold of a Ryder Truck Rental in Spearfish and the woman there was very nice and understanding. Se said she could rent me a truck for $300 if I could get down there. I talked to John and Spearfish was another 10 miles or more further than Gillette (looking at over 100 miles now) -- he said he would do Spearfish but no further.

So we loaded everything back up again and headed for Spearfish, SD. John told stories the whole way about small town life and the things he had seen as Sheriff in Broadus and how he had been a fireman before he was Sheriff and some friends had convinced him to run for Sheriff and he won even though he had no experience. He told me about what college was like for him in Rapid City and how he had gotten screwed by one of his professors and we exchanged stories about working down on Pine Ridge. It was a beautiful day.

Finally we pulled into Spearfish and made it out to this little shack that they rented trucks out of. The lady who I talked to and her husband were very nice, small town mentality. They all made jokes about having a fire and where the extinguisher was in the truck they were renting me. They felt kind of bad about it afterwards, but I told them it was okay, John had been making jokes about fires all day. The truck that they were renting me had some sense of divine irony. It was a 17' box that was big enough to hold all the stuff I originally had and then some and all I had was this pitiful stash of stuff to put in the back. I loaded up, paid my bill, and got the hell out of there. I took the rest of the drive in one swallow and made it home by 1:00 AM.

So for the time being, here I am back in Rochester, MN -- Working on moving to Chicago, IL. The studio equipment is gone - and with it the majority of the services we had to offer to local musicians in the past. For now, that means more prolonged inactivity for the label. We will be continuing to work on networking with some other bands that are friends of ours, specifically Säh and Amateur Love, but others as well. The options are open from here. I, for one, am heading to Chicago with barely a new drumset and alot of ambition under my belt. As for the label, only time will tell.