I spent a significant chunk of my formative years in the mountains of Oregon and Idaho. The whisper of the wind moving through a stand of pines, the glint of sunlight off a deep blue glacial lake, the roar of a snow-fed mountain stream…all these are a part of who I am. But I last saw Idaho some nineteen long years ago, when I flew back from Australia to bury my father on a shady hillside overlooking the university town of Moscow. This summer, I journeyed back in the company of my daughters and my sister to bury my mother’s ashes there, too.
I expected the sight of my father’s grave to be wrenching, and it was. Yet I also found an unanticipated but nonetheless real peace in knowing that my mother was, finally, where she wanted to be—beside the man with whom she had shared so many incredible years of her life. That sad task complete, my sister and I then took some time to reacquaint ourselves with Idaho—and to share it with my girls.
I’d forgotten just how clear the lakes and rivers of Idaho are; how breathtakingly magnificent the mountains, how gloriously clean and fresh and oxygen-saturated the air. We drove up the St. Joe River, meandered around Coeur d’Alene and Pond Oreille lakes, even spent a couple of days down in McCall. It was more than a trip down memory lane. It was a reconnection with a time and a place that was dearer to me than I’d remembered.
Of course, much has changed in the last twenty or thirty years. Some cities like Coeur d’Alene and Boise have grown in ways one might regret. Yet Moscow has turned into a charmingly pleasant town, with gourmet restaurants, cute little coffee houses, exquisite bakeries, and a jazz band that played beside the square’s fountain during Saturday’s farmers’ market. And the land—the endless miles of forest-covered mountains and wide-open spaces—is much the same as it always has been, still hauntingly empty, still heart-stoppingly beautiful.
All of which made for a painful yet ultimately soothing and uplifting trip.
