I saw a lot

It’s hard to stop.

And the longer I’m away, the easier it gets to be away. Each day is its own day, and it gets filled up as it comes, mostly, and I don’t think or plan much beyond that day, the one I’m in.

I like being out in the world, seeing what there is to see. Walking, it was trees and rocks and flowers and mountains and lakes and streams, and each one of these and more is a sort of wonder—meaning I would wonder about it, think about it, consider it…. The view from the moving van was different, not so close-up but intriguing too. I would wonder at the larger shapes of the land, the geology and hydrology (though in mostly uneducated ways), and the human efforts on the land, the ranch buildings and the fences, and what was inside the fences, the fields and crops….

So much of the driving time I was looking at agriculture, mostly cultivated fields.  And in the west I traveled, except for parts of North Dakota, any crop field is irrigated. A few cattle can subsist on unwatered sagebrush, but all the space devoted to hayfields suggests even they need something more. Wheat was a common crop too, and there was some potatoes and sugar beets, a rare patch of corn. But in Montana and Idaho and western Oregon and northeastern California, if there was a crop in a field it was almost always alfalfa or other grasses for hay. Most fields were near a river or canal or reservoir, but sometimes wells supplied the water. The water was typically applied with the picturesque center pivot system—a long line of trusses, supported on rubber tires, with drop sprinklers in between the axles, and a sprinkler “gun” at the end shooting a long plume of water out well beyond the last truss. The fields were scored with dirt grooves where the tires made their way. Sometimes the grass was summer tall, sometimes it had been cut recently and was drying in fluffed up windrows, and sometimes it had been baled and big rectangular blocks or big round bales dotted the shorn field.  

Driving the west, you see the large effort it takes before we can eat a hamburger, both the meat and the bun. It seems a lot of work considering the pay-off, though I do like hamburgers. If we suddenly decided to stop eating beef, a large portion of the people and work in the west would disappear….

The towns too were part of the pageant—the main street “business district,” the municipal buildings, the houses and yards and yard ornaments, the parks, the cemeteries, the museums…. As for the latter I visited disappointingly few. Too often I came into a town too late, and was limited to longingly peering through a window or door, my hands cupped against the glass. But one of my favorite parts of town visits was a trip to the grocery store. When on the road, I went to a grocery store almost every day, to get something for dinner. They were rarely large, these IGAs or regional chains or independents, but certainly more significant than convenience stores, and late in the day the people of a town would come to shop, and so I got to see them too, be in their company, though most of my conversations were short and limited to the checkers (almost always women, either under twenty or over fifty).

Besides the towns there were a few other institutions I visited, Grandpa’s rehab hospital, Stan’s maximum security prison, the Horizon casino and hotel in South Lake Tahoe…. These have their own specific cultures and architecture, mostly unfamiliar to me, and so I tried to pay particular attention….

Wherever I went there were almost always people to look at too, and sometimes to talk with. Dozens, maybe hundreds if I added them all up. Those grocery store checkers count too, and it’s recent enough that I can still remember the surly young woman with red hair in Sidney, the elderly woman with a bob and wearing a smock in Terry….

Among all the people, my grandfather is at the center of the summer, and his painful and difficult recovery, the changes that are hard for him and that he’s making hard for those around him…. Heleen and Tom too, in Bishop, who took me in and transformed my heart trouble scare from an impediment to a boon….

But I didn’t always hit it off with people…. There was a man I first met at Silver Pass on the PCT, and over the next four or five days we crossed paths a number of times. He was a section hiker too, about thirty, and we had similar goals and were moving at a similar pace—which would usually have been enough for at least mild trail bonding. But no. Each time we met he would answer my friendly questions with the briefest of answers (unless it was to question some decision of mine, such as to camp at Virginia Lake: “Oh, it’s going to be windy up there,” he warned. It wasn’t.) It became clear that he really wasn’t interested. Nor was he particularly interesting. And yet each time I saw him, trail etiquette and my own propensities obliged me to try again to engage him…. I should add that at least three times I saw him chatting away with other hikers….

I never did learn his trail name—usually hikers handed this out early on—so I named him for myself, Sweaty Guy (SG). His gray shirt was always darkened with perspiration at the armpits and down the front, with two large circles on either side of his belly. He was pudgy and he usually wore a white hat with a flap that hung down to shade his neck and that he tied in front under his chin, obscuring a portion of his face (to keep off the flies and mosquitoes as well as the sun).

My last attempt at sociability was at Rush Creek. I arrived, planning to camp, and he was already there, setting up his own camp. I gave an awkward chuckle and said, “Synchronicity.” We did seem to continue to make many of the same decisions. He didn’t look up but only grunted in response and continued putting up his tent…. After a long pause I said good-bye and went off in search of my own campsite…. That was it, I told myself, I’ll make no more effort with him. I saw him twice the next day but said nothing and neither did he. 

SG was a rare sort. Most people on the trail and off were friendly and ready to chat, to both tell and ask. Greg, the engineering professor from the Air Force Academy, for example, was an affable, appealing man. However, there were more than a few, always male and usually older, who could only talk about themselves…. Another man I kept meeting up with, around the same time as SG, was of this sort. I first spoke to him at Upper Soda Springs campground, where he told me that he had spent 1700 nights in his Big Agnes tent (I found this hard to believe: that’s five years, and the tent didn’t look particularly old). Each time I saw him, I would ask a question or two, usually about his hike, and he would strike off on a monotone monologue which would stretch on for some time, until suddenly he would say something like, “Well, I can’t stand here and chat all day,” as if to imply I was holding him up….

It’s not just hard to stop walking and traveling, it’s hard to stop writing …. Here at the end I think about what didn’t appear in the daily entries, and I want get more in…. Though not so much to include everything I saw or did, but simply to keep writing about it….

