As Tall As Mountains

I’ve passed the six month mark since my concussion, finished all of my various therapies. I got the museum job I mentioned in my last post. I’m not back to normal but I’m starting to remember what normal feels like. Heck, I even rode a bike on a road for the first time since the accident last week! I’m still feeling bitter that I’ve lost so much of the strength and stamina I spent so much time developing. I climbed mountains. Now I can’t even commute to work without being wiped out and winded.

If you are curious about any of my adventures from after my last post here, I am much further along on my Instagram with briefer vignettes from my adventures. You can find me at @thestarsonthehorizon there.

At any rate, it seems like considering everything (especially the progress I’ve made) it’s time for me to at least attempt to start up where I left off, back in Idaho on the far side of my last Rocky Mountain pass.

I noticed a distinct difference between the Montana side of the Lolo Pass and the Idaho side. It felt like I’d crossed a divide into a completely different climate, though the temperature was just as chilled as before. My mom and I had invested in long underwear in Missoula and I’m pretty sure my mother will never look back. We went from shivering to quite cozy in our tent, though the temperature was still frosty. Idaho was lush and green. The woods were so dense if I had wandered past the tree line I would have been in complete darkness. The daylight did not penetrate the canopy. Whereas the Montana side was as rocky as it was wooded, I had seen so much evidence of wildfire, everything looked dry and brittle. The forest was broken up by patches with hardly any plant life, or just the smallest sign of undergrowth. Some of these areas were more deliberate, patches of cleared woodland from the presence of logging companies.

In Idaho the land felt more untouched. The rockfaces were just as abundant but covered in moss inches thick! I could see water trickling down from the mountain peaks in rivulets. Rockfaces had been worn down by the constant trickle of water for millennia until they formed crags and caves like deep claw marks in the mountainside. They were so deep and dark that as I traveled along the road, the Lochsa river to my left, the mountains rising up above me to my right, I couldn’t see anything in their darkness. In the distance on the river I saw what looked like a grizzly bear hunched over to catch fish–or perhaps it was a shaggy golden-brown rock? I didn’t slow down to find out what it was. Not long after that I passed one of these deep dark crevices in the mountainside. I could hear the constant drip and trickle of water and a deep and menacing growl. Back at travelers rest (only a day or two before, at the very beginning of the Lolo pass), I was warned that there were cougars in these mountains. Once again I didn’t stop to find out what it was that I heard. I only knew that there was no mistaking that sound for anything else. All of my experiences biking in Kentucky and West Virginia being chased by dogs with predatory instincts came flooding back to me. I didn’t think confronting whatever it was was the right call. I decided to act unfazed by it–to continue on at the same pace I’d been going at. Nothing followed me, so I suppose it was the right call.

As my path flattened out and I followed the Lochsa River westward as it merged with the Clearwater, I was struck by how much farther the mountains went on. With each bend in the river I thought I’d see the end, I’d come around a curve and it would be flat. It didn’t happen so suddenly, though I did notice the abrupt shift from woods to windswept desert, though I had yet to learn that term. I called the formations I saw step pyramids. They were as tall as mountains, or at least they still felt that way. We stopped that night in Kamiah, just the First Indian Presbyterian Church. We explored the graveyard for a long while. Some graves had headstones, some were no more than a mound of dirt and perhaps a weathered wooden cross, but most were covered with tokens or mementos meant for their loved ones who had passed. My heart ached for them. The church seemed to still be in use, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the missionaries who must have come here–of how many people were Christian by force rather than by choice. I thought of the small school across the street, its stated affiliation with the church. I wondered if it was a residential school, and how much heartache this place had experienced.