The Hard Ride of Route 93 in Roundtrip Ticket to Paradise 2

None of this entry is my original work - I am plagiarizing it out of an old National Geographic magazine, the issue of December 1992. I am reprinting it owing to the fact that, for some reason, it just hits me right in the heart… and causes tears every time.

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The Hard Ride of Route 93

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by Michael Parfit photographs accompanying the original story by Chris Johns [not included here because there is no way for me to include them]

~

“I drive Highway 93”, the bumper sticker reads. “Pray for me”. It was printed in the Seventies, and, like the road, it’s frayed. You see it on old cars, but you see more old cars on this road than on the broad, sterile interstates that float across the country hardly touching the land. This is Highway 93, a tough two-lane blacktop that runs 1860 miles from a car wash and a liquor store in Phoenix, Arizona to the Canadian National Railway yard in Jasper, Alberta - long, narrow, dangerous, magnificent; in hard contact with America all the way. I drive 93. All the time. I live on it in Montana. I’ve lived on it in Idaho.. I’ve worn out six cars on it. I fly up and down it in my old Cessna. I ride it in buses and in the odd vehicles that pass for buses around here. I’ve even gone down it in an ambulance, flat out on a gurney, hanging on for dear life to the hand of an emergency medical technician who turned out to be the woman who rents me movies. I guess she prayed for me, and it worked.

Once in a while you look around at something you’ve grown used to and you notice that everywhere else things have been changing, and suddenly the familiar thing is the last of its kind. In a country now linked by interstates, that’s Highway 93: the last hard road.

On 93 you can still experience the buffet of large vehicles breaking the speed limit going the other way, be blinded by headlights bearing down on you, and know when trapped behind a combine that the next passing lane is 40 miles ahead. A rest stop is a gravel turnout with a picnic table, a pit toilet, and a garbage can with bullet holes in it. You don’t have to pay to use Highway 93; the only toll is on your shock absorbers and your mind. Life on Highway 93 is close to the bone.

In wind and rain in Phoenix I begin my pilgramage. I drive a 1977 Ford F-150 four-wheel-drive with a toolbox in the back, a CB up front, an intermittent taillight that gets me in trouble with the police, and a good-hearted 351 V-8 that runs on regular. I carry a case of oil; the main seal leaks. Like most people who take solitude on the road, I also bring a cargo of loss and hope: Death has been in the family lately. I’m close to the bone myself, out on this road to see new friends, to make new ones, and to do some mending. Pray for me.

~

It begins: Farmer’s Liquor. Weiss Guys Car Wash. Cinder-block motels, a machine shop, a liquor store turned into a boxing gym. Interstate 17 floats overhead on smooth concrete slabs. I’m below in the grit. A coyote howls on a billboard, advertising booze.

The modern retirement cities of Sun City and Sun City West hide behind walls from this outlaw road. The town of Surprise doesn’t. Surprise is a 93 kind of place: It’s hot and dusty, with small houses and chain link fences bent where the kids jump over.

Just beyond Surprise, I pass a line of skulls on a dirt turnout. It’s a guy selling boiled longhorn skulls out of his Oldsmoblie. “Funny about a road,” a woman in Wikieup told me. There’s a lot of ranchers on 93. And there’s a lot of....” She searched for the word. “A lot of – questionable people on this road.”

Yeah, I know. I love it.

There are a lot of ranchers on 93 - and miners, farmers, loggers, truck drivers. Wickenburg, 52 miles out of Phoenix, celebrates them all: a Cowboy Poets Gathering, an autumn Bluegrass Festival, Gold Rush Days in February. From up and down 93 and all over the West people come to sing and rhyme about working hard and loving lonely.

Now at a Wickenburg dude ranch, I see a copy of a ditty I saw up in Idaho not long after my wife, Debbie, and I moved to Highway 93 in 1971, full of love for each other and for the big open land. Debbie’s gone, but I still like the song:

Sweet clean air from east to west And room to go and come I loved my fellow man the best When he was scattered some.

