Thanksgiving in Challis

The snow lay thin and apologetic over the world. That wide grey sweep was the lawn, with the straggling trees of the orchard still dark beyond; the white squares were the roofs of the garage, the old barn, the rabbit hutches, the chicken coops. Further back there were only the flat fields of Dawson's farm, dimly white-striped. All the broad sky was grey, full of more snow that refused to fall. There was no colour anywhere.

--Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising

I'm writing now from my home in Seattle.  Last  Saturday I also was at home in Seattle.  But in between, I spent five days, including Thanksgiving, at my sister's home near Challis, Idaho, about a five hour drive northeast of Boise.

To those of you from elsewhere, Washington and Idaho are both parts of the Pacific Northwest.  But, please believe me, Washington and Idaho -- certainly, Seattle and Challis -- are two different worlds.  Different obviously scenically and topographically, but it's more than that.  Returning from Challis also feels like a return from a different era of American history.

Each morning, I'd be the first person up, holding a cup of coffee as I stared out the windows.  Kathy's house is actually about nine miles west of Challis, literally on the boundary of Challis National Forest and in the shadow of hills that rise above her pasture land.  Those hills loomed directly above us, but in any other direction there were other  hills, if more distant.  Brown hills, at this time of year, after the leaves had fallen and grass had dried.

Brown until the second day or so of my visit, when the hills no longer were brown, but white.  White with snow.  The ranch property remained accessible by road, although the road became covered with snow, but the snow cuts us off, if only psychologically.  We feel very alone.  Just our family members, a roaring fireplace, two dogs, and five horses.  The dogs hang out in the house, begging to be taken for long walks (walks for us, mad dashes for the dogs).  The horses hang out in the fields, the fields covered with snow.  Never complaining, just asking for daily access to fresh hay and for some occasional affectionate company.

I know I romanticize, but I felt transplanted to the prairies of the nineteenth century, where families homesteaded and farmed and lived isolated from each other.  To Little House on the Prairie, maybe, but with TV and better food.

The loneliness isn't scary, but -- to a city boy -- a bit eerie.  The dark comes early in late November, and the dawn comes late.  I stare out the windows into the dark, knowing that not only our horses are out there, but coyotes and deer and elk and beavers and rabbits.  Wolves, I ask my sister?  Bears?  Probably not.  Extremely doubtful.  But nothing is certain.  Not in late November, in the dark, when the hunger of winter falls across the land.

When not chatting or staring into the fire or studying the dark outside the window, I was re-reading Susan Cooper's five-book series, The Dark is Rising, which I discussed in this blog in March 2012.  A fantasy series set deep in the history and landscape and peoples of England and Wales.

The atmosphere of those books no doubt influenced my vague sense of the uncanny as I spent my days and nights in the snows, in the isolated, hilly land west of Challis.

The snow fell softly but persistently as Friday, the day of my return to Seattle, approached.  A drive of 162 miles loomed ahead of me, taking not the shortest but the least hilly return to the airport at Hailey.  The on-line reports from the Idaho Department of Transportation were a bit unnerving, as they continued to warn of a possibly heavy snowfall on the roads I'd be taking.

I left Challis early and -- not to prolong the drama -- arrived at the Hailey airport with plenty of time to spare.  But the drive south down U.S. 93 through falling snow and hanging mist added to my sense that I was passing through enchanted lands.  The highway was virtually deserted -- I drove for miles without seeing another car.  As I left Challis behind, the road became increasingly covered with snow, with more dry snow falling from the sky and blowing across the roadway, across my windshield.  The highway runs, for the most part, straight and flat through a long valley, as it hugs the base of the Lost River Range to the east.

But the Lost River Range seemed lost indeed, obscured by the mist and steadily falling snow.  At times, however, the highway moved close enough to the hills that they became faintly visible, hanging like ghost mountains over the road.  From past drives in summer, I knew that those hills were reasonably high but hardly Alpine in dimensions.  But on Friday, as they revealed themselves through the mist -- mystical, looming, colorless forms of rock and snow -- they suggested old, grainy photographs of the mighty peaks in Alaska.  And then, as the road moved farther west, the hills disappeared back into the mist, only to reappear minutes later as the road once more approached them.

My flight back to Seattle was uneventful.  But as the plane rose above the clouds, I saw a very slim crescent moon hanging outside my window, with Venus shining brightly nearer the horizon.  These two lights stayed just outside my window for the entire first half of the flight, a fitting conclusion to a week that was magical -- magical if only in my own imagination.

And if I'd looked at that moon more closely, I now discover that I would also have seen Saturn shining and almost touching the moon's upper horn.  But that would have been one wonder too many.