by Neil Peart
However, even a ghost rider couldn’t pass through international borders unmolested by fascists, and after that unpleasantness I felt rattled for the rest of the day. At least the riding was good, following a two-lane through sun-washed forest and mountains. Still curious about the local reputation, I explored a dirt road down through a dot on the map called Moyie Springs, but saw no visible signs of white supremacists and survivalists (though I guess they would hardly advertise).
Late in the afternoon I stopped at a motel in Kalispell, Montana, which would give me an early start for a ride across the famous Going to the Sun Highway in Glacier National Park. Dinner added to what was an unpleasant welcome to America, with a “mediocre meal of strange-tasting tortellini and lentil-free lentil soup with a ‘hottle’ of coffee — haven’t seen one of those for . . . not long enough.” I also felt compelled to note, I’m not sure why, that the meal had cost 20 U.S. dollars. Maybe because it was both bad and overpriced.
I also noted how many older men I had noticed on this trip, Americans and Canadians, who wore their jeans belted and slung under their protruding bellies, allowing them to pretend they still wore the same waist size by pushing their belts ever lower down their backsides. The women they accompanied often demonstrated the same oblivious vanity (“vanity without dignity,” I decided to define it); they seemed unable to see what they really looked like. Women in their 50s and 60s dressing, grooming, and acting like the girls they imagined they still were, though the passing decades might have left them wrinkled, coarsened, jaded, and — all too often — vast. (Thoughts of a mean brain in a mean season.)
To complete my “welcome to America” evening, I couldn’t even take a walk after dinner, for the motel was located on a busy strip of franchise restaurants, gas stations, stores, and other motels, and there was neither a sidewalk nor even a shoulder to walk on. With traffic speeding by, and whizzing in and out of parking lots, I soon gave it up as a dark, perilous, unrewarding proposition, and retreated to my room to read Jack London’s Martin Eden.
The motel provided an in-room coffee maker, and I was up early to brew a cup of strong coffee, load the bike, and ride through a cold, cloudy morning to the entrance to Glacier National Park. The Going to the Sun Highway had been built at the urging of Joshua Logan, an early director of the park, to allow people easier access to the park’s majestic scenery, and it was considered something of an engineering triumph. Open only in summer, it climbed in narrow, winding loops to Logan Pass, at 6,664 feet, surrounded by peaks approaching 10,000 feet, and as I rode along past sheer drops and switchbacks, I was encouraged to take it easy and enjoy the view. “Not a ride to be aggressive,” I noted, “but gorgeous.” I saw on the map that, as the short-eared owl flew, at one point I was barely 10 miles from Waterton Lake, where I had been just two days and 570 miles ago, and I pondered the wisdom of my “scenic loop.” Still, despite the fascist border crossing and the depressing stay in Kalispell, I had at least learned that I was the Ghost Rider.
By noon, I reached the Glacier Park Lodge, a huge log-beamed resort hotel that had been built near the Great Northern Railway station of Glacier East (another imposing log structure, now operated by Amtrak). It had been built in a time before interstate highways and RVs, when tourists with sufficient means and leisure time would arrive by train and take packhorse trips through the park, sometimes as far as the Prince of Wales Hotel across the border.
Once again I arrived at this lodge within a few days of its closing for the season, and thus shared it with fewer people, in a more relaxed atmosphere. The vast interior of the lobby was pillared with giant log columns rising up three floors to the log crossbeams, high above cavernous fireplaces and arrays of comfortable furniture. I was immediately taken with its rustic splendor, so reminiscent of another time, and booked in for a second night, prepared to try some serious hiking. Having skipped breakfast, I was more than ready for a hearty lunch of chili and red wine, then a walk to the neighboring village to buy a day-pack and a water bottle.
On an afternoon “warm-up walk,” I set off on a trail with signs warning, “You Are Now Entering Grizzly Country,” and once again I was singing all the way, or clapping when I couldn’t think of another song quickly enough (the rangers tell you, “just keep making unmistakably human noises”). The trail led up through the woods to an overlook, a windswept hilltop of waving grasses and stunted pines, at about 5,000 feet. From that spectacular vantage point I could see the meaning of the slogan of the two parks, “where the mountains meet the prairie,” for I looked in one direction across a wooded valley to the green slopes and gray peaks of the Rockies, raising my binoculars to watch a bull elk stroll across a high meadow, and in the other direction over the open prairie undulating in calm golden waves, raising my glasses to watch a distant bird of prey ride the gusty wind.