One night in Wickenburg, at the Bluegrass Festival, I hung around an impromptu jam session in a little arena formed by three parked motor homes. Astroturf was thrown on the dust. Lanterns hissed. There were two fiddles, two mandolins, a banjo, one mournful steel guitar called a Dobro, and three guitars.

The Dobro player, Millie Vannoy, had two Shi Tzu dogs. The male wore a red cowboy bandanna, the female a stuffed heart on each ear. They barked.

“Let’s sing one the dogs don’t know,” said itinerant guitarist Art Kershaw, who once lived in Kalispell. Millie was tentative on the Dobro. She didn’t like making mistakes where all those experts could hear.

A banjo picker named Les gave advice I got to thinking about as I rolled up the road at two that morning: “Hey, Millie,” he said, “you got to hit them bad notes hard.”

~

Highway 93 was once promoted as running all the way to Central Americal, but that was an exaggeration. It never even made it to Mexico, and lately it’s been losing ground to bureaucracy. Signs still label it Arizona 93 from Phoenix to Wickenburg, but the state’s abandoning the number. The federal designation begins just north of Wickenburg. I stop there on gravel that glitters with glass and talk to truckers on the CB. Where are you headed, and what do you have on?

“Come out of L. A.,” one says. “Goin’ to Texas. Windows.” “Outa Tucson. Vegas. Pipe.” “Going to Georgia. I got bodies.” I swear that’s what it sounds like. Bodies? In a semi? Say again? “Potties. Universal toilets.” Most are laconic, but one guy roars past in a big refrigerator truck and rolls out an American road rosary.

“Salem Oregon, outta Dallas. Ninety three, Ninety-five, Eighty, Three Ninety-five, Two Niinety-nine, One-Thirty-nine, Thirty-nine, Ninety-seven, Fifty-eight, to Five. Cabbages.”

“So what’s the worst part of it?”

“The worst part? Right up through here.”

Yup. Pray for us all. Before I reach Wikieup, the road gets mean. A good two-lane is 34 feet wide; enough shoulder outside the fog lines to duck from someone else’s drift. Here the road’s 24 feet narrow. Gamblers drive 93 back to Phoenix after all night at the casinos: “Drunk, tired, broke, and mad,” a wrecker told me.

About 30 miles south of Wikieup I get stuck behind a motor home with Alberta plates - another snowbird in search of sun.

On a curve to the right I glimpse the highway past him: completely empty. Here’s a straightaway at last. I drift left, a foot across the dotted yellow line, and look.

Help! There’s a semi right on top of me. A wall of iron pipes booms past and is gone. I shiver, hot.

~

“This will be the best milk shake you have ever had on the planet, bar none.” Whew. I’m ready. I’ve crept into the village of Wikieup to visit Paul Moss, proprietor of the Chili Factory. Paul has a ponytail, small red sunglasses, and a background teaching young doctors business management at the University of Utah Medical Center. We may look like hicks out here on 93 in our Levi’s and old trucks, but don’t count on it.

“They call this Blood Alley,” Paul says genially over the whir of the machine. He gestures broadly and slowly, all poise and presence, like an actor delivering Lincoln. Lyn, his wife, comes in, and - I can’t believe it - it turns out she’s from the Bitterrot Valley, a thousand miles up 93, less than a hundred miles from my home.

“Her family’s been on 93 for a hundred years,” Paul says.

My truck chugs a quart of oil and rolls on. North of Kingman there’s a hand-painted sign put up by someone angry about his loss to this road. “KILLER HIGHWAY,” it reads, red on yellow. “CAUTION.”

I stop at an antique store that has a Confederate flag in a window, and Craig Cherry gives me veiled warnings about everything. A Doberman is chained in the yard.

