unat '04--Day Thirteen (Indolence)

Trout Lake, WA to Lolo Hot Springs, MT
Today's Mileage: appx. 544 mi. Total Mileage: 6,909 mi.
TT: 11 hrs. TTT: 99 hrs.
Quote of the Day: "This day I completed my thirty-first year and I...reflected I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the happiness of the human race or to advance the...succeeding generation."—Journal of Capt. Merriweather Lewis,18 August, 1805.
News of Note: None.

Around 8:30 the next morning, I sit in front of the aforementioned retired boot shop facing a pond and feeding a trout. The trout, a four-pound rainbow, is happy to be up this morning, rounding the leaf scattered surface and picking at the little bits of trout chow we've thrown in the water. The pond is a small, man-made one, dug for the purpose of giving Andy's former Alaska boss, his wife and their now-grown children a place to swim. The boot shop, as well as the main house and a remarkable tree house up the property are all built from wood milled from the property, all built by Andy's former Boss himself. The architecture of each is composed of what I call "Western Boomer," a style that I became very familiar with growing up in the Southwest—Natural wood tones, angles, stone floors and an affection for natural light.

Knowing now that our trek heads east (rather than the original plan to visit Andy-friends in Eugene) to Bozeman, Montana, I am reading the words of Captain Lewis'. Tracing part of the Lewis and Clark Trail is one of the selling points for the journey for me. Andy's former Boss has traced as much of the route as he can remember as we discuss the day's navigation over a map. Some of my thoughts turn to Lewis' fate barely five years after the above entry (written October 11, ironically also Columbus and Native American's Day) when the hope of those words is nowhere to be found. Mired in debt and swirling in the haze of what would clearly diagnosed today as clinical depression, Lewis kills himself on the floor of a one-room cabin near the Natchez Trace.

As with any good story however, it is not only the ending that gives the story weight and I think of those moments as well. The track we will follow (carefully marked along the way by the Highway Departments of Oregon, Idaho and Montana) will occasionally intersect with some of the most dramatic moments of the transcontinental Voyage of Discovery that defines Lewis' short life. Family drama (Sacagawea breaks down when she recognizes a brother she was separated from as a child), combat (the Corps sole violent clash with Native Americans, namely Blackfeet braves), near starvation and the few quarrels among the 37 men of the Corps of Discovery will occur along much of the route we take today.

And yet, with all the flights of the imagination that these moments can inspire, this morning I find myself rereading Lewis' "note to self" on his birthday. He goes on to write:

"I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now sole feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended. But since they are past and cannot be recalled, I dash from me the gloomy thought, and resolved in future to redouble my exertions and at least endeavor to promote those two primary objects of human existence, by giving them aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestowed on me; or in future to livefor mankind, as I have heretofore livedfor myself. (Emphasis is Lewis')."

It is striking that, here in the midst of what would become one of the most extraordinary efforts of exploration in U.S. history, we find a man, beyond the arcane prose, ruminating on the fruit of his labor.

Tired of sitting with Mr. Trout, I march into the forest to pick a fresh apple from a now-wild orchard Andy's former Boss tells me was planted by a German squatter long ago. I have long forgotten the pleasure of a fresh-picked apple until this trip. I wonder, what of Captain Lewis' questions? He is asking, "What are our personal gifts? What is it about my nature that prevents me from drawing them forth to the benefit of others? To the benefit of myself?" For Lewis, the very human (and VERY American) need for navel gazing and one's interior monologue suddenly overshadow the facts—that he has covered nearly three thousand miles of land largely unseen by a white man and has even farther to go. Breast-beating stifled by overriding questions of self and effort and identity. Then, what of these questions and my own decidedly less ambitious voyage of discovery? Frankly, I find myself short on answers, despite standing on the apparent cusp in my own self-efficacy. All career choices have reached their inevitable ends and after electing to finish the worthless degree I began in 1985, I've done so. As with some graduates 18 years my junior, I've discovered no new paths or answers hidden within my diploma.

Tired of sitting with Mr. Trout, I march into the forest to pick a fresh apple from a now-wild orchard Andy's former Boss tells me was planted by a German squatter long ago. I have long forgotten the pleasure of a fresh-picked apple until this trip. I wonder, what of Captain Lewis' questions? He is asking, "What are our personal gifts? What is it about my nature that prevents me from drawing them forth to the benefit of others? To the benefit of myself?" For Lewis, the very human (and VERY American) need for navel gazing and one's interior monologue suddenly overshadow the facts—that he has covered nearly three thousand miles of land largely unseen by a white man and has even farther to go. Breast-beating stifled by overriding questions of self and effort and identity. Then, what of these questions and my own decidedly less ambitious voyage of discovery? Frankly, I find myself short on answers, despite standing on what should be apparent cusp in my own self-efficacy. All career choices have reached their inevitable ends and after electing to finish the worthless degree I began in 1985, I've done so. As with many of the graduates 18 years my junior, I've discovered no new paths or answers hidden within my diploma.

While I certainly can't compare these two trips, I can't resist creating a few similarities. By now, tempers have flared on our trip, too—usually earned and each, I hope, equivalently dismissed. The amount of information we've tried to digest, while not as encyclopedic as what L&C had to contend with (they came back with the assessment of 24 native tribes, 178 plants and 122 animals) has been dizzying. To labor the metaphor, I imagine standing with Lewis as he stares into the bright sunlight at a bend in the Columbia, wondering, after the trials the last two years, what within prepares me for whatever that big river has in store (later, I will actually stand at one of those literal bends, trying to squint down the gorge)? As predicted earlier, thus far there have been no epiphanies, few glimmering moments of clarity. As for my own talents...

The apple was delicious.