The next day brought overcast, chilly temperatures, and threatened rain, but during breakfast I pondered the trail maps and ordered a box lunch to carry in my new day-pack. I decided on the trail to Squaw Peak, which looked like about 10 miles return, and stopped at the front desk to ask the staff, mostly young students, if they had any knowledge of that trail. Fortunately, one of them had done that hike about a month previously, and he gave me some valuable tips — especially in telling me he had become lost while returning through one unmarked section, and he’d had to “bushwhack” for awhile. When I reached that part of the trail, where it disappeared into a barrier of scrubby bushes, I decided I would make some strategic blazes with my Swiss Army knife.
A light rain fell as I hiked through the dim woods, but fortunately the soil was gravelly and well drained, so the trail never became too muddy. With a rain hat and waterproof jacket I was warm and dry enough, except for my feet, and I soon fell into a fairly quick rhythm, singing and talking out loud all the way.
A spruce grouse stood at the side of the trail as I approached, and I stopped and turned to sing it a chorus of “Gentle on My Mind”: “But not to where I cannot see you, standin’ on the back road, by the river of my memory, ever smilin’, ever gentle on my mind.”
The grouse stood there in front of me the whole time, perhaps 10 feet away, seemingly mesmerized by my performance of this classic of lyric poetry in the American language, like “Ode to Billie Joe,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” or “Little Green Apples” (at least the way Sinatra sang it). Once again, I contemplated the strange behavior of birds and women.
As I climbed above treeline into stretches of sparse meadow and bare rock, I began to see many animal tracks pressed into the soft soil, and piles of scat alongside. By these combinations of spoor I thought I could identify elk, deer, and sheep — and one fresh specimen full of half-digested berries that could only have been left by a bear. In places the earth had been gouged out with sharp claws, a sure mark of the grizzly, and I was sure I could smell a thick, unpleasant musk in the damp air that might be ursine body odor. Feeling exposed and vulnerable, I picked up a pointed, fist-sized rock and carried it with me. Laughable, even at the time, but I wasn’t going down without a fight.
I had almost reached the clouds when the trail petered out at a tumble of boulders marking the base of the actual peak, a rough pyramid of bare, wet rocks. Taking shelter from the chill wind behind one of the boulders, I shrugged off my pack and sat down to devour the sandwich, apple, and cookies, all the while clapping my hand against my steaming jeans to keep up the “human” noises, and imagining grizzlies behind every rock.
Bending to keep the rain off my journal, I wrote, “Definitely scary to know they’re all around, and unpredictable, and wanting my ham and cheese sandwich!”
Looking out over the sodden view, back toward the tiny lodge five miles distant, and the forest giving way to prairie beyond, I looked up and contemplated the next part of the climb: a long scramble up rain-slick rocks. I realized the view wasn’t going to be any wider from up there — if in fact I’d be able to see at all, with the clouds sinking ever lower. What if I got lost
in that fog? Or fell and got hurt? The goal-oriented part of me still wanted to go for it, but the survivalist thought better of it, and for once he prevailed.
I headed back down again, an easy downhill ramble, the rain falling heavier all the time. By the time I reached the lodge, Squaw Peak had been swallowed by clouds, and I knew the survivalist had made the right decision. Peeling off my wet clothes for a hot shower, I stuffed my soaked and muddy shoes with newspaper and put them under the steam radiator, which emitted sounds right out of the movie Eraserhead, and hung everything else around the room to dry while I went down to the bar for a well-earned drink.
The rain continued for hours, and a TV forecast in the bar even mentioned a chance of snow, so it didn’t look as though I would be “going to the sun” the next day. I sat with my map spread on the bar, sipping my whisky, and thought about where to go next. A quote was posted on the wall, attributed to someone named Reggie Leach:
“Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion; you must set yourself on fire.”