“There’s some sly dogs out there,” he says. He isn’t talking about the Doberman. “At least they think they are,” he says. He gestures to a long slope west of the highway, which is covered by a haphazard city of trailers and homemade houses, as if there’d been a flash flood of houses from Kingman. I ask who lives in the boulders above his store. “We keep to ourselves in the desert,” he says slyly, flipping a shot stick over and over in his hand.

I drive up there and meet Jim King. King is what an Arizona rancher might call a nester: a man and wife on small acreage, on a thin living, with a backhoe, a couple of trucks, several outbuildings. Lots of nesters along 93.

King has no well. He hauls water for his double-wide trailer from the city of Kingman in a 280-gallon tank in the back of his pickup. Costs him $1.40 per fill-up. He even grows onions, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, and cabbage with the hauled water, planted in the bed of an old army truck. The truck bed’s on stilts, so he can sit in the shade under his garden.

~

I come to Hoover Dam in the dark. From here, wires and pipes lead away. Western cities haul power as well as water. Highway 93 goes right across the top of the dam, and the traffic slows to 15 miles an hour to cross it, caught by the narrow roadway between walls of rock, acres of concrete, miles of shining water, and a web of high-voltage wires that glistens in the night. I park and stand beside the water, watching the parade of cars and trucks as they glide past under amber lights, a strangely patient movement for a highway, as if the world had run down.

Or maybe this is a shrine in which even 18-wheelers must walk softly. Solemn bronze angels stand watch by the visitors center, and on each post of the guardrail by the dam tonight stands an empty pop can. Coke, Pepsi, 7UP - each can reflects the slow-moving lights. Someone questionable, with a curious and appropriate devotion, has offered aluminum candles to the steel god.

From the air, at night, Highway 93 north of the dam is a boulevard of light - malls, convenience stores, fast-food joints, and gas stations - all the way to Las Vegas. It’s a long spear of glitter shoved into the bonfire. I follow it straight through the blazing city and then out again, heading for Lincoln County, the one part of the highway where I always seem to get in trouble. I don’t remember the trouble more or the people who helped.

In 1974 Debbie and I landed here in an ancient plane and a brake failed. We got help from Bill and Bob McCrosky’s Texaco station, towing servie, and bar a mile from the airfield. A few years later I landed there, not knowing that the airport fuel pumps were empty. Dan Devlin, who worked at McCrosky’s, gave me a ride to Pioche to pick up five gallons of high-octane car fuel. Then, just last winter, I flew up out of the warm South, intending to camp, but the temperature was only 10 above. There was Clyde Mecham at the airport with an old truck, worried that I might freeze. He drove me to McCrosky’s, where the bartender, Cordelia “Cordy” Benezet, gave me a ride to a motel in Caliente in her old station wagon.

“The people here are friendly,” she said. When I agreed with feeling, she modified it. “I don’t mean outgoing friendly,” she said. “I mean they’re generous with themselves.”

Now when I get to Panaca, it’s day again and there’s somebody else in trouble. It’s Reyes Martinez, who has been driving 93 all the way from Twin Falls, Idaho, with his family, towing a broken Chevy pickup on a U-Haul trailer behind a big old yellow Dodge. Two hours back up the highway, where there’s nobody, a trailer tire blew and ruined the wheel. Martinez managed to jam the Dodge’s spare on the trailer and got to McCrosky’s. Bill McCrosky finds him an old wheel and tire out back and puts it on. There’s no charge.

“Got to give ‘em credit,” Bill says as they pull away. “Most people would have made us come get ‘em. They figured out how to get it here. Saved us the trip.”

~

Another day, another quart of oil. I’m off, past Pioche out into the vast spaces of the geologic province called Basin and Range: long valleys that drain only into themselves, bounded by austere mountains, populated by cows and coyotes. In the heart of this is Geyser Ranch, where I stopped late last year.

In the ranch house Kathy Baumeister was making good, thick boiled coffee. She reminded me of a cowboy poem heard in Wickenburg:

She does what is needed And won’t look for praise Knowin’ it comes as seldom As her eight-hour workdays.

