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By Root 639 0

Highway 12 now referred to as the Clearwater Canyon Scenic Byway. The entire trip took less than three hours—across flat farmland nestled between stands of timber, past Fraser Park (named after David Fraser, the man supposedly murdered by the Chinese), complete with a rough baseball diamond, a single set of warped pine bleachers and a galvanized-pipe swing set; down the grade with its switchback turns so tight the trucks with their long loads of poles took both lanes at the curves; across the bridge at Greer and past Orofino with its doctors and tiny airport said to be cursed so that all owners died in fiery crashes while trying to maneuver their single-engine planes between the highway and parallel water; alongside the widening Clearwater to its confluence with the Snake at the mouth of Hells Canyon—out of the absolute blackness of nights in the forest into a city of twenty-four-hour markets and cars lined up at the intersections ten deep.

As the years of our travel passed, Greg, four years younger, would listen intently as I read to him from the Children’s Library of Classics our parents had purchased with the set of encyclopedias we hauled with us from one place to the next. Arabian Nights, Robinson Crusoe, King Arthur, Robin Hood, Treasure Island, Swiss Family Robinson—the worlds I fantasized were lush with exotic flowers, full of giant pythons and man-eating natives, populated by gossamer fairies, men and women who conversed in words I had never heard spoken, words I mispronounce to this day because their sounds existed only in my mind’s ear: joust, vizier, yeoman.

The books kept me anchored—not in the real world, but in worlds I carried with me, stacked neatly in a cardboard box I balanced on my knees as the heavy car leaned into the curves of the road. I marked the miles reciting lines from Tennyson’s “The Idylls of the King”:

“My good blade carves the casques of men,

My tough lance thrusteth sure,

My strength is as the strength of ten,

Because my heart is pure.”

The sentiment echoed that of the children’s hymns we sang when my grandmother took us to Sunday school: Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war … Reading the tales of Arthur, I mooned over the mystery of the Silent Maid, whose throat was as white and round as the cup of a lily and who waited silently for the arrival of Perceval. I thought that if I could not be a queen I might be the Maid, who “prayed and fasted till the sun/Shone and the wind blew through her.”

My fantasies of feminine loyalty and sacrifice would be interrupted by my brother’s yell that he could see the mill as we came into Lewiston. Its towering smokestacks belched out sulfuric steam, and the fog rising from the giant settling ponds shrouded the river and road in a foul mist. The lights seemed blinding, so bright they swallowed the stars and left nothing secret. Sometimes I’d move my box to the center of the seat and sink down to the floorboard, where I covered my head with my coat and made a night for myself: through the seams, pinpricks of light shone through and I imagined constellations of my own naming: Avalon, Galahad, the Holy Grail.

One winter there was no travel. Instead of heading to Lewiston, we remained circled at the edge of the meadow, where elk grazed, herds of a hundred or more filling the evening air with high-pitched whistles and barks. The men had decided to wait out the cold. They pooled their dole, and for a short time we were rich in food: canned fruit filled the cupboards; bags of beans slouched in the corners of the rooms like woozy children. The single refrigerator we all shared burgeoned with carrots and cartons of Camels, so that the air wafting from the opened Frigidaire carried the mixed incense of sweet earth and tobacco.

My father and uncles filled their deer and elk tags, and then those bought in their wives’ names. Night after night they came through the door, a haunch or back strap thrown over their shoulders, or the full body of a yearling, lean and tender. The women worked at the counter and table spread with butcher paper, trimming