The day after I got home to St. Paul I sat down with the Minnesota atlas and picked out a short hike, probably just an overnighter, on the Pow Wow Trail up north in the Boundary Waters. My gear is well organized, I have leftover food; I could be ready in an hour…. And I paged through the western states in the U.S. road atlas, picking out roads I want to drive, places I want to go and see. The van is running well, it’s only partially unpacked….

Home, I guess

The drive east late in the day yesterday, into North Dakota, was tempestuous. Not because of my driving but due to the large number of large vehicles on the road and the impatience of their drivers. These were not ranchers or travelers, for the most part, but truck drivers, working regionally in construction and on the oil and gas fields. The types of trucks were various, from white pick-ups to tankers to semis pulling “wide load” pre-fab housing units, but the drivers shared an obvious irritation with a VW van going 55 mph. Since there was so much traffic coming the opposite direction, they would sometimes get stuck behind me for a time. They would ride up close up on my rear bumper, the larger trucks filling my rearview mirror—as if proximity could make me go faster…. At the smallest of breaks they would gun their motors and charge around me in clouds of black exhaust and then cut sharply back into our lane; they would disappear ahead, moving at a high speed….

In great relief, I pulled off the road about seven, right after crossing the Little Missouri River, and drove a mile up a red dirt road to a campground. Last summer on my last night I stayed at this same CCC Campground, in the Little Missouri National Grasslands and just across the river from the north unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. No one else was about, but at a parking space beside an outhouse and interpretive sign I found a small plastic bag of marijuana. I opened it up and had a whiff, then I put it back down.

I had a couple hours of daylight left, so I went for a hike. The campground is the northern terminus of the Maah Daah Hey Trail, which runs 96 miles south through badlands, hills, and sagebrush, down to the south unit of the national park. According to the sign, the name of the trail is taken from the Mandan Hidatsa language and means “grandfather, long-lasting” and “deserving of respect.”

The late day was still warm when I set off, and it took some time to adjust from driving to walking…. It’s too easy to give in and privilege speed; going so slow after going so fast, especially on a shorter hike, can seem pointless. But a footpath is as worthy as a two-lane highway, and in this case a greater and more soothing pleasure….

About an hour along, I was surprised to meet a young man pushing a green mountain bike. The hills had seemed deserted. His derailleur was hanging down beside the rear wheel, broken off. He said, “Yes, I have been pushing for the last five hours.” He was in his early twenties, dark-haired, and he spoke with what sounded like an Eastern European accent. “I was getting away from buffalo,” he said, “and then the bike, it broke.”

He was sweaty and dusty but he did not look in the least discouraged. He only carried a small pack, but I asked if he had ridden the entire trail. “Yes,” he said, “two days. I am meeting my girlfriend at the end. I think maybe she is being worried now.” I wanted to ask more but he moved on, pushing his bike, and I continued up the trail though not much farther. By the time I got back to the campground, he was gone. I want to ride the trail too, but the fall might be a better time….

My last night in the van, and I lay looking out the rear window at the stars overhead…. I rose at five and set off in the dark, with far to go. The two longest driving days of the two and a half month trip would prove to be the first and last days…. But while the first was a promise, the last was an end, and I drove along feeling thwarted and a bit vexed…. I wanted to have a look at the small towns, like Killdeer and Dodge and Buelah…. I wanted to take the dirt road to Chase National Wildlife Refuge…. I wanted to spend the day at the Missouri River, visiting the Knife River Indian Villages Historical Site, Ft. Mandan, and Garrison Dam…. I lamented all the public libraries I was passing up….

The morning drive was beautiful. I took two-lane roads through the sunny middle of the state, and I’d come far enough south to get away from the traffic and oil and gas development of the Bakken formation. The rolling land was cultivated with alfalfa and wheat and sunflowers, mostly the last, stretching off in big yellowy fields of giant round flowers. Sloughs large and small occupied the folds between hills, and ducks and grebes and the occasional white pelican floated on the water…. I got gas at a small Sinclair station in Washburn, where for the first time on the trip I had to pay inside (no card reader on the pump). The woman at the register called me “Hon” and I got a free bag of ice with the fill-up….

I listened to a Williston radio station, and the main topic of the morning call-in show, “News and Views,” was guns, specifically how in Arizona one can walk around with a gun in a holster, in plain view, no permit required, and wasn’t that a great idea. Mostly I avoided such programming, which too often involved fierce anger and untoward disdain. It brought me down….

Yesterday morning I listened to a much more enjoyable station out of Forsyth. The disk jockey was an older man (he told us his 103-year old mother was doing poorly, and he was going over to the nursing home in Miles City to see her, so he’d be off the air for a couple days), and he seemed to speak without plan and without particular concern if he had to pause to figure out what came next; to fill the gaps, he would sometimes gabble to himself in a cheerful manner…. He played a few old country music songs, but mostly he gave out local news and information (though again, without any discernible organization). He read the temperatures and wind speeds for several dozen towns. He gave results and descriptions of local little league baseball games. He told us what was on the menu at the senior center. He read off the names of those having birthdays and anniversaries, dividing the list by towns. He did current ag product prices….

He was easy-going and chatty…. Until he got to an item about a litter of cats available for adoption. His voice took on a hard edge as he explained how they had been abandoned along a local road. He referred to the people who had done this as “idiots” and “perverts,” the latter word an odd choice, it seemed to me. But clearly the cat story had hit some sort of sensitive spot…. But he soon regained his equanimity….

I passed a billboard that read “Be an American. Use ethanol.” Later I saw another billboard directive, this one more general: “Be polite.”