Her husband, Luke, the ranch foreman, was talking to Sean Keele, who had brought a flatbed load of hay down 93 from Twin Falls. Turned out Sean was related to my friends Lynn and Ruby Keele, who lived up in Idaho near Debbie and me. They ran one of the smallest post offices in America, where they cacheted envelopes with a woodcut of a grouse. Lynn and Ruby are dead now too.

Luke showed Sean a piece of wrought silver. “Cowboy without silver,” he said, “might as well work in Texas.”

Another quart of oil, another hundred miles. Ely stands high and windy at a junction of valleys and highways, 93, 6, and Route 50- nicknamed “the loneliest highway in America.” I drive past the junction thinking: in some places there might not be many cars on 93, but I would never call this highway lonely.

The road runs fast, but I stop and let slowness catch up with my life at the gas station, motel, bar, and cafe at Schellbourne Station, 40 miles out in the desert north of Ely.

Lyman Rosenlund, who owns Schellbourne Station, wears stained overalls, red Budweiser suspenders, a blue shirt, and a questionable hat. His talk is slow and quiet.

When I drop in for coffee, Lyman’s reading the Wall Street Journal. At the bar, George Murray, a trucker on his way down 93 with a load of potatoes bound for Los Angeles, eats ham and eggs cooked by Charlcia “Charlie” Rosenlund, Lyman’s wife.

Lyman points to a story in the Journal and says: “After another 30 years they’ll prove this planet was not made for civilization.”

“Great breakfast,” says George.

Lyman and Charlie came here in 1953. Outdoor toilets, no well, no electricity. The power didn’t get here until 1974.

“All we had was whiskey, shot glasses, and four kinds of cigarettes,” he says. “Those miners was in here every night. It was so easy to make money.” His eyes are blue and quzzical. Behind him a waterfall splashes down a little rock wall. Rubber frogs play on the stones, eyed by rubber snakes.

We sit. George eats. Lyman reads. I sip. Outside a coyote crosses the road to go sing on a ridge - tough, adaptable, opportunistic, wild, free, clannish. Not unlike Lyman and all my other friends on this open road.

“Those days,” he says at last, “if you couldn’t get a job, you could cut cedar posts or Christmas trees, or sort ore. Today it’s even difficult to acquire dynamite. Hell, we used to put it under the bed to keep it warm. Mom and I knew the United States of America at its best.”

~

My breather’s over. Blacktop rolls out. The speedometer keeps climbing. “Speed limit out here,” Luke Bauminster once said, “is Peg the Needle.”

A memory flashes in the rearview mirror of my mind. Only a few weeks before, I had been riding 93 with the Nevada State Highway Patrol, handing out tickets to guys like me.

“God bless America!” Sgt Jeff Mundwiller had said, reading the meter. “Eighty-four miles an hour. Give me a break!” He reached up and flipped on the lights. After he got back from writing the ticket, Jeff had looked at his chart of fines: “That’ll cost him 171 bucks.”

I drive 93 - at 55.

This whole road’s a small town. I drive 147 miles north, and it’s like going across the street. I find myself standing with a friend of Lyman’s - rancher Steve Boies - near the junction of Salmon Falls Creek and an irrigation ditch built by men and horses about 1910. We talk - of course - about water.

“This is the lifeline of this ranch, Boies says. “Crane!” he adds, pointing at a sandhill crane rising from a field. “Water’s what makes it all possible.”

We get back in his pickup and drive a dirt road through sagebrush.

“Deer!” Boies says. A dozen mule deer bound up a hill.

Boies manages the ranch with his wife, his mother, and three employees: it’s a different operation than it was before his father died in 1976. Then there were more hands, a bunkhouse, and a cook. Boies only misses part of that. “Nothing’s worse’n having a damn ornery cook around. Never knew a cook wasn’t ornery.”

