The Long Way Home: A journey into the heart

By Tom Pahl; photos by Tom and Carol Pahl

Editor’s note: Ocracoke Islanders Tom and Carol Pahl have been on a trek around the United States (following 70-degree weather) and reported back from time to time. This is their ninth and final dispatch. They will return to Ocracoke soon.

After spending months under the expansive skies of the southwest desert, the mountains loomed overhead, almost menacingly, as we climbed north into the Colorado Rockies from New Mexico. Of course, there was that never-ending series of hairpin turns, ungodly steep grades, and unguarded drop offs we had to negotiate, with a 20-foot trailer tagging behind.  Me: eyes glued to the road.  Carol: trying to look; trying not to look.  We still debate what’s scarier, going up or coming down.

We stop at roadside pull-outs for the risk-free view, or we go hiking into the mountains and along rivers; I ride my bike whenever I can find a good trail. We are awed by the unimaginable scale, by the distances, how the mountains fade away in ever paler shades of blues and greens until the earth and the sky become one.  Sometimes we’ll spot a cabin or a herd of elk down in a vast valley and the true scale of the view grows in its majesty.

This, at first awesome, only becomes more awesome as we push north into Wyoming and Idaho. Hardly a turn in the road or the coming over a rise doesn’t evoke an intake of breath and a “wow.”  You’d think, after a time we’d run clean out of “wows,” but no, our susceptibility to amazement seems as endless as the western horizon.

In Boulder, we caught up with our Ocracoke friend Lida Jones. Unsurprising to those who know Lida, we found her spunk and her care for the condition of the world to be intact. She attempted to make us give up our wandering ways and move in with her, but, tempting as the offer was, we pressed on. 

We reach our highest elevation of the trip at Rocky Mountain National Park in northern Colorado: almost 12,000 feet above sea level, a full thousand feet above that point where trees can no longer survive for lack of oxygen. The landscape turns to alpine tundra and, even in June, deep snowpack lines the roadways. Glacial lakes there stay icy right through the summer months. I try to imagine just how inhospitable the place must be in January.  

But as unreal as that may be, even harder to imagine is the environment some 300 million years ago when these high peaks were yet to form and this place was at the bottom of a shallow warm sea. Over millions of years, sea life and ocean currents laid down vast quantities of sediment and seashells, which morphed into layers of sandstone and limestone and fossils hundreds of feet thick. Imagine, at the time, the area was tropical. Great trees and ferns covered the land beside the inland sea as the continental plate drifted slowly northward across the equator.

Then, around 70 million years ago, the North American Plate, with the great inland sea aboard, began a westward drift, colliding with and pushing over the edge of the Pacific Plate, resulting in the mountainous uplift that drained the inland sea and forms today’s Rockies.  Along with older granite and gneiss, those sedimentary layers, once beneath the sea, were pushed up into the sky, confounding early explorers when they found fossil seashells at these alpine elevations. I wonder, if bivalves could dream, would they have ever dreamed of such heights?

We push on.  A long pause at Grand Teton National Park and adjoining Yellowstone brings joy and trout and bears and elk, and bison, and a flash across the road; grey and lithe, a wolf stops for a look before melting into the forest.  In Cody, Wyoming, I get a Stetson; Carol gets boots. Then, decked out, we spend a couple of weeks in the Sawtooth Mountains along the Salmon River at Stanley, Idaho. Yet more and more awesome.

We push on through western Idaho where we record the hottest temperatures of the trip, 106 degrees one day near the aptly named Hell’s Canyon. It’s hard on us, but harder on little dog Napoleon, who is struggling, so we race for the coast. We suddenly find relief where, instead of thousands of feet of elevation, we are at sea level.  The air is thick with oxygen. It’s foggy and cool, and the Pacific Ocean crashes all night long against the rocky, volcanic Oregon shore. Napoleon earns the “Wonder Dog” title as he rebounds, so happy to be back where there is sand and salt water, his happy place.