After Jamestown, the land changed. And I had taken to the interstate, so the driving changed too (the billboards, for example). The hayfields and sunflowers gave way to corn and soy beans. There was less water, more trees. The land was greener and the views more constricted. There were more cars and trucks on the road. I soon crossed into Minnesota, and I love my home state, but I was already missing the west and the wide open plains….

But I just drove on. There was nothing else to do…. And at seven loss turned to reward, when I reached Naomi’s house in Minneapolis and hugged my eldest daughter and kissed Winston’s forehead and tossed Jacky in the air and gave Rosalie’s smooth cheek a gentle pinch….

We had dinner, and the boys did most of the talking, though I did my share too, and later I drove across the Cities to my own house, and that I was it, I was home.  

Sidney

The Yellowstone River flows north from Yellowstone Lake, from the national park in the upper left corner of Wyoming up into south-central Montana to the town of Livingstone, where it bears right and heads northeast. The river eventually empties into the Missouri River near the North Dakota border, 692 miles from its source. It is considered the major tributary of the Upper Missouri. For a long stretch in Montana, from Livingstone to Glendive, the interstate (first 90, then 94) roughly follows the Yellowstone. But you mostly can't see it from the highway.

You have more contact if you get off and follow the local roads down the long valley, roads that are sometimes paved, sometimes not. They are not reliable, though, and when one of these roads heads off north or south into the big expanse of northern plains, or just ends, one must get back on the interstate, at least for a time. But there's enough of the two-lane roads to make this one of my favorite drives in North America.

I set off well before dawn, chastened by the previous afternoon and evening's heat.... I saw few cars in the early hours—driving on one of the two-lane sections—and when I did the other driver would lift four fingers from the top of his or her steering wheel in greeting. The first couple times I worried that my response had come too late to be seen, so I started anticipating, lifting my four fingers almost simultaneously with my interlocutor's. You find this brand of motorist friendliness throughout the west, but only on roads that are used almost exclusively by locals.

I passed through the small towns of Custer and Hysham, where the residents were just starting to stir, then the larger railroad town of Forsyth, then more of the tiny sort, Cartersville and Rosebud and Hathaway.... The broad, shallow valley was gold where the hayfields had been cut, and paler gold in the far fringing hills, pale green along the river where cottonwoods grow, darker green in the cedar-y folds of the hills....

I stopped at a small grocery store in Terry for ice, and eyed the museum across the street. But I had visited it last year and decided to keep going.... At Glendive the interstate bears east and leaves the river valley, but I continued northeast on state road 16, still with the river, an hour up to the town of Sidney.

Sidney was my main destination for the day, where I planned to spend the afternoon, but the town was something of a bust. Mostly because it was so congested, with trucks and construction and working men—as are all the bigger towns in northeastern Montana and northwestern North Dakota. The reason is the oil boom. In recent years thousands of wells have been drilled to get at the oil shale and natural gas in the Bakken formation, and thousands more are underway or planned.

Sidney first boomed one hundred years ago, when the Lower Yellowstone Irrigation Project was completed; the area became a big producer of sugar beets. Farming is still important, cattle ranching too, but it's the oil that's driving the change and that sets the town apart from others of its size in the west or on the Plains.... Economically, I'm sure all the hectic activity is a boon, but the aesthetic results are not pretty....

I found the library next to the county courthouse, always a good place to look first. It was time, with the one o'clock temperature up to 93.

I scouted the small library for the best place to sit—a table near an outlet—and found my spot in the back by a window. Along the wall in front of me a woman sat at a carrel and on a chair beside her sat a tiny baby.

Actually it was a doll. I'd thought it was a real baby because it was so realistic. But I looked again, as something didn't seem right—children two or three months old don't usually sit up on their own, and support their neck so well, even if propped in the corner of a chair with a pink blanket.

From where I sat I could see the doll but only the arm of the woman, who was working on a laptop. I figured the doll was her daughter's, maybe, and the daughter was occupied elsewhere in the library. But, no, this was not the case.

After a time, the woman rose from her chair. She took a corner of the pink blanket and pulled it over the fake child's head. Then she went off to the bathroom.... When she came back she carefully removed the blanket and tended to the doll. She sat it up a little better, fixed the collar of its onesie, and smoothed its dark wispy hair. Still standing, she studied the doll baby.... After a moment she reached out and removed a piece of lint from its right shoulder, smoothed its hair again, and then, apparently satisfied, sat back down at her computer.

Later, after I was finished with my work, I was standing in the portico of the library looking through a pile of free books. The woman came out to get a can of Pepsi from a vending machine. She said to me, "Anything good?"

She was in her thirties, dressed in mom jeans and a black t-shirt. Her eyes were small and weak behind her small glasses, her hair a bland brown but fashionably cut. She had a pale complexion, modestly pretty features, and a butt noticeably large for her thin frame. She made and held eye contact in an unusually forward manner.

I waved a Murakami novel in the air, indicating I had indeed found something good.

She asked me where I was from, and after I said "Minnesota," she asked where exactly, and when I said, St. Paul, she said, "My brother is the acting chief of police of Minneapolis." She spoke in the manner of someone who makes stuff up but doesn't really know she's doing it—rather earnestly and with a naive frankness. But I had no reason, really, not to believe her. "I love Minnesota," she said. "I take the train out there, but I get off in St. Cloud because it's closer to my brother. He lives in Monticello."

She asked if I'd been to Sidney before, and I said that yes, I had, and then we talked of its transformation. She said, "I'm married to a farmer, but he's in the oil industry too, in sales." She told me that she had lived in the area all her life.

"My internet connection at home is terrible," she said. "That's why I'm here at the library. At home I can only watch YouTube late at night, that's the only time the computer's fast enough."