Nice one, Reggie, whoever you are. (A hockey player back in the ’70s, apparently.)
I dashed off a postcard to Gramps at his retirement home in Ontario, telling him about my narrow escape from the grizzlies, and another to a neglected friend, my other colleague (along with the aforementioned Alex) Geddy, Rush’s bass player and singer. Like Alex, Geddy had been a compassionate and loyal friend through my troubles, always there at the House of Mourning after Selena’s death (he was the first to make Jackie laugh in those terrible days, as Alex was the first to get her to eat something, if only some broth. When she couldn’t keep even that down, Alex made her laugh again by saying, “Hey, that’s okay — now you can be a supermodel!”).
While Jackie and I were in London, Geddy had visited us one evening on his way through town, and while I (“Chef Ellwood”) worked in the kitchen, I heard Jackie talking and laughing with him, as he drew her out and raised her spirits. For an evening, anyway.
My partners in Rush through 24 years of professional ups and downs, both Geddy and Alex had proved to be good and caring friends. When I told Geddy I was setting off on this “journey to somewhere,” he offered to meet me “anywhere, anytime,” if I needed company. I knew he meant it, and promised I would keep it in mind, and try to pick somewhere good, like North Dakota or Iowa, to summon him for a “rescue” visit.
In the postcard to Geddy I also joked about the grizzlies on my hike, telling him that I had “carried a pointed rock, for grizzly punching — yeah right!,” and that I was doing as well as can be expected, a line Jackie and I had settled on back in London as a way to answer friends who asked how we were doing. “As well as can be expected.”
Though “what could be expected” was arguable, that was still true of how I felt I was doing, and the condition of my little baby soul. My days continued to be woven of strands of light and darkness, hope and despair, though my nights were mostly black and “haunted.”
Worst of all, I often awoke at three or four in the morning and lay there for an hour or so, staring into the darkness and thinking bad, bad thoughts. These spells seemed to have been increasing since our stay in London, and the problem seemed to be my stomach — though it was never painful, but only a little uncomfortable, like indigestion. Sometimes I couldn’t even figure out why I was awake, and I could never identify what might be causing this distress — rich food, meat, alcohol, or, as I asked my journal, “Was the abuse which caused this insult to my formerly strong constitution self-inflicted, or just the deep and constant aggravations of recent life?” A darn good question.
In any case, lately I defined my overall progress on the Healing Road as, “One step forward, one step back.”
Next morning, the clairvoyant combination of weather forecast and map decided I should head back west across Idaho to the Columbia River, and then let the weather tell me where to go from there. Despite the unpromising forecast, I had plenty of sun after all, and that encouraged me to take a couple of side trips to avoid repeating the same route. North from Whitefish to Eureka, through the inevitable forested mountains (my “soulscape,” after all), then back south to Libby (on the “excellent 37,” as I described it) along the narrow length of Lake Koocanusa (puzzling over the name of this man-made lake which straddled the border, I guessed it was a compound of the nearby Kootenai National Forest and the two country names — similar to those failures-of-imagination found along state borders further south: Texoma, Uvada, Calneva, Mexicali, and so on).
Recrossing the Idaho Panhandle, I turned south at Bonners Ferry (on “busy 95”) down through Coeur d’Alene (the source of its name, “heart of an awl,” is both strange and unknown) and Moscow. I rode on south through the western corner of Idaho, “stormy seas of wheat” on that bright, windy day, to Lewiston, named for the explorer Meriwether Lewis. His partner, William Clark, was commemorated on the opposite side of the Snake River, in Clarkston, Washington. I paused at a high viewpoint and, with an automatic “wow,” looked down 2,000 feet over the two small cities straddling the big river. Where I stood must once have been the post-glacial river bank. A historical signboard indicated an old wagon road winding down its steep slope, and I decided to make my entrance to Lewiston that way, ready to find a motel after nine hours and 473 miles.