I find myself reminiscing about a childhood trip to the Oregon coast decades ago.  To my surprise, little has changed in nearly 60 years. The place names come back to me, and the pounding of the mighty Pacific has done little to change the rugged landscape. One rainy, foggy day we trek along the oceanside around Heceta Head, and Neptune State Park, and Cape Perpetua. 

It is windy with slant-wise rain cutting through my meager raincoat, but the rumble and spume of the churning seawater call for stormy weather. We can barely hear each other as we yell and point over the roar. Fall-walking over baseball sized rocks and jumping across sloshing tide pools, I search for agates, the jewel of Oregon’s volcanic past. For some reason, I found many more when I was 10, but the one I turn up is enough to transport me back to that time of wonder. My brother and I competed for who could find the best agates and jasper.  My dad had a rock tumbler and, back home, turned our finds into glistening, priceless gems.

No road trip is worthy of the name if it doesn’t include a journey into the heart. This is that part of the story for me, as the northwest mountains are my homeland. It is a story slow to unfold, but I see it coming as we plan our eastward turn from the Pacific coast across Montana, where I was raised. Instead of taking the northern more scenic route through Glacier Park, I finally realized that the area of my old hometown, Corvallis, was calling to me. So we adjusted our plan to take us into Montana’s Bitterroot Valley.

But first we had some serious visiting to do.  We spent a week with Carol’s best friend on the Oregon-California border.  Their friendship goes back to first grade, and they had a lot of reminiscing to do.  So, I leave them to it and drive south into California one day, to hike in the redwood forest.  I tried to take photos, but, as with so much we have seen on this trip, there seems to be no way to capture the true scale of it in a picture.  I tried a short video. I tried setting my hiking pole against a tree. I tried getting a person in the photo but no matter what I did, the gigantic, endlessly tall trees were reduced to the ordinary by my efforts to capture them. The obvious lesson is: owning an iPhone doesn’t make you Ansel Adams.  The less obvious lesson is: put your camera down and experience the wonder. And so I do.

From Brookings, we meandered up the coast and turned inland for a stop at Portland to visit Carol’s son, Sam.  Portland was a war zone! Everywhere we went, people were walking on the streets, eating vegan ice cream and yelling greetings to one another. The horizon outside the city was devastation itself, snow-capped Mount St. Helens and such. We regularly saw signs posted outside homes declaring their radical views, such as, “All Are Welcomed Here,” and similar dangerous sentiments.  It was great to be able to catch up with Sam for a few days in Portland and escape before the anarchists got us.

Next stop, Port Townsend, Washington, to visit Carol’s youngest daughter, Rene, and her family. If you ever get a chance to visit, I think you’d find Port Townsend to be the Ocracoke of Washington state.  Great coffee shops, ice cream, good restaurants, bookstores, a harbor filled with beautiful boats, and a genuineness you’d recognize.  And speaking of Ocracoke, we met up with old island friends, Maria Logan and Matt, for a wonderful waterside dinner and more reminiscence.  It was great to share their infectious happiness.

After 10 days of good food and good company with Rene and David and grandchildren, we again pack up to move on.  This time with some bit of melancholy, leaving family behind, and because this turn eastward marks the return phase of our year-long adventure, and we’re not so sure we are ready for it to end.

We stopped for an overnight just on the Montana-Idaho border where we rode the Hiawatha Bike Trail, a converted railroad bed that once was transport for vast quantities of gold and silver ore. The trail is 15 miles long, taking riders through nine tunnels and across seven trestle bridges. 

One tunnel is a cold, dripping, dark mile-and-a-half long. I try to picture the mass of rock and forest that sits 1,000 feet overhead, as I ride through. The vistas along the trail and atop the trestles overpower my ability to think. So humbling and awesome and endless, I think I could forget my own name.

Coming into Montana from Idaho, I am flooded with memories of a dream-like childhood with the Rocky Mountains as backdrop.  Watery names carry deep memories: the Clark Fork River, the Yellowstone River, Flathead Lake; places where my dad used to fly fish for rainbow trout. The Bitterroot River cuts through the valley, where a family friend drowned one winter when the ice gave way. We take a campsite at Lake Como, just south of Hamilton and Corvallis, where so many of my memories are rooted. It is strange and wonderful and confusing, as I have not spent time in these places since I was 10 when we left Montana to move east. 