While we were talking, I was thinking of the baby in the pink blanket, sitting over on the other side of the library. I wanted to ask her about the doll, but I was afraid the question would be too personal. Though she mentioned her husband a few times, she said nothing of children. Had she lost a child? Was she unable to have children? Was she crazy? Was I?

She told me that she had come to the library to work on the website for her business, but I was too distracted to ask what the business was.

"If you want to see more books, you should go over to Good Cents." A thrift store with a large book section, she said. "And cheap, just a dime or a quarter for the books. Sometimes, you know, for some books, I don't like to pay full price. Plus, I always like to see what other people have been reading. It's so interesting.”

She tried to give me directions to the store. "Do you know where the Penney's is?" No, nor any of the other businesses or landmarks she mentioned. "Well, anyway," she said, "it's on Main Street. That's not this big street out here, that's Central, even though all the high school kids say, 'Let's cruise Main' when they really are going up and down Central. Just go down Main until you cross the railroad tracks, down by the grain elevators, you'll see it."

I wanted to talk more, but we came to a brief pause, and then she said she'd better get back. She said, "It was nice meeting you," and I said, yes, good to talk to you....

I walked to a nearby grocery store and bought a tomato, an avocado, and a cucumber. I bought a bean and cheese burrito from a trailer with Indiana license plates, set down in a gravel lot, then repaired to the town park and a patch of shade to eat.... Afterwards I tried to visit the MonDak Heritage Center, but they were closing just as I walked in. "I'd stay and let you look around," the woman said, "but I have to pick up my grandkids." I found Good Cents but it was closed too. This was when I decided I was disappointed with Sidney.

Though I was only ten or so miles south of the confluence of the Yellowstone with the Missouri, I took a road east and crossed into North Dakota. The road was busy with trucks of all sizes, coming from the east, and piling up behind me and riding close on my tail.

It occurred to me that maybe the business of the woman at the library, the website she was working on, had something to do with that well-tended doll. I had assumed damage, but I didn't really know anything about her.

Eastward into eastern Montana

Alix and Dustin like to sleep in, I like to get up at dawn if not before. Stalemate.

But Alix divided the difference, and when I came back at eight from a short walk up the canyon, she was out of the tent. She suggested we two drive to nearby Big Sky for breakfast, and Dustin could sleep, which he preferred to do. “And maybe if we’re gone long enough,” she said, “he’ll have packed everything up by the time we get back.” To cultivate the possibility, we took the van.

It pretty much never occurs to me to go out for breakfast. Or to do something as inefficient as leave a campsite and drive fifteen miles only to drive back. But luckily Alix is more flexible and open-minded. We had a fabulous breakfast at the Bugaboo Café, at the junction of the turn-off to Big Sky proper. The heart of the resort/ski mountain is nine more miles up a side valley, and it offers nothing like a pleasant café, but only the expensive and ersatz “western” amenities that the loaded vacationer apparently prefers. Condo complex redoubts are scattered about the valley floor, and log shopping centers too, with discreet signage masking flyfishing stores and fine dining….

The Bugaboo was related to this breed—with its log cabin décor—but more hipster, with tattooed waitresses and organic ingredients. I had the best breakfast I can remember eating for years. The basics, two eggs (over-medium), fried potatoes, sausage (patties), and wheat toast, but each item perfectly prepared, perfectly tasty. Alix had ordered from the lunch menu, an open-faced sandwich with ham and melted cheese and tomato. It was good, but she envied me my choice. Towards the end of the meal I slowed way down, trying to make it last, and mulling over which bites to end with…. Plus, I wanted to linger in Alix’s company. Soon we would be heading out in different directions….

Back at the campsite, Dustin was up but he had been occupied in making a fire so he could boil water for coffee. No packing up yet…. The van is always ready to go, so I didn’t have anything to do but follow them about, talking at them as they emptied the tent and took it down and packed up their full car….

And then we had to part, which was hard. They headed south towards Idaho, planning to spend the night at the Mackay Tourist Camp. “Dustin likes the word ‘free,’” Alix said. Most of us do…. I drove back north to Bozeman, skirted along the edge of town, and got on I-90 going east….

The day was oppressively hot again, in the nineties, and the mountains were almost obscured by haze. I kept checking the dashboard controls to see if the heat was on, but no, that was just the normal air….

I got gas in Big Timber, where I found the library but forced myself to push on another hour to Columbus before I took my afternoon break. In the first three days out from Boise I had covered 650 miles, which is nice, closer to an amble (the ideal) than a dash. But I only had three days left and still a thousand miles to go. I’d have to pick up the pace.

But not if it meant driving through the afternoon.  At two I entered the cool refuge of Stillwater county’s small library. For the first time on the trip I didn’t first ask the librarian for a wifi code, and for the first time I needed one. I spoke with a young woman in a colorful and airy and sleeveless ankle-length dress; her name tag said Sarah. Later, an older man came in and announced loudly, “Don’t you look Hawaiian today!”

I stayed till closing, at 5:30, and when I went back outside I discovered that if had become noticaby warmer over the last hours. It was now 101 degrees….

A bottle of cold water from the cooler offered solace for a few miles of driving. As did the two-lane roads I took down the Yellowstone River valley, rather than the interstate….

When I got close to Billings I managed to tune in the NPR station and was rewarded with a half hour lecture on Robert Frost, recently given by his most recent biographer, Jay Parini. According to Parini, a professor at Middlebury College, Frost’s notion of “truth” harkened back to the ancient Greek idea of “alethea,” meaning something that must not be forgotten. He tried to tell of, or show, such truths in his poems. Parini argued that such a concept was different than the contemporary definition of truth, which emphasizes verification (a result of the Scientific Revolution). The Billings station broadcast only the first half of the talk, promising the second half for the next evening. I made an out loud sound of disappointment….

