In case you need another excuse for a Montana getaway this summer, a quirky new boutique hotel has opened in Helena, the Treasure State’s capital. The Bell Hotel occupies the site of the former Bell Motel, a classic 1950s roadside lodge thoughtfully reimagined by CWG Architecture. Each of its 14 rooms features locally made chocolates, coffee, and artwork. While in town, ask the front desk about the Bell’s Picnic in the Park package. The hotel supplies a basket of local treats and a blanket; Montana provides the sublime scenery and glorious weather. You’re on your own for companionship.
Hannah honey was a peachy kind of girl /
Her eyes were hazel and her nose was slightly curved /
We spent a lonely night at the Memory Motel
– The Rolling Stones
The Americanist in me finds motels irresistible. My heart delights in kitschy décor, Googie marquees, and giant plastic wildlife figurines. I relish the midnight hum of the highway and the smell of Keurig coffee and diesel exhaust in the morning. The taco truck in the parking lot at sunset. An old man in a lawn chair sipping Budweiser watching the fireflies. The European mind cannot grasp such aesthetics.
I love motels for the same reason I love railroad towns, seaports, and airport bars overlooking the tarmac: they evoke movement, dynamism, and wanderlust. While hotels are destinations, motels are waystations—outgrowths of the vast highway network. Their natural inhabitants are fugitives, illicit lovers, teamsters, traveling salesmen, and lonesome drifters chasing the horizon. The motel is a distant descendant of the Silk Road caravanserai and the frontier boarding house. There’s a reason so many rock ‘n’ roll ballads are about motels.
The “motor hotel” first emerged in the 1920s, around the time of Ford’s Model T, but the Golden Age of the motel was the Fifties. What a time to live in America! Elvis was king, the economy was booming, and we had just saved the world from the Axis Powers. Rising car ownership and an expanding highway system made the national parks, the Rockies, and the California coast more accessible than ever. It was the age of the Great American Road Trip—and, of course, the motel. Perhaps that’s why I so cherish motels. They’re relics of that halcyon age of boundless American optimism.
Come to think of it, Helena itself exudes the same poetry of the road. Gold first put the city on the map, but the railroads gave it permanence. The trains carried a steady procession of prospectors, ranchers, politicians, and merchants. Transplants arrived from the East Coast, Ireland, and Eastern Europe—dreamers eager to light out for the territory, like Huck Finn. Montana is motel country, and the Bell Hotel understands this well.