I nearly cause an accident on the road between Corvallis and Hamilton as I slow down to look for our last home before we moved away.  Maybe that’s it.  I jump out and take a picture.  I think that’s it.  Jingles, our Irish Setter used to run in these fields.  Katrina, the old Scandinavian woman, who lived across the road showed me how to butcher a chicken. I had been waiting for the bus and went to school that morning with red blood spots on my jacket.

Other mornings we would throw rocks at the passing trucks that carried sugar beets, hoping to knock a beet loose so we could chew on its sweetness. My brother and sister and I would venture out into the wilderness, east, toward the Sapphire Mountains and a flowing waterway we called the “big ditch.”  If west, we headed toward the Bitterroot River, across a huge farm field, ultra-wary of the bull that lived there, which, we were sure, would kill us dead, if we gave it the chance. Meadowlarks sang from wood fence posts.

Over the days we are there in the Bitterroot Valley so many memories fill my heart.  My dad had a car that he called “Flattery,” as in “flattery will get you nowhere.”  He was a lay preacher at the church in Hamilton.  I recall, one Sunday, he’s all dressed in his black preacher’s robes and colorful sashes. With a few minutes to kill before we hop in Flattery to leave for church, he is teaching us kids how to play poker. He demonstrates what a straight is and why, in mathematical terms, you shouldn’t draw to fill an inside straight. My mom, rolling her eyes and smirking at the sight, always favored irreverence.

Our stay at Lake Como coincided with the Ravalli County Fair and Rodeo in Hamilton. So, of course, we went.  We ate junk food, watched a livestock auction, checked out the arts and crafts displays, went through the 4-H animal barns, watched, but did not ride, the “Slingshot,” and then we ate more junk food. But the main event was the nighttime rodeo.

There was bronc riding, calf roping, barrel racing, bull riding and the iconic rodeo clown.  The announcer on the PA is keeping score and making smart-mouth commentary. At one point he checks in with the audience: “Who’s here from Darby,” he asks, and a roar comes up from the crowd. “Who’s here from Hamilton?” Again, the roar. And then when he asks, “Who’s here from Corvallis,” I am on my feet waving and yelling, “Yeah! Corvallis!” I’m from Corvallis! I’m from here.

And so again, we move on. We head east in earnest. But before we could go, we had to say goodbye to our little dog Napolean. It was a mercy for him, but our hearts are shredded beyond repair. We are grateful for the deep humanity of those who helped us through. We constantly celebrate the joy he brought to our lives and every day we wish what everyone wishes who has ever loved and lost a dog. We left a lot of tears and a lot of memories in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana.

I think I shed some tears at that moment, and thinking back later, I realize that since we left Montana, over 60 years ago, I have never been “from here.” I am lucky to have been so many places in my life, but none where I could say, “I’m from here,” until we landed back in the Bitterroot Valley that night, in those rodeo stands.

I never mourned leaving Montana.  I was 10 years old, and, to me, life was an adventure. In fact, after that departure, I went on to a lifetime of departures, a lifetime of adventure, including this very trip, and I still don’t regret it.  But I don’t think I realized just how important a part of most peoples’ lives being “from here” is until this day when I realized how much it meant to me. And for the whole remaining time we were there, I found myself randomly engaging people in conversation just so I could casually say, “Yeah, I’m from here.”

As I write this, I am sitting in the glory of the New Hampshire White Mountains, back in the deciduous forests of the eastern United States. All around there is an explosion of yellows and reds and oranges: Aspen, Maples, and Oaks, with a deep blue sky telling us that there is beauty to behold in every part of this great land.

Our year-long adventure is nearly done. As we are, at once, looking forward to returning to our little paradise on Ocracoke Island, and regretting the end of this adventure, we have indeed taken the long way home.