The Boies family owns 14,000 acres and has a permit from the federal government to graze 113,000 acres more - mostly rolling sagebrush hills and grassland managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Their private land includes a number of isolated 40-acre chunks around the springs that Boies’ grandfather bought back in the days when owning water gave you use of the land.

But under pressure from environmental groups, the BLM is changing its policies. (Some groups have raised the cry “Cattle Free in ‘93,”, meaning the year, not the highway.) Back down at Schellbourne Station, Lyman, who used to run sheep, saw his allowable herd go from around 900 ewes to 498 in two years before he sold the sheep.

Here on Boies’s ranch, the agency has proposed rules that would let Boies graze certain portions of the BLM land near streams only one summer out of four.

“The days of ‘control the water, control the land’ are over,” Boies says. If there’s a threat to life as it is along this highway, it’s government policies.” We bounce on down the road. Boies shouts: “Eagle!”

~

The road draws me on, away from beautiful deep sunlight of afternoon in the high desert out into low windy clouds and nightfal north of Twin Falls. I rise and fall as the road crosses hills of lava, the lights of small towns showing occasionally in the distance. It feels exactly like sailing ten miles offshore. In fact, a lot of large yachts use this part of Highway 93, riding the swells of rock on their flatbed trucks to avoid overpasses on the interstate.

Once I came through here, past Craters of the Moon National Monument, in a snowstorm at 2AM, hurrying home to Debbie, and drove 93 for 20 minutes without headlights because I could see better through the snow. The whole 20 minutes I met no other car, but I saw two mule deer and a coyote.

I turn left at Arco, and head for the magnificent mountains of the Big Lost River Valley and the village of Mackay. For me, it’s dangerous territory, close to the bone. Debbie and I moved to Mackay in 1971, when she was 21 and I was 24, and we left in 1976, but from where I stand today it looks like the best time of our lives. As I drive deep into this utterly familiar landscape, I have a strange detachment. A young man lived here who had my name and looked like me and really loved his wife, but I can’t quite remember him.

What I remember now is driving back to Montana through here in June of ‘91 in a motor home I’d rented because Debbie was too sick to ride in a car. I was going back to Montana after taking her to her sister’s house in California to make her last stand against the cancer.

I drive slowly, trying to catch the storm of memory that roars past somewhere overhead. It is elusive. I park the truck by a bad bridge over the creek and walk slowly home.

It is an old log homesteader’s cabin out in the sagebrush, with cottonwoods around it. We had happened upon Highway 93 by chance while wandering around the United States and had found the house by chance while wandering around this valley. I had no idea then how unusual both house and highway were, and how unlikely it would have been to find such a wild and beautiful place to live anywhere but on this anachronistic road.

Much of each winter, snowdrifts would block our dirt road, and we would have to walk a mile to the house. It seems now that it was always 40 below and the wind was always blowing. But she hung in with me, cooked our meals, heard out my heartache, and walked with me in the bitter wind. Across the open sagebrush slope we could hear home long before we got there: The wind blew in the bare cottonwoods and made the sound of the sea.

The door is not locked. It never was. The house was abandoned when we moved into it and is abandoned now. Some people lived in it for a while after we left, but they changed nothing. Here’s the piycher pump that replaced trips to the spring; it’s dry. The bay window I cut in the logs - chainsaw architecture - has lost a pane. And here’s my ingenious door, with a latch hidden by a nail; it still works. On log posts and ceiling, my varnish shines.

But I didn’t hang in with Debbie, and our marriage came apart in Montana in 1989. Man, I hit those bad notes hard. Then in July 1991, at her sister’s home, with our two kids in the next room and her brother, her sister, and me by her bed, she died.

I touch a log. Suddenly I find myself desparate to fix up the house again the way it was. Prime the pump! Put flowers in a jar! Then I think: Why? As if I could capture those days with varnish. The varnish is still there, but the days aren’t.

