Brandon Schrand

Why I Stay

1.

Rick Bass’s Winter: Notes from Montana is, for me, a keeper of a book, one of those you find yourself coming back to again and again. It’s a slim, unassuming volume—almost apologetic—and chronicles Bass’s first winter in the hinterlands of Montana’s Yaak Valley. It is also a kind of treatise on why he chose the Yaak, and by extension, why he defends it from invaders, marauders, looters, and ignorance. The book first arrived in my mailbox on a spring afternoon in 2003. It was one of those books that float into your life at just the right time. I was then a full-time graduate student, father, and husband. I recall pulling the book from the packaging as I raced out the door to teach one of my freshman composition classes. While I crossed the quad on that spring day with robins pecking in the grass, I turned to the first page and read this:

I’d been in the mountains before. I’d gone to a college built on the side of a mountain, Utah State University, and had never been so happy—not at being young or being in college or being free, but happy just at being on the landscape, moving across such a strange, wonderful land.

I stopped mid-stride and looked around. I, too, was at Utah State University, and had only then made the connection that Rick Bass had been there, on that very quad, no doubt, and had looked as I was then looking at Logan Canyon and the Bear River Mountains that towered over the campus. It was one of those moments we call the “shock of recognition,” and I was sucked in from the get-go. For years, I had had it in my head that I wanted to be a writer and this book fueled in no small way that daydream.

Later that same spring, and after I had burned through Bass’s Winter, I finished my MA in American Studies at USU. Shortly before graduation, I learned that I had been accepted into the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Idaho. They gave me a teaching assistant gig, some scholarship money, and my wife, Kelli, and I said, “Well, that’s that. We’re going.”

Although I am a fourth-generation Idahoan (born and reared in Soda Springs, a small town in the southern part of the state), I had never been to Moscow (pronounced Moss-Coe)—a funky, woodsy college town up in the panhandle, or, more specifically, on the Palouse—a verdant place of rolling hills and forest. It is collision of color and contour—all lentils, rapeseed, mustard, and dry peas. Electric yellows and burning greens.

So I was ecstatic.

I was ecstatic in part because, like Rick Bass, I also wanted to get into some remote swath of rural land and write. I was smart enough to see it as a Romantic notion, some Thoreauvian daydream, but I didn’t care. Rick Bass moved to Montana’s Yaak Valley and I would move to Idaho.

But amidst the ecstasy there were real concerns, too. Becoming a writer, for instance, is a crackpot notion. Something best left to madmen who are single, skinny, and who smoke a lot. Sane people don’t prod their families into the woods so they can become a writer. Who was it that said, “I’m going to the woods with a typewriter and a gun, and it’s going to be one or the other”? So there ensued a war between the concerns and the daydreams. The daydream itself would keep me from rooting around in parts of my head where logic took up residence and issued forth reprimands, reproaches, and recriminations. Logic said that it would be easier to become a pilot, surgeon, or astronaut than it would to be a writer. Logic said that I had a family to think about. Logic said just getting one thing published would be next to impossible let alone a book, or many books. Fools gold, pie in the sky, pipe-dreams, the lot of it. Better to get a job and settle down. Then if the fancy strikes, sharpen the pencil and amuse yourself with the little stories you’d like to tell. Just don’t make your family suffer while you chase rainbows. That’s what logic said.

But the daydream arrives at night like a lover. Like a drug. Like hypnosis. Before you know it, you’re afloat in its crystal waters and you can see yourself. Yes, you can see yourself writing in a studio tucked in a grove of ponderosa and throwing hunks of wood on the Bassian fire that fuels your wonder.

As it turns out, it was a good time for Kelli, Mason (our son who was not yet three), and I to take our leave of Utah. While part of me will always long for the Bear River mountains that tower on the east side of Cache Valley, or the dramatic Wellsville range that juts to dizzying heights on the west side, and all the canyons—my God, the canyons!—I felt that Logan was going the way of so many western towns. That is was becoming sprawly and big-boxy and obnoxious. Where alfalfa fields once raged, there stood parking lots and planned communities and car dealerships so large and illuminated you could, I swear, see them from space. But this complaint—that of the insider who feels he has been trampled by outsiders or the dynamo of consumerism—is not new. It is less swan song than it is gripe. If I were really affected by it all, I could, I suppose, get involved. Attend meetings. Deliver speeches. Pound podiums. Form coalitions. That would be the responsible thing to do. But I wanted to live in a place in which I felt driven, like Bass, to defend. A place like the Yaak Valley, for instance. And Logan, Utah wasn’t it. So in the end, we sold our house, waved our flag of surrender, and turned north toward Idaho.