Around eight I started to look for a place to stop for the night. I had been considering Pompey’s Pillar, a landmark on the Yellowstone that Lewis and Clark mention in their writings, and where one can still see some of their graffiti carved in the face of a cliff. But the gates were closed….

Instead I found an open lot nearby, at the edge of a bluff above the river. A bit of crumbly pavement suggested it might have been an overlook at one time, but a big pile of gravel implies a currently more pedestrian use…. I opened all the doors and windows of the van and let the warm wind blow through. The temperature was still well up in the nineties, but the sun was nearly down, a nebulous ball of orange on the hazy western horizon, its clout diminished and fading fast.

In the back, I made a sandwich and cut up a cucumber and carrots and listened to a station reporting Olympics results…. After sunset the wind died and a number of mosquitoes arrived. I had to shut myself in (except for the two small sliding windows with screens), and I lay in the still and sultry dark on top of the sleeping bag…. Below the bluff a train passed alongside the river, while behind me a quarter mile distant big trucks rumbled by on the interstate.

The color white, but more importantly Alix and Dustin and Lula

In Ennis in the morning I sat in the van at the town park and read the Bozeman newspaper.  Here are a few items from the “Police Reports” section:

* “’Some kind of animal’ got into a North Fifth Ave apartment and was hiding under a sofa there around 1:15 a.m.”

* “A 5-year-old child playing with a phone called 911 and told a dispatcher his name was ‘Toothless.’”

* “A man called 911 saying he believed his brother stole his vehicle and wrecked it while he was away. It turned out his brother was playing a joke on their mother.”

* “A woman who thought her mother’s dog had been stolen while her mother was at church discovered the animal was with her sister-in-law.”

* “Golfers at River Road golf course said a couple nearby was arguing loudly around 5:15 p.m. The couple told a deputy ‘they had been yelling at one another in a normal manner of working out their differences.’ The deputy told them to ‘keep their disagreements quieter in the future.’” ….

I talked to Alix on the phone and we decided to meet in Bozeman. She and Dustin had left Minnesota four days previous, on their own summer road trip. They have three weeks and plan to go as far as San Francisco.

I drove north and east, mostly along the Madison River. Besides the handsome mountains and lovely valleys, this portion of Montana is notable for two features: the large number of vacation homes and the numerous “fishing access” dirt roads and parking lots along all streams. Flyfishing has apparently replaced cattle ranching as the basis for region’s settlement and economy….

Rafts of white pelicans gathered on the Madison mid-stream, dunking their huge beaks into the water, in competition with the anglers standing in the shallows…. I passed a number of small white crosses, markers Montana uses to indicate a spot where someone has died in a car accident (with a cross for each fatality). Some of them are dressed up by family, like one near Norris, festooned with plastic flowers, white angel statuary, a personalized license plate reading “Jimbo,” and an 8x 10 framed photograph of a teenage girl blowing a kiss….

I was listening to Moby-Dick as I drove along, and just along this stretch the narrator came to chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale.’ A theme seemed to have emerged, with the pelicans and crosses and whale, to hold the morning together, inside and outside the van. Melville pondered the doubleness of white, how

it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things …. and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the Milky Way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, forever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt? 

Which gives you something to think about as you drive along looking at pelicans and especially at small crosses marking lonely spots where people have died….

In Bozeman I hung out at the town’s big fancy library and at nearby Lindley Park….

At the park, Alix and Dustin pulled up in their white SUV and parked next to my white van, and she got out and we hugged for a longer than usual time. Then Lula got out too, and she jumped about and whined and peed while I petted her and assured her that it was all right….

We drove in tandem through the hot (more 90s today) and congested town, stopped at a grocery store for supplies, then drove an hour south into the mountains and into the narrow Gallatin Canyon. The Gallatin River was busy with rafters and the ubiquitous anglers in their khaki outfits and rubber waders.

We turned off for the Swan Creek campground and found an open site, one of only two available. Alix and I had stayed at this same small and pretty campground back in early June on the way out to Boise. And we’ve stayed at Swan Creek on previous trips too. It’s a mile up a tiny, steep-sided canyon, the thirteen sites spread out congenially among the trees and thick underbrush.  You can’t see the neighbors, nor hear them over the noise of the stream….

Dustin tied Lula to a tree on a long lead and tossed her a ball, which she wrestled about in the dirt. Alix showed me their purchases from a thrift store in Livingstone—a colorful 80s sweater, and a shellaced portrait of two kittens (white)—and we talked and talked about the events of our two trips…. I had so much to tell, and so much I wanted to hear….

Alix broke out their two new fishing poles, but it took us some time to get her reel into working order. And then after just one inept cast in the small stream we dashed back to the site and hid the poles behind the van. Alix wants to fish, thus the equipment, but they don’t have fishing licenses yet. The campground host probably doesn’t enforce fishing regulations, but it was his passing car that caused us to suddenly abandon our efforts….

Later Alix started a fire and cooked chicken and baked beans for us. I cut up a tomato and an avocado and a loaf of bread. We sat up late by the fire, and I was tired out but didn’t want to go to bed.  I would only have their company for this one night. But I finally took to the van, and they got in their tent with Lula, where they watched the first twenty minutes of Legends of the Fall before they too gave in to sleep.

Upper Coffee Pot

In Rexburg (pop. 25,484), in northeastern Idaho, I spent a portion of the morning in the library, then walked along the main street, bought bread at a bakery…. I can quickly become attached to these attractive middle-sized towns. And why keep driving anyway. But in the afternoon I did go on.

I took a lonely open road north past a set of blonde sand dunes—a magnet for ATV riders—and then out into the wide sage…. The paved but unlined road was the sort that’s usually gravel, in the west, stretching away from the U.S. and state highways, from towns, and serving only a scattering of ranches….