The storm of memory roars above me. I cannot touch it. Then I walk away from the house, and out of my mouth come unplanned words: “Debbie, where did you go?” The storm hits like lightning, and I’m on my knees in the sagebrush.

~

(Intermission, suggested by the Diarist…)

~

I drive 93. Fast. In this nation of cars, road noise and heartbeat thunder together, like a Chevrolet commercial. Mackay’s gone. Challis passes. The canyon of the Salmon River rises on either side like the gates of a refuge, dry golden walls of rock and grass in late sunshine.

At last in need of a voice - the more questionable the better - I stop along the river to visit “Dugout Dick” in one of the 16 caves he has built of stones, adobe, old lumber, car parts, and tires in a talus hillside. He plays me his guitar and talks about ghosts.

“Bonnie comes to visit me,” he says, all scraggly gray beard and sincere eyes. “She was my common-law wife. She got beat to death by a drunk in a spud cellar in ‘63.”

Dugout Dick is 76. His real name is Richard Zimmerman. He’s lived here in a cave since 1948. To pay his bills, he rents spare caves for $15 to $50 a month, milks goats, and sells tourists religious poetry.

“I been out of the body several times,” he says - no wild gestures, no rolling eyes. “Another time, I floated to another planet.” In some places this kind of man would be put away out of sight of the normal world, but on 93 we still love him. I give him a ride to his mailbox and drive to Salmon.

Oil change and lube: $21. Salmon, Idaho is one of the most remote and isolated towns on 93: 2941 people 142 miles south of Missoula. A mill town, a tourist town: People fly from here into the vast wilderness areas of the west. But isolation is relative: People in remote places up and down 93 are like soldiers in a hospital - there’s always somebody worse off. I remember driving with Steve Boies - who is also a long way from anywhere - and he pointed behind us at a four-wheel-drive wagon turning west.

“You think we’re isolated,” he said. “They live 30 miles back there off the oil. We’re uptown compared to lots of ranches.”

Isolation breeds a state of mind. “It’s conservative here,” said Dick Hauff, a retired U S Forest Service supervisor. “There’s a strong feeling of self-reliance. If this were the Baltics, we’d be declaring our independence.”

I had met Dick one day a few weeks before, when I rode the bus from Missoula to Salmon to Arco and back. I use the term bus loosely. From Missoula south I traveled in a 1980 Dodge van with 186,000 miles on it and a bungee cord holding the hood down. It towed a 16-foot horse trailer of freight, which happened to be hundreds of small wooden boxes for a cheese factory in Salmon. From Salmon the bus was an extended-cab one-ton Ford pickup driven by a young man with hair down his back who wore a Harley-Davidson T-shirt.

Turned out that the Harley driver, Lee Murray, was the least questionable of the group, except for a polite woman riding south from Challis. A 14-year-old boy who got on in Mackay inadvertently explained why parents up and down 93 like to say: “Great place to raise kids.” He wore a dark cowboy hat and a couple of earrings in his left ear. He was going home to Las Vegas.

“I hate it here,” the kid said. “The teachers know you too good. You can’t do nothin’.”

“Someday,” Lee said later, “I’m gonna drive the mail.” It got dark going back to Salmon, and Lee listened to a talk show of KFI in Los Angeles. We passed occasional house lights where he drops off Avon supplies to ranch wives every month. The eyes of deer shown in the fields. Callers to KFI argued about trade relations with Japan. One car rose out of the night and flashed past. The road went dark again. KFI in the Sky reported bad traffic on the 91 freeway in L. A. “Amazing the things that happen,” Lee said.

I follow Lewis and Clark’s route out of Salmon and cross Lost Trail Pass on 20-mile-an-hour switchbacks.