From the hotel restaurant, “Meriwether’s,” I looked back at that view from below, the wrinkled, treeless bluff falling into shadow in the translucent twilight, lights beginning to appear from ranches up along that old wagon road. The restaurant itself was a strange mix of high and low Americana; an elegant dining room decorated with candles, fine linen, twinkling fairy lights and plate-glass windows on that splendid view, a nicely-dressed, well-spoken waiter wearing a tie and a neatly-trimmed beard, and an ambitious menu offering wine suggestions beside each dish (I chose the jambalaya, very spicy, and the accompanying Chardonnay).
However, the “entertainment” at Meriwether’s was provided by a muted player piano (complete with a dummy that resembled Harpo Marx) tinkling out honky-tonk ditties, and the few other patrons (only six, on a Saturday night) were dressed in trailer-park chic, with a gender-less array of short-long haircuts (a.k.a. “mullets”), baseball caps, shorts and T-shirts bursting with obesity, huge plastic-rimmed eyeglasses, and the inevitable mood-spoiler of a squalling, unkempt child. (Mean once again, perhaps, but note that only one low-life diner at Meriwether’s sat alone . . .)
An early start on a Sunday morning often presented me with a world of my own, with the local population sleeping late and their cars and trucks tucked into their driveways and garages. I had another bright, cool morning on empty roads as I crossed to the Washington side of the Snake and into what I described as the “Shar-pei hills,” treeless and furrowed with yellow grass. “Righteous riding, 70-75 mph.”
In Walla Walla, the “onion capital,” as both signs and the perfumed air attested, I bought maps of Oregon and Washington, then stopped for breakfast at an old-time downtown restaurant called the Red Apple. With the weather so fine, I ventured west into the often rain-soaked parts of those two states, for I had heard of a couple of mysterious attractions along the Columbia River: a full-scale replica of Stonehenge, a chateau called Maryhill that had been turned into an art museum in the middle of nowhere, and the Columbia River Scenic Highway.
A Ghost Road.
Only two short stretches remained of the Columbia River Scenic Highway, an engineering marvel opened in 1915, and now mostly replaced by Interstate 84. It was an anomaly in the history of American roads, for it was not built to carry settlers to the frontier or goods to market, but simply to make the spectacular scenery of the Columbia River Gorge accessible to motorists. And although it was paid for by the Oregon taxpayers, it was the vision and dream of one man: Samuel Hill.
As a young attorney for the Great Northern Railway, Sam Hill married the boss’s daughter, and thus launched his career as railroad magnate and financier (his death certificate, in 1931, gave his profession a
s “capitalist”). But, unlike the clichéd “robber baron” driven by greed and power, Sam Hill was the other kind of renaissance American, one whose dreams did not stop at amassing a fortune; they began there.
On a remote stretch of the treeless banks of his beloved Columbia River, Sam Hill built a short-lived utopian community called Maryhill (after his already estranged wife, who had moved to Washington D.C.), experimented with irrigated farms and orchards, built the first paved road in Washington State, commissioned a war memorial in the shape of a full-scale replica of Stonehenge (as it would have been when it was “new” — and if the Druids had built their celestial observatories and altars of human sacrifice out of poured concrete). At the Canada-U.S. border, south of Vancouver, he also commissioned a “Peace Arch” in the Roman style (if the Romans had built their triumphal arches out of poured concrete).
On the high rim of the northern bank of the Columbia, Sam Hill built a huge chateau (yes, of poured concrete), again called Maryhill, though Mary was apparently long gone, and never made an appearance there. Sam consoled himself with mistresses, several illegitimate children, and a long relationship with Marie, Queen of Romania, whom he had met while promoting Great Northern stock to European royalty.
The Queen’s biographer, Edmond S. Ellerby, described Sam Hill as “a raving American eccentric, a giant aging sheepdog of a man with a cherubic face, a shock of white hair and a penchant for building ramshackle monuments to pipe dreams.”
The Queen herself wrote, “Sometimes his ideas come so rapidly and he talks so fast that his friends scarcely understand him. Sometimes the things dreamers do seem incomprehensible to others, and the world wonders why dreamers do not see the world the way others do.”
At its completion in 1926, Maryhill became an art museum, and so it remained, exhibiting native arts, a collection of drawings and sculpture by Rodin, and exhibits from the royal family of Romania.
