Mermaids in Montana, 600 miles from the ocean, may have saved their motor inn

GREAT FALLS, Mont. — Drive north from Yellowstone and you’ll encounter a barren land of idle grain elevators, hazy mountains, yellow fields, blue skies, very little water, and, as a result, even fewer people. Distance seems immeasurable. Sounds are swallowed by silence.

All of which may explain our relief when the expanse of the very open road led to this city on the Plains, and we found ourselves at the front desk of the O’Haire Motor Inn.

“Tonight’s mermaid will swim until 10,” said the woman at the front desk, handing over a room key.

Thank you. Wait. What?

Yes, the mermaid.

Where to even begin here? Well, I suppose with Sandra Johnson-Thares, who runs the motel and may well personify American ingenuity.

Back in 1996, the O’Haire Motor Inn was struggling. Johnson-Thares and her mother needed an idea to turn things around, so one day that winter, they hunkered down to brainstorm in a booth at their Sip N’ Dip cocktail lounge. The underground bar already shared a glass wall with the swimming pool, they reasoned. What if inside the pool — at this point, the two might have been a couple of drinks in — they had real mermaids, tails and all? It was funny. That’s something people wouldn’t expect some 600 miles from the nearest ocean.

“The more we drank,” Johnson-Thares said, “the funnier the vision of mermaids became.”

So mermaids it would be. They debuted that Christmas with tails made from green tablecloths and secured with duct tape. The spectacle grew with time. After a family vacation to Disneyland, Johnson-Thares wrote a letter to Anaheim about the submarine ride that was closing. Did they have plans for the decorations? A few weeks later, a big box of Disney seaweed arrived in the mail.

These days, Johnson-Thares sews tails in a workshop upstairs from the bar that spans two rooms. There are bins for bras of different sizes and clothing racks of glimmering sets from past holiday specials. She is a regular at the Joann Fabric and Craft store, where the staff know her as the mermaid woman. Each tail, adorned with sequins, scales, lace, and layering, weighs upward of 10 pounds, as much as 40 when wet.

Johnson-Thares now fields as many as 100 mermaid-related inquiries a week. So many, in fact, that she’s developed a script she can recite from memory: “Mermaids swim every Monday to Sunday starting at 6 p.m. Mermaids and occasionally a merman swim during brunch on the first and third Sunday of every month, unless it’s a holiday. Sometimes there are maintenance issues with the pool and the mermaids won’t be in, but we do our best.”

In the Sip N’ Dip lounge tonight, a puffer-fish chandelier and fishing nets dangled from a thatched bamboo ceiling. At the piano, Joel Corda, an opera-trained middle school teacher, crooned “Unchained Melody.” There was blue and orange neon, tiki sculptures, drinks of an unnatural turquoise color, and, as promised, a mermaid turning graceful underwater flips behind the glass.

“People always ask if they’re real,” said Johnson-Thares, as the mermaid played peekaboo with a sixtysomething couple from Calgary who were sipping Blue Hawaiians at the bar.

Johnson-Thares has eight mermaids and one merman on staff. Most prefer to remain anonymous, worried about so-called “merverts” — which is why a bouncer walks the mermaids to their cars at night — as well as what the employers at their day jobs would think. Recently, the United States Postal Service discovered one of its employees swam at the Sip N’ Dip and demanded she stop, calling it a violation of its standards of conduct. Other merpeople work at PetSmart, as a college admissions counselor, and — tonight’s mermaid, Marvel — as a social media consultant.

“When I was young, I wanted to be a dragon,” Marvel told me after her shift in the pool. “But I was told I couldn’t be a dragon. So I wanted to be a knight. But I was told I couldn’t be a knight. And then I settled for a mermaid and, well, I can do that.”

The lone merman — an optometrist by day — performs on Sunday as part of a brunch special because, as Johnson-Thares puts it, “it’s important that children know that men can be mermaids too.”

More than 25 years after Johnson-Thares and her mother had their big idea in this landlocked city of 58,000 people, where the wind chill regularly drops to 30 degrees below zero, the mermaids of the Sip N’ Dip lounge endure. And so does the O’Haire Motor Inn.

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