On the fifty mile detour I did come upon one town, Kilgore, a collection of four or five houses and an old general store with a tin roof. The store appeared as if it hadn’t changed much in the last fifty years and probably longer…. Inside the walls were decorated with dozens of deer and elk horns, and on the wall by the door was a collection of photographs of hunters with their kills. Like the town, the store was quiet and still, and at first I didn’t notice a tiny ancient woman standing motionless behind the counter. I had seen no other cars on the road in, no other cars in the town, and it seemed to me that customers must be few, especially on a Monday. The woman didn’t move while I wandered around the store but stared straight ahead. She did respond briefly to my initial surprised greeting, and then to an inane comment I made about it being a “great store.” She said, “thank you.”

In a back corner of the store was a small bar and a pool table, but both were dusty and looked like they hadn’t been used in a while. Large standing coolers were scattered about, with narrow aisles between, and the store was full of dark corners…. I wanted to inspect rather than shop, but the woman made me nervous. I asked about ice, and she pointed at a white freezer, one more commonly seen in a home basement, and I bought a bag before stepping back out into the sunshine.

Beyond Kilgore the road was indeed gravel, over foothills and down a long, golden valley fringed with dark green conifers. Cows were scattered about, and I saw two elk as well but no other people. But that was about to change.

The Kilgore road eventually brought me back to U.S 20 at a place called Island Park, which is not a town, as the map indicates, but a collection of tourist amenities. Motels and “lodges” and cafes and various guiding and rental businesses devoted to recreation. Highway 20 serves as a southern and western conduit for Yellowstone, and the long approach corridor is busy with travelers and with commercial enterprises devoted to catching them along the way….

There are also a number of Forest Service campgrounds, and I headed for one a few miles off the highway, to have a hike. I thought I might also camp, but Upper Coffee Pot Campground’s fifteen sites, spread along Henry’s Fork, were all taken by large RVs or large trailers pulled by large pick-ups. Often other people get in my way, but I suppose there wouldn’t be such things as National Forest campgrounds if I was the only one drawn to them….

Anyway, I mostly wanted the hike…. The trail wound downstream along the bank of the river, through green forest thicker and with more undergrowth than I was used to; there was even moss on some of the rocks. As if to emphasize the role of water, it began to rain just after I set off. Not hard, though, and only for a half hour. It pleasantly cooled off the hot afternoon (temps in the 90s in the Yellowstone region this week, contributing to a “very high” fire danger).

The air was redolent with the fragrance of spruce, and I felt a pang of longing. For the first time since I  came off the trail two weeks ago I missed it….

I put one foot down after another, in the wet dust, on slippery rocks, and strode along down the quiet river….A kingfisher darted downstream, calling out… Later a pair of terns circled over the water and one plunged into the river with a sloppy splash and came up with a small fish in its beak…. A muskrat dove from a log, frantic to elude me though I had no intention of giving chase…. Three great blue herons also responded to my presence by fleeing…. Sorry.

Two women passed, returning to the campground, and they wore bear bells on their boots. Till that moment I had forgotten about bears, but now I realized that I had come into grizzly country for the first time. The joy of the hike diminished thereafter, but didn’t disappear.  I began to whistle and sing as I went along, more loudly at the overgrown stretches….

Most people don’t go far from the campground, but if they do they probably are carrying a fishing pole. Henry’s Fork, like all the streams in the region, gets lots of attention from anglers. Two miles down, the wide, slowish river narrowed and transformed into Coffee Pot Rapids, a beautiful half mile stretch of falling and tossing and sliding pale green water. Here the anglers concentrate their attentions…. When one such man (with large tattoos of trout covering one calf) passed me walking fast, I was happy to know someone was in front of me running interference, in case any bears should make an appearance….

After an hour on the trail I reached the bottom of the rapids and sat on a rock beside the stream.  I concentrated my efforts on watching the water, admiring its color and movement. I attended to the ferns along the bank, to the tall spruces, and noted that the rapids had broken off and carried away any portion of a tree that fell across the river. I spotted a frog, and another kingfisher sped by…. Despite the possibility of a bear, it was good to be outside in the mountains again.

Good-bye to Boise, third time

Arco

When the sun appeared over the top of the Boise Mountains I was a few miles from the house, on a bike ride. I would be leaving town in a couple hours but I didn’t really want to go just yet.

On the bike I had taken two-lane roads to the south away from town, through flatlands once strictly rural and now well on their way to suburban. I passed housing developments with names like Charter Pointe and Devonshire. What’s with that extra “e”? And worse, what does damp old England have to do with the high desert of western Idaho?

Back at the house, Grandpa was up and working in his office all ready. This was rare; the hours of four till ten in the morning usually found him in his sleeping chair, if not sleeping…. I packed the van, put ice in the cooler, arranged my maps and snacks in the front seat….

When I came back in the house one last time, Grandpa was sitting at the kitchen table. He asked about my route for the day, and then we discussed the weather report…. He fell silent and didn’t seem to know what else to say, but he wasn’t ready for the good-bye that would send me on my way….

In the past five days, since I’d returned, the two of us hadn’t spent much time alone together, as we had before. In a way it was easier at the rehab center. What else was there to do besides sit together, talk, watch television. But at the house he had been busy, after his own fashion, trying to get his life back together; it hadn’t been going smoothly…. Where before he was calm most of the time, waiting to heal, at home he was querulous and impatient; he was frustrated by his physical limitations (when one can’t bend over, for example, even minor tasks are difficult or impossible); he didn’t like much of what had been done at the house while he was away, and he said so; and he often resisted the ministrations of his caregivers, arguing for his own way. I’d seen him upset, seen him at moments behaving badly, and I could only look away…. It didn’t seem to me that he could be mollified, most of the time anyway, but that he would have to be the one to change and adjust….