Part of Idaho’s appeal, I think, is its inaccessibility. It is not an easy state to navigate even under the best driving conditions. For example, there exists no freeway that connects the panhandle with the rest of the state. In order to travel north to Moscow from the Idaho/Utah border (where we were), you either have to light out northwest on I-84 toward Boise for six hours, and then cut north along a zigzagging highway for another six hours. Or, you can bear northeast on I-15, cross into Montana, veer northwest toward Missoula, taking I-90 to the top of Montana (hello Canada!), and hook due west into the Idaho panhandle, and then drive south for another two hours. Or, once you have reached Missoula, you can angle due west, crawl up the switchbacks of Lolo Pass, drop down into Lewiston, Idaho, and then shoot north for Moscow. Although this route is shorter by distance, the highway follows the Clearwater and Lochsa Rivers and is marked with signs like “Winding Road Next 99 Miles.” You can average, if you are lucky, 50 miles per hour. But not much more. Nor would you want to. It’s a drive to be taken in. Recall that this is where Lewis and Clark traversed over two hundred years ago. In The Journals of Lewis & Clark, you can almost hear their exhaustion, fatigue, and dismay: “The road through this hilley Countrey,” they write, “is verry bad passing over hills & thro’ Steep hollows, over falling timber &c. &c. continued on & passed Some most intolerable road on the Sides of the Steep Stoney mountains.”

There’s bad. And there’s very bad. And then there is verry bad.

I can only imagine their stomping through this nearly impenetrable landscape.

Two years ago, I had time on my hands, and took, for the first time, this route on my way south to visit family. Lewis & Clark nailed it. The mountains are massive and dark with pines. In the middle of the pass you actually feel like you could be in the center of a Bierstadt painting, a diminutive figure in his sublime vision. The river was low and slack in some places. It was late summer—September 12, to be exact. I remember the date for three reasons. It was the day after my son’s birthday. It was the day that David Foster Wallace died. And it was the exact day that Lewis & Clark made their epic pass 203 years earlier.

It is a remote and wild and unpredictable landscape, all stone and water and trees. Some of the aspens were beginning to yellow and their leaves cart-wheeled alongside the road or floated the riffles between ancient river rocks that looked like stone whales. The route is all hairpin and buttonhook turns, a road relegated to the contours of the rivers that have carved out this world.

Regardless of the route, you are looking at a solid twelve hours of driving. When I tell people this, they inevitably sigh, as if fatigued just by the thought of it.

“Isn’t it great?” I say, because it is.

After opting for the mostly-freeway route that flings you up near the Canadian border, we settled in a two-story Victorian rental in Troy—a tiny logging town eleven miles east of Moscow. It had a terraced yard, an apple tree, room for a garden, wood burning stove, and a wide front porch that overlooked the town. Troy, population 700, huddled in a wooded gorge and was lined with steep streets, smelled of rip-sawed lumber, and you could hear the continual whine of the mill working day and night. At one edge of town, decks of logs rose up from the mill yard, and at the other, grain elevators towered over Main Street.

I spent those first autumn afternoons splitting and stacking the two cords of tamarack I had ordered. The labor had a rhythm to it, and the more I split and stacked, the more I came to know the axe handle and its sweet spot, how to avoid knots, and, finally, the art of adjusting the stove’s damper. When I wasn’t stacking wood, I was busy putting my office together. I built a set of bookshelves, arranged my books just-so, and set to work on some essays I wanted to write.

Kelli had lucked into a great job with the university, and Mason attended daycare on campus. Everything, it seemed, was right in the world, like all the sunshine fell just on us. On the weekends, Kelli and I canned tomatoes, green beans, and peaches. We baked bread and took Mason on hikes on Moscow Mountain. It’s difficult for me not to romanticize that time in our life. But to crib Bass, I, too, had never been so happy before. I was young. I had a great family. I was writing and teaching. And we lived in this place—this wonderful place—and for the first time in a long time, perhaps in my entire life, I felt at home.

Troy, Idaho had everything we needed all within two blocks. A general market where you could buy a few groceries and household items like candles or fuses or pencils. You could buy wine, fishing tackle, rent movies, and try your luck on lottery tickets. We had a library, post office, city hall, barber, mechanic, three bars, and a liquor store. On the edge of town, between the mill and the city park, you could find a gas-station with a laundry, and the White Pine Cafe. Behind our house, a gravel road meandered into a grove scored by a brambly gulch and I would take morning walks through there after writing.