“You can drive the pass many, many times too slow,” said Mary Riley, who owns the Bitterroot Stage bus line with her husband, Jack. “But only once too fast.” I drive slowly down into Montana, and the character of the land changes. The sagebrush is gone, the grasslands diminish, cowboy boots on the bar rail give way to logger boots. The rock ridges of the Bitterroot Range rise from cloaks of pine, Douglas fir, and tamarack. The cloaks are threadbare in patches, and I pass hundreds of acres of forest cut down and decked in rows in each town.

In the spring of 1988 I flew over a convoy of loaded logging trucks driving Highway 93 from Eureka, a logging town where Canadians come to gamble, all the way south to Darby to protest government policies as well as environmental activism that loggers believe was keeping them out of the woods. Much farther back, in 1979, Debbie and I bought land north of Missoula and came down to Stevensville to one of the many log-home builders along this part of the highway, who are now shipping even to Japan, to design and order our last home. So even my house has driven 93.

~

Missoula is busy in the night, kids cruising the strip of shops and fast-food joints near an intersection on 93 known as Malfunction Junction. I dash through and head north.

Lots of traffic on this road: It’s the main highway from Missoula to Glacier National Park. The state highway department has plans to widen it - to a full four lanes in many parts - but there are fights about that up and down the road. Just out of Missoula environmentalists are worried that a larger road will be a barrier to animals, because the forests that close in on 93 at a pass provide the only east-west crossing corridor for wild animals for almost a hundred miles in either direction. Even wolves have crossed there, and a mountain lion using the corridor killed a child there in 1989.

In Arlee, where the woman lived who held my hand that night in the ambulance when what might have been a heart attack or appendicitis turned out to be only a kidney stone, the debate is simple. People here argue whether the road should go through town - which would result in sidewalks, gutters, and street lights for the first time - or bypass it, which would be quieter but might sink some of the few small businesses that hang on in Arlee now, living close to the bone.

~

North of Missoula I pass a place that ought to bear a cross made of iron. No one here will ever forget the great Valentine’s Day train wreck of 1990, when a freight pulled by three locomotives tried to take a 25-mile-an-hour curve at 72 and threw some of its 37 cars and mountains of loose lumber out onto Highway 93. Amazingly, no one was killed. The two engineers, who were later fired, claimed to have been in a “reduced state of awareness.”

The CB crackles. One of the many truckers hauling wood chips to the pulp mill in Missoula is flirting with a woman on a radio at home. “I drive truck,” he says, “but I ain’t no truck driver.” In the solitude and mist of early morning I follow 93 past the wooded coves, the quiet villages, and the astonishingly calm waters of Flathead Lake.

“It looks like the lake gradually turned white and reached up to touch the sky,” my daughter, Erica, who is now 15, wrote in her journal when we covered the same ground just before Christmas last year. A little later she wrote: “We are in Canada!”

In Canada Highway 93 is a provincial road: British Columbia 93 and, later, Alberta 93. Past Cranbrook the Canadian Rockies grow huge on the northern horizon, vast but weightless in snow and alpenglow.

And with the mountains comes another transition, as pronounced as the thickening of the forest north of Salmon but entirely human. It happens between Canal Flats, where everyone works at the mill, and Invermere, where people work at resorts. There a highway dominated by those who use the land for a living becomes a conveyance for those who play on it.

“Canal Flats is just a dirty little logging town,” said a manager at a resort when my kids and I stopped there a few days before Christmas. “Very rough. Ethnic people. The police don’t want to go down there.” She preferred Invermere: “Lot of quaint things there: glassblowers, artists - crafty people. Don’t even consider Canal Flats part of the valley. All their money goes into their vehicles.”

I like Canal Flats. There’s lots going on there tonight. The curlers are having a Lumberman’s Bonspiel over at the ice rink, sweeping and sliding, and there’s a dance at the community center. I choose the dance.

By ten the center is packed: Fifty or more young couples jitterbug and two-step to Roseanne Cash, and drink vodka, Bacardi, or beer at two dollars a paper cup. Outside, a kind of round-robin fistfight goes on all night, as much a ritual as the dance; boys changing partners while girls watch.

