border (where we were), you either have to light out northwest on I-84 toward Boise for six hours, and then cut north along a zigzagging highway for another six hours. Or, you can bear northeast on I-15, cross into Montana, veer northwest toward Missoula, taking I-90 to the top of Montana (hello Canada!), and hook due west into the Idaho panhandle, and then drive south for another two hours. Or, once you have reached Missoula, you can angle due west, crawl up the switchbacks of Lolo Pass, drop down into Lewiston, Idaho, and then shoot north for Moscow. Although this route is shorter by distance, the highway follows the Clearwater and Lochsa Rivers and is marked with signs like "Winding Road Next 99 Miles." You can average, if you are lucky, 50 miles per hour. But not much more. Nor would you want to. It's a drive to be taken in. Recall that this is where Lewis and Clark traversed over two hundred years ago. In The Journals of Lewis & Clark, you can almost hear their exhaustion, fatigue, and dismay: "The road through this hilley Countrey," they write, "is verry bad passing over hills & thro' Steep hollows, over falling timber &c. &c. continued on & passed Some most intolerable road on the Sides of the Steep Stoney mountains." There's bad. And there's very bad. And then there is verry bad. I can only imagine their stomping through this nearly impenetrable landscape. Two years ago, I had time on my hands, and took, for the first time, this route on my way south to visit family. Lewis & Clark nailed it. The mountains are massive and dark with pines. In the middle of the pass you actually feel like you could be in the center of a Bierstadt painting, a diminutive figure in his sublime vision. The river was low and slack in some places. It was late summer-September 12, to be exact. I remember the date for three reasons. It was the day after my son's birthday. It was the day that David Foster Wallace died. And it was the exact day that Lewis & Clark made their epic pass 203 years earlier. It is a remote and wild and unpredictable landscape, all stone and water and trees. Some of the aspens were beginning to yellow and their leaves cart-wheeled alongside the road or floated the riffles
WHY I STAY
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