Of course not all of them were sunshine days, plucked from the hypnotic pages of some Wordsworthian ode. We were poor. Very poor. Even with Kelli’s job we struggled. Summers were especially hard. No classes to teach meant no income on my part. Our bills would stack up on the counter unopened. We bought our clothes second-hand, and relied on—more so than we ever would have thought—the truck we grew in our garden. So it wasn’t easy. Eventually, even the labor of chopping wood lost its dreamy luster. Funny how the Romantic notions of a writer’s idyll can wither and deflate under the cruelties of the real world. There is nothing Romantic, for instance, about coming home after work in January to an ice-box of a house having to split kindling outside in the dark and light a fire while your wife and son hop from one foot to another to keep the blood flowing, their breath clouding the air in whitish plumes. There is nothing Romantic, for instance, about the constant burns on your fingers, hands, and wrists from all those quick fiery flesh-on-stove kisses, which is much more frequent than you could ever have imagined.

The daydream, in other words, was giving way to the reality.

Consider, too, our snake problem. The landlord omitted the part about the snake colonies that resided in the stony terraces of our yard. We’re not talking rattlers or boas or cobras; just your average garter snake. But to me, a snake is a snake is a snake, and I squeal like a little kid every time I see one. My neighbors—some of them third and fourth-generation loggers—must have rolled their eyes and clucked their tongues whenever they spied me bolting from a snake. On any given afternoon while tending my garden or splitting wood, I would see one in my periphery or one would slide by my boot, and I would squawk and fling whatever tool I had in hand—hatchet, hammer, hoe—and high-step it to the porch. Meanwhile, the neighbor kid—a red-headed seven-year-old boy with wide-set eyes who always ran around in his dirty, white underwear—would swing snakes over his head like a rodeo man and fling them one-by-one into the street or onto the roof of his house while I watched from my porch goggle-eyed in abject paralysis. Once, I broached the snake situation with a different neighbor who just laughed: “Wait ‘til you hit one with the lawnmower.” Jesus! I thought. I hadn’t considered that! Then there hatched a new paranoia. I was petrified of hitting one with the mower and my mind would obsess over the sliding-thunk! sound it would make and the spangles of blood and snake-meat on my trousers and on and on.

Egad.

2.

One can go crazy with such thoughts, but such thoughts can be tamped down by distractions, by routines. Routines, by definition, are about the familiar. They take root in reality, not in daydreams. In the summer and on weekends, I would pull Mason in his wagon to the post office where I would drop off a bundle of manila envelopes containing my latest round of essays, my latest round of hopes dispatched to literary magazines nationwide. But just as I had sent hope out the door and into the world, I would check the mail and find my hopes dashed by the usual array of one-sentence rejection slips.

It’s no revelation to say that Idaho is among the reddest of the red states. Republicans have held court in Boise for as long as I can remember. Of course, for those who align themselves with the GOP, this distinction is a matter of pride, tradition even. But because I grew up in a house of Democrats (my dad is union electrician) in southern Idaho (the very reddest stretch of the state), and because I grew up more or less without religion (in a territory dominated by Latter-day Saints), and because my parents didn’t work at Monsanto—the chief employer in the county—I know something about being an outsider in a decidedly insider state.

But if I am honest, I will admit that I never felt like an outsider while growing up. At least not in any consequential way. It was, however, when I left Soda Springs, when I left home, that I felt an unexpected chill. And each time I go back, I leave a little more broken. How could I have known then, as a young man, that you can never really go back and stay because to leave in the first place was itself a kind of betrayal? Leaving always relegates you to a duplicitous state: you are both insider and outsider. You are of that land, and foreign to it. You belong, and you don’t. You can never return. Not really.

Yet in a sense, I do return, time and again. What I began writing in those early days when we lived in Troy, when I was indulging my Bassian daydreams, and when we were poor and happy, amounted to an attempt at reconciliation. No matter what subject was at hand, my background and my place crept in like unsettled business. And the more I wrote about my place, about my hometown, the more I became passionate about it. The more I felt connected. Yet, paradoxically, the more I felt estranged. You can’t, for instance, write about the ills and evils of Monsanto (which I have done elsewhere and at length)—the very company your friends depend on for sustenance—without forsaking something.

Something is always lost in writing about one’s place. It occurs to me, too, that the more you love a place and the more you write about it, the more there is to lose. This all runs counter to what we think when we set pen to paper. Writing about one’s place doesn’t seem complicated at first blush. What, in fact, could be easier? But complexities abound. My roots are in the southern part of Idaho, but I make my home in northern Idaho. They are different worlds to be sure.