I finally had to say, “Well, I have to get going,” and he stood up and we hugged. I looked at him and wondered if I’d see him again, but then I pushed away the thought because what’s the use of it. I prefer to assume that he’ll manage and I’ll see him again next summer. He took a white envelope with my name on it from his pants pocket and slipped it into my waist pack on the table. I drove to the closest gas station and put his $40 gift in the gas tank.

By the middle of the day I had reached Craters of the Moon in the middle of the state. I went for a walk through a lava field adjacent to the visitor center, remembering, as I do on each visit to this national monument, the time when Alix was six and on a walk at the same spot she had fallen and gashed her hand on the sharp rock, and there had been blood everywhere…. I took care with each step.

At the town of Arco I turned north and drove another half hour up the wide and lovely Big Lost River Valley to Mackay. To the west stood the White Knob Mountains, to the east the Lost River Range, the highest set of mountains in the state and including the highest peak, Mount Borah (12,662’). I’d been in Mackay three years previous, to do the Mt. Borah hike, and I’d come back to stay in the town’s campground.

The Mackay Tourist Camp is a throwback, both in name and operation. Lots of towns established such tourist parks, starting back in the 1920s, as a way of attracting motorists and getting them to spend their money locally. They were often free, and Mackay’s still is. It is rather seedy, but it’s well off the road (behind the town), and there’s shade and a few picnic tables. The first time I’d had the whole place to myself, so I was surprised to find a number of big RVs and trailers…. They had taken the best sites all along one edge, and the second tier area was under siege from several big sprinklers…. But I found a dry spot and backed the van in between two cottonwood trees….

I opened up the van and put up the table and spent some time writing…. But the afternoon temperature had risen into the mid-nineties, and even in the shade it was quite hot…. Eventually I drove into town for ice, and at a small store in a Chevron station I discovered two booths in a corner. I took one of them and continued my writing work under the comfy air-conditioned auspices of the convenience store. The town’s people came and went, buying beer and sodas, microwave burritos, cigarettes, and ice cream bars. For a time, four young teenagers took the other table, and I was subjected to their painfully inane conversation. One of the boys, about thirteen, kept whimpering theatrically as he punched buttons on his phone; I didn’t see how the other three could bear this performance. Finally, one of the girls said, “Let’s go back to the park,” and they got up and left.

Eventually I left too, and returned to the tourist camp for the night.

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Note: One year ago today I had my bear encounter at Glacier National Park. I thought about it off and on during the day, occasionally rubbing the spot on my left thigh where a shallow divot remains….Two days ago Mom tried to give me a book called Great Bear Stories, a collection of bear attack accounts. I declined her gift. I do not want to read about bear attacks or even bears in general, maybe never again but especially when I’m about to head back through Montana.

One hundred years

In the morning the black water had drained, but the kitchen sinks still didn’t work. Mom went ahead and  told Grandpa, and he said, “I know, it’s done that before.” But when he ran the tap, and black water bubbled up again, he said, “It hasn’t done that before.” Mom confessed to the macaroni down the garbage disposal, and he said, “That must be it, you just can’t put any food down there.” But it seemed to me that the trouble was older and deeper….  

We did the garbage disposal trick again, with the ice, me under the sink, Mom at the switch…. But it didn’t work. Grandpa had me search the garage for drain cleaner, but it wasn’t where he thought it should be, or anywhere else, as far as I could find. Mom said, “I’m going to the store to get some.”  Grandpa said he was going too, which wasn’t what she’d had in mind but she didn’t say so.

They went to Wal-Mart and bought the cheapest sort available, something that cost less than half as much as Liquid Plumber. I had my doubts, but it worked, or at least the sink drained for the rest of the day….

Grandpa hadn’t slept again. He spent most of the night back in his office sorting papers again. In the small office there’s a desk with a computer, a chair, a bookshelf, and several dozen open cardboard boxes spread around the floor and taking up nearly all the space in the room. Each box is hand-labeled, and the papers are divided with brown torn-of flaps from other boxes which indicate the contents behind. Grandpa has another office space in the basement, decorated in a similar manner. If he wants to take the time to search, he can put his hands on, say, a monthly bank statement from the 1970s, or a 1994 coupon from a carpet cleaning service, or any one of hundreds of issues of Idaho’s small Catholic newspaper….

Here is where he has decided to concentrate his initial attack on the contents of his home, to begin a campaign to strip away the deep deposits of householdery, silted up over decades….

Overnight he had filled two laundry baskets, one with papers that could go right into the recycling, one he wanted me to look through to see if anything needed to be shredded. Supposedly he had culled such materials himself, and at first I thought my task unnecessary. But I did indeed find a fair number of tax forms and other documents with his social security number, and I pulled them out. I’d never used a shredder before, and the sound and results were pleasing.

Later, Mom asked Grandpa if it felt good to be getting rid of stuff. He shook his head in lament, as if regret still trumped satisfaction. “I would’ve gone on the same for a hundred years,” he said, “if it wasn’t for this … wreck”—he swept his hand over his lower body in a gesture of irritation—“this wreck ....”

In the morning he had said to me, “I figure if I can just get rid of one thing every day …. That’s three hundred and sixty-five things a year.” I nodded encouragingly, but I thought, what counts as a “thing”? Whatever the definition, at that rate it’s going to take a lot of years to get done what he wants to do…. Or maybe wants to do. He also told me he had probably $5000 worth of tools in the garage. Easily, I’d guess (it would be hard, though, to put a dollar amount on the hundreds of mayonnaise jars full of screws and nails and bolts and every sort of small hardware fitting known to civilization). But he’s not culling out in the garage, and has expressed no interest in doing so…. I suppose I should be supportive, but I’m not convinced by a day of discarding piles of tax instruction booklets. That’s the easy stuff…. What about all the stuff that he’s more attached to, or, more to the point, that he thinks he needs? I don’t know, maybe he’ll be able to re-think what “need” means….  