Jocelyn Sagar, who’s taking tickets and selling hot dogs, has the last word about this area.

“Invermere is a tourist town,” she says. “Canal Flats is a people’s town.”

The village of Lake Louise, the gem in the heart of the Rockies, looks like the ultimate tourist town. The first time I called the famous Chateau Lake Louise, the public relations woman said, sounding snooty, “We don’t think of ourselves as being on Highway 93.”

Yeah, I wanted to say. You don’t belong here either. All your money goes into old wine.

But the snootiness was a facade. These people are just as questionable as the rest of us on this road. Maybe it’s because many of the 650 employees are 20 years old, work for minimum wage, and love the mountains with a lunatic love that drives them out into the high country on skis in January. Maybe it’s because isolation strikes here too. Or maybe it’s because the hotel’s general manager once drove the length of Highway 93 from here to Phoenix with four friends sitting in lawn chairs in the back of a doughnut-delivery panel truck, towing a boat.

He did it right. Not only did he drive the road in one shot, but somewhere near Panaca, Nevada - where else? - he got in trouble. A tire blew and the five men discovered they had forgotten their lug wrench. But another of Lincoln County’s inexhaustible supply of generous souls, a man named Grover, showed up in a pickup with a shop jack and every tool in the world, and got them back on the road.

My kids and I spent Christmas at Lake Louise, far from the memories of home. People had come from all over the world to the hotel, but it was still just another small town on Highway 93. Christmas Eve, as the lights in the rooms were going out, Erica, my son David, and I went to the lake and skated up and down holding hands, thinking lightly and without pain about friend and mother, Debbie. Skating, we sang every carol we knew, to the mountains, the moon, the sleeping hotel. As Christmas morning came, we were still singing.

I drive 93. It is the last leg, up through the astonishing mountains and the ice. The road finishes in a crescendo of beauty: lakes, forests, rock, glaciers. Besides 93 it’s called the Icefields Parkway; to the people here, it’s the Banff-Jasper road, or the B-J. As I round a curve, a coyote hops over the guardrail out of my way, adapted to the world as it is - unadorned, beautiful, close to the bone.

I drive 93. But 93 ends. I cross the wide, braided stream of the Athabasca River and come to Jasper, Alberta, population 4,500. A long way from Phoenix. But this is again a working person’s town: the Canadian National Railway employs about 400 people here, hauling coal, grain, sulfur, potash, and lumber east and west through the Rockies.

I drive through the railroad yard with Steve Wort, yard operations coordinator. He’s driven all of 93; we share memories of Hoover Dam. “Strange place.” Mule deer and fat elk graze between the 16 sets of rails, eating leakage from the grain hoppers. “Everything we have that has wheels is rollin’,” Steve says. “And it’s all rollin’ through here.”

I’m tired. I’m happy. Trains are rollin’, picking up where my highway leaves off. As in life, one thing ends, but everything goes on.

A grain train pulls in, and an elk moves out of the way with a breathy shrug. A dark-haired young woman who can’t wait another five minutes jumps from the forward engine as it’s still moving. A red backpack’s slung on her shoulder and her long hair’s blowing, and she heads for the office to sign out and go somewhere important. Maybe it’s a man, or a man and a child, or a precious solitude, or a blues band at the Astoria bar. Doesn’t matter: her longing catches mine.

I watch her go, wishing for something I can’t have. She strides away across the tracks, sure as that coyote that jumped the rail: unknown woman, familiar woman,; another part of this long chain of strung together, strung out, opportunistic, adaptable, hard-working, tough, lonely, questionable, cranky, open, big-hearted friends of mine who live close to the bone on this hard road.

I live on 93. Envy me.

~

Written by Michael Parfit, photos originally accompanying the article in the December 1992 issue of National Geographic magazine by Chris Johns.

Last updated February 09, 2015