Any time I drive the length of the state, I note the line where the sagebrush stops and camas begins. I note where the time-zone changes from Mountain to Pacific, and the dramatic drop in elevation the farther you go north. I note where irrigation dies out and dry-farming picks up. I can see where the juniper and cottonwoods give way to the evergreens. I note where the desert ends and the rivers begin. Where the Sawtooths vanish in the rearview and the undulating Palouse shimmers in the distance.

3.

One morning last summer, at an artist’s colony in the east, I found myself at breakfast with a small group of fellow writers, all of whom were from either Manhattan or Brooklyn (mostly Brooklyn), and none of whom had ever been west of the Mississippi. “So you live in Boise,” one said, more as a statement rather than a question.

“No—that’s southern Idaho. I live up north in the panhandle, on the Idaho-Washington border.” I sipped from my coffee, and quickly added, “I am from southern Idaho, but I prefer the northern part of the state so much more. I don’t think I could live in southern Idaho again.”

One woman with severe eyes and thick-framed glasses said, without missing a beat, “Why? Because it’s trashier?”

Trashier. Translation: all of Idaho is trashy, but the southern part just happens to be more trashy than the north. Her comment was, of course, rude, thoughtless, and ultimately said more about its source than its subject, but it did speak, I think, to uninitiated perceptions of Idaho. It’s marginal. It’s on the fray. It’s feral. It’s home to whackos and gun-toting loons. Still, the comment left me smarting, but instead of offering some kind of defense, I redirected the conversation.

Southern Idaho,” I said, “has been decimated by strip mining and taken over by corporations like Kerr-McGee, Simplot, and Monsanto.”

Everyone nodded and the conversation moved toward Monsanto and GM foods and we were, thankfully, out of the wilderness of Idaho talk.

If I have lived half my life saying and writing things in just the way I wanted, I have spent the other half not saying the things I should have. What I should have said that morning at breakfast was that they would do well to take a drive through Lolo Pass. They should spend twelve hours driving in the same state and confront its dramatic changes. What I should have said is this: drive across southern Idaho’s great Snake River Plain where you can see for miles, hundreds of miles, in any direction on a cloudless day. See Craters of the Moon. Witness the great swags of sagebrush and massive shelves and kerfs of buckled and broken basalt abut bright-green alfalfa fields. Witness how the sun’s blazing light puts rainbows on the irrigation mist. At harvest, see dozens of combines—custom cutters—mowing through the barley and sunlight and dust like enormous slow-moving bulldogs. See the swathers cutting the summer’s last crop of hay. Notice how the bales dot the landscape in a fit of agrarian geometry. What I should have said was this: if you haven’t smelled freshly mown hay in the high desert, haven’t breathed in that sweet, dank, heavy-hearted smell of promise, then you haven’t lived. Whenever I find myself in its midst, I feel intoxicated by the memories it rushes to my mind. When I moved sprinkler pipe as a bony teen, bucked fifty pound bales, or when I drank icy water straight from the farmyard spigot at day’s end and ached for the towngirls, tanned and perfumed, like heartbreak waiting to happen.

Idaho’s story, I might have said, is the story of the West. It is a story of paradox. It is both wasteland and arcadia. There are super-funds and national parks. It is pristine and ruined. There are family farms and corporate farms, organic farms and feedlots. It is complicated and wonderful because of its own oppositions. What better place to write about?

4.

Before Kelli, Mason, and I crossed the border from Utah to Idaho, people would ask why I was going to the University of Idaho (of all places, their tone suggested). “Because I want to be an Idaho writer,” I’d say. Inevitably some wisecrack would follow along the lines of, “Way to set such a high bar for yourself!” And I would laugh. But I was serious too. There were, I would argue, untold stories in Idaho. Montana was filled with writers (Rick Bass among them), but Idaho seemed like fertile ground. So I always saw my daydream of an occupation rooted in a specific landscape.

Most days I am glad to be a borderlander—someone caught in that strange place between insider and outsider, between northerner and southerner, between daydreams and reality.

I recall my September trip through Lolo Pass two years ago. After spending hours on its looping roads, and after crossing into Montana (southbound), and then back into Idaho at Mon-Ida Pass, I saw the entire Snake River Plain before me. It was nearing dusk. To the west, the sun roared above the horizon, and to the east, I found its foil: the moon. A pale disk pasted to the clear blue sky, it was full and rising. And I drove between them, the sun and the moon. I recall, too, how my eyes swept from west to east, from sun to moon, and with my window down, I could smell the new-cut hay. My car threw its cinematic shadow over the alfalfa fields, and out of nowhere, I broke. I began to sob, but I didn’t know why. Or maybe I did. Just maybe.