Mom made hamburgers and corn on the cob for dinner, and heated up leftover peas and macaroni and cheese. Mike ate with us, and afterwards he and I watched some of the Olympics. I was impressed by the women running the one hundred meters. They were amazingly fit and strong and cut, and almost all of them had interesting hair. A runner from Nigeria had the first name Blessing; she was tall and powerful and a big swathe of pale hair swept across her forehead and was tucked behind an ear.

Late in the evening I biked to the nearby Sonic for vanilla milkshakes. At one of the outside tables a man with a shaved head sat with three skinny blonde girls, about eight, nine, and ten. They all had wet hair and they were in their pajamas. Out for a treat, just before bedtime. I envied the man, until their order came, and the girls began arguing bitterly over the division of the mozzarella sticks.

Garbage disposal drama

In the afternoon we left Grandpa alone for a couple hours, and Mom and I went off on a thrift store jamboree. There’s a seedy strip mall over at Fairview and Five Mile that has a Saver’s, a “4-Vets,” and an Idaho Youth Ranch (the latter the most common of the state’s secondhand stores); there’s a K-Mart too, and a beauty college, but we didn’t go in those.

I concentrated on the books, Mom on the gewgaws. We started at Idaho Youth Ranch, which proved the best of the three, and I finished before Mom and went on to the next alone. After that she felt a little rushed. But I can only take a store for so long, and then I must escape that particular collection of consumer detritus, because even though I sort of like a civilization devoted to consumption I sort of don’t.

Later, I went to the grocery store alone because Mom was tired. Only after I got there, to the Fred Meyer’s, did I realize I had come at five pm on a Friday evening. Many people placed their shopping carts in my way, and while I strove to control my irritation I didn’t hesitate to mutter imprecations under and sometimes over my breath.  

Mom made macaroni and cheese for dinner, with a side dish of green beans flavored with bacon and vinegar. She asked Grandpa if he liked it, and he said he did. I ate two platefuls.

In the midst of making dinner, Mom had accidentally dumped half the macaroni into the left side of the sink and it had slipped down into the garbage disposal. She called me in to the kitchen, and we surreptitiously ran the disposal….

That side of the sink has been backing up, and I thought the disposal didn’t work. But earlier in the day, Grandpa had enlisted me to solve the problem. It seems he’s dealt with it before…. He was annoyed that he couldn’t take care of it himself, but the task required kneeling down and reaching under the sink, and he can’t do that. He got Mom involved too….

She was placed to one side, ready with a bowl of ice cubes; I was directed to clear out under the sink and get ready to plug in the disposal. (So, it’s not broken but simply unplugged. Grandpa said there’s a short, and that’s why it’s not plugged in and in regular use.) When he was ready, he told me to plug it in, Mom to flip the switch on beside the sink. “Now. Pour in the ice cubes,” he said. “Pour ‘em in.” They crunched loudly, while I waited, my head under the sink, my hand on the plug…. “All right,” Grandpa said after a minute or two, “that should do it.” I pulled the plug.

Another example of how things work around the house—sort of, but not really….

So later, after the macaroni mishap, Mom figured we could re-create the solution. But it didn’t turn out that way. At first it had seemed to work, the macaroni disappeared and the water drained, but later, after I’d done the dinner dishes, Mom used the sink and suddenly both drains started backing up with black, noxious smelling water. She called me in from the living room where I was watching SportsCenter.

Grandpa had gone to his room for the night, so we had some time to try to figure out what to do…. We tried the garbage disposal a third time, but that just made it worse—more black water bubbled up into the sink…. I said, “Let’s just let it sit for a while and see what happens,” but that didn’t work either…. I went in search of a plunger, and after scouring the house found a small one in the garage. First, I used a cup to empty the sinks, dumping the water into a pot, the pot several times in the backyard…. I was just beginning to wield the plunger when Grandpa came into the dining room, pushing his walker before him. He didn’t see what I was doing, and I nonchalantly put down the plunger and moved away from the sink.

I didn’t want him to see the problem. In part because he might have one of his outbursts about people messing around with things that they weren’t supposed to mess around with. In part because I knew there was a good chance he’d keep me up all night working on the problem. It was already after eleven.

Mom got up from the table in what I thought was an overly brisk and obviously guilty manner. She moved to put herself between Grandpa and the sink as he shuffled into the kitchen. He said he was hungry. “I can get you something,” Mom said, sliding to one side and then the other to block his view. They settled on a sandwich, and he sat down at the table.

I went back to the living room, figuring it was out of my hands now. Either he noticed or he didn’t.

He didn’t. Mom kept him away from the sink, fed him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a glass of milk, and eventually he returned to his room…. I returned to the kitchen to try the plunger, but it didn’t work. I was relegated to hoping the problem would go away by morning.

Back in his room, Grandpa watched a Tarzan movie, the volume full blast. There had been a Turner Movie Channel Tarzan marathon, one 1930s film after another all day long, and Grandpa had been taking in bits on and off. I watched a few minutes here and there too, and I must say Jane was rather sexy, the sexual tension between her and Tarzan often striking. At one such moment, though, Cheetah undermined the possibilities for action by pushing a baby deer on a log out into the lagoon, where a giant crocodile came zooming in for a snack. Tarzan had to abandon Jane—they were in a pre-coital clinch—and leap into the water and wrestle the crocodile. He stabbed it with his knife numerous times till it went limp and floated to the bottom. Maybe a bit of transference, or would it be sublimation?

thrift store purchases