My Own Private Idaho

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.

Thirty Years On

**

Thirty years ago today, at 8:32 in the morning, Mount St. Helens erupted in an apocalyptic horror of searing volcanic gas and steam that vaporized everything in the immediate blast zone—wildflowers, deer, bear, campers, volcanologists. Old growth Douglas fir up to seventeen miles away were blown down like toothpicks. Surging mudflows filled nearby valleys and national parks and highways with anywhere from 150 to 600 feet of hot melted snow and goop. A vast plume of steam and pulverized mountain shot into the air and then began to drift eastward on the wind, a dark rumbling cloud that blotted out the sun and turned what had been a fine sunny spring day into an eerie, lightning-split night. Automatic streetlamps flickered on. Cocks began to crow. And those of us who’d grown up reading about the last days of Pompeii found ourselves thinking about, well, Pompeii.



I was living in Moscow, Idaho, at the time. As incredible as it may seem today, no one bothered to notify the authorities of that small college town that 1) the volcano had blown and that 2) the ash cloud was headed right for us. The annual Renaissance Fair in city park was in full swing, with everyone—including the cops—eying the black cloud on the horizon and going, hmmm, that looks strange. Then, as if some giant hand had drawn a black shade across the sky, day disappeared. A fine ash began to fall.

It fell into the night, drifting down like a weird gritty snow. Although we were several hundred miles from the blast, something about the wind and the lay of the land dumped an extraordinary amount of the stuff on top of us. The next morning we awoke to a clear blue day that disappeared into a thick white haze as people began to stir and the fine ash billowed up again.



I remember we were full of questions no one could seem to answer. Just how toxic was this stuff? No one knew. Could we let the cat out? What would it do to our car engines? To us? And how the hell do we get rid of all this stuff that looks like snow but isn’t? It’s not like it’s going to melt.

And then of course there were the horrible images coming from the mountain. A pickup truck with the tiny burned bodies of two little boys on a fishing trip with their dad. A couple camping 25 miles away from the mountain, far outside the “danger zone,” swept to their deaths. Compared to that, having to wear a surgical mask for months every time you wanted to play Frisbee was not something you felt you could complain about.

**

Until Hurricane Katrina, Mount St. Helens was the defining natural disaster of my life. I still recall those days with such vivid clarity that it's hard to believe it's been thirty years. Then I look at those funny old cars in the fading photos, and think, yeah, thirty years.

Death in a Small Town

I attended high school and college in a small Idaho town nestled in the foothills of the Rockies. My own daughter’s looming graduation recently stirred memories of those times. Yesterday’s news of a shooting spree around my old alma mater stirred even more memories.

Moscow’s courthouse is right across the street from the high school, while the church in question is right behind it. Our high school had an open campus policy, so at lunch and during free periods we’d go stand around in front of the church and grab a smoke. On one memorable cold, rainy day in January, I broke up with my first long-term boyfriend under that church’s portico. The thought of a gunman charging through those memories is dislocating. Moscow is a beautiful, leafy town of lovely old buildings and that air of intellectual inquiry and creative excitement that always seems to hang over a university. Everyone keeps saying, Things like this aren’t supposed to happen in Moscow. And yet…

I remember once, in my twenties, sitting around with a small group of other young women. One was from New York City, another from Philadelphia, a third from Chicago. None of them had ever personally known anyone who had been murdered. I had known four, and three of those young women had been murdered in Moscow.

A few weeks ago, my older daughter called me, upset because she’d just heard that a friend of hers from her undergraduate days had been killed in a car accident. “I never knew anyone my age who died,” she said. I commiserated with her, but I also thought, Wow. People died in car accidents all the time when I was in school. Perhaps it had something to do with the lack of seat belts and air bags, but I suspect it had more to do with icy mountain roads, which are a bad combination with inexperienced or drunk young drivers.

There have been times when I wished I was raising my girls someplace like Moscow, Idaho. Being a parent in New Orleans can be unnerving, what with Bourbon Street and Mardi Gras, second lines and Southern Decadence. And then there’s the constant shootings—a cousin of mine caught a bullet in the throat just driving to work one day (she survived). And yet when you live in a country where the rate of firearms homicides is NINETEEN times higher than that of the other thirty-five high-income countries COMBINED, the idea of safety anywhere is an illusion.

I know this. And still I mourn. Things like that shouldn’t happen in a